Don MacVittie
There are 209 entries for the tag Don MacVittie
It has been a while since I wrote an installment of Load Balancing for Developers, and now I think it has been too long, but never fear, this is the grad-daddy of Load Balancing for Developers blogs, covering a useful bit of information about Application Delivery Controllers that you might want to take advantage of. For those who have joined us since my last installment, feel free to check out the entire list of blog entries (along with related blog entries) here, though I assure you that this installment, like most of the others, does not require you to have...
Every once in a while, as the number of people following me grows (thank you, each and every one), I like to revisit something that is fundamental to the high-tech industry but is often overlooked or not given the attention it deserves. This is one of those times, and the many-faceted nature of any application infrastructure is the topic. While much has changed since I last touched on this topic, much has not, leaving us in an odd inflection point. When referring to movies that involve a lot of CGI, my oldest son called it “the valley...
By now, everyone even vaguely familiar with information security knows the military maxim of blitzkrieg – burst through the hardened defense at a single point and then rush pell-mell to the rear where the soft underbelly of any static army lies. It is a good military strategy, provided you have the resources to break through the defenses and follow up with a rapid advance into the rear areas. While there are variants of this plan, and a lot of discussion about how/when it is strategically worth the risk, historically speaking it has been a smashing success. Germany did it...
There was an interesting discussion on one of the table-top wargame lists I belong to (Two Hour Wargames if you follow the hobby) about the “production value” of a given set of printed products. While it devolved (as web conversations often seem to) to a comparison with Hollywood, the point was valid. The original reviewer that caused the thread to get started was more interested in how pretty the books were than the quality of the contents. I, personally, don’t care how ugly or mal-produced a wargames ruleset is if the rules are consistent and provide many hours of enjoyable...
There is a series of advertisements for Capital One aired in the US featuring Vikings talking about “more points” from their credit cards that asks “What’s in your wallet?” While they’re entertaining, I never understood what Vikings had to do with a credit card, other than perhaps both like to plunder unsuspecting innocents. Though in fairness, credit card issuers tend to just increase rates, while the Vikings enjoyed wholesale slaughter when they plundered, and took literally everything not nailed down. But the question is valid in the modern day. Most people have enough credit cards, and...
After a couple of weeks of vacation, some minor oral surgery, a birthday, and my five year anniversary at F5 Networks (has it really been that long?), I’m back to annoy or please you some more. Our holidays were acceptable, and here’s hoping all of you had an enjoyable time also. One thing I noticed is either that I was out of touch over vacation, or there were far fewer “tech predictions for 2012” type articles than has been the case in the past. I think that’s a good thing. Let’s just deal with things as they come, shall...
The complexities of life often escape a young child. The Little Man asked me the other day why I had to go work, which was both a compliment to wanting to spend time with me and an unintended backhand slap at Lori, who was going to hang out with him while I took care of business. The answer was the usual stuff, that working paid the bills, and work has its own rewards… It did not include “and I like my job”, though I do, simply because I didn’t want to imply “more than hanging out with you” to...
Ever try to explain something to a three year old that they don’t want to hear? It’s a chore. They change the subject, try to ignore you, turn away, and as a last defense, start asking “why?” a lot. It is amusing that IT often suffers the same issues. Really. We’re adults, but at the root of the problem, they’re basically the same. When a customer says “We need fluff!” IT often responds with “We don’t support fluff, try some cotton balls instead”. The other situation that I find massive parallels in is the guy that simply...
We at F5 – like most collectives of geeks - are constantly discussing the wide array of IT boondoggles that are out there, looking at which ones hold water and which are just passing fads. Often we’re debating which are passing fads. Today I received an email to a small group asking if any of us had tried out the augmented reality stuff out there. I haven’t, but that gives you an idea of the edge that is sometimes taken. And it is that time of year where every pundit and their uncle is making predictions about...
When I was hired in to a utility to head an Automated Meter Reading project that was just getting organized – R&D was largely done, but implementation was not started – the team was set up in a rather odd manner. We had our own datacenter, we had our own networking, we had our own well, everything. And that was a conscious choice on the part of management. As it was presented to me, they didn’t want the early phases of the project mired in “we can’t set up load balancing for our app, you have to go talk...
#F5 DevOps – Managers need to make use of existing technology and adopt culture change. It is entertaining to read all that is currently being written about DevOps. Having been a developer, a development manager, an operations manager, and even a CTO, I can attest to the fact that the “throw it over the wall” syndrome is real, and causes real problems for everyone involved. That is about where my agreement with the current round of pundits ends. The thing is that they talk like there is some fundamental technological reason why DevOps isn’t happening. That’s...
There has been much made in Information Technology about the military quote: “He Who Defends Everything Defends Nothing” – Originally uttered by Frederick The Great of Prussia. He has some other great quotes, check them out when you have a moment. The thing is that he was absolutely correct in a military or political context. You cannot defend every inch of ground or even the extent of a very long front with a limited supply of troops. You also cannot refuse to negotiate on all points in the political arena. The nature of modern representative government is such that the...
#f5 There’s a new brand of Chili in town. I don’t usually talk a lot about F5 specific solutions, but since we’re the only ones doing this (so far), the contents of this blog are F5 specific. Though this needs to be industry standard. So, you’re yearning for some chili. That’s understandable, this time of year is when those of us from the US midwest think of chili, because it’s good hunting season food, and it both fills you and warms you up. So grab a handful of hamburger and stuff it in your mouth, then grab...
Funny thing about the advancement of technology, in most of the modern world we enshrine it, spend massive amounts of money to find “the next big thing”, and act as if change is not only inevitable, but rapid. The truth is that change is inevitable, but not necessarily rapid, and sometimes, it’s about necessity. Sometimes it is about productivity. Sometimes, it just plain isn’t about either. Handcarts are still used for serious purposes in parts of the world, by people who are happy to have them, and think a motorized vehicle would be a waste of resources. Think...
Last week, InformationWeek quoted a Microsoft manager as saying there was “No chance” Windows XP would get another stay of execution. This really shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone, it was only the backlash from enterprises that kept Microsoft from ending support for XP over the last several years. So now that Windows XP support will no longer be available, it is time for even the most recalcitrant enterprises to consider their options. All of their options. The world is changing on us yet again, and the needs of tomorrow might not be the needs of the future....
The rate of change in a mathematical equation can vary immensely based upon the equation and the inputs to the equation. Certainly the rate of change for f(x) = x^2 is a far different picture than the rate of change for f(x)=2x, for example. The old adage “the only constant is change” is absolutely true in high tech. The definition of “high” in tech changes every time something becomes mainstream. You’re working with tools and systems that even ten years ago were hardly imaginable. You’re carrying a phone that Alexander Graham Bell would not recognize – or know...
Developers are a great lot of folks, people who spend their day trying to do the impossible with bits for a customer base that is, by and large, impossible to satisfy. When the bits all line up correctly, the last line of code has been checked in, and the nightly compile accepted for deployment, then they get to sit back, relax for five minutes, and start over again. If this makes you think it’s not a great life, then you should live it. Developing gives instant feedback. No matter how unhappy users can be, fixing that nagging bug you’ve...
#F5Networks There is a wealth of information out there, don’t forget to tap into it. Note: When I say “peers” and “lunch” throughout this blog, I am not only referring to IT management. No matter your position in the organization, gathering useful information is always a benefit. Though you’ll want management’s support for the bit where I suggest a two hour lunch. Some IT shops frown on that, even if it’s only occasionally. In many industries, it is all about word of mouth. I’m not talking about tech-savvy industries that have just rediscovered this truth since Social...
There has been a lot written about “IT Democratization” and how it will change the world. To some extent that is true, and I’ve previously encouraged IT management to support the process. But listening to those who see a “Bright new future” makes me realize that while we agree in principal, as always, the devil is in the details. In high school, we could take the standard lunch for a set fee or eat ala-carte’, which was essentially a short-order grill. Others could bring their own lunch, whatever they (or their parents) could pack into a bag or box. ...
Lori and I have a large technical reference library, both in print and electronic. Part of the reason it is large is because we are electronics geeks. We seriously want to know what there is to know about computers, networks, systems, and development tools. Part of the reason is that we don’t often enough sit down and decide to pare the collection down by those books that no longer have a valid reason for sitting on our (many) bookshelves of technical reference. The collection runs the gamut from the outdated to the state of the art, from the old...
Sun Tzu wrote that you cannot win if you do not know your enemy and yourself. In his sense, he was talking about knowing your army and its capabilities, but this rule seriously applies to nearly every endeavor, and certainly every competitive endeavor. Knowing your own strengths and weaknesses - In our case the strengths and weaknesses of IT staff and architecture – is imperative if you are to meet the challenges that your IT department faces every day. It is not enough to know that you must do X, you must know how X fits (or doesn’t!) into...
When horrid disasters strike and both people and corporations are put on notice that they suddenly have a lot more important things to do, will you be ready? It is a testament to man’s optimism that with very few exceptions we really don’t, not at the personal level, not at the corporate level. I’ve worked a lot of places, and none of them had a complete, ready to rock DR plan. The insurance company I worked at was the closest – they had an entire duplicate datacenter sitting dark in a location very remote from HQ, awaiting need. Every few...
(Booming voiceover voice); Are you running the same tired old network tools? Does your network staff have to administer security and load balancing for each and every application? Do you find application analysts and owners show a growing frustration with the network team’s response times due to overloading? Well get in there and fix that network! Get the tools that you need to make your network more application friendly, reduce fatigue amongst your network staff, and give application owners more control of their applications! That was, of course, a joke poking fun at both the way we run...
