My job at Monolithic has been one of the greatest adventures in my life, and has given me opportunities to participate in many different projects. There is one part of my job that not too many people know about, but that is the job of IT manager.

David has always believed in keeping our office computer systems up to date, and state of the art, and that has definitely contributed to the design, manufacturing, and construction of Monolithic Domes.

Our website is one of our biggest assets. Our website got 6,225,837 hits last month and we hope to keep that number growing everyday.

Our office only uses Apple computers. We have iMacs for our draftsman,  Mac Minis, a beefed up Mac Pro (see video) that has two dual core processors and 16 gb of ram for finite element analysis, MacBooks,  MacBook Pros, and recently a new MacBook Air for my boss David.

All of the computers, except for the laptops, are ran using an xServe that maintains our Directory Services. That means, that most of the computers are just shells, and all our user data comes from one xServe. Well, that xServe is getting very full, so it was my job to figure out our data storage plan for the future. I started by looking at what Apple had to offer, and this is called an xRaid.

The xRaid is a box that can hold up to 14 hard drives, and combine them to make one massive place to store your data. The first thing I looked at was the price, between 6 and 12 thousand dollars, I said its time to look somewhere else.

After looking around at a lot of different options, way too many to post here, I am back to the xRaid. Here’s why: #1 This is a permanent solution. Once we get over the pain of buying the thing, we won’t have to buy anything like it for a long time. When we need more space, we just go drop in another drive. #2 The xRaid is built to last. The xRaid has two power supplies, two cooling systems, and can be implemented with any kind of raid that you want, so even if do lose a drive, you will not lose data. #3 Apple’s Drive Modules. I was very surprised to learn that Apple’s drives go through 350 hours of testing vs. the 5 minutes for regular drives. Their drives also have a .02% failure rate vs. the 20% failure rate of an off the shelf drive. #4 It is completely manageable by remote. Which in my job is important, since I am out on the site half the time.

*The xRaid also works very well in Windows, Linux, and even mixed environments.

So Mike, where do you learn all this stuff? Well, my brother Dave is the person who continues to teach me, and he has pointed me to another place. We have been buying all of our equipment through a company called Expercom. My favorite thing about Expercom, is that when you have troubles or need advice, they are right there to help.  They have a wonderful customer service department and have literally saved us thousands of dollars on computer equipment.