IT Professionals Forum

This group of IT professionals in the Roanoke - Blacksburg region of Virginia meets every other month to learn from each other, review best practices, and discuss current issues. If you'd like to be notified when the IT Pro's Forum has a meeting, click on the  icon at the right of this page to join the RBTC e-newsletter or update your areas of interest.

Blades vs. Stand-alone Servers:
Business Case, Technology Overview & Open Discussion

Join us at the next RBTC Roundtable event facilitated by two seasoned IT Managers: Shierod Russell, Information Systems Manager at Rackspace Cloud and Russ Coonrad, Manager, eCommerce Systems Development at Advance Auto Parts. After an overview of the topics listed below, Shierod and Russ will facilitate the next 40 minutes of open discussion with you and other IT professionals in the region, so have your questions, experiences and opinions ready to share. If you would like to stay after the event ends, there will be more discussion and networking from 1:00-1:30 pm.
 
Topics Introduced for Open Discussion:

• Basics of building business case for or against moving to blade servers
• Cost Optimization: Consolidation of servers, network switching
  
• Cost to Manage: Servers, network in data center, cabling, etc.
  
• Consolidation of application layers of network: Use layers 4-7 to manage high availability and load balancing
  
• Simplification of IT management through hardware consistency.
  
• Capacity on Demand: Use of virtual environments to quickly facilitate business processing capacity, test/development environments
  

Cost: FREE. Please register and bring your own lunch. (Register using the form below)
When:  11:45 AM - 1:30 PM on Friday, May 6th - Registration begins at 11:45, the event will begin promptly at 12:00 PM and end at 1:00 PM. For those who would like to stay, there will be additional discussion and networking from 1:00-1:30 PM.
Where:  We'll be video conferencing between two locations: 

• Roanoke Location: Roanoke Higher Education Center 
  108 N. Jefferson Street, Room 710, Roanoke, VA (Driving directions and parking info)  
• Blacksburg Location: Rackspace Hosting**
    755 University City Blvd, Room 203, Blacksburg, VA (Driving directions and parking info)