2009 – The year for consolidation

Hey everybody,
Hope you all had a great Christmas a New Years :- )

I believe 2009 will be the year of cost consolidation for most businesses worldwide. Businesses will look at a wide range of measures to save costs to consolidate and save space (infrastructure footprint), power and cooling costs, infrastructure investment and also staffing costs.

These can be achieved by undertaking a full review of your IT Infrastructure and data centers from the top down.

Some technology which will help with cost consolidation and will be in high demand this year is:

Blade servers – These help reduce the physical space requirements of your infrastructure and compacts the technology into a much smaller form factor. These can reduce the size of your infrastructure footprint by an enormous amount (typically by about half, obviously depending on the size and type of infrastructure you had previously). But most blade enclosures have the capacity to squeeze 8 half height blade servers into 6U’s of rack. If you had 6x 5U servers filling up a rack previously you may be able to squeeze them all into a single blade enclosure, saving half of your rack space.

Because Blade servers are high density, the technology introduces increased power and cooling demands per rack


Virtualization – This is a hot topic at the moment and a hard concept to explain to somebody that hasn’t come across it before. In essence virtualization is a method of having one or more operating systems running in a sandboxed environment on the one physical host. This allows many virtual servers (all servers in their own right with their own operating system, applications and storage) to be run on the one physical host.

Virtual servers are incredibly powerful in a number of scenarios, including:
· Consolidating legacy applications off ageing hardware into a virtual environment – You can take snapshots of a physical server, and turn the snapshot into a virtual server. A classic example is if you need to keep NT4.0 running for a particular application, but have been paying for extended hardware maintenance, you can ‘suck’ the physical server over to a virtual one. This would mean that the server is running on new hardware and would minimize the risk of legacy hardware failure

· You may have servers that have been installed Ad-Hoc for particular projects or applications and at the time little thought was given to running the application on an already established server. Instead a new server was purchased. This over time could lead to a server sprawl where you have racks full of servers which are incredibly lightly loaded, but you have to pay for power, cooling and maintenance for the servers. In this scenario there would be a good case of virtualization where you may be able to get 10 (or more) physical servers lightly loaded onto one large high availability server.


Cloud computing – As businesses look at ways to reduce costs, outsourcing looks fairly attractive. Recent cloud based services such as Microsoft Azure mean that businesses can outsource a whole server function or just a single web application, and with a technology giant behind the service, SLA guarantees are more likely to be achieved with greater reliability and scalability potentials moving forwards.


Some new technology and concepts that will be starting to get some enterprise vision this year include:
- Solid State Disks (SSD’s) – These are high reliability flash drives, that have large capacity options, redundancy options and are quicker and require less power. This is because with the SSD there are no moving platters or drives that need to be powered. To date long term reliability has been questionable, however storage vendors are starting to produce SSD’s that have a mean time between failure (MTBF) of similar levels to that of a traditional hard disk.

- DC Power rather than AC – This is something I will be blogging about a bit later – But the latest data center concept is to supply your entire data center with DC power rather than AC power. With AC power supplied to the rack, the servers have to convert the power to DC anyway, with massive power losses (which take the form of heat) – Thus saving on your cooling at the same time.

- Looking outside the box in terms of your cooling. I have been watching this space now for some time and there are numerous concepts around to help save the power spent on cooling:

o Most data centers are cooled at 68 degrees F (20 degrees C), however a study by Intel suggests that it found no consistent increase in the rate of equipment failure when running the data center at 92 degrees F (33 degrees C). Thus saving power on cooling. There is a catch-22 on this in that the hotter the servers get the harder the fans run, using more power and creating more heat. Dean Nelson (Sun's Senior Director of Global Lab and Data Center Design) suggests in a recent video that there is a "sweet spot" which is probably in the range from 80-85 degrees F (26-29 degrees C).

o Another option that seems to be taking off is if the data center is located in a consistently cool location, consider pumping outside air in to cool the space, and then move the warmed air through to the office space where people are working

Hope all is well.
Cheers,
Phil

Seasons Greetings and Happy Holidays

Hey everybody,
To end the year off with a bang, I just received my final University subject grades – I passed which is great. I was hoping for a Credit, but mustn’t have done as well as I hoped in the exam. But the great news is I have now officially completed my Masters degree. Graduation is in April ’09.

