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Intro Load Balancing for Developers – the Architect’s View Okay, there are a zillion bits about load balancing including introductions and articles for developers, but I’m throwing this out in a blog format so we can be more chatty and less “instructional”. To that end, I’ll be a lot more laid back than what you’re used to reading on the topic, but the whole point of this (and any follow-on) blogs is to get you to understand rather than just know load balancing. If you already understand, join me, there’s a comment form below, tell the other readers what I’ve missed or understated. So you’ve built... posted @ Wednesday, March 11, 2009 9:50 PM | Feedback (1)

Options, Options. A Geek Kid Has Them. Fair warning, my Friday posts are lighter, and will continue to be as long as I think I’m funny. If you’re here for work, move along, nothing to see here. When you’re a child of a geek family, if you show signs of interest in technology the jokes start going around about job offers. Lori and I’s mothers both programmed – mine with punch cards, hers in COBOL – we are both programmer/network/gaming geeks, so of course our kids get “job offers”. At 12, Korey was mastering Visual Basic, and we were meeting with Novell. Someone from Novell... posted @ Thursday, March 05, 2009 10:41 PM | Feedback (3)

Reason #1 That You Need File Virtualization So I’ve been going to start this series forever, and things just kept piling up. Today I have decided to embark upon it, and worry later about other commitments, because I think it is an important topic. I wasn’t a fan of File/NAS Virtualization at first – it seemed like an added layer to the very clean (if chatty) NAS hierarchy. I’ve grown to understand that the addition of the layer is nothing compared to the adaptability that layer provides, so I want to share. This series will start with the low-hanging fruit, the stuff that anyone who’s... posted @ Wednesday, March 04, 2009 8:09 PM | Feedback (4)

Project (Mis)management I was doing a video blog last night and got to pondering the state of project management these days. With the PMI and several other groups trying to rein in the beast that is runaway projects, it seems we’d have come further than we have. The one thing that got me thinking this – and the corollary that I came up with later – is that projects have a predictable pattern – staff who are already very busy with five projects more important than yours (or that got in the queue before yours, however your organization does it)... posted @ Tuesday, March 03, 2009 5:38 PM | Feedback (0)

Network Computing Awards 2009 Hey all! Just a quick post to say you should pop out and vote in the Network Computing (UK) 2009 Awards. Of course we want you to vote for the BIG-IP in the “Load Balancing Product of the Year” category (since they don’t have an Application Delivery Network category ;-)), but there are some great entries in the other categories too that are worth checking out. The Network Infrastructure and Storage categories both have a wide array of different technologies under them, makes voting difficult and watching who comes out ahead fun. We believe in... posted @ Monday, March 02, 2009 10:25 PM | Feedback (3)

RealIT – Watch the Monkeys Write Shakespeare In the darkened back rooms of F5, and in the far reaches of Missouri and a basement in Wisconsin, we on the DevCentral Team have been slaving away at cooking you up some new and exciting content. “What do you mean, our site is slow?” Joe asks. “Ever tried to access a North American site from China?” the voice on the phone asks, “Everything is slow.” And there was our dilemma, in a nutshell. Our China team wanted their own localized version of DevCentral, we wanted to provide it to them, but we couldn’t afford a huge... posted @ Wednesday, February 18, 2009 1:16 PM | Feedback (2)

Multiple Project Mania We, like most of you, are involved in a number of projects at a given time, juggling our priorities to make sure we’re delivering on our commitments while not letting other commitments slide. Our current top-priority project is the DevCentral China system that was launched not too long ago, we’re still in the documentation stage where we will offer you insights into how we managed to make our applications, hosted in North America, work well in China, and the pitfalls and pratfalls along the way. I personally am also involved with our Business Development team doing some... posted @ Tuesday, February 17, 2009 12:22 PM | Feedback (0)

Multi-core: Invasion of the Heavyweights? Well, I saw on The Register the other day that Intel had released a toolkit consisting of several plug-ins for Microsoft Visual Studio to support Multi-core development. Having said so much on the topic, and having a long-running interest in compiler theory, of course I downloaded it during a week that I was crazy-busy enough that I couldn’t even get this blog out ;-). I’ve installed it, but haven’t tried it out yet. This blog is just to ponder if multi-core development is finally about to grow up. As much as there is opportunity for a small player... posted @ Monday, February 09, 2009 1:32 PM | Feedback (0)

