It was a pleasure to spend this weekend with many a familiar face at the ReproMAX Technical and Production Conference in Washington, D.C. I had the fortunate opportunity to spend a couple hours addressing the attendees and talking about a couple areas of technological change that can have a deep and important affect on their businesses and their bottom line.
My session centered on 5 primary areas of excellence that can be achieved within a reprographic shop to achieve L337 H4ck3r (that's not a typo) status in technological efficiency. Those areas were:
- Standardization
- Virtualization
- Consolidation
- Analysis
- Outsourcing
In my opening presentation, I spoke a little bit about my own personal setup. I use a standard MacBook (2.4 Intel dual core, 2GB RAM) running OS X. On top of that I run VMWare's Fusion virtualization host software. I have a copy of XP Pro running as a virtual machine as well as a copy of Linux Fedora 9 and Ubuntu 8 (Hardy Heron).
The flexibility of this setup allows me to determine the OS I need, how many processors I need to use, the amount of memory to dedicate to each and what level of performance I can expect. I run this setup as there are a handful of apps on each platform that I need to use and test, but I still can maintain the stability and usability of the Mac OS. In addition, if any of the apps I'm using or testing crashes out the OS, I can simply delete the image and start over. Supreme flexibility.
In addition to the user environment, virtualization is a progressive and advancing way to handle servers as well. A server can be running a stripped down OS (Linux, Windows, Mac OSX, etc.) that is stable, manages power and connectivity and is protected from application entanglement on the OS level. This is excellent if you want to run Apache and PHP on a Linux server while running IIS on a Windows Server enviro. The two will never run into each other and if one fails, the other keeps right on serving.
There are a handful of tools out there now as well that allow you both to make and serve virtual machines. VMWare has been a leader in provisioning this type of tool, but Sun is entering the game as well, and they're coming out Open Source. Sun is producing a new tool called "Virtual Box" (download: http://www.virtualbox.org/). This tool allows you to build VM images in a free tool. We've tested it a bit and thus far it looks great.
Virtualization is just the beginning of advancing your technological infrastructure and a critical tool for automating your environments both on the user side and the server farm. For more information or a closer look at my environment, leave a comment and I'll answer what I can!
All the best,
Tanner
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