An interesting thing about toll booths, they provide a point at which all sorts of things can happen. When you are stopped to pay a toll, it smooths the flow of traffic by letting a finite number of vehicles through per minute, reducing congestion by naturally spacing things out. Dams are much the same, holding water back on a river and letting it flow through at a rate determined by the operators of the dam. The really interesting bit is the other things that these two points introduce. When necessary, toll booths have been used to find and...
It’s interesting to watch the evolution of IT over time. I have repeatedly been told “you people, we were doing that with X, back before you had a name for it!” And likely, the speaker is telling the truth, as far as it goes. Seriously, while the mechanisms may be different, putting a ton of commodity servers behind a load balancer and tweaking for performance looks an awful lot like having LPARs that can shrink and grow. You put “dynamic cloud” into the conversation and the similarities become more pronounced. The biggest difference is how much you’re paying for...
The Web Application Firewall debate has been raging for a very long time, and we keep hearing the same comments going back and forth. Many organizations have implemented them as a fast-track to compliance, primarily compliance with PCI-DSS, but the developer community is still hesitant to embrace them as a solution to their problems. And that’s because like so many things out there, they are seen as an “either-or” proposition. Either they can relieve a developer of the need to write security code, or they can’t. If they can’t, then why have them? I’m a developer by trade,...
In our first house, we had a set of stairs that were horrible. They were unfinished, narrow, and steep. Lori went down them once with a vacuum cleaner, they were just not what we wanted in the house. They came out into the kitchen, so you were looking at these half-finished steps while sitting at the kitchen table. We covered them so they at least weren’t showing bare treads, and then we… Got used to them. Yes, that is what I said. We adapted. They were covered, making them minimally acceptable, they served their purpose, so we enjoyed...
I know I’ve touched on this topic in some of my “IT Management” overview blogs, but it’s an important one, so I thought I’d give it a blog all its own. Even though we have a living myth that cats and dogs never get along, we all know it just isn’t true. There are any number of cats and dogs that live together and do just fine – including our two, Sun Tzu (Dog) and Nietzsche (Cat). While we all enjoy the joke, we know that deep down, the two are compatible, and it really is...
We spend an obsessive amount of time looking at the market and trying to lean toward accepted technologies. Seriously, when I was in IT management, there were an inordinate number of discussions about the state of market X or Y. While these conversations almost always revolved around what we were doing, and thus were put into context, sometimes an enterprise sits around waiting for everyone else to jump on board before joining in the flood. While sometimes this is commendable behavior, it is just as often self-defeating. If you have a project that could use technology X, then find...
Farm tractors and military tanks share an intertwined history that started when some smart person proposed the tracks on some farming equipment as the cross-country tool that tanks needed to get across a rubble and shell-hole strewn World War One battlefield. For the ensuing sixty years, improvements in one set of tracks spurred improvements in the other. Early on it was the farm vehicles developing improvements, but through World War Two and even some today, tanks did most of the developing. That is simply a case of experience. Farmers and farm tractor manufacturers had more experience when...
There was a time when application developers worried only about the hardware they were developing the application for. Those days passed a good long while ago, and then AppDev’s big concern was the OS the application was being developed for. But the burgeoning growth of the World Wide Web combined with the growth of Java and Linux to drive development out of the OS and into the JVM. Then, the developer focused on the JVM in question, or in many cases on the interpreted language interfaces – but not the OS or hardware. For our purposes I...
One of the things that F5 has been trying to do since before I came to the company is reach out to developers. Some of the devices in your network could be effective AppDev tools if utilized to their full extent, and indeed, I’ve helped companies develop tools utilizing iControl that give application managers control over their entire environment – from VMs to ADCs. While it is a struggle for any network device company to communicate with developers, I think it is cool that F5 continues to do so. But increasingly, the Network is the place you need...
Yes indeed, today is the last Friday in July, making it System Administrator Appreciation Day, that day when you offer a small thanks to the SysAdmin that keeps your systems running while you’re worrying about the apps or the storage or the security. Seriously, these are people who have to know a little bit of everything IT just so they can do their jobs. Most know how to program, most have decent security chops, most can allocate storage, most know how to create, start, and bounce VMs, and all of them know about systems. But we don’t often...
In case you missed it, F5 released version 11 of TMOS this week, and working up some collateral for the release, I had an interesting epiphany. High availability, highly adaptable networks are about to change. Again. There has been a steady evolution of networking technology over the last couple of decades, that includes everything from TCP optimizations to application security have grown out of the need to improve something about the network. The thing is that advanced Application Delivery Controller (ADC) functionality is still relatively new to the marketplace. The products are mature and server up a ton...
Gear shifting in a modern car is a highly virtualized application nowadays. Whether you’re driving a stick or an automatic, it is certainly not the same as your great grandaddy’s shifting (assuming he owned a car). The huge difference between a stick and an automatic is how much work the operator has to perform to get the job done. In the case of an automatic, the driver sets the car up correctly (putting it into drive as opposed to one of the other gears), and then forgets about it other than depressing and releasing the gas and brake pedals....
It is interesting to me the number of variant Transformers that have been put out over the years, and the effect that has on those who like transformers. There are four different “Construction Devastator” figures put out over the years (there may be more, I know of four), and every Transformers collector or fan that I know – including my youngest son – want them all. That’s great marketing on the part of Hasbro, for certain, but it does mean that those who are trying to collect them are going to have a hard time of it, just because...
When time and performance mattered, CSG Content Direct turned to Dell and F5 to make their replication faster while reducing WAN utilization. We talk a lot in our blogs about what benefits you could get from an array of F5 products, so when this case study (pdf link) hit our inboxes, we thought you’d like to hear about what CSG’s Content Direct did get out of deploying F5 BIG-IP WOM. Utilizing tools by two of the premier technology companies in the world, Content Direct was able to decrease backup windows to as little as 5% of their...
We’ve all had that chilling moment when the gate attendant at the airport comes over the loudspeaker, and doing her best Charlie Brown’s Teacher imitation, announces “Jursim Puzzling vlordid Netting, gollink dummole Neptune.” (This flight is in an oversold situation, we’re looking for volunteers…). While we could discuss the causes and solutions to this being an all-too-frequent event in the daily operation of airlines, for the purposes of this blog, let’s talk about the back end. The problem on the back end is, quite simply, that the plain cannot be expanded to handle the burden demanded of it. That...
Think about this for just a moment. When the automobile was invented, the idea was known. The idea was to free horses from transport duty, have less… Mess in the streets that horses generate, and move stuff. Over time, “stuff” became differentiated into “people”, “goods”, and “major shipping”. Though the transportation industry eventually spawned off many other industries such as farm equipment and military vehicles, it stayed relatively true to its purpose and true innovations in automotive transportation became fewer and fewer. There has not been a geologic shift in automotive technology in my lifetime, and only undependable oil...
It is a very cool world we live in, where technology is concerned. We’re looking at a near future where your excess workload, be it applications or storage, can be shunted off to a cloud. Your users have more power in their hands than ever before, and are chomping at the bit to use it on your corporate systems. IBM recently announced a memory/storage breakthrough that will make Flash disks look like 5.25 inch floppies. While we can’t know what tomorrow will bring, we can certainly know that the technology will enable us to be more adaptable, responsive, and (yes,...
In the years I’ve known Jonathan Feldman, he’s repeatedly come up with ideas that are profound in the “Huh. That’s obvious now, wonder why I didn’t think of it in those terms” sense of really profound. His most recent blog fits into that category, a blog where he urges IT managers not only to try out up-and-coming vendors and technology, but to try them out against the will of their staff, and in mission critical situations. The blog, for your reference, can be found at InformationWeek. All that he says is obvious, after the fact. And he’s right, there...
This is the second part of this series talking about things you need to consider, and where cloud usage makes sense given the current state of cloud evolution. The first one, Cloud Storage, can be found here. The point of the series is to help you figure out what you can do now, and what you have to consider when moving to the cloud. This will hopefully help you to consider your options when pressure from the business or management to “do something” mounts. Once again, our definition of cloud is Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - “VM containers”, not...
There’s a whole lot of talk about cloud revolutionizing IT, and a whole lot of argument about public versus private cloud, even a considerable amount of talk about what belongs in the cloud. But not much talk about helping you determine what applications and storage are a good candidate to move there – considering all of the angles that matter to IT. This blog will focus on storage, the next one on applications, because I don’t want to bury you in a blog as long as a feature length article. It amazes me when I see comments like “no...
Information Technology – geeks like you and I – have been responsible for an amazing transformation of business over the last thirty or forty years. The systems that have been put into place since computers became standard fare for businesses have allowed the business to scale out in almost every direction. Greater production, more customers, better marketing and sales follow-through, even insanely targeted marketing for those of you selling to consumers. There is not a piece of the business that would be better off without us. With that change came great responsibility though. Inability to access systems and/or data...
I recently read a piece in Network Computing Magazine that was pretty disparaging of NAS devices, and with a hand-wave the author pronounced NAS dead, long live cloud storage. Until now, storage has been pretty much immune to the type of hype that “The Cloud” gets. Sure, there have been some saying that we should use the cloud for primary storage, and others predicting that it will kill this or that technology, but the outrageous and intangible claims that accompany placing your applications in the cloud. My favorite, repeated even by a lot of people I respect, is...
