Applications of glaze and decor on dimensioned andesites used in construction sector

This report presents initial results of the development process of a new product using andesites obtained from Afyon/Iscehisar region as an alternative to traditional ceramic wall and floor tiles used in construction sector. The series of characterization tests were conducted on andesite samples. Then, the samples were applied glaze for trial purposes. Analysis indicated that the andesite samples consisted of sanidine, mica and pyroxene minerals and its apparent porosity, density, water absorption and compressive strength values were 15.75%, 2610 g/cm³, 7.43% and 40.7 MPa, respectively. In heat microscope measurements, maximum sintering was recorded at 1138 °C. Linear expansion coefficient (α) of the andesite at 400 °C was 3.26 × 10^?6 K^?1. Firing performed by using the prepared glaze recipe at approximately 1160 °C produced good results in terms of body-glaze harmony. In addition, different decorative surface finishes to be used in indoor and outdoor spaces were obtained via under glaze decorative technique.     

SANchk: SQL-based SAN configuration checking

Storage Area Networks (SANs) connect groups of storage devices to servers over fast interconnects. An important challenge lies in managing the complexity of the resulting massive SAN configurations. Policy-based validation using new logical frameworks has been proposed earlier as a solution to this configuration problem. SANchk offers a new solution that uses standard technologies such as SQL, XML, and Java, to implement a rule-based configuration checker. SANchk works as a light-weight extension to the relational databases of storage management systems; current support includes IBM?s TPC and the open source Aperi storage manager. Some five dozen best practices rules for SAN configuration are implemented in SANchk, many of them with configurable parameters. Empirical results with several commercial SANs show that the approach is viable in practice.