Friends: Comic Reminders of Reality. The following is an actual IM conversation with a friend. The name has been changed to protect the guilty, but this person had many, many original printed works on his computer. [12:44] friend: GGGGGGGGUAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHAGHAGHAGHHHHHHAAAAAAAAAAGH[12:45] dmacvittie1: Feel better? Crappy day, so if it works, I'll try it ;-).[12:46] friend: HARD[12:46] friend: DRIVE[12:46] friend: ON[12:46] friend: FIRE[12:46] friend: FIRE DON[12:46] friend: FIRE[12:46] friend: FLAMES[12:46] friend: BURNING MY[12:46] friend: HARD DRIVE[12:46] friend: YEARS OF WORK[12:46] friend: PICTURES[12:46] friend: EMAILS[12:46] friend: GONE[12:46] friend: FIRE[12:46] friend: :@ :@ :@ :@ [12:47] dmacvittie1: backups?[12:47] friend: AHAAHAHAHAHAHA[12:47] dmacvittie1: marshmallows?[12:48] friend: might as well ...[12:56] friend:... posted @ Friday, January 30, 2009 6:58 AM | Feedback (0)

Security: Here we go again! We as an industry have this love-hate relationship with security - a necessary evil doesn't do enough to describe the growing portion of our IT budget consumed by making certain only the people we want are in, and they can only see the bits we want. And because of that, one of the first things to get hit on a downturn is security spending. It's a larger budget, it doesn't generate a cent of revenue, and frankly, it pisses most of us off. Until the breach that is. Then we want to know why that hole existed (and likely someone... posted @ Friday, January 23, 2009 12:54 PM | Feedback (0)

Accuracy is important. Vulnerabilities not so much. Heh. Got you reading, didn't I? The point of this blog post is short and sweet. Yesterday SANS released their list of the Top 25 Vulnerability Coding Errors (emphasis mine). Sadly, finding that to be too long for a snappy title, they got rid of that superfluous word "Vulnerability" and titled it Top 25 Most Dangerous Programming Errors. These geniuses were blindly followed by journalists, bloggers and twit-heads who chimed in on this entrancing topic. Some of these blind followers are, sadly, people I respect. One word: FAIL. These are great, the list has been a long time in... posted @ Wednesday, January 14, 2009 1:23 PM | Feedback (1)

The Secret Seattle Meetings. Well, it's that time again, as Jeff mentioned in his post, we're all here in Seattle, meeting face to face for some serious mind-share and moving stuff forward that has floundered. These are always such great meetings, largely because there is always stuff that is going on but even the rest of the team isn't aware of. Today Colin was showing off some WOW stuff that he'll hopefully be able to share with you soon (don't hound him, there are legal reasons he's not sharing yet ;-))... Just to show that we made a great choice when we hired him,... posted @ Tuesday, January 06, 2009 5:51 PM | Feedback (0)

A Multi-Faceted World View Outside of work I spend some amount of time debating a range of topics with chosen friends over email. This week I'm debating the future of the press with InformationWeek editor Lorna Gary. While we have pretty divergent views about what the next few years hold for "the press" in the traditional and new media sense, Lorna is intelligent, educated, and aware not only of the needs of her little piece of the pie, but pressure on advertisers, etc. It makes for some stimulating conversation, and I always learn something from these discussions. Which is one thing you should be... posted @ Tuesday, December 16, 2008 12:44 PM | Feedback (0)

F5 ARX and Data Domain - Reduced Expense, Streamlined Storage We get the opportunity to interview people on occasion, and when we signed a partnership with Data Domain, I became intrigued. The two technologies definitely could be complimentary, but I wanted to understand the how/why of our partnership. Rick Gillett, VP of Data Systems Architecture took some time to chat with me and provide some slides that illustrate how the two technologies work together via this partnership and what the cost implications could be - based on real-world deployments of ARX with Data Domain. It had some serious surprises for me, that's for certain, I'm hoping it does for you... posted @ Thursday, December 11, 2008 2:15 PM | Feedback (0)

The Many Faces of Storage Virtualization I started a blog post about this topic over a week ago, and it grew into a huge article instead of a blog post. I'm hoping to have it ready for posting as an article yet this week, but there are some tidbits I thought I'd share outright. Less of a teaser than a "if you want just the overview, here's info with recommendations for further research topics". In the world of storage virtualization there are a ton of options for enterprise IT to pursue, including SAN virtualization, NAS virtualization, Virtual Tape Libraries (VTLs), and iSCSI virtualization (new to you?... posted @ Tuesday, December 02, 2008 1:49 PM | Feedback (1)