Wishing you all a very Merry Christmas, Season’s Greetings and hope you all have a great New Years.

It’s been a pretty exciting year, and I’m hoping 2009 will be even better!

Cheers :- )

Phil

Microsoft – You can do much better

Hey everybody,
I’ve been out and about over the past few months and have met up with quite a number of CTO’s, CIO’s and IT Ops managers and I’ve got a big problem with 3 technologies from Microsoft:

- Exchange direct push Versus Blackberry
- Virtual Server / Hyper-V Versus VMWare
- Terminal Services / Remote desktop Versus Citrix

All of the companies I visited had recently chosen not to implement Microsoft’s solutions, instead opting for the competition – Despite the fact that they had to pay significantly for them.

All but one of the managers I had spoken to said that they didn’t even bother with a technical trial of the Microsoft solutions mainly because they had been told that the competitor’s products were far more mature and were more reliable.

Only one of the managers actually knew why they went for a VMWare / Blackberry and Citrix environment and said that they had run tests on the comparable Microsoft solutions, which is commendable.

All of the Microsoft solutions here are free (with the correct versions of the software and CAL purchases), thus saving significant money in a large scale implementation. I know there are very good reasons as to why one would pick VMWare over Virtual Server or Blackberry over Exchange or Citrix over Terminal Services.

My main concern here is that most of the IT managers I spoke with didn’t even bother to find out about the Microsoft solutions or run a trial simply because they were advised otherwise or that they had their own opinion about it.

I personally think this is quite sad – I believe these products are great and I would always recommend the Microsoft offerings (unless there were special requirements which the Microsoft offerings didn’t address).

In my mind it all comes down to advertising and general awareness of the Microsoft product offerings. Microsoft – I think you guys can do this better. You need to be out at industry events promoting your products, you need a better advertising campaign (don’t get me started on the “I’m a PC" ads), you need to be pro-actively seeking out companies that are looking at running projects and you also need to be getting involved with the guys in the trenches to try and turn around this negative publicity. Lastly – Microsoft – You just need to get people excited and inspired with your technology!

Anyway – That’s just my rant for the day.
Hope you are all well.

Cheers,
Phil P

How do I keep up-to-date with all that is happening in IT?

Hey everybody
I’ve had a few people now ask me how I keep up-to-date with the latest technology trends and innovations. The answer is fairly simple – Use lots of different news sources along with attending lots of IT gatherings, events and conferences.

From a news perspective – I find Blogs are the best way to stay on top of the latest IT news and I use the integrated RSS reader in Outlook 2007, which is an easy method of collating them into the one view.

The Blogs that I read regularly are:
The Clustering and High Availability Blog from the MSDN team
Michael Kleef ::: MSFT
Microsoft Security Bulletins
Network World on Security
Network World on Servers
Robert Hensing’s Blog
The Sobelizer – Robert Scoble
Microsoft Security Vulnerability Research & Defense
Sunbelt Software’s Blog
The Enterprise Engineering Centre Blog
Windows Mobile Team Blog
Windows Server Division WebLog
Windows Virtualization Team Blog
You Had Me At EHLO..
And of course – The IDEAS Insights Blog – The company I work for

The other news site I always scan over is SlashDot – “News for nerds, stuff that matters”

Other than regularly reading these Blogs, I also like to attend as many industry events and conferences as I can – Microsoft’s TechEd, Cisco’s Technology Solutions, HP’s Technology At Work, CeBIT, product launches and other various vendor and end user events and conferences around the place.

The other piece of news this week is the Microsoft System Centre Virtual Machine Manager (SCVM) 2008 has been RTM’d, which is good news, especially with my Physical to Virtual (P2V) conversions I was talking about in my previous blog post.