My mother recently had hip replacement surgery. She’s tough, has needed this most of her life, and only had the surgery now because doctors wouldn’t treat her any more without it. So we kids are taking our turns visiting her during her six to eight week recovery period. The one thing I’ve noticed since I arrived, is that while she is thrilled to have a hip that works like it hasn’t since she was a teenager, the things she cannot do frustrate her. One rule is that you take steps one at a time during the healing process, stepping up...
Lori and I’s youngest daughter graduated from High School this year, and her class chose one of the many good Vince Lombardi quotes for the theme of their graduation – “The measure of who we are is what we do with what we have.” Those who know me well know that I’m not a huge football fan (don’t tell my friends here in Green Bay that… The stadium can hold roughly half the city’s population, and they aren’t real friendly to those who don’t join in the frenzy), but Vince Lombardi certainly had a lot of great quotes over...
A few of us were talking on Facebook about high speed rail (HSR) and where/when it makes sense the other day, and I finally said that it almost never does. Trains lost out to automobiles precisely because they are rigid and inflexible, while population densities and travel requirements are highly flexible. That hasn’t changed since the early 1900s, and isn’t likely to in the future, so we should be looking at different technologies to answer the problems that HSR tries to address. And since everything in my universe is inspiration for either blogging or gaming, this lead me to...
A few years ago, a gentleman created a video showing how quickly an unpatched, unprotected Windows XP machine was infected once connected to the public Internet (the linked video is worth a watch, and is short). That video took the business community pretty much by storm, but was old news to security administrators and most systems administrators. Things have improved on the operating systems side of the house, but so have the systems, attackers, and environment for hackers, meaning things aren’t much better today. In the confines of your enterprise, that’s all cool. Whether you are deploying a...
Lori and I received the new Blackberry Smart Phones that F5 ordered for us last week, and have spent about a week familiarizing ourselves with all that has changed since our several-year-old ones came out. There is certainly a lot of change. The Social Media add-ons bundled into these phones are certainly much nicer than the ones we had installed on our older phones, texting has its own app rather than being a part of the email package, the screen is more crisp, and photo quality is light-years ahead of previous incarnations, but still doesn’t compete with high-end digital...
One of my hobbies is modeling – mostly for wargaming but also for the sake of modeling. In an average year I do a lot of WWII models, some modern military, some civilian vehicles, figures from an array of historical timeperiods and the occasional sci-fi figure for one of my sons… The oldest (24 y/o) being a WarHammer 40k player and the youngest (3 y/o) just plain enjoying anything that looks like a robot. While I have been modeling more or less for decades, only in the last five years have I had the luxury of owning an airbrush, and...
There is a theory in traditional military strategy that goes something along the lines of “take land, consolidate your gains, take more land…” von Moltke the Elder found this theory so profound that he suggested a defender could trade land for time – advice that Russia managed pretty well in The Great Patriotic War (known in the west as World War II), and German General Kesselring practiced against the allies in Italy during the same war. By giving up land, the enemy is forced to occupy it before they can begin forward movement again, buying you time to build...
It’s kind of funny the way the tech press will kick an incumbent around the block for perceived or imaginary shortcomings in their products. The Blackberry Playbook is a good example. You’d think that RIM went out and created a useless piece of garbage that was never going to see uptake no matter how large RIM’s enterprise market share was. <Warning, I own a Playbook> The press and bloggers have leveled a whole slew of complaints against the Playbook that range from no out-of-the-box integration with mail servers to the power button not being convenient enough....
While plenty of people have had a mouthful (or page full, or pipe full) of things to say about the Amazon outage, the one thing that it brings to the fore is not a problem with cloud, but a problem with storage. Long ago, the default mechanism for “High Availability” was to have two complete copies of something (say a network switch) and when one went down, the other was brought up with the same IP. It is sad to say that even this is far-and-away better than the level of redundancy that most of us place in our...
After a short break to get some major dental rework done, I return to you with my new, sore mouth for a round of “Maybe we should have…” discussions. In the nineties and early 21st century, positions were created in may organizations with titles like “chief architect” and often there was a group whose title were something like “IT Architect”. These people made decisions that impacted one or all subsidiaries of an organization, trying to bring standardization to systems that had grown organically and were terribly complex. They ushered in standards, shared code between disparate groups, made sure that...
It has been a while since I wrote a Load Balancing for Developers installment, and since they’re pretty popular and there’s still a lot about Application Delivery Controllers (ADCs) that are taken for granted in the Networking industry but relatively unknown in the development world, I thought I’d throw one out about making your security more resilient with ADCs. For those who are just joining this series, here’s the full list of posts I’ve tagged as Load Balancing for Developers, though only the ones whose title starts with “Load Balancing for Developers” or “Advance Load Balancing for Developers”...
Note: While talking about this post with Lori during a break, it occurred to me that you might be thinking I meant “MS Windows”. Not this time, but that gives me another blog idea… And I’ll sneak in the windows –> Windows simile somewhere, no doubt. Did you ever ponder the history of simple things like windows? Really? They evolved from open spaces to highly complex triple-paned, UV resistant, crank operated monstrosities. And yet they serve basically the same purpose today that they did when they were just openings in a wall. Early windows were for ventilation and...
On occasion I have talked about military force multipliers. These are things like terrain and minefields that can make your force able to do their job much more effectively if utilized correctly. In fact, a study of military history is every bit as much a study of battlefields as it is a study of armies. He who chooses the best terrain generally wins, and he who utilizes tools like minefields effectively often does too. Rommel in the desert often used Wadis to hide his dreaded 88mm guns – that at the time could rip through any tank the British...
Having just returned from our annual D&D tournament, this year in Las Vegas, I have role-playing on the mind, so when I read the title of Elizabeth White’s blog IBM and Cable & Wireless to Develop UK Smart Energy Cloud, I immediately thought of the AD&D Druid spell Call Lightning which gathers clouds and then emits lightning every ten minutes until it runs out. Which is kind of in line with what her blog is talking about – two companies with a history in smart energy grids getting together to make it a reality. Most striking to me...
I read the Life as a Healthcare CIO blog on occasion, mostly because as a former radiographer, health care records integration and other non-diagnostic IT use in healthcare is a passing interest of mine. Within the last hospital I worked at the systems didn’t communicate – not even close, as in there was no effort to make them do so. This intrigues me, as since I’ve entered IT I have watched technology uptake in healthcare slowly ramp up at a great curve behind the rest of the business world. Oh make no mistake, technology has been in overdrive on...
InformationWeek has been out and about talking up their most recent CIO survey and keeps calling attention to the fact that one in three CIOs see creating a new business or business model as a driver in 2011. This is not a new phenomenon, but one in three is more CIOs than I would have intuitively thought, so I started to think about it. There has always been a drive, at least in every company I’ve worked for, that if you want to grow your ivory tower you need to generate revenue. Because IT is a support function...
Since I’ve mentioned it a couple of times, I thought I’d offer you all a link to my article in Computer Technology Review about The Cloud Tier. The point was to delve into how/when/where/why of cloud storage usage. While there is a lot to say on that topic and the article was of limited word count, I think the idea that it can fit into your existing architecture with minimal changes and then be utilized to service the needs of the business in a better/faster/more agile manner is the key point. Normally I keep my blogs relatively vendor-independent....
Mike Fratto over at Network Computinghas a blog that declares the need for standards in Cloud Management APIs is non-existent or at least premature. Now Mike is a smart guy and has enough experience to have a clue what he’s writing about, unlike many cloud pundits out there, but like all smart people I like to read information from, I reserve the right to completely disagree. And in this case I am going to have to. He’s right that Cloud Management is immature, and he’s right that it is not a simple topic. Neither was the conquering of...
I was on the road last week, doing my bit for a roadshow with VMWare and NetApp sponsored by CDW. My team has spread these trips out amongst us, and I drew Nashville as my city to visit. I’ve been through and around Nashville, but never stayed there. This trip was no exception to that rule, I saw the airport, the hotel, and the venue where the event was held. But that’s okay, I was there to do business, not sight-see, so I was in one morning and out the next. The attendance was okay, and the attendees were as...
Every spring I get excited. I live in Wisconsin, which my travels have shown me you may not understand. I have actually been told “that is not your house, there is snow on the ground. All of America is sun and beaches”. Well, in Wisconsin, it gets cold. Moscow style cold. There are a couple of weeks each winter where going out is something you do only after bundling up like a toddler… Mittens, hats, coat, another coat, boots… But then spring comes, and once the temperature gets to the point where the snow starts to melt, the sun...
One of the majors Lori and I’s oldest son is pursuing is in philosophy. I’ve never been a huge fan of philosophy, but as he and Lori talked, I decided to find out more, and picked up one of The Great Courses on The Philosophy of Science to try and understand where philosophy split off from hard sciences and became irrelevant or an impediment. I wasn’t disappointed, for at some point in the fifties, a philosopher posed the “If you’re a chicken, you assume when the farmer comes that he will bring food, so the day he comes with an...
In nature, things seek a balance that is sustainable. In the case of rivers, if there is too much pressure from water flowing, they either flood or open streams to let off the pressure. Both are technically examples of erosion, but we’re not here to discuss that particular natural process, we’re here to consider the case of a stream off a river when there is something changing the natural balance. Since I grew up around a couple of man-made lakes – some dug, some created when the mighty AuSable River was dammed, I’ll use man-made lakes as my examples, but...
