Eye Of Singapore

Compost is an excellent additive for your garden or bed of flowers. It’s also one of the finest mulches and soil supplements. Additionally, it’s inexpensive and easy to make. Everybody has most of the things they need to make compost right in their home. There are many places you can go to find some composting tips to help you get started making your own compost. If you’ve ever started a garden or flower bed for the first time, you know how costly it can be to start off when you’ve to be purchasing potting soil, surface soil, fertilizer and other miscellaneous additives. Why undergo all this when, with the right composting tips, you are able to make your own compost and save money?

If you have ever read up on composting tips, you’ve probably heard and read how great compost is for gardens because it increases the soil’s water retention qualities, loosens hard soil and improves the texture, structure and aeration of soil. You’ll have a steady supply of potassium, nitrogen and phosphorus always getting into your soil with compost. You may not notice a huge difference in your garden the first year, but each year it will get better and better. Following are some composting tips you may find very helpful if you’re just learning about composting.

Any kitchen food waste you have should not be thrown out but should be added to your compost pile. Most compost bins or piles are kept outdoors, although a smaller one is kept in the kitchen for convenience. When the small one gets full, it’s emptied into the larger one outside. Heat, which your compost pile needs, will build better in a large pile but try not to make it larger than 3 feet by 3 feet. Be sure you have a cover on your compost bin to keep bad smells from entering your kitchen. Avoid throwing in bones or meat, but other foods that are excellent are coffee grounds and filter, egg shells, vegetable and fruits scraps.

Once you discover you’re really interested in starting a compost pile and still have questions, the internet is loaded with composting tips such as these as well as your local library or extension office.

Make sure you keep your compost pile aerated either with a compost aerator or by hand. In order for your pile to heat up and break down, it needs to be periodically turned so it can get the oxygen it needs. Every time you add something new, you need to flip it around. Make sure your compost pile stays damp as it will not break down if it’s too dry. However, make sure it doesn’t become too wet, either. The more variety of bedding materials you have, the quicker it will break down so try to avoid having only one ingredient. Make a mix of leaves and grass clippings or some other similar ingredient. Hopefully, these composting tips have been helpful for you in your new hobby.

Riverbed Technology (NASDAQ: RVBD), the technology and market leader in wide-area data services (WDS), today announced that Raiffeisen Banks, part of the Raiffeisen Organization, has installed 150 Riverbed(R) Steelhead(R) appliances and the Riverbed Central Management Console (CMC) as part of its ongoing strategy to improve access to real-time data and increase worker productivity, while controlling IT costs. The speed provided by Riverbed has allowed Raiffeisen Banks to centralize its IT infrastructure and remove 150 servers from its local branches. In addition, Raiffeisen Banks’ bandwidth utilization has dropped by over 87 percent.

The Federation of Raiffeisen Cooperatives (www.raiffeisen.it) is a group of cooperative entities based in Italy, incorporating banking, agriculture, energy and social services. The banking and insurance services are managed by Raiffeisen Banks with a total of 190 offices throughout the Alto Adige province in Northern Italy, employing 1,750 people and with a turnover of EUR 9.15bn. Raiffeisen Banks outsources its IT services to Raising Unified Network S.p.A.

Raiffeisen Banks had previously pursued a strategy to install servers in each branch location. However, for 190 offices throughout the Northern Italian region, this strategy had become unmanageable. Data between sites was not always consistent and on occasion was not updated. Backups were performed locally, resulting in high costs; maintaining the servers was also time-consuming and costly. For mobile employees the problem was even more widespread, with users losing valuable time trying to download emails and files.

To manage this dispersed architecture, Raiffeisen has outsourced its IT services to RUN. “The main challenge was to consolidate data from 190 local offices to just 40 head offices and a centralized data center. This would provide a more robust architecture, and would allow users to have constant and up-to-date access to files,” explained Dr. Peter Werth, director of RUN. “However, we wanted to find a solution that would not involve an increase in bandwidth costs.”

Working with Zycko UK, Werth investigated the WAN optimization solutions available from Riverbed and Cisco. “Riverbed was way ahead of the competition and the clear leader,” said Werth. “The Riverbed Steelhead appliances were just easier to implement and deploy. They’re more transparent and technologically advanced.”

Following the installation of the 150 Steelhead appliances, Raiffeisen has successfully removed 150 servers from local branches and centralized the IT infrastructure to its data center. The bank has experienced other benefits, including simpler software upgrades and reallocating IT staff from backing up data to other IT projects.

“The results have been great. Bandwidth utilization has been reduced by over 87 percent, CIFS traffic has been reduced by 90 percent and HTTP traffic reduced by over 75 percent,” said Werth. “With the Riverbed CMC we also have a real-time view of our data and global visibility of Raiffeisen operations.”

The bank intends to remove servers from all 190 locations and plans to install the remaining 40 Steelhead appliances in the following months. It is also testing Steelhead Mobile for its consultants and mobile employees.