Also – Further to my post about Data Centre’s in a Box – It looks like Microsoft has taken this to the extreme and is using containers to run servers in, but inside a building.

Each container is 40 foot long and can contain up to 2,500 servers. Apparently they are extremely energy efficient with a Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) rating of 1.22

It also appears that the latest Google data centre may be heading in the same direction

This is an interesting twist on the Data Centre in a box concept – It will be interesting to see how that pans out.

In other news - I’ve just booked in my final Uni exam – It’s booked in for the 24th November – I’m very excited about the prospect of having it all done, now just to focus on the last assignment due in 2 weeks time.

Cheers,
Phil P

Thoughts on Virtualisation

Hey everybody,
I’ve just submitted my 2nd last assignment for my Masters degree, so I thought I’d take some time to update my blog post.

As I write this I’m finishing off migrating our production development system from a virtual server on Virtual Server 2005 over to Hyper-V (Windows 2008). So far so good. The new server is much quicker and I can now allocate up to 2 virtual CPU’s for Windows 2003 (up to 4 for a Windows 2008 guest OS).

I started thinking about a recent LinkedIn discussion where I was shocked at the perception people had about Microsoft’s virtualisation platforms – Words like this were thrown around:

• “Go with VMware who is the leader of the pack. It's been around for a long time, and it is using efficient memory”
• “VMware are several years ahead of these new players. So, don't tried the inferior products, and go with the best for now”
• “VMware is the market leader and their technology is proven”
• “It's not mature yet”

I personally don’t believe any of these above statements are correct – Other than the fact that VMWare has been around for longer than MS Virtual technologies (not by that much though).

Hyper-V can do most things that VMWare can, and it’s considerably cheaper. The big thing that Hyper-V can’t do is “ live hot swapping” in a clustered environment. More information on this here.

I came across an interesting article published earlier this month where the PacLib Group commissioned a study to find out what it would actually cost to migrate their environment over to a virtualised environment. The outcome is it would cost $25K for installation and $25K for software for a VMWare installation. This is one of the most interesting quotes I have read in a long time from David Furey (the IT Manager at The PacLib Group): - “You’ve got to question whether it’s worth paying $50,000 for that. I know the VMware camp go on about features like VMotion, but for $50,000 I could pay someone to move my virtual machines for me.”

The functionality David is talking about is the live hot swapping in VMWare (that Hyper-V doesn’t have) – But one seriously needs to ask – How much is that functionality actually worth to the business? Is it worth the 10 seconds or so of downtime you save when comparing it to a Hyper-V clustered environment? Perhaps it is important for your business to have the VMWare functionality – But it needs to be evaluated.

The one thing I sorely miss at the moment is some way to perform a Physical to Virtual migration (P2V). In MS Virtual Server 2005, this was fairly complicated, although do-able using the Virtual Server Migration Tools coupled with Automated Deployment Services (ADS) – All were free provided you had Windows 2003 Enterprise.

With Hyper-V the only way to perform a P2V migration (using the Microsoft tools) is via the System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2008 – Which so happens this software is in Beta, and it would eventually be a purchasable product.

I’m not saying VMWare is no good – It’s great – I just think people need to have more of an open mind about the solutions that they look at and evaluate all options. I suspect that over time we will see more of what the PacLib Group went through as people start to question whether the extra features of VMWare are actually worth the money given the various virtualisation options around now.

Anyway – That’s it from me.

5 weeks to go for my Masters degree and I’m done :- ) Can’t wait.

All the best.
Phil

Its up – The new Microsoft advertising campaign to take on Apple featuring Jerry Seinfeld

I’ll let you decide what to think – Check it out here first..
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/

My reaction – I was quite disappointed really. Microsoft has been given so many things it could throw back at Apple (as the Apple ad's did to Microsoft), but instead the analogy was comparing shoes. I really didn’t get it.

I bet the guys who wrote the Apple ad's are absolutely rolling in laughter at this attempt.
The Apple ads actually focus on the technology (albeit from a slapstick view), but nonetheless they are incredibly appealing to all, and convey the Apple message – This advertisement didn’t have anything about the technology and in my opinion was not appealing.