There are many instances in the world where third-party verification of thoughts and ideas are just a useful thing to have. Cases where the vested interest of one party makes their opinion suspect, even if it is unbiased. For those cases we have a whole collection of organizations and corporations that will research and verify, test and certify, validate and verify, whatever, depending upon the issue and the needs of the target audience. A good example of this that I know of for the obvious reasons is gluten-free foods. There is a “certified gluten free” program in the US,...
I was working for a mid-sized enterprise as an IT manager, a project that was on the cutting edge of technology at the time, and because it was on the cutting edge, we were using a whole slew of different embedded applications and their masters to collect data. Those masters were written on every platform imaginable – from Novell Netware to Windows to Linux to Solaris – and in every language that was common on each of the platforms. Our job was to make sense of it all. The information these systems collected was billing data, they all collected...
Recently I was in a conversation where someone seriously suggested that Web Application Acceleration and WAN Optimization should be the job of developers, since they are in the code and creating the network traffic. At first I was taken aback by this suggestion. I was a manager of a small team of developers and admins when Web Application Firewalls first started to be bandied about (though I don’t think they had the fancy name then), and went through this entire discussion then. Never in my wildest dreams did I think we’d revisit it on the much grander scale mentioned....
My older children, like most kids in their age group, all played with or collected Pokemon cards. Just like I and all of my friends had GI Joes and discussed the strengths and weaknesses of Kung-fu grip versus hard hands, they and all of their friends sat around talking about how much cooler their current favorite Pokemon card was compared to all of the others. We let them play and kept an eye on how cards were being passed about the group (they’re small and tend to walk off, so we patrolled a bit, but otherwise stayed out of...
Our basement, like most geek basements, has a pretty good collection of outdated computer gear. Some of it is running on the network, some of it is sitting there waiting for the end times. Or for a crook to break in and steal it so we don’t have to dispose of it. I’ve posted this picture before, but here is “the cable box” before the last time I went through and cleaned it up. Or at least a close-up of one part of it, it is a pretty large box. One of the things that we have been...
In a couple of unrelated bouts of cleaning – one to show The Toddler my Boy Scout sash, which required going through boxes in the basement until I found it, and the other attempting to dig a toy out from under the stove, which required pulling the stove out from the wall and cleaning under it in one of those scenarios where once you’ve seen it, you have to clean it, I found some unexpected bits. In the box that contained my Boy Scout sash, I found the tire pressure gauge that I’ve been vaguely looking for over the...
One day many years ago, Lori and I’s oldest son held up two sheets of paper and said “These two things are exactly the same, but different!” Now, he’s a very bright individual, he was just young, and didn’t even get how incongruous the statement was. We, being a fun loving family that likes to tease each other on occasion, we of course have not yet let him live it down. It was honestly more than a decade ago, but all is fair, he doesn’t let Lori live down something funny that she did before he was born. It...
Lori and I were talking shop over the weekend, and one of the things a co-worker had said on an email thread triggered an entire series of observations from me. Not being one to keep my mouth shut, I thought I’d share them with you and lead you to my conclusions, so that you can decide if they’re accurate or not. The presumption of the hype cycle is that you need and will adopt cloud computing en-masse. This is an interesting presumption, but the security, economics, and Service Level Agreements (SLAs) will have to be there long-term for it...
There’s this funny thing about pouring two bags of M&Ms into one candy dish. The number of M&Ms is exactly the same as when you started, but now they’re all in one location. You have, in theory, saved yourself from having to wash a second candy dish, but the same number of people can enjoy the same number of M&Ms, you’ll run out of M&Ms at about the same time, and if you have junior high kids in the crowd, the green M&Ms will disappear at approximately the same rate. The big difference is that fewer people will fit...
It should be no surprise to anyone that the number of mobile devices is increasing at an astounding rate. In fact, according to Ericsson, mobile broadband subscriptions will double in 2011. Let’s all just take a moment to ponder what that means to our worldwide infrastructure. Lots has been written about this topic from a theoretical viewpoint, but we’re about to find out how flexible our infrastructures really are. If you have web servers or other resources on the Internet, some of those new mobile devices will be coming your way. Let’s take the worst case scenario and...
Lately there has been a whole lot of breast-beating and article writing attributing this trend to that vendor and this other trend to this other vendor. You may have noticed that we at F5 benefit from some of this noise. It is pretty well accepted that we are the ADC leader and most pundits include us as one of the few “cloud enabling” vendors. But all of this misses the point. The point is that you, and your contemporaries around the world decide what The Next Big Thing will be, not some marketing person writing a campaign plan. The...
The limiting factor in adoption of file virtualization has been, in my opinion, twofold. First is the FUD created by the confusion with block-level virtualization and proprietary vendors wanting to sell you more of their gear – both of which are rapidly disappearing – and second is the unknown element. The simple “how does this set of products improve my environment, save me money, or cut manhours?” Well now this issue is going to rapidly go away also, because you can find out easily enough. Those of you who follow my writing know that I was a hard...
You get the call at 2am. The data center is on fire, and while the server room itself was protected with your high-tech fire-fighting gear, the rest of the building billowed out smoke and noxious gasses that have contaminated your servers. Unless you have a sealed server room, this is a very real possibility. Another possibility is that the fire department had to spew a ton of liquid on your building to keep the fire from spreading. No sealed room means your servers might have taken a bath. And sealed rooms are a real rarity in datacenter design for a...
Happy New Year! Out with the old, in with the new! No really. I know that a sane IT manager or network admin is averse to change just because there is so much natural change in our particular industry, but this is one of those times where you can run, but you can’t hide. The one thing nearly all of us will be doing in 2011? Taking some form of remedial action to address IPv6. Some smart cookies were proactive, others won’t have to change this year, but most of us will be figuring out what to do in...
Every once in a while, I like to step back a bit and write for those who haven’t been in the field for a zillion years. For starters, it helps refresh the pool of information out there for people trying to research something they haven’t done before. It helps a lot that I enjoy sharing my knowledge, so writing such a blog is like “non-work”. Since I’m gearing up for some holiday time, this seemed like a great time to do just such an article, so I cast about and TCP optimizations came to mind. A lot has...
While helping Lori with her fishtank avocation, I have learned a lot of incidental information, like the fact that there are essentially three types of tank – reef, fish, and mixed. Reef tanks hold corals, anemones, etc, while fish tanks hold fish, with a minimum of incidental coral or coralline structure. Mixed tanks have fish who are carefully selected specifically not to eat the pretty corals, soft corals, anemones, and other tasty tidbits growing on the rocks. This is somewhat amazing to me, because in a sense, I share the Toddler’s view of fishtanks. He points and says “That’s...
As you all know, I try to keep my marketing spiel for F5 to a minimum here. I don’t hesitate to mention when F5 has a product that will solve your problem, but try to focus on the problem and technical solutions. But sometimes I want to crow about how good our product lines really are. Thankfully, Lori provides a venue for us to do just that called F5 Fridays. This week I guest wrote an F5 Friday article about our new ARX Cloud Extender product and it’s cool enough I thought I’d let those of you who...
I’ve been pondering another installment in my Load Balancers For Developers series revolving around recent changes in the market that drive a trend toward availability of Virtual Load Balancers, giving developers an idea of what, when, where, and why they might take advantage of a virtual load balancer. There’s a lot of information floating around out there, and one of the things this blog will do is include some development-specific links in the list of related articles at the end. The primary goal of this article is to help you understand where and why, but since I try not to...
Lori pointed me at a blog by Alan Shimel about sexual harassment in Open Source that is well written and pretty well documented. I read it with interest, and was kind of surprised that Open Source as a group was implicated. And of course he wasn’t implicating all of Open Source, just pointing out that it happens enough to be a trend. I have a lot of respect for Alan, but after years in business, I can tell you it isn’t only an Open Source issue. Since this is an IT blog, I’ll stick to IT subjects except to...
It is an interesting twist in the IT world that with the increased usage of purchased packages and the growth of on-demand IT, we increasingly find ourselves talking about “Applications”. This is a good reference point, it addresses all of the things running on our servers with one fell swoop, but much like when you talk about “vehicles”, the phrase has little meaning beyond discussing similarities. In the IT sense of the word, Application can be defined as a program running on hardware. In the datacenter sense of the word, it can be a program running on one of our...
We spent the US Holiday Thanksgiving at my Mothers’ house some 500 miles away. We love when we get the chance to see her, and there’s always someone else there. This year one of my wonderful nieces was there with husband and baby in tow. And the baby was sick. Now this is my grand-niece, so of course I wanted to spoil her a bit, but she was out of sorts with a cold and ear infection, so it was tough. The Toddler is at the age where he wants to play with little girls, but beyond tag isn’t...
As solid and reliable as fishtanks and rifles are, they share a common weakness. The tiniest crack in either will eventually destroy the entire product. Why did I choose “fishtanks and rifles”? Lori and I’s hobbies include those two items, but there are other things the same applies to. My oldest son said his tom-tom had a crack at the bottom, and I made the same observation to him… Best to get that fixed now, since the point of a drum set is to beat on it and make vibrations, I can guarantee what will eventually happen if nothing...
I recently replaced my home laptop. My trusty old Dell Latitude was just worn out, as we tend to put our systems to a lot of use, and it was three years old – dead battery, failed to start one time, telling me it had no hard drive, etc. We buy enough computer equipment that even though we are not a small business, we purchase through the Dell small business sales unit. It doesn’t provide us any benefit other than one very important one – warranties against any possible harm. To quote the support rep I chatted with when...
