Other
When is ‘unlimited internet’ not.
This could be seen as me being high maintenance and if this is something that you’re not interested in, I can only apologize. But it must be said.
What do you define as ‘unlimited internet’ ?
The reason for this is that I want to buy a shiny new Blackberry Storm.
It’s available on the Vodafone network here in the UK and it looks wonderful. I can have one tomorrow. But there is an issue. The unlimited internet is subject to a fair use policy.
At this point I seek to state that Vodafone is not doing anything wrong they publish the fair use policy on their adverts, this is an industry wide issue. (in the UK anyway excluding the iPhone).
Is unlimited internet with a fair use policy limit of so many hundred megabytes of data unlimited?
Apparently the ‘unlimited internet’ phrase is for an atypical user. Can we please therefore define an atypical user. I get a few hundred emails a day, I blog on the move, am I an atypical user?
Anyway, back to blogging.
YouSendIt rocks for sending large files
File delivery service YouSendIt announced Thursday that it has released a plug-in for Microsoft Office 2003 and 2007 that will allow users to send any file from Word, Excel, or PowerPoint to recipients through the company’s service.
Based on my testing, the plug-in, which requires registration to download, works quite well. After surfing over to the company’s plug-in page, which is already populated with other plug-ins for iPhoto, Outlook, Photoshop, and others, I downloaded the file in seconds.
Every now and again I have to transfer files to clients/log files to vendors etc, and the limit on email file sizes/firewalls can make it a bit complicated. Check out YouSendIt.com, it’s great and very cool, a great way of getting files to people. That there is going to be a plug in for Office is great news.
Cloud is the future for the enterprise?
The future of corporate IT is in private clouds, flexible computing networks modeled after public providers such as Google and Amazon yet built and managed internally for each business’s users, the analyst firm Gartner says.
Cloud computing hype centers largely around the outsourcing of IT needs to cloud services available over the Internet. While this trend is expected to accelerate, Gartner predicts it will also become standard for large companies to build their own highly automated private cloud networks in which all resources can be managed from a single point and assigned to applications or services as needed. “Our belief is the future of internal IT is very much a private cloud,” says Gartner analyst Thomas Bittman.”Our clients want to know ‘what is Google’s secret? What is Microsoft’s secret?’ There is huge interest in being able to get learnings from the cloud.”
Interesting and I can certainly see why the future might well be in cloud computing. But before we proceed, a few issues or things to note. It’s dependent on:
- Who pays for it - is that an internal IT cost or a bought in service? A shared infrastructure cloud, or a Fixed Income cloud with a shared one for all the shared infrastructure applications
- Your application being coded/in line with what the cloud/grid can deliver
- The issues of ‘owning the infrastructure’ - once it’s a cloud is my voice as loud when I complain if it doesn’t work - what level of control do I have in a cloud computing solution. Key to this is the level of ‘edge’ living that I as the business user/operator can choose to adopt, is there a form I can sign to override the default rules?
- Issues of data protection/sensitivity/control - what application data and applications can reside on the same infrastructure, do I want my HR data being processed/managed on the same servers as my Wiki, my trading applications
- Who supports the cloud and what level of support do I get if my application, my batch doesn’t work
- How will the development teams react to this and how will this be relayed to the end user - “sorry the site’s down, it’s because it’s on cloud” - with buy-in from the development teams this message can be transformed.
I’m eager at this point not to seem negative of the concept. But we need to decide on the basics, how we would deploy the technology, who owns what, and have the ‘default’ answers so that we can ‘pre-answer’ or ‘pre-resolve’ issues.
By that I mean, if the billing, if the processes aren’t in place to aid in transforming the way you provision or provide the IT infrastructure, these kind of issues can de-rail your success.
At the same time there is a hidden benefit of your own infrastructure, you own it, you define the limits of operations, you can control what is supported, what is ‘in scope’ or what can be signed off as an acceptable risk. With an external vendor/provider you have to operate in line with their processes/procedures to enable them to proivde that level of availability (the five 9s). In an internal system, I can accept the risk, say proceed, next.
Information is power - as is managing your systems
IT professionals don’t have the right tools in place to manage their data centres effectively and many fail to monitor all their equipment, according to research from the (ARI) Aperture Research Institute.
The institute, which is funded by data centre specialist Aperture, found that under a third of all data centre professionals monitored more than 90 percent of their equipment while, rather alarmingly, 12 percent of those surveyed had no sort of monitoring system at all.
Tom Waun, Aperture’s president said that managers who were failing to look at all the equipment were leaving themselves open to vulnerability. “The problem is that any item of equipment could fail; it could be a UPS or an aircon unit as well as a server.”
It’s a mixture of things. There are many individual systems which carry out different functions, the hardware monitoring tools (like Insight Manager or IBM Director), the software monitoring tools (like HP OpenView or CA NSM). We have the information, we know therefore the servers we have, we know that Server97 is a DL380, but getting an overview, linking all the individual databases and knowledge bases is the problem. Just ask any large enterprise for the following:
- A list of all servers - ok that’s not too bade
- A list of all servers with Internet explorer 6 including customer facing ones
- A list of servers which are Compaq DL380’s, which have Internet Explorer 6 on Windows 2000 SP4
The ability to do on demand reports for business specific, IT and licensing specific reasons is the thing that we need to be able to do. With an understanding of what we have, who owns it and what it’s doing, we can then decide where we want to go, what we need to achieve to do so and which systems and business lines are impacted. Anything the vendors can do to achieve this has to be a good thing.