Come on Microsoft – You can do much better than this!!
Phil

Windows Server 2008 – What it means from a techo’s perspective

Hey everybody,
I’ve now installed Windows 2008 Enterprise x64 onto a really nice HP ProLiant DL580 G5 (4x 2.9GHz Quad Core CPU’s with 12GB RAM, and 8x 146GB hard drives in a RAID-5 array) server.

My experience so far has been really great. Windows 2008 appears to have been well thought out and well designed.

Some stand out new features that I love in Windows Server 2008 includes:
Ability to extend or shrink a partition on the fly
This is a very cool feature with Windows Server 2008. It lets you shrink and expand a hard drive partition on the fly without the need for a 3rd party application. You can even expand and shrink the operating system partition on the fly without the need for a reboot. This is a very exciting development for me as I’m always adding more disks to the RAID array, and it’s now easy to extend the partition out.



Bare metal backup and recovery (without the need to go offline for backup)
For me this is a really exciting development. This feature allows you to take a full disk image (using Volume Shadow Copies), and can save it to either a network drive or an external USB disk. Previously to get a similar type of bare metal backup you would have had to use something like Ghost, however these products usually required the server to be offline to be able to get the image. With Windows Server 2008 this feature can be run on the fly, and can also update the original backup taken incrementally. In the event you need to recover the server (for example the OS partition is corrupted), you can boot off the Windows DVD, and then enter the Recovery console and elect to restore one or more partitions from the backup image. I don’t view this as part of our daily backup routine, but I do view this as part of our disaster recovery solution, and will take updated snapshots once a week or so.

Power savings
Whilst I haven’t dabbled with this yet, Windows Server 2008 comes with many features to save power such as the ability to fine tune how much power the hardware components are using

Terminal Services remote Apps
Windows Server 2008 has some very exciting new terminal services capabilities. The big one for me is that you can enable a specific application to be able to be run remotely, and then the on the client side, you place a short-cut to the application on the terminal services server and it will be run just like it was installed on the client. But without the need to be in a full terminal services session (full desktop console)

Read Only Domain Controller (RODC)
Windows Server 2008 also has the ability to be a Read Only Domain Controller (or RODC). This is great for environments where you might not be able to fully guarantee the server’s security (physically). This means that the RODC cannot be written to or updated from an Active Directory perspective (only read from).

Windows High Performance Computing (HPC) Server 2008
For the first time ever – Microsoft is releasing a High Performance Computing (HPC) version of its operating system. The HPC bits actually sit on top of a vanilla installation of Windows Server 2008 (64-bit only).This version is intended to compete in the high end of town, and be run on a 64-bit environment natively and can scale up to thousands of CPU cores. It is a purpose built operating system for clustering and has better systems management, job scheduling, networking interfaces and storage capabilities over the vanilla version of Windows 2008 Server.


Just a warning for all of you who are thinking about deploying Windows Server 2008 into your environment – Make sure you check with all of your 3rd party software suppliers to make sure they fully support your new environment. I’ve had massive issues with our anti-virus products as well as our 3rd party backup applications. Luckily the products I am using are supported, so they are working with me on a fix.

Anyway – That’s all from me on Windows Server 2008 – A quick sum up in 2 words: I LOVE IT.


Cheers,
Phil

Foobar for VMWare - Why can't I start my virtual servers today?

Hey everybody,
I am now done and dusted with those 2 subjects for my Uni degree, and I now only have one left – On wireless technologies. I’ve got 3 weeks off on holidays, so I’m going to get some R&R, plus I need to start thinking about upgrading my MCSE certs to MCITP Enterprise (for Windows Server 2008).

I was going to be blogging about Windows Server 2008 today, but the big news today is VMWare are in the headlines for the wrong reasons. Apparently if you have the latest version of ESX (3.5.x Update 2) you will be unable to boot your virtual servers up today (the 13th Aug) or ever after until a fix is released.

