April 25'

There hasn't been an update in a while, because I suck... and forget...

Been reading a few other blogs that do the whole "Month end update", so thought I would try it out.

In summary, I just wanted to get something out whilst I have been thinking about what's happened this month... But coming to realise my memory is actually pretty terrible, so probs best to get it jotted down, but what I might start to do is to try get at least a quick 20 minutes draft on a sunday. So then I could produce something more "fluffed out"... towards later on in the month.

Work wise, it's been unusually busy for me!

Beginning of the month saw the close of a huge project at work, where I had been deploying a brand new full Commvault stack for one our customers. Was great to work on a full project again from start to finish. In total I had 5 weeks with them, one of them working report in Perthshire, nice place that I hadn't been to before, so nice to explore a new part of Scotland!

The environment was stood up on with Lenovo 1U chassis for a physical Commvault Commserve and then the Media Agents, but with it being 1U, the backend storage were connected in via direct connected Fibre Channel to a Pure Storage all flash array! Was nice to get to have a play with some new Pure hardware again!

Standard configuration, but what stood out here was the environment were split over 3 Datacenters, with live sync replication between Primary and DR and then using intellisnap backups for a range of Hyper-V hosts / clusters.

Two weeks later, I moved to another Commvault project where I have deployed another CommVault Media Agent but in Azure this time backing up to some Cool blob storage. Just a small estate here backing up a hand full of VMs and some Azure File configurations.

Then the last project I have worked on this last week is a Large scale site with 3 Data Centres, and two regions in Azure, mainly here though we have just performed a pre-hand over healthcheck to make sure that the environment is up to scratch and in a suitable condition to actually hand over and turn on monitoring. If we were to turn on monitoring in an environment that is in a bad position, then it could trigger hundreds of cases / alerts in seconds and overwhelm our service management teams in minutes.

Outside of work, we have spent most of the weekends out visiting somewhere with the family.

The First weekend we went over to see my dads new twin axle tourer, what a great caravan it really is too! Then stayed over in Knaresborough for a few hours after where there was a food market in the castle grounds too!

Sunday we went over to Lincoln for "Countryside lincs" which is a fun-filled family day out with plenty of interactive indoor and outdoor activities and workshops to discover a flavour of food, farming and the countryside. Jam-packed with animals, activities, experiences and entertainment for all the family

Two weekends' ago we went down to Wimpole Estate NT, a great national trust with a HUGE amount of land and their own onsite farm, which quite a large number of different animals for the kiddos to learn about and see. Very much a "much visit" if you are a National trust member.

This last weekend we went to Eurika with the boys, if you dont know what this is, it's pretty much a children's science museum, where they can learn about such a large array of different topics, it will possibly be our last time this year as like many other places you pay once and get a "years pass" but our passes will possibly run out before we get the chance to visit again.

Within the weeknights I have been tackling / working away in the utility room, we decided, very spontaneously to "renovate" the utility room downstairs in the extension. Mainly to give us some more room as we have a double door fridge freezer and it were just drawfing the place in the middle of the wall before...

But that is now complete (hopefully) and making room for other things to be done around the house!

I think... for now, that is a good "quick" summary of what's happened this April...

Maybe... I might do a May one

Lets see..

Till next time!