For decades now, the game Dungeons and Dragons has suffered from what is commonly called “Edition Wars”. When the publisher of the game releases a new version, they of course want to sell the new version and stop talking about the old – they’re a business, and it certainly does make the ability to be profitable tough if people don’t make the jump from version X to version Y. Problem is that people become heavily invested in whatever version they’re playing. When Fourth Edition was released, the MSRP on just the three books required to play the game was...
The hype around cloud shows every indication of settling down, which, if you go with the Gartner Hype Cycle model means that the trough of disillusionment is yawning before you. But you don’t have to dip into the trough, if you didn’t ride up the hype hill. The thing is, that with this particular hype cycle, IT was the brakes on the hype cycle, wanting to quickly identify what Cloud could and could not do for your organization, while the business was riding the hype up. That’s good, it will serve to smooth out the trough. If you’re...
When I was in Radiographer (X-Ray Tech) training in the Army, we were told the cautionary tale of a man who walked into an emergency room with a hatchet in his forehead and blood everywhere. As the staff of the emergency room rushed to treat the man’s very serious head injury, his condition continued to degrade. Blood everywhere, people rushing to and fro, the XRay tech with a portable XRay machine trying to squeeze in while nurses and doctors are working hard to keep the patient alive. And all the frenzied work failed. If you’ve ever been in an...
We were sitting and chatting with a fellow geek last night, and he was describing a corporate network he is familiar with. The description was like a tale from the old show “The Twilight Zone”. If it was a security vulnerability, it was present. If it was a standard and accepted security procedure, it was not present. The story got scarier by the minute, and was largely explained when the punch line was “they’ve had 200% admin turnover in the last few years.” Actually, I don’t know if it was 200%, I suspect it was higher as a percentage,...
One of the things that I love about technology is the fact that every time there is a problem, five solutions crop up to solve it. One of the things I hate about technology is the fact that every time there is a problem, five solutions crop up to solve it… And there are marketing geeks and pundits willing to tell you which one to choose before you even know that you have the problem. I was out in Anaheim last week with F5’s rockstar salesforce, telling them about the Future of IT. Or trying to, you’ll have...
I am barely old enough to remember when US “Service Stations” really were – when someone else pumped your gas, and while it was pumping they washed your windshield and checked your oil. Not old enough to have actually used one mind you, but old enough to remember them. Whenever my Mother had to get her own gas – which was not very often – we’d only stop at full service stations, which of course changed over the years, and now that she’s widowed and much older, she’s pumping her own gas because there are precious few service stations...
That’s a mouthful, but this is just a quick blog to point you at the actual blog I guest wrote for our F5 Fridays series. In short, we’ve been toying with F5 BIG-IP WOM in the labs as a performance and distance enhancement tool for VMWare vMotion moves over the WAN when NetApp Flexcache is deployed. Pretty cool stuff, and while I wasn’t involved in all of the testing that went on, as the Technical Marketing Manager for WOM I did get to see the results as they rolled out of the lab. Take a read if...
When I was earning my bachelors, I joined the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and through them, several special interest groups. One of those groups was SIGRISK, which focused on high-risk software engineering. At the time the focus was on complex systems whose loss was irretrievable – like satellite guidance systems or deep sea locomotion systems – and those whose failure could result in death or injury to individuals – like power plant operations systems, medical equipment, and traffic light systems. The approach to engineering these controls was rigorous, more rigorous than most IT staff would consider reasonable. ...
As those of you close to me know, I have an interest in historical military firearms. As a veteran, I of course have an interest in the M-16, since I used it, but otherwise my tastes run more to World War II era weapons of all countries. Interestingly, in the United States a law change in 1986 made it rather difficult to own a fully automatic weapon, and a change created by a special form of license allows collectors like myself to buy and own them under certain conditions, but the limitation that after 1986 no automatic weapon can...
If you’ve never heard of my Load Balancing For Developers series, it’s a good idea to start here. There are quite a few installments behind us, and I’m not going to look back in this post any more than I must to make it readable without going back… Meaning there’s much more detail back there than I’ll relate here. Again after a lengthy sojourn covering other points of interest, I return to Load Balancing For Developers with a more holistic view – application performance. Lori has talked a bit about this topic, and I’ve talked about it in the...
You could, in theory, install 2 foot diameter pipes in your house to run water through. If you like a really forceful shower, or want your hot-tub to fill quickly, bigger pipes would be your first thought. Imagine your surprise if you had someone come in, and install huge pipes on the inside of your water meter, only to discover that you didn’t get a whole heck of a lot more water through them? You see, the meter is a choke point. As is the pipe leading up to your house. It’s not just the issue of the pipes...
Every once in a while you hear something going on in the political spectrum that strikes you as meaningful and useful, that you hope against hope they will manage to get past the details and partisanship and move forward on. Right about the time of the writing of this blog, in the United States, we’re hearing a lot of these things because it’s an election cycle. Problem is that with 300 million people it is rare that any one idea is agreed upon by everyone, and politicians cover the spectrum, so often what sounds like a good idea is tough...
The purpose of an usher, be it at an old time movie theater or a wedding, is to take people to suitable seats and see that they’re comfortable. The purpose of a bouncer is to throw out bums and keep the peace. These two words conjure pictures in your head of similar folks, but their function is completely opposite. Many of the things confronting IT today that are as much driven by the business and buzz as by IT and requirements are Cloud Computing and Wireless Devices. Look back historically and find parallels to these things, they’ll help...
I had a blog partially written for today when @GeorgeVHulme tweeted this: "WAHOO! Minnesota goes Private Cloud! “. And that changed my thoughts and direction completely. Here’s the article George linked to State of Minnesota Signs Historic Cloud Computing Agreement With Microsoft. The fact that it was private cloud and with Microsoft got me to read the article. And it’s actually a pretty impressive story for both the state and for Microsoft. In essence, this takes “private cloud” to a different place than I would have envisioned. They’re outsourcing. Yes, there’s a line in the sand, beyond which...
Every once in a while you see something that reminds you of the old “right tool for the job” adage. I’ve probably told this story here before, but for those of you who don’t sit at the edge of your chair waiting for me to post another blog, I’ll re-tell it so you can laugh at me. THE EARLY LESSONS ARE THE STRONGEST My father was an antique dealer for most of my productive life. As a child I learned everything from identifying depression glass with a glance to caning chairs...
I’ve been talking about Cloud Storage Gateways off and on, and F5 doesn’t have any reason to care one way or the other which Cloud Storage Gateways win the race, so even though I always strive to keep my blogs only biased based on merit, this one should scream at you that it is unbiased. I’m not bucking for a new job (F5 really does rock as an employer overall), we’re not in the space, but we do care about the space because our ARX box can take a Cloud Storage Gateway and treat it like a NAS… Presuming it’s...
There is one little thing you’re missing from your IT budget. While it impacts manpower most of all, you’ll be feeling it throughout your budget, and see signs of it in other departments as well. You should plan for it, because it is nearly a guarantee that it will continue to impact your budgeting for the next year or so. It’s not SOA. SOA had its day in the sun, and though Cloud will give it a little bit more, it is pretty much baked into the budgets of those organizations using it, and not even on the radar...
Thursday was quite the day for us. I mentioned earlier in the week that I was setting up the storage for Lori to digitize all of the DVDs, well we came to the conclusion that we needed 12 terabytes of raw disk to hold movies + music. Our current NAS total was just over four Terabytes, clearly not enough. While I take it in stride that I would consider purchasing an additional 12 TB of disk space, you have to stop in awe for a moment, don’t you? It was just a decade ago that many pundits were saying...
Now that Lori has her new HP TouchSmart for an upcoming holiday gift, we are finally digitizing our DVD collection. You would think that since our tastes are somewhat similar, we’d be good to go with a relatively small number of DVDs… We’re not. I’m a huge fan of well-done war movies and documentaries, we share history and fantasy interests, and she likes a pretty eclectic list of pop-culture movies, so the pile is pretty big. I’m working out how to store them all on the NAS such that we can play them on any TV on the network, and...
Someone said something interesting to me the other day, and they’re right “at 10 Gig WAN connections with compression turned on, you’re not likely to fill the pipe, the key is to make certain you’re not the bottleneck.” (the other day is relative – I’ve been sitting on this post for a while) I saw this happen when 1 Gig LANs came about, applications at the time were hard pressed to actually use up a Gigabit of bandwidth, so the focus became how slow the server and application were, if the backplane on the switch was big enough to...
I owned a book once – long since wandered off in the hands of a friend or one of my children so I can’t give proper reference – where they discuss replication teleportation. Where your pattern is transmitted, but your physical self is not. Back in the 90s, some smart folks at IBM were working on just this theory. In the book, the new copy of you wakes up and they say “congratulations, you’ve made it to Mars safely”, while the old copy of you wakes up and gets the same speech, right before the old copy is killed. The...
We developers used to be obsessed with optimizations. Like a child with an Erector Set and a whole lot of spare parts, we always wanted to “make it better”. In our case, better was faster and using less memory/CPU resources. Where development came from – a few Kilobytes of memory, a much slower CPU, and non-optimizing compilers, this all made sense. But the rest of IT, and indeed, the business, didn’t want to see us build our Erector set higher, or make our code more complex buy more efficient, machines were speeding up at a relatively constant rate and the...
There is an interesting bit in high-tech that isn’t much mentioned but happens pretty regularly – when a good idea is adapted and moved to new uses, raising it a bit in the stack or revising it to keep up with the times. The quintessential example of this phenomenon is the progression from “subroutines” to “libraries” to “frameworks” to “APIs” to “Web Services”. The progression is logical and useful, but those assembler and C programmers that were first stuffing things into reusable subroutines could not have foreseen the entire spectrum of what their “useful” idea was going to become over...