OpenOffice and StarOffice for the Mac!
November 17, 2008 (Computerworld) A month after OpenOffice.org released its first-ever free application suite written for Mac OS X, Sun Microsystems Inc. today unveiled a native Mac edition of StarOffice, the commercial version of the bundle.
StarOffice 9, which Sun officially unveiled today, shares code with OpenOffice.org 3.0, the free suite that launched in mid-October to strong demand; the OpenOffice.org servers were knocked offline for several hours the first day. According to an official with OpenOffice.org, users downloaded 3 million copies of the suite the first week it was available.
Great news, another office suite has to be good news for the Apple platform and bring more choice to Apple users. I’ll need to check it out, I didn’t know that OpenOffice was out for the Mac!
Innovation of the virtual infrastructure continues
Working with VMware Inc. (NYSE: VMW), Cisco Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: CSCO) has upgraded its Fibre Channel SAN switches so they can provide a range of storage services to virtual computers as they are moved around data centers.
The upgrade to the MDS 9000 aims to provide the same set of storage services to virtual machines that the SAN switch provide to physical servers, according to Rajeev Bhardwaj, director of product marketing for storage solutions at Cisco. The key step is to partition a physical host bus adapter into virtual HBAs so every virtual machine has its own virtual HBA and can be connected to a virtual SAN, he said.
Anything we can do to improve the possibilites with the virtual infrastructure has to be a good thing, check out this article talking about developments from VMWare and Cisco.
Virtualization on a HP Proliant ML115 G5
I recently decided to virtualize my computers here at home using VMware’s ESXi. When I moved I realized I had a little too much computer equipment. Not to mention when all of them were running my electric bill would get a little ridiculous while these machines mostly idled. I ended up purchasing an HP Proliant ML115 G5 which is HP’s entry level tower server.
An interesting article about virtualizing systems on to one of HP’s Proliant servers, it’s mentions a few work arounds, do check it out.
The need to apply Microsoft (and other) patches
A former Microsoft employee who’s now CTO for a patch management firm says an update issued by Microsoft on Tuesday closes a vulnerability that has been exploited for almost seven years and that he first identified while working for the company.
Eric Schultze, who served as a founding member of the Trustworthy Computing team at Microsoft and was a security director for the vendor, says the MS08-068 patch that Microsoft released as part of its monthly Patch Tuesday announcement closes a flaw he first tested at Microsoft in 2001.
An article talking about the Microsoft patch that was recently released, and another gentle reminder to apply all your security patches/hotfixes and remember the server firmware - it’s the first thing your vendor or service provider will ask when logging a call.
What’s in store for the future?
Speaker: Miha Kralj, Senior Architect Microsoft in Redmond. Let’s just say he won’t have gotten that title by accident. It’s a repeat session and the room is full. I think everyone heard about the first run of the session.
Facts:
- The new data centre can host 12 times more servers than it did before.
- >500,000 IT graduates in China speaking English every year.
- 74% of email is spam
- 119 million spam mails delivered to mailboxes every day. That’s over 50% of mail.
- This session will not be technical. It’s about trends and where we think they’re going, i.e. the future isn’t what it used to be, i.e. where’s my hover car and personal jet pack that the BBC promised me when I was a child? I’m quite irate! Seriously, some of this session will work out, some not.
An interesting post about how IT will change in the next 10 years which raised some great points some of which I hadn’t considered before. Certainly we need to move on to the next generation IT, where it’s no longer virtualization of the server, the network or storage. It’s virtualization of the data center, where I fail workloads, applications and data centers between sites, where my IT can run wherver the business need deems it so, wherever it’s cheapest or wherever the carbon cost of that data center is lowest.
A view inside the next-generation data center
November 10, 2008 (Network World) Visa is looking for a few good people to run its next-generation data centers.
In July, the electronic payments company posted a job listing on the Data Center Job Board for a senior facilities engineer in Virginia to ensure the smooth operation and launch of new state-of-the-art data centers.
Visa is looking to mimic the 2006 launch of its Operations Center Central (OCC) processing facility in Denver in other data centers around the globe. Visa is pushing the envelope of virtualization in that facility and two others in different locations.
An interesting article talking about Visa being on the look out for people to manage it’s next-generation data centers, check it out, it’s a good read.
in my company we have had huge problems outsourcing, all the departments we have outsourced are now suffering and we ...
Hello everyone ! Can anyone tell me what is the estimated value of this green datacenter complex ? And when ...
Yes, outsourcing can bring challenges to us, especially for the owners. Even before there are lots of challenges in outsourcing. 
Internet protection is a must for business security and data integrity. Electronic Banking 
We are in the process of doing much the same; decommissioning our relatively old installations at Docklands in favour of ...
I always use `hponcfg -g` from the commandline of the Linux server. 
Martin, It's great to see that you have picked up this article, many articles report large numbers and tempting savings ...
If you have problems, email me and I'll send you a few config scripts.