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Paul Knight

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Sr. Systems Engineer VCP, State of Delaware

78 points

Over 20 years experience in IT, much of it dealing with call centers, working for and/or with Avaya, Bell Atlantic, NorTel, Rockwell and others, to design, code, test and maintain enterprise solutions. Now designing systems for the State of ...

Over 20 years experience in IT, much of it dealing with call centers, working for and/or with Avaya, Bell Atlantic, NorTel, Rockwell and others, to design, code, test and maintain enterprise solutions. Now designing systems for the State of Delaware using the latest virtualization and storage technologies. Also owns Delmarva Computer Associates, providing IT for small business professionals.

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WEB: Private Consulting

April 29, 2011

Paul Knight and 3 other people answered this question

What is Oracle really up to in the cloud?

John raised an interesting question that started me thinking about how that might be accomplished. To my knowledge, Oracle's virtualization product does not implement true fault tolerance. VMware provides this feature by maintaining a sync'ed memory image on a separate host. VMware takes care of ... more

Information Technology

Cloud Computing

March 25, 2011

Paul Knight and 23 other people answered this question

How do you motivate your employees when there is limited upward mobility for them in the company?

As a career nerd, I think Carole touched on an important aspect. For me, having cradle-to-grave ownership of a product, component, process or service provided by the company is as important as the compensation I receive for doing my job. Perhaps even slightly more so. ... more

General Management

Leadership and Management Development

Nov. 16, 2010

Paul Knight and 6 other people answered this question

Is it possible to pass a virus over VPN?

Most financial and bank transactions use HTTPS rather than VPN. HTTPS uses SSL or TLS to encrypt the browser data. This is very different, however, from VPN, which establishes an encrypted tunnel, through which, all communications are encrypted. When you access your bank over the ... more

Information Technology

Network Security

Oct. 25, 2010

Paul Knight and 6 other people answered this question

Best virtualization software on a tight budget?

If you already have an IT infrastructure and are actively life-cycling hardware, then virtualizing in-house should be saving you money. I am very leary of outsourcing key components of my infrastructure. In some cases, that may not even be allowed by law or policy. more

Information Technology

Software Quality

Virtualization Software

Oct. 11, 2010

Paul Knight answered this question

How would you compare VMWare to Novell?

Novell's virtualization portfolio has been assembled to out-flank Red Hat's relatively new virtualization offering, RHEV. To that end, Novell has partnered with VMware to provide a comprehensive data center solution. Novell's Platespin technology dovetails well with VMware's vision of cloud computing, though VMware's own product ... more

Information Technology

Virtualization Applications

Oct. 10, 2010

Michael Dortch selected a best answer for

Virtualization: what matters most?

Applications, desktops, servers or storage -- which resources is your company virtualizing or considering virtualizing right now, and why? more

Information Technology

Application Virtualization

Desktop Virtualization

Server Virtualization

Oct. 1, 2010

Paul Knight and 1 other person answered this question

What is desktop virtualization?

Virtualization is the act of taking a physical component and converting it into a software process that can share the physical resources of a system with other, similar, software processes. In general, virtualization provides three major benefits.
The first is economies of scale. A typical ... more

Information Technology

Desktop Virtualization

Oct. 1, 2010

Paul Knight answered this question

What software products are specific to the virtualization industry?

The core product that drives the virtualization industry is the "hypervisor". This is the software that takes the underlying hardware resources and serves them up to the guest servers that are created on top of this platform. There are two types of hypervisor. Type 1, ... more

Information Technology

Virtualization Software

Virtualization Strategy

Sept. 20, 2010

Paul Knight and 2 other people answered this question

Is VMWare the best virtualisation company?

As far as server virtualization goes, no one is better than VMware. They have the thinest hypervisor and, having been in this space much longer than anyone else, they have the security experience and robust data center tool set that makes managing your virtual infrastructure ... more

Information Technology

Servers and Storage

Sept. 17, 2010

Gregory Pickett, CISSP, GCIA, GPEN selected a best answer for

What type of security testing do you have done?

I am interested in finding out what type of security testing is most prevalent among enterprises today. Whether it's a vulnerability scan, security audit, penetration testing, or a combination of the above, I would love to hear about what your company is doing. If you ... more

Information Technology

Security Testing

Sept. 14, 2010

Paul Knight and 5 other people answered this question

Where do you see the next big security threats coming from?

Your question hints at what we are seeing today: the maturation of criminal and politically-backed organizations operating in the cybersphere. Kevin's point of starting with the motive is key, as the bulk of security exploits follow a strict cost/benefit curve.
Those exploits that reap the ... more

Information Technology

Sept. 14, 2010

Paul Knight and 5 other people answered this question

How do you secure a network?

Layers. Bill likened a network to a secured highway. Think about how federal buildings are physically secured. Switchback roads, concrete barriers, manned checkpoints. All of these have analogs in network security. In fact, all of the previous answers start with just these items - physical ... more

Customer Service

Information Technology

Sept. 13, 2010

Paul Knight and 2 other people answered this question

Server virtualisation best practices?

The best way to minimize exposure of your hypervisor is to select a virtualization solution that does not layer the hypervisor on top of an existing OS. I recommend VMware as they have the thinnest hypervisor in this space. They also have the tools and ... more

Information Technology

Server Virtualisation

Servers and Storage

Aug. 12, 2010

Paul Knight and 7 other people answered this question

What’s the most you would pay for 1 TB of virtual storage?

As I had orignally stated, local storage does not address the offsite backup issue. I address that using a salvaged Megaraid card and DAT4 tape drive. The tapes are stored offsite and rotated out in a methodical manner. This is done at no additional cost ... more

Information Technology

Servers and Storage

Storage Devices

June 25, 2010

Paul Knight and 1 other person answered this question

Wireless Network Security: What are the basics on securing a wireless network in a small office?

The point of hiding the SSID isn't to secure the network, simply to make it less visible. If someone is really determined to get into your wireless network, they will find a way. That is why Robin's suggestion of putting a firewall behind the access ... more

Information Technology

June 25, 2010

Paul Knight and 4 other people answered this question

how can i consolidate our servers through virtualization? i need to know the hardware requirement?

I concur with Andrew's assessment. You never want to place your production systems on a single host. Always think in terms of a cluster of at least two hosts and set up high availability between them. That requires a shared storage mechanism, usually a SAN. ... more

Information Technology

Servers and Storage

June 16, 2010

Paul Knight and 2 other people answered this question

Is this a good desktop virtualization strategy?

Based on the pain point your described, the need is to centralize your data assets. I would recommend an VPN solution that allows your road warriors to access a central file server or SharePoint repository remotely. This solution can also be used to provide RDP ... more

General Management

Information Technology

June 16, 2010

Paul Knight answered this question

How do you back up data in your office?

The first question that comes to mind is how are the 25 computers related to the 2 servers? If the 25 computers are PC workstations, then the recommendation would be to set up a central file server, use roaming profiles if necessary. A network attached ... more

Information Technology

June 16, 2010

Paul Knight answered this question

Looking for access control software.

I recommend BlueCoat proxies to meter or block access to sites. They also provide antivirus checking of web content. more

Information Technology

June 16, 2010

Paul Knight answered this question

VM mobility between data centers

I regularly move guests between data centers with those same centers being mutual fail-over and DR sites. This is in addition to off-site DR readiness. We use VMware and redundant, fiber-connected SANs to implement this. more

Information Technology

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