I was pondering the weather in Northeast Wisconsin this morning, it’s gloomy and oppressively hot. Between heat and humidity, I’d say it felt more like the US’s Pacific Northwest than the Midwest. And it’s been that way all summer. We’ve been plowed under with 80+ percent humidity for months, and every once in a while the temperature dips to remind us that we’re in Wisconsin. It is the last day of August, tomorrow is September, when cool and wet is supposed to start converging upon us. It will be a relief after months of hot and humid....
A RANGE OF OPTIONS Almost exactly a year ago, I inherited several sets of model railroad trains. Two full O scale sets and two full HO scale sets. They were in varying stages of disrepair, and I wasn’t certain any of them worked. I’m not a train person, but my kids might be – given the chance to try them out. So I took them all to different dealers (who would have thought that different people work on different scales?), and had them all looked at to determine which one was most in...
My eldest son has been having car troubles. To be more direct, he needed a new car. We agreed to help him out financially, let him go do his shopping and comparing, and when he chose a car I took him to pick it up. He chose a used PT Cruiser to replace his worn-out Olds Achieva, and on the way home, tried to familiarize himself with the features of the new car. Anything that the Achieva didn’t have and the PT Cruiser did, he found to be odd to him. And I pondered that as I drove him...
My father was an antique dealer that specialized in furniture refinishing. All of us children spent some amount of time down at the shop getting instruction in how to handle antiques from dishes to weapons to furniture. But each of us got special instruction in how to treat a piece of furniture. The man looked at a piece of broken down furniture with a critical eye, and then caressed it like it was special, he could recover some of the most horrifically damaged furniture with nothing but experience and trial-and-error. The one lesson all of us received over and...
As I write this, Lori and The Toddler are on their way to the store, his first trip out of the house without a diaper (nappy for our UK friends), she bravely told him that they would go get some robots as reward for being a big boy. I told her that it was brave – possibly brazen – to take him out straight away, to which she replied “I’m putting clothes in the diaper bag and taking it along just in case”. I’m sure all will be well, he has inherited his mother’s stubbornness, and is pretty focused on...
When you’re going through your basement, attic, or garage and reorganizing, you move things from box to box, shuffle locations of boxes, buy better boxes to hold things that are more precious, take steps to see to their safety by keeping boxes off the floor… There is an entire sorting mechanic going on that you are likely hardly even thinking about. THE BIGGER THE MESS… I recently swept through our basement – boxes had been dumped down there when we moved into the house (seven years ago), and two of our children have...
While there are a whole array of well-documented benefits to be found in virtualization, there is one truth to virtualization that has not escaped the experienced IT veteran. Virtualization sprawl is not just bad for operations, it is bad for disaster recovery planning. Not only are there a ton more systems to worry about in a world where a new system can be brought online and be fully functional in hours, there is a dedicated amount of disk packed behind that virtual machine that must be maintained also. And when the worst happens must be restored. ...
Jessica Scarpoti over at Tech Target has an article discussing the state of CDN and application delivery. While I had not put a ton of thought into this particular market – CDNs grew into some pretty special-use, high-end items because of their pricing models over a decade ago – it does bear some obvious similarities to cloud, so this is a pretty well thought-out article. The question that springs to mind for me is “will CDNs remain CDNs?” in the rush to cloud services, CDN providers are a large portion of the way there already, having to have massive...
This week has been a banner week in the world of Cloud computing. The experts have been out there saving us from ourselves in droves. Good to know that there is no shortage of people who either don’t get what cloud is and think they do, or don’t get what cloud isn’t and think they do. Meanwhile, they will offer us a bit of entertainment. The second more than the first, admittedly, but both are amusing. I CAN HAS FUD? First for your studied consideration is Phil Wainright, writing over on Ziff-Davis’ website....
There are some topics that warrant the occasional revisit as time goes on, and application security is certainly one of those. As long as we have applications being developed and deployed, it seems we will have bad guys looking to exploit them. While I do believe that the Internet, like the Old West, will eventually need to be cleaned up and a set of common rules enforced, still there will be bad-guys, some people never learn that you can’t just do whatever you want and expect to get away with it. So we need application security. At this point,...
No matter what country you live in, if it is in any way democratic, you have seen the political trend wherein nearly everyone knows the correct solution to a given problem, but hidden agendas, partisanship, and general demagoguery get in the way of implementing that solution. In most industrialized countries, the most obvious and timely instance of this is any discussion of cutting government spending. Everyone knows that it is inevitable, the government cannot spend more than it makes forever, any more than a business or a household can, but partisanship and turf-protection always make these things move very slowly,...
I read an interesting blog the other day that is pretty spot-on about IT, customers, and what we’ve spent the last 30 years doing. We’re in a field whose purpose is to increase the capability of the enterprise while simultaneously making it easier to do whatever the organization in general and IT specifically does. IT’S WHAT WE DO It is a pretty rare enterprise that can do without IT these days, for systems are what the military refers to as “force multipliers” – they make the people available more effective. We blame a...
Remember when Beanie Babies were free in Happy Meals, and tons of people ran out to buy the Happy Meals but only really wanted the Beanie Babies? Yeah, that’s what the storage compression/dedupe market is starting to look like these days. Lots of big names are out snatching up at-rest de-duplication and compression vendors to get the products onto their sales sheets, we’ll have to see if they wanted the real value of such an acquisition – the bright staff that brought these products to fruition – or they’re buying for the product and going to give or throw away...
The last couple of years have been painful, to say the least. Some call them unprecedented, financially, but I do believe that is pushing the descriptor a bit far, since there have been plenty of instances where business pretty much en-masse questioned the amount that IT returns for their investment and cut budgets, so the feel of this recession is not much different than what we’ve felt before, it’s just by necessity. The funny bit of this is that everyone seems to agree that IT spending still went up in 2009, just by a massively reduced amount. Since the pinch...
In the data center of the future, you are going to need to be able to bring up new instances of an application, have them fully functional without any user intervention, and when they’re no longer needed they should clean up after themselves and quietly go away. Five years ago this was fantasy talk, two years ago it was coming to the fore, and today we can see clearly that such adaptable infrastructure is going to be mandatory for any installation/application that has a highly variable rate of throughput. The drivers for this need for adaptability are varied, but...
Storage at rest de-duplication has been a growing point of interest for most IT staffs over the last year or so, just because de-duplication allows you to purchase less hardware over time, and if that hardware is a big old storage array sucking a ton of power and costing a not-insignificant amount to install and maintain, well, it’s appealing. Most of the recent buzz has been about primary storage de-duplication, but that is merely a case of where the market is. Backup de-duplication has existed for a good long while, and secondary storage de-duplication is not new. Only recently...
YES, IT IS ABOUT THE BUSINESS… Over the years data archiving and backup technology have waxed and waned, growing closer and further away from each other as the needs of the enterprise, new technologies, and the external economic and regulatory environment have changed. There have been clear indications that the need for reliable backup and archiving of data was a growing regulatory requirement, yet it did nothing for the business, and that meant it was a hard-to-sell expense. BUT LET’S NOT GENERALIZE TOO MUCH. Out in the...
A couple of weeks ago, one of the people I follow on our home Twitter account (focused on role-playing and miniature wargames) tweeted “Zombies! This Year’s Vampires Are Zombies! Oh Please Let This Year’s Vampires Be Zombies!!” as a joke aimed at those in the entertainment industry that were riding the fad wave of Vampire films/books/games. Seriously, the show that did the penitent Vampire in the 80s was good, everything portraying a “good-guy” Vampire after that was lame follow-on. That’s how I feel about high-tech sometimes. “Cloud is This Year’s SOA! Oh Please Let Cloud Be This Year’s...
Anyone who has children and travels by car will tell you that there is no substitute for the mandatory array of bathroom breaks that must be taken by those children. One of the many reasons I prefer to travel at night when driving long distances is that children who are asleep are not asking to pull into the next rest stop for yet another restroom break. And I was one of those children. My father once told me I had the smallest bladder on the planet… Right before my mother made him stop at a gas station for me. ...
Where you are going has a huge impact upon the mode of transportation that you choose to use. If you are going to the neighbor’s house, you tend to walk. If on your way to town or downtown, you tend to take a motorized vehicle. Out for a leisurely trip around the subdivision? You are likely going to ride a bike. Going to another continent, probably a plane, maybe a ship… You get the idea. Several years ago (while working for Network Computing) I reviewed WAN Optimization products, with an eye to file transfer acceleration. Interestingly, F5 decided not...
With thanks to Led Zeppelin for some great lyrics. There's a sign on the wall But she wants to be sure 'Cause you know sometimes words have Two meanings Since cloud computing has a bit of an identity crisis, and cloud storage is just starting to realize one itself, it should be no surprise to anyone that “cloud storage gateway” has more than one meaning. While they are all a...
At the end of the odd but intriguing movie Existenz, one of the primary characters looks at the other after killing a bunch of people and says “We’re still in the game, right?” With the implication that you the viewer really don’t know if they’re still in the Virtual Reality game they were playing. Sometimes, Cloud feels like that. I can just go “We’re still in the cloud, right?” Here we are, it is 2010, the pundits have been hailing cloud for years, and yet there is still a vast gulf of understanding of what is the cloud, exactly...
