Corner Edge provides a unique service to several design studios and advertising agencies that eliminates this issue, allowing creatives to maintain complete creative control while reducing overhead cost through outsourced development. What makes our development service so unique is not only our top notch developers and database engineers but their collaboration with our design staff.  Our designers are steeped in a traditional print background. In addition to being excellent interactive designers, our staff has more than 20 years of experience in advertising, packaging, collateral and publishing. This diversity  makes Corner Edge designers ideally equipped to serve as liaison between our clients creative departments and our developers.

We understand both sides of the spectrum so nothing is lost in translation. If your agency/studio is geared primarily towards providing print advertising, package design or branding yet has a need to also deliver integrated, branded web initiatives Corner Edge can help you provide that service. Because our designers posses well rounded creative experience in both web and print they can effectively communicate with your creative team in the same language to ensure a cohesive brand translation from print materials to web and mobile devices.  This translates into time savings, fewer missed deadlines, and project success.

If your client needs a web site, mobile app, social media marketing, or other interactive product and your considering outsourcing the development be sure to partner with a company that understands your business and one that can bridge the gap between print and web.

How nice would it be if you had a secure file transfer system built into your website? Secured with HTTPS, audited by YOU so you know WHO has permission exactly, and stored in a top tier data-center with 7+ layers of physical security and max web performance?

CornerEdge has built and hosted several of these file exchange and document management solutions for happy customers this year.   Contact us today for more information on how you can better service your clients with professionalism, ease, and the highest level of security for their information.

While having two complete setups of VMware is probably cost prohibitive, with the small footprint of VMware ESXi, you can use a simple workstation or even a laptop as a cold spare DR backup.  As you’ll see below, I have easily installed VMware on my laptop, and with a large enough hard drive, and enough memory, I could run a small to medium office server environment setup on my one laptop, or even a mid-range business desktop.  The cost of these is usually around $1500-2500, and when you consider the cost of a second server may come in at $5000 or more, this is a great low-budget way to have your office back up and working quickly in the event of a major disaster.

To do this simply, just power off the VM’s on a schedule that fits your DR needs and copy the files from the main DataStore and upload them the the DataStore on your backup setup.  You will want to make sure your backup processor is a 64-bit proc with VT enabled if you are running 64-bit VM’s, you have enough storage space for the foreseeable future, and definitely install as much memory as your budget and workstation will allow, and that should be it.

You clearly shouldn’t expect the same performance of this setup as you would get from a true server, but it would get people back online and running again while you work on the main server.

Here is a quick picture I took of my laptop running VMware ESXi just for fun.  I had installed ESXi on a USB stick, and booted to that when I powered on my laptop.  This install was originally done on a PowerEdge 2950, and without any modifications to the install, it came up just fine on an Dell Latitude E6500.  Simply carry a USB flash drive and a large external storage drive and you can have a backup ESXi server wherever you go.

Since this machine was part of a cluster, we simply migrated the VMs on the failed server to the other working ESXi server through vSphere vCenter Server.  The working VMware server was able to overcommit the available physical memory by almost 50% with room to spare.  We then took down the server with the bad drives to rebuild.  We also took this opportunity to install the OS onto a USB flash drive, which installed internally to the server, and remove the remaining two working hard drives to run a completely diskless server configuration.  With a small amount of configuring to VMware, the newly rebuilt server was ready to join the cluster again and the VMs were then evenly distributed throughout the cluster, all the while never having to power anything off.  That means never having to send out maintenance notices to customers that their hosted servers will be offline, and keeping out uptime in tact.  The whole process took only about 5 hours as well.  When was the last time a total failure on a system RAID drive, and nothing went down, and everything was upgraded and repaired in 5 hours?

Wild Heart Bulk Landscape Supplies Exciting New Website

Wild Heart Bulk Landscape Supplies is a woman owned business with a goal to create superior work and service at a reasonable price. Wild Heart offers a  wide variety of products and services from their store in Hillsborough, NJ. To help the company grow Corner Edge has designed and developed a new web site that highlights  their bulk products, custom sheds and landscaping and maintenance services. Corner Edge custom developed specially designed calculators to help customers and staff to determine the volume of product needed for a given project. The site also includes order request forms for bulk supplies and sheds, which will soon be incorporated into a full online e-commerce site linked directly to the company’s sales ticket system also developed and securely hosted by Corner Edge. Be sure to visit the various services pages to see some fun Flash animation created to represent each service. In addition to Flash Corner Edge has begun implementing the latest website development techniques available through the use of  html5 and CSS3.

Corner Edge Design redesign of cr-law.net

The result was an updated “CR” logo with a 3D platinum look and clean new website design that is easily navigated. The home page features a Flash animation of the CR logo and animated text. iPad/iPhone and mobile visitors are redirected to an alternate home page. Even though the site has a few “under construction” pages on it we are very proud to launch this new web presence for Carmagnola & Ritardi LLC., and to address those “under construction” pages the Corner Edge development team is planning to implement their web based on site content editing system so  Carmagnola & Ritardi will have complete control over their site content.

