Month: April 2017

Basic IT equipment you need at home

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Article written by Techicated

The average home can no longer function with just a computer and a router. The typical family can have as many as 15 devices, and wireless internet access is a basic requirement. Here is a basic equipment set up that will serve a household well.

Storage

We produce a lot of data that we need to store. This data includes everything from pictures, videos, documents, to movies and music. Trusting a single location like a cloud service is risky. Imagine you store all your documents on Google Drive, and then you lose your account for some reason. Everything is gone. The best practice is to store everything locally on a device like a NAS and then backup that data to the cloud.

Access Points

The best way to get proper coverage across an entire home is to have access points in strategic areas. It will take some experimentation and testing to get it right, but it will require multiple access points. There are mesh systems available that make this setup easier, although they are a bit more expensive than standalone units.

Firewall

The typical home will not have or need a firewall. However, if you have lots of internet connected devices like IP cameras and home automation gear, you can control what sites the devices access with a firewall. Set up requires some technical knowledge.

UPS

All this equipment needs protection from power failures and spikes. A UPS will protect the devices and supply clean power throughout the day. Not everything will be in a position to get UPS power. Try and buy devices that have built-in battery backup

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Using a portable air conditioner in a server room

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Server rooms are part of almost every mid-sized organization. They vary from a small closet sized space to large office rooms. Often, most organization do not have the luxury of setting up a fully equipped server room air conditioner with climate control and raised floors, especially in a rented space. Most of the server rooms these organizations use are built for human occupation and do not have the cooling that a few racks of servers need. Here are several reasons why a portable air conditioning unit is perfect for a situation like this:

Portable air conditioners can be used around the clock without asking the building owners to run the central plant overnight. This saves the cost of running the building cooling system around-the-clock.

Rather than cool the entire room focused cooling by positioning portable units strategically allows cooling without any additional wastage. Again, it offers economic advantages to running a large computer room air conditioner for hours.

You may provision additional servers at any time without worrying about additional heat load. All you need is another portable unit positioned correctly to offset the new equipment.

There is also the option of relocating the server room without much notice. In the event of a change of location, there is no big operation required to move the servers and other equipment to another site.

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