Monthly Report – July 2012

SandyNet

WiFi – We continue to see growth on the WiFi service. Infrastructure upgrades have been made to four neighborhoods so far this summer and we have several more neighborhoods scheduled for improvements.

Rural Wireless – We added another business customer in the rural area this month with the Oral Hull Foundation. We were able to provide a very cost effective WiFi build for their entire campus bringing high speed internet service to their office, lodge, dorms and mobile home park area. I talked with the manager last week who informed me that their guests have been very happy with the service. Projects like this make the red tape on the USDA project worth it for me.

Fiber to the Home – We are working on contract negotiations with i3 and hope to have a contract ready to present to council very soon.

Graphs

Note: The unusual dips and correlating rises in the graph lines are due to an error discovered in the way some rural customers billings were being coded. The correction of the error is actually what caused the drops and rises in the lines.

 

IT Department

We are slowly but surely making progress on the desktop virtualization. This month we moved several more servers into the “cloud”. We also migrated our original test box that we used as a proof of concept into the cloud as a host server. Prior to this month it had been running as a host server but it was on a system independent of our other two servers. Bringing all three together into one environment gives us more flexibility and stability as a whole.

We are investigating the possibility of adding an additional storage server at the SandyNet office that will allow us to do offsite replication of the virtual environment that is being stored at City Hall. We already have offsite backup of our data, but this new system will allow us to very cost effectively create backups of entire “machines” making restoration much easier in the event of any problems.