Certification Group

Well the summer break from the Cert Group was much deserved, but every good thing must end. We will be starting the Study Group up again on September 12, 2009. We usually look for a certification that everyone has a good chance to pass no matter where they are in their studies. We also try to pick a certification that doesn't expire so you do not have to worry about getting recertified before you graduate. So far we have done A+ and Server 2008: Active Directory. Also, different from previous cert. classes, we will have a rotation of four different instructors to provide education from four different angles. These cert. classes are a great way to get a jump on your career and make you stand out in the hiring process. We would like some feedback as to what everyone is interested in studying. Feel free to comment to this post, talk to Mr Johnson (Bear), Mr McCoy, or me to let us know what you are wanting to study in this next cert. class. Thanks and I hope to see you all there.

August Meeting

Thank you to everyone who made it to the meeting this month. We enjoyed a trip to the First National Bank Technology Center. We met with a gentleman named Brett Bock. He is the Vice President of Enterprise Technology Services at the bank. He and one of the Sr Engineers on site showed us their Virtual Center Console and discussed how the bank uses virtual machines and servers to run their business. They have about 700 virtual servers inside of a physical box with 10 blade servers. They gave a great presentation on their network and showed how they can track virtually any alarms and faults remotely. They showed us how they can "drill down" on a problem or a link within the network and find out virtually anything they need to know about it. They discussed how they can make changes to the bandwidth, CPU, and Ram to accommodate the workload of different monthly scenarios such as a day they know there will be an influx of deposits. We spent about two hours in a classroom type setting to learn about the Virtual Console. Then they took us over to the actual server room and showed us the hardware. Very interesting!! This was a great experience to see some cutting edge, real world applications that are being deployed today. Again, thanks to everyone who made it and hope to see everyone next month.

PS: The Certification Group is set to start again on September 12th. We will decide what we are going to study that day.

Tech Republic Network Administrator

If you are still starving for networking news, give this link a try. They have a lot of good stories and tidbits from the networking field.
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Mark Minasi's July Newsletter

For those of you who don't know who Mark Minasi is, he is quite possibly the best technology writer and speaker there is. He has a ton of great readings both on the net and in books. He also has lots of videos covering topics from NT enterprise networking to TCP/IP and everything in between. He has an interesting newsletter this month talking about whether to upgrade to Windows 7 or not. Newsletter. You can also visit his web site at www.minasi.com. Happy reading!!