See the official Knowledge Base Article here:
http://kb2.vmware.com/kb/1006716.html

Nothing has been said about what happens to virtual servers already running (presumably nothing will happen until you try and reboot your virtual servers), however VMWare have announced a licensing bug where the software cripples itself on the 12th August 2008 (presumably this functionality was supposed to be for the demo version, and should have been un-locked as part of the registration process).

The immediate workaround that VMWare have announced is just to roll back the hosts system date and time (not that it’s much of a work-around), but I’d say a patch will be coming out within the next few hours to correct this problem.

Anyway – That’s it from me for the minute – I’m currently building up a really nice HP ProLiant DL580 G5 server with Windows 2008 for one of our production servers, so I’ll be back in the next few days with my experiences from that.

Cheers,
Phil

Just a note to let you all I’m still here :-)

For me the next month will be pretty heavy – I’m wrapping up 2x university subjects at the moment which will mean that I only have 1 subject left before I finish my Masters degree. All being equal I will then have it finished by the end of this year.

One of my subjects is quite hard – I’m studying Encryption – The standards I’m learning about are DES, 3DES and RSA. Not only am I having to learn them at a high level, I have to learn the mathematics behind them. For DES and 3DES this is not so much of an issue (as there is little maths involved), but RSA is extremely complex and involves large Prime numbers and Mod maths.

The other subject isn’t too hard – It’s focused on IT Security (more on the ethics side than the technical side), but with a focus on learning about Linux – The 3 flavours I’m learning include Red Hat, Fedora Core and Ubuntu.

Some exciting technology developments have happened over the past week:
- HyperV (the new Hypervisor for virtual servers running on Windows Server 2008) has been released to manufacturing (RTM). This means that anybody who has an appropriately licensed Windows Server 2008 can run virtual servers in full production mode

- The new 3G iPhone – Apple have released the new 3G iPhone in Australia. I’m currently looking for a new phone, and the iPhone looks like it would suit me down to the ground. Although I must say when I compare it to other midrange to high-end mobile phones of around the same price, it does look like a number of the iPhone’s features are now obsolete – For example the phone only has a 2MegaPixel camera – Other new phones are coming out with 5MegaPixels. Another example is a built in FM radio, most other phones from Nokia or SonyEricsson do have a built in radio. If the iPhone had a built in FM radio I’d be sold, but at the moment I'm not convinced.

Anyway – I better get back to my Uni work – I’ve got 2 assignments due in 2.5 weeks time, and then the final 2 exams on the 4th and 5th August.

Cheers,
Phil

Data Centres in a box – What’s the go?

Portable all-in-one Data Centres are starting to become more prevalent. First was the APC Data Centre in a truck, and then came the Sun Portable Data Centre in a container and more recently (and more extreme) a floating Data Centre on a cargo ship.

I’m sure there are more businesses out there who are selling their own spin on the portable Data Centre, but what does it actually mean to have one of these services available to you?

I think that the most common use for these will be as a ‘service’ meaning you rent the ‘box’ for a period of time and contained within that box is a plethora of server equipment, networking kit and some form of portable high-speed internet connection (Satellite?) of which will either come pre-configured or self-configured.

I think the uses of these portable Data Centres are fairly limited however, and are probably confined to a few key areas:
- Disaster Recovery – As long as you can get your hands on one of these portable data centres fairly quickly (depending on business SLA’s), these could be very useful in providing a big punch fairly quickly without the need for costly ‘on standby’ equipment – You just need the space to put the truck, container or ship.
- Companies that have a large requirement to be very mobile – For example a news network, or a TV network covering motorsport, an events company that has a large IT dependency or even a geographical research / materials company (land or water)

I suspect the use for a floating Data Centre would be fairly limited – And probably for quite illegal activities (international waters). Which brings about an interesting question – Who’s laws would the data centre be liable to follow? And who would enforce them?

Anyway – That’s it from me – I’m back from holidays now, so you will start to see some more activity from me over the coming weeks.

Have a good one : - )
Phil