A couple of articles that have come out in the last week or so got me to pondering the current state of IT Management mentality, and it is somewhat amusing, if you think it through. We’re risk-averse where all evidence indicates we don’t need to be, and we’re cutting edge, risk aware but not averse, where all evidence says we should be treading with caution. The curious thing to me is that all of this is happening at once, and we’re okay with it. The first article that brought this to my attention was published on The Register about...
In Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope (the first Star Wars movie for those more curmudgeonly than I), Luke is training with a light saber… Ben Kenobi: Remember, a Jedi can feel the Force flowing through him. Luke Skywalker: You mean it controls your actions? Ben Kenobi: Partially, but it also obeys your commands. VIRTUALIZATION AND THE FORCE Virtualization is much like that – it limits your options, in effect controlling your actions, while also helping you to do your job more effectively....
Rubik’s Cube was first patented in 1974. The first book talking about a solution algorithm was published in 1981. In 2007, computers were used to deduce the smallest number of moves to solve a cube, and in 2008 that number was further reduced. That’s 34 years after it was invented. And it’s just a toy. NO! Turn it RIGHT! RIGHT! I’ve danced around this quite a bit, but time to hit it head on. The maturing of server virtualization, the growth of virtual desktops, the introduction of cloud, and deduplication of at-rest data...
Lori, the Toddler, and I drove down to my mothers’ house in Cincinnati (about 9 hours away) for the fourth of July weekend. Our youngest daughter drove her car with her sister, the sister’s fiancé, and our grand-daughter. We stayed in touch via text message and drove through the night. What does all of this have to do with networking, you ask? Well I was driving about 1AM around Indianapolis, Indiana, and realized that there were an awful lot of cars on the road for the middle of the night, presumably holiday traffic, but things were moving along smoothly,...
One of the things I have talked about quite a bit in the last couple of months is the disjoint between the needs of enterprise IT and the offerings of a wide swath of the cloud marketplace. Some times it seems like many cloud vendors are telling customers “here’s what we choose to offer you, deal with it”. Problem is, oftentimes what they’re offering is not what the enterprise needs. There are of course some great examples of how to do cloud for the enterprise, Rackspace (among others) has done a smashing job of offering users a server...
Ever hang out with the person who just wants to make their point, and no matter what the conversation says the same thing over and over in slightly different ways? Ever want to tell them they were doing their favorite cause/point/whatever a huge disfavor by acting like a repetitive fool? That’s what your data is doing when you send it across the WAN. Ever seen the data in a database file? Or in your corporate marketing documents? R E P E T I T I V E. And under a normal backup or replication scenario – or a remote office...
Lori and I were discussing accomplishments with our 23 year old a week or so ago, and he is keeping score of the things we’ve done and he’s done. We’ve written books, he’s written books. We’ve written for a magazine, he’s written for a magazine. Then he hit the things he has to do if he is to “win”, including both ANSI and ISO standards, masters degree, etc etc. (there’s actually one I can’t mention yet). While trying to impress upon him that it is not a competition and we just want him to have a long and...
THE SLOW GROWTH OF SPEEDY COMMUNICATIONS It used to be that if you were replicating database or file storage to a remote location you had few options if your connection was not the best. You could use rate shaping to give more of the pipe over to your replication, increase TCP window sizes, turn on jumbo frames… All relatively primitive stuff. As time went on, the speed and reliability of data connections grew, which increased our usage of such connections to replicate data, which decreased the reliability of the connections because we...
If a given nation independently developed twelve or fourteen governmental systems that all sat side-by-side and attempted to cooperate but never inter-operate, then anarchy would result. Not necessarily overnight, but issues about who is responsible for what, where a given function is best handled, and more would spring up nearly every day. EVERY WHICH WAY… Welcome to storage networking. Over the years this field has grown more independent standards than WarCraft has users. Many of them were required for the times, hardware, connectivity, whatever. Others were required because a given vendor thought they...
So I’m jealous that Lori works D&D references into her posts regularly and I never have… Until today! For those who aren’t gamers or literary buffs, a Hydra is a big serpent or lizard with a variable number of heads (normally five to nine in both literature and gaming). They’re very powerful and very dangerous, and running into one unprepared is likely to get you p0wned. The worst part about them is that mythologically speaking, if you cut one of the heads off, two grow in its place. Ugly stuff if you’re determined to defeat it. That’s...
Over the last several years, and for several more to come, virtualization and cloud are transforming the way that we implement IT. The purpose of the department is the same – to serve users in the best manner possible – but the agility with which that service can be offered has increased by a magnitude or more. Bringing up a brand-new server took weeks, now it is hours. The entire focus of Server Administrators shifted from hardware, so that it is a small part of what they do on a daily basis, the number of servers you can offer the...
One thing that some companies seem to have grabbed onto and run with while others don’t seem to have made the correct connections to fully utilize is testing in a highly virtualized or cloud environment. Of all the things these environments can do well, testing is one of the best possible use cases to deploy them. For some of you, this isn’t news. I know some testing people who have this down to a science, and no doubt their wisdom is palely reflected in this post. VIRTUAL OR CLOUD? In this case, cloud...
Looking for my blog today? It’s in hiding. I posted it over there –>> Lori’s blog. She is running a series called “F5 Friday”, and as I promised a few blogs ago, I have a write-up about Data Manager (DM), complete with screenshots in for today’s installment. A little weird that it’s on her blog? Not really… Nothing to do with our relationship or anything, she’ll do some of these and will host others by employees, partners, customers, who knows? Mine is just the first of many to be hosted on her blog… So read and enjoy, DM...
BACK IN THE DAY… Years ago I wrote a piece for Network Computing Magazine about the state of Utility network security and the issues it presents. I focused largely on SCADA security, but also looked at Automated Meter Reading (AMR) and the new issues it brought to the table. That article was not without foundation, I built and lead the team that did the IT portion of the first total AMR replacement in the United States. The field was new, and we used about a dozen different systems to get complete coverage, making integration and...
It’s been a good long while since I wrote an installment of Load Balancing for Developers, but you all keep reading them, and they are still my most read blog posts on a monthly basis, so since I have an increased interest in WAN Optimization, and F5 has a great set of WAN Optimization products, I thought I’d tag right onto the end with more information that will help you understand what Application Delivery Controllers (ADCs) are doing for (and to) your code, and how they can help you tweak your application without writing even more code. If you’re...
Those who love to hear themselves talk about the growth of cloud computing just seem to keep barraging us with numbers, and it is time that those of us with a desire to understand what is really going on demand some clarity into those numbers, because many are obviously questionable, some are even obviously bunk spewn by those who want you to believe everyone else is rushing to the cloud and you must too. First of the issues is defining what is “enterprise computing”. It amazes me to see some of the numbers thrown about for how much enterprise...
NOTE: To my knowledge, F5 Networks does not do business with Deep Storage. This article is purely personal opinion and should not be construed as F5’s stance on… Well… Anything. In fact, there’s a chance I’m getting called “up on the carpet” (as we used to say in the military) right now for this blog. Wish me luck. If you’ve read my blog for the last few years, you know that I’ve bemoaned the death of print publishing in high tech simply because some of the publications were the last bastion of truly unbiased evaluation of gear. Everyone else...
For those who don’t know, according to the Meyers & Briggs Foundation, part of the Meyers-Briggs Assessment is defined as: The essence of the theory is that much seemingly random variation in the behavior is actually quite orderly and consistent… The same can be said about your data. Much that is seemingly random is consistent and predictable. One of the problems currently facing the enterprise is to properly categorize that data so that its “personality” is well known. You cannot sort (or tier) what you don’t know, and this is a simple proposal for how you might begin such a...
There is a trend in the high-tech industry to jump from one hot technology to another, without waiting for customers to catch up. We’re certainly seeing it with Cloud, there are people out there pushing the “everyone else is doing it and gaining agility!” button every day. But you’re not there yet. Part of the reason you’re not there yet is that virtualization is still growing up. Between VM sprawl, resource over-utilization, virtual versus physical infrastructure, and the inherent task of IT to continue to support the business as it sits today, there isn’t a ton of time left for...
In the rush to cloud, there are many tools and technologies out there that are brand new. I’ve covered a few, but that’s nowhere near a complete list, but it’s interesting to see what is going on out there from a broad-spectrum view. I have talked a bit about Cloud Storage Gateways here. And I’m slowly becoming a fan of this technology for those who are considering storing in the cloud tier. There are a couple of good reasons to consider these products, and I was thinking about the reasons and their standing validity. Thought I’d share with...
In a recent blog by Randy George over at Network Computing, he gets a little excited over the prospects of running 100% virtual, and is somewhat dismissive of hardware appliances. Buried in toward the end of the post is a note that says he’ll be running tests of virtual Wan Optimization tools, which explains his excitement up front a bit. Lori and I used to write for Network Computing (NWC), before it went away, then returned as a web pub. We never worked with Mr. George, but we have worked with some of the people who are still...
I’ve had a couple of blog posts talking about how there is a disconnect between “the market” and “the majority of customers” where things like cloud (and less so storage) are concerned. So I thought I’d try this out as a follow on. If I were running your average medium to large IT shop (not talking extremely huge, just medium to large), what would I be focused on right now. By way of introduction, for those who don’t know, I’m relatively conservative in my use of IT, I’ve been around the block, been burned a few times (OS/2 Beta...
It is Memorial Day here in the US, where we remember those who served our country in the military – particularly those who gave their lives in military service. So I thought I’d tell you a cautionary tale of a good idea gone horribly wrong… A TALE OF TANK DESTROYERS Leading up to America’s entry into World War II, the leading thinkers of military strategy in the U.S. theorized that a mobile anti-tank unit, with the correct equipment, could assault and defeat enemy armor. This was an off-shoot of a theory they had...
