I have been inactive for a couple of days, this is because I am working on a new string of blogs focused on demos and how-to topics. I will be demoing software and walking through a few other topics in a hands-on blog series. The setup work is taking me a little time but my goal is to publish one demo or how-to per week. The first demo will focus on facilitating a full system recovery using Legato Networker. This is an issue I am working on for a customer right now and thought others may be interested.

-RJB

Now that the Evolution of Disaster Recovery roadshow is over, it?s time to start releasing the podcast. Because each seminar was just over 3 hours, we are releasing it in 4 parts.

This week, we have part 3.

Part 1 - The state of data proctection. This includes a discussion around, backups, backup to disk, virtual tape libraries, CDP, archiving, and more.

Part 2 - Edge to core data consolidation. Here we talk about using Cisco WAAS products to consolidate our data in a centralized location. This simplifies the management of our infrastructure, and makes preparing for DR much easier.

Part 3 - Leveraging Server Virtualization for Business Restart. Now that we understand how to protect out data, and have it in a centralized location we need to figure out how to make this data usable. Virtualization enables us to do this.

Part 4 - This section is a blending questions from each of the 9 cities we presented in.

A copy of the presentation can be found here if you?d like to follow along.

So on my last night of my “official” vacation I thought I would conclude the series with a post that refers back to my inaugural post from July 5th as well as pose some questions about what it could mean from a broader perspective. I just finished an article in the September 18th issue of BusinessWeek outlining how DuPount outsourced legal services to OfficeTiger a Business Process Outsourcer (BPO) recently acquired by R.R. Donnely & Sons Co.

According to the article DuPont aims to save 40% to 60% on document related work and cut $6 million from is $200 million dollar legal budget. Of course there is some associated risk but on the outskirts of Manila DuPont now has 30 Filipino attorneys, including three who have passed the U.S. bar exam. The attorneys sit elbow-to-elbow with 50 staff employees, working three shifts seven days a week they read, analyze, and annotate digital images of memos, payroll and medical records, old engineering specifications, and other documents that might be used as evidence in DuPont legal cases.

As a technologist working in the storage sector I spend a significant amount of time talking with customers about compliance and the need to facilitate e-discovery. We leverage software technologies like enterprise content management applications, Email archiving applications and full-text indexing to facilitate this. As software and hardware vendors we have a major hurdle to overcome, we have a fundamental inability to create meaningful metadata. Is it possible to automate the creation of meaningful metadata that eclipses the simple taxonomy we are capable of today? Does a BPOs ability to read, analyze, annotate, index and retrieve eliminate or decrease the need for such software products? With Asia also being a software development hotbed how long will it be before a BPO like OfficeTiger teams up with or organically grows a software development business to automate their processes hence lowering consumer cost? Where does this leave the software only vendor? Will they be at a disadvantage, with only the ability to offer a component of the total solution.

The obvious goal of outsoucing/offshoring is to cut cost but DuPont also hopes to reduce the evidence collection and processing time from 18 months to 3 months. This will be enabled by leveraging a global legal team operating 24/7. Office tiger will convert millions of archived paper records to digital format, code and index them; dramatically reducing the effort required to analyze the evidently data. It is not hard to see the cost benefits when the average salary for an attorney with five years experience in the Philippines, who has a very similar legal system to the U.S. is ~$30,000 including benefits. To put this in perspective that is about half what a veteran U.S. corporate paralegal earns and one-fifth what a first-year attorney can earn in in New York.

OfficeTiger believes that corporations are looking at more cost effective ways to buy legal services so cost does not become a variable when deciding to whether or not to defend a case. The need for alternative legal service could push OfficeTiger to ~1000 employees and hundreds of lawyers by the end of 2007. It looks to me like the paradigm is shifting in many of the markets where software vendors have focused, globalization will continue to morph the marketplace and the nimble will be best positioned to take advantage of the changes.

Read the full BusinessWeek article here .

-RJB

Happy to see Andy Bechtolsheim back at SUN returning them to the innovator they once were. I have to say Thumper looks pretty impressive!? Check it out here.

-RJB

Microsoft has opened up the Netscape playbook! Virtual PC 2004 is now free and can be downloaded from here. If history teaches us anything the desktop attack is the first move in a campaign focused on world domination. It was the goal in the with the Internet Explorer campaign that Microsoft ran against Netscape, why should we believe this will be any different? I remember back in the day running Netscape on the desktop and server (Netscape Communications Server). First the switch came on the desktop (after all it did save corporations a ton of money), next the server switched to either Microsoft IIS or Apache. Will the world once again end up with two alternatives Open Source (XenSource) and Microsoft?

Should be interesting to watch!

-RJB

It appears that there has been some activity around my original SMP clusters and virtualization post. I just noticed that there was a link back from jtroyer on the VMTN. I thought that I should make everyone aware of a follow-up post that further elaborates on the topic.

-RJB

On September 6th, 2006 I posted a response to a blog post on http://vi411.org entitled “Change“. I have run across a great video that I thought I would share.

View the video, funny and relevant! Also read the blog explaining the video. Long live Sniff and Scurry! In the event that you have not read “Who Moved My Cheese?” you should!

-RJB

So tonight I logged onto http://jimcarroll.com, for those of you who don’t know who Jim Carroll is, he is a highly regarded futurist. I was amazed by the relevancy of this particular blog post to some of my previous posts. Overall the post was insightful, thought provoking and I enjoyed it so much that I felt compelled to share it.

-RJB

I had the need to load a MSSQL 2000 instance on a Windows 2003 box when I encountered the following error “Unable to validate product key”. This was the MSDN SQL 2000 CD that I had used on numerous W2K and WXP boxes so I had no idea what was going on. After some researching I found the fix.

A simple registry change. The hack can be found here.

I hope this helps someone else out.

-RJB

On September 14, 2006 aweeks on VI411.org responded to my SMP clusters and virtualization post by stating that Don Becker’s statement is “ignorant”, a word I intentionally avoided in my original post due to the harsh tone. Let me further clarify my original post by stating that I believe most pioneers like Don Becker need to be arrogant! They are blazing the trail and in my opinion arrogance begets fortitude. Don Becker’s idealism causes him to ignore the fact that Microsoft owns a large portion of the market and x86 virtualization solves inadequacies in the Micro$haft Windows operating system. Again his ability to disregard this truth can only be viewed as an attribute when trying to develop a superior emerging technology. There is a place for x86 virtualization today but who knows what the future will hold. After reading aweeks’ post I realized that I was the “ignorant” one to not understand and commend Don Becker’s hard line aggressive view. In a world of David and Goliath where marketing spin suppresses innovation and stifles technological advances, I am glad there are people like Don Becker.

-RJB