Corner Edge Solutions remains on the cutting edge of technology and application development with the beta release of it’s already successful iWeb Presentations platform. The growing popularity of the iPhone and iPod Touch mobile devices as well as the anticipated business market success of Apples iPad has inspired us to make our products available to a wider audience. While still available in it’s original form as a Adobe Flash based web application with a .NET backend to manage users and track data the new mobile version has been completely redeveloped from the ground up to accommodate the iPad. Corner Edge developers have embraced the Apple development environment and is excited to offer this and many more products and service applications for these ground breaking devices. Corner Edge Solutions is committed to providing the very best service on any platform. Contact Corner Edge today for a iWeb Presentations for iPad demonstration.

Assuming you already have the port forwarding set and the site is accessible from the internet, there is only one check mark you need to remove to get this working from the inside.  Start by hovering over the “System” in the menu bar, then click “Advanced”.

Home Page of pfSense firewall

From there, scroll almost all the way down to the “Network Address Translation” section, and uncheck the “Disable NAT Reflection” option.

pfSense System -> Advanced -> Network Address Translation

Now you will be able to type the public name or IP address into your browser and be able to see the page being hosted on your internal LAN.  No more keeping hosts files to keep things easy, which sounds even easier to me.

Highlighted you will see the data store block size.

When data stores are created, their default block size is 1 MB, which gives you a maximum virtual hard drive size maximum of 256 GB.  So how do you get larger VHD’s?

Hopefully you are reading this and have a brand new ESX/ESXi setup, in which case you can just delete the data store and recreate it, choosing a different block size.  If you already have machines running on the data store, you have a project ahead of you, because deleting the data store will format all data on that drive, and you will have to start from scratch, or be creative before you make the change (there are some ideas of how to work around this below).

If you have the disk space to cover 2TB, then I would go with the maximum of 8MB block size to give you a maximum virtual HDD size of 2TB.  There is no noticeable I/O performance difference by using maximum size, so use the largest size to mazimize your storage.  Here is a quick reference of what block size you can choose and what the maximum VHD that will give you:

Block Size     Max VHD size

1MB                256GB
2MB               512GB
4MB               1TB
8MB               2TB

Already have servers running?  How do you fix it?

If you already have the data store in use, and can afford some downtime for a maintenance window, here is a workaround you could do, asuming you have more than one ESX(i) server at your disposal.  You can power the VM down and use the free VMware vCenter Converter (http://www.vmware.com/products/converter/) to move the virtual machine from one ESX(i) server to another.  Figure on about 1 minute per gig of hard drive size when moving it, with a GB network.  Once the VM is moved to its new location, power it an and make sure all is working well before you delete from disk the VM on the original ESX(i) server.  Once all the VMs are moved off the ESX server, you can go ahead and remove the data store and create a new one using the new block size.

If you hapen to have your VMs in a cluster with vMotion, this task is even easier, as you can change the location of the datastore through the migrate option.  If you dont have any other ESX servers, you could probably do it to VMware Servers, but at that point, you would probably be better just adding multiple drives to the VMs, it would be a lot less work.

Here is a nice reference guide from VMware with this and other importand configuration information: http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vi3_35/esx_3/r35u2/vi3_35_25_u2_config_max.pdf

Ok, so your hard drive fails.  How do you diagnose the failure?  Is it the click of death?  Are there bad heads, bad clusters, a stuck spindle? Does it sound fine, but just not load?

When its making strange noises, this site might help you decide exactly what has happened with a close listen to the drive:

http://datacent.com/failing_hard_drive_sounds

A lot of times these noises mean you are toast, or in for a costly repair & data recovery job.  If you have backups, this can serve for great entertainment to satisfy your inner geek.  You’ll know exactly what happened…

Without backups, well, at least you can add the exact diagnosis to your new data loss nightmare story.  But those stories are getting REALLY old these days, so please make sure you are getting good backups, there is no good excuse.

-Russ

I can truly:

• Answer all calls on my office phone – via my software phone on my laptop.
• Make all calls with my office caller id with my softphone – caller id says I’m in the office to customers, so what if there are birds in the background.
• Access all my data on the virtual office system, outlook anywhere, & external sites via the internet
• Enjoy this beautiful weather!
• Have the freedom to sit down and work ANYWHERE with my verizon air card & laptop.

Can you work from anywhere? Call us today for more information how you can free yourself from the confines of a traditional office environment. You deserve this level of efficiency and ease of technology access.  We can help you drive your business ahead of the curve.  This is easy, and its time you took advantage of it.

iWebPresentations can be password protected and date sensitive, so only invited viewers have access. iWebPresentations also capture data so you can track user input and response.

To see a preview of iWebPresentations go to design.corneredge.com.