The DevCentral Black Friday Special! Having been deluged with Black Friday special offers at home and at work, we have decided to offer you, gentle reader, a Black Friday special of our own! If you aren't familiar with Black Friday, it is the day in the US after our Thanksgiving Holiday - this Friday - when all the stores start their Christmas specials because Thanksgiving is the last holiday before Christmas, and the retail stores are all vying for your business. Just so that our friends overseas do not feel left out, this Black Friday special is open to all of our registered users, not... posted @ Tuesday, November 25, 2008 12:34 PM | Feedback (0)

Ruby - Scalable on its own? Sometimes you read an article and it gets you giggling. No you don't? Okay, sometimes I read an article and it gets me giggling. I have a history with the press, and it left me with two distinct beliefs. First, look for the bias in the article - it's there, whether it's a political article or a tech article, the writer has opinions and editors seem to have lost the ability to filter them, even when they're "warm fuzzy" opinions rather than fact-based ones. Second, don't assume that just because a publication was willing to publish this person they... posted @ Thursday, November 20, 2008 1:43 PM | Feedback (2)

Doing More With Less - The Extreme Version Nine things you can do to weather the storm. We've known for quite a while that you would be asked to do more with less budget next year - the credit crunch if nothing else was going to make your organization cautious about large infrastructure investments when money in the bank is a good idea. But starting relatively recently - it gelled yesterday, but actually started several weeks ago - tech companies and IT departments started making staff cuts. That means not only will you be asked to do more with less, but you'll be asked to do more with... posted @ Friday, November 14, 2008 1:45 PM | Feedback (0)

Multicore: The RogueWave Option It is truly intriguing when you delve into the whole multicore problem that you find different companies have taken such wildly different approaches to solving the problem and avoiding the pitfalls inherent in parallelism. RogueWave has decades of experience writing efficient code that serves the needs of their customers. Back when I was a Project Manager for shrink-wrapped software (COTS in the current lingo), we used their libraries to get a lot of work done that would have been much more painful without them. But time marched on and RogueWave's C++ libraries became less useful in the enterprise as the... posted @ Thursday, November 06, 2008 9:26 AM | Feedback (1)

Nothing but Blue Skies Coming My Way The rest of the team is at a conference this week, and I admit that I'm running a little slow. I was supposed to be there, but a personal issue kept me home this year, and I find myself working slower than normal - perhaps because my team (and many other teams) aren't here to spur me on. Anyway, One of our NSEs (Hey Jeff!) sent me this article over at Linux Magazine, and I decided that it was much more exciting than my prepared blog topic, so I am going to run with it. Mr. Hess clearly isn't... posted @ Friday, October 24, 2008 11:16 AM | Feedback (0)

What's in a name? Boy I have to say, every time I wipe the egg off my face a new batch gets smeared on there. In this recent blog post I misused the term "Panacea". It was late, I was cleaning things up, and I was thinking plethora and wrote Panacea. Thing is, I had recently turned on "Search Engine Friendly URLs", which generates the URL a blog post resides at from the title, so by the time I noticed it, changing the title would have broken a bunch of links. And links just keep getting added. So, what do you think the blog... posted @ Tuesday, October 21, 2008 10:21 AM | Feedback (0)

CMP - One way to crack the multi-core challenge. We at F5 are not unfamiliar with the problems presented by multi-processing. We also have development that must take advantage of both multiple cores and multiple CPUs. Our development team tackled this problem a while back, and is continuing to add improvements to how our system handles multi-processing. So I thought I'd take a break from talking about how others are tackling the problem as it relates to your development environment, and offer you a bit of an overview and a document that offers you some background on the problem. Our own Kenneth Salchow, Manager of Product Management (is that... posted @ Monday, October 20, 2008 10:43 AM | Feedback (0)

Multi-core Development: Digging into Cilk++ Things are kind of wild here, so this is both late and shorter than I wanted, but the main points are here at least. I've talked to the first vendor of multi-core development solutions and wanted to offer you all an update. The point here is that F5 Products can speed your network access and load balance work across multiple servers, server virtualization products can put the work of multiple servers onto one box, so the missing leg we're looking for is the one that maximizes utilization of the CPU in a multi-core environment. That's what this series is about.... posted @ Wednesday, October 15, 2008 2:06 PM | Feedback (0)