George Crump posted an interesting article over on Storage Switzerland that talks about the current state of the storage market from a protocol perspective. Interestingly to me, CIFS is specifically excluded from the conversation – NAS is featured, but the guts of the NAS bit only talks about NFS. In reality, NFS is a small percentage of the shared storage out there, since CIFS is built into Microsoft systems and is often used at the departmental or project level to keep storage costs down or to lighten the burden on the SAN. But now that I’ve nit-picked, it’s a...
According to this post on Dave Rosenberg’s CNET blog, Australian researchers have found that three major cloud providers have instability and performance variance. This is the opposite side of the hype cycle, where all those who can only see black and white and had dumped me into the “against the cloud” category suddenly get confused. I’m not for or against any technology, I just like to see it used in the proper manner and at the proper time. It’s a bit early for the hype to start turning into cold hard reality, but Cloud has kind of...
Since I first started covering storage, back around the turn of the century (sounds more impressive than it is, no?), the argument has been ongoing in far more organizations than you could imagine about who should “own” storage security. Does it belong with the storage group? With the security group? How about in IT services, since they’re the ones that are on the pointy end of user relations? Considering the number of times that the security group has been around this May-pole, you’d think they would have all the answers, but in many ways this isn’t a “what...
It amuses me when people start throwing about phrases like “interoperability” and “federation” in a space still hopping in the middle of the hype cycle. You would think that with our long and growing history, we in IT could be realistic about the prospects of any early implementers putting interoperability high on the list above functionality, wouldn’t you? It just isn’t going to happen tomorrow – the marketing hype has gotten so wound up that they’re getting the cart far before the horse. Early adopters in any high-tech space believe that lock-in is a business model, and...
So a while back I covered Load Balancing for Developers, trying to help developers who don’t yet have exposure to load balancing to understand the when/where/how of load balancing.
I took a bit of a break to do some BIG-IP/TMOS V.10 work, and figure it’s about time (since I’ve been gently prodded by readers a couple of times) to move on with the advanced applications.
But first, a moment of silence for Borland, who this time surely is breathing its last. I’ll try not to reminisce too much here, but their DOS IDE was the best out there, hands down. And...
We first introduced iControl interfaces for ASM in version 9 of LTM, and that support was about what you would expect from a first release – usable, but not expansive. With V10, we have stepped up the number of interfaces and the functionality they offer you access to, and here’s a quick overview of those changes. There is a Tech Tip coming soon about the interfaces themselves and how to use them, this blog is just to help you determine if you can achieve your goals utilizing iControl against ASM. Not that I want that to sound too harsh on...
Lori and I have a larger home network, with several servers, multiple switches, two WAPs, and eight or so clients. Thrown into the middle of all of that is an aging Infrant Technologies (now NetGear) ReadyNAS, 1 Terabyte. The ReadyNAS, from before NetGear purchased Infrant, has had a bad cable for about two years, but has been working just fine otherwise. Of course a bad cable implies one of the drives was down (it was), and that makes RAID kind of redundant. About a week ago the ReadyNAS took itself off-line. We have a lot of data out there that...
Well, I’ve covered the basics of iSessions – a secure, optimized tunnel between two BIG-IPs – so now it’s time to talk about usefulness, both today and going forward. Since iSessions are an infrastructure issue, the following works for redundant data centers also, assuming they have BIG-IPs in them, it’s just that cloud is the buzzword du-jour, and there’s actually a teentsy bit more benefit to using them for the cloud. First off, I assume that your cloud vendor has BIG-IPs (that is a safe assumption as of today), but you’re living in the real world, check with them...
Amongst the wave of new features that came out in Version 10 of TMOS is a nifty little feature called iSessions. This being the first release of iSessions, there is a lot of curiosity and not as much documentation as we’d like yet. So I’ll walk you through what is available, why you’d want to use it, and what benefits it offers in this blog post. As time goes on we will expand our coverage of iSessions to more fully discuss all of the options and challenges they present. The concept of iSessions in v.10 is pretty straight-forward…...
Note: If you’re here for Load Balancing for Developers or Reasons You Need File Virtualization (both iterated on my team page), I took this week and last off to cover v.10, check back next week. Forest, Trees… The new functionality in v.10 is so expansive that it’s easy to get buried and not see the larger picture right away. That’s kind of what happened to me when this blog post came about. Originally I was going to write about using Logical Volume Management (lvm) for testing configurations, but honestly the release of evaluation licensing makes for some other...
One of the cool new items in v.10 is the use of a logical volume manager (LVM) to create and manage multiple “partitions”. This is the last time I will use the term “partition” to refer to v.10 disk space in this post, since partitioning was the way things were done prior to v.10, moving forward we use the volume system. Considerations The first thing to do is decide if LVM is the right tool for you. Like most massively cool technologies, it supersedes the system it is designed to replace. While we do our best to provide...
For those who missed it, we’re in the middle of the IT Revolution lead by our v.10 release of TMOS and our new 8900 model. Due to all the great stuff to talk about in the new version of TMOS, I have put off the Load Balancing for Developers and Reasons You Need File Virtualization series on hold for this week, and possibly next. Then I’ll hop back on them and we’ll explore ADCs for Developers and more Reasons You Need File Virtualization. As part of the revolution, you need more control. Or iControl, as the case may...
For a good long while, bigpipe has been the command line tool for use with BIG-IP products. It worked admirably, and has lasted a good long while, but as with everything that is vibrant and successful, BIG-IP outgrew bigpipe. Starting with v.10, you have access to a new command processor – tmsh. While you can still call bigpipe, tmsh offers such power that we figure you won’t be doing that for long. Offering a full blown scripting language based on tcl, tmsh gives you functionality that makes this author wonder if a whole lot of work currently doled...
Continuing the Friday Funny series (some missed that when I didn’t disclaim it last week, so “Fridays are the days I think I’m funny”). Thursday was an insane day, starting with my laptop having VPN issues, and ending with after-hours work calls. Indeed, I’m writing this at 10 PM Central time (GMT – 5) Thursday night, just because I’m here and just finishing up. Not too much work, just one of those days. So midway through the day, a friend of mine that does freelance in technology and RPGs – Bill Silvey – tried to...
If you’re just joining this series, there is a complete list of the Reasons to date on my team member page.
Are we at reason #5 already? Wow. Okay, this is another one that salesmen will tell you because it is truly compelling, but it is truly a good reason, one of the best.
It is also one of the ones that I eschewed before getting to see real numbers that I could quantify were not marketing material.
The disk savings are real.
Yeah, I said it, and it’s true. Sure, you could argue that they’re only disk purchase deferments, I would disagree....
If you’re new to this series, you can find the complete list of articles in the series on my personal page here
If you are writing applications to sit behind a Load Balancer, it behooves you to at least have a clue what the algorithm your load balancer uses is about. We’re taking this week’s installment to just chat about the most common algorithms and give a plain- programmer description of how they work. While historically the algorithm chosen is both beyond the developers’ control, you’re the one that has to deal with performance problems, so you should know what is...
I took the easy topic this week, and things are so crazy it’s still late in the day that I’m posting this. My apologies. This one also focuses more on ARX than previous ones – this is because replication is a differentiator for many vendors’ products, so I’m being careful to talk about what most can do, then give details for the one I know the best. If you’re just joining this series, there is a complete list of the Reasons to date on my team member page. Replication is of growing importance in the enterprise, be it...
If you’re just joining this series, check out Reason #1 and Reason #2 That You Need File Virtualization Tiering is the one benefit that a sales person will tell you about, so I was putting it off a bit, but it is the one thing I’ve had requests for, and it’s a benefit most enterprises can relate to. I’ll tell you up-front that even though it does offer a huge savings, for reasons I’ll mention below, this isn’t one of the big drivers for me – I knew about the benefits of tiering before I decided that File Virtualization...
So last time we were talking about when and why you might implement load balancing – either with a dedicated load balancer, or with a full-blown Application Delivery Controller (ADC). This time we’ll briefly run over what a load balancer does and how it does it.
If you’re just now joining us, the first blog in this series can be found here: Intro to Load Balancing for Developers – the Architects View.
Note that this is a very high level overview, but the end of the article includes links to other articles that offer you more detail if you need it....
Some Twitter users get really upset when people unfollow them. I’ve seen public apologies on blogs and in Tweets, people wondering why… I figured I’d save them all some trouble, and lump 15 of the reasons into one Friday blog post for your enjoyment. Remember, on Fridays I think I’m funny. 1. Dear PoliticalCommentator: You had roughly a 50% chance that I would disagreed with you, and another 50% chance that your constant stream of amateur political commentary was just plain annoying. Which means that technically you should have no followers by now. 2. Dear MarketingMessage:...
If you’re just joining us, the first article in this series is here.
While desktop management is a volume issue – touch enough desktops and something is likely to break – Reason #2 is more about complexity. Our data centers are like the cloverleaf on a busy freeway intersection – stuff going every which direction, and no one is quite certain (though some claim to be) what causes all those collisions and slowdowns.
Simplified – and possibly more effective - Security
Yes indeed, I did say that. And I mean it. I figure that once it’s explained, even my Security friends will have...
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 your web app ZapNGo,...
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...
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...
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)...
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...
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...
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...
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:...
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...
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...
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,...
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...
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...
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?...
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...
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...
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...
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...