WebAccelerator Beta and Toys We are signing up to be part of a couple of beta programs here at F5 - something that one of us will blog more about in the next week or so - but part of the process was, unsurprisingly , us getting a handle on what the products could do for DevCentral. The cool thing about being who we are is that we found out tidbits that we can share with you, and we'll be doing that when the timing is good. The thing we saw that I thought was the absolute coolest was a feature of WebAccelerator. We... posted @ Friday, October 03, 2008 10:25 AM | Feedback (3)

F5 Paparazzi Today, Lori was arrested for the March of Dimes Jail-and-Bail, and I, acting as your friendly local Paparazzi, followed along to get some surprise pictures. The first problem was that they came in a white unmarked car. This confused me, couldn't they at least find a Black Maria (common KGB vehicle) to pick her up? This is the point at which I realized that this was big news, our Lori going to Jail! So I packed up the baby and followed them in.   And can you believe it, she even used the child as an excuse... posted @ Thursday, October 02, 2008 5:49 PM | Feedback (0)

VIrtualize This! Well, my guest view for SDTimes went live yesterday or today. You have all heard the story from me before - Approach Virtualization and every other buzzword du jour with a bit of skepticism. Generally speaking, buzzwords get that way because there's a very useful application behind them - notable exceptions being NAC (Network Access Control) and ILM (Information Lifecycle Management), but those two had useful bits, they were just industry-sponsored umbrella buzzwords for a whole lot of stuff. Server Virtualization yields great benefits early on when you're merging servers that don't use much in the way of resources and... posted @ Wednesday, October 01, 2008 9:25 AM | Feedback (0)

What's in a Cloud Anyway? There's a lot of talk about Cloud Computing, how The Cloud is different than The Grid, and what the risk assessment for The Cloud is. What people aren't talking about is something that all AppDev folks need to know... How does it impact them. Frankly, if my app must be developed differently to take advantage of The Cloud, then frankly, Cloud Computing has already failed. That's why there's not a Grid in every enterprise. But Teh Cloud is new and kewl, Teh Grid is full of fail, right? The other thing that architects have to care about is "who has... posted @ Monday, September 29, 2008 1:06 PM | Feedback (2)

Groundswell Update Well, thanks to you all and your excellent participation here on DevCentral, and those who have gone out and commented on the Forrester Groundswell site, DevCentral is doing exceedingly well. Of course we cannot know who will finally win the competition (awards are given out the end of October, I'm not certain when judging is done), but we as a team are confident that our chances are good - because our users rock. And the comments that have been left for the Groundswell judges? They make every second we invested getting our entry set up worthwhile. Thank you to... posted @ Tuesday, September 23, 2008 11:23 AM | Feedback (0)

Multi-Core III - a panacea of options I find it amazing how many ways we can find to slice a pizza, skin a cat, or solve a technology problem. Truly amazing. Thus far in my multi-core odyssey, I have run into driver-based solutions, library-based solutions, and shim-based solutions to how to maximize use of multi-core. That's not to mention the upcoming version of C++, which is supposed to include the solution in the compiler. Each of these approaches has its strengths, though I think the best option would be for the OS to resolve the problem directly. It already has a scheduler and mechanisms for semaphores and... posted @ Monday, September 22, 2008 12:13 PM | Feedback (2)

Virtualized Storage - Cleaning up invisibly. Last week while Joe and I were at our Lowell offices (formerly Acopia, now known as the F5 Data Solutions group), I learned a lot that I didn't previously know about our ARX directory-level virtualization product. Now I'm not new to the storage space, and indeed, had looked at Acopia briefly when I was the storage editor at Network Computing, but there was so much going on in storage at the time that I never got around to covering them directly. All things considered, I hoped to get a handle on how specifically we did what all storage virtualization products... posted @ Monday, September 15, 2008 10:57 AM | Feedback (0)

Travel-n-Learn. That's the life. So I'm sitting in the airport in Boston, going home after a three day stint here learning about the ARX and getting some other stuff done that Joe and I had on our agenda. I'm coming home with a ton of fodder for how to utilize ARX in your enterprise, both alone and with LTM. Soon you'll be seeing more storage blog posts from me, and that's good news, I really enjoy the storage space - except for that part where a few companies control the high end and good ideas either go through them or die on the vine.... posted @ Friday, September 12, 2008 3:32 PM | Feedback (2)