The visitor rate on gotitsolutions.org is increasing. I thought it might be nice to share some of the stats with the gotitsolutions.org community.

Only 8.6 days in to September and gotitsolutions.org has had 93 unique visitors. These numbers are encouraging and I think this could be a big month.

-RJB

I just finished reading a blog entitled “Developing software by the 15% rule”. Any company providing professional services type work, specifically fixed scope work as defined by a SOW runs the same risk as defined in this blog. I would propose that absoluteness of the 15% is far less important than the message the manifesto sends. The manifesto sets expectations, highlights a methodology and provides perspective clients that warm and fuzzy felling. The feeling that you are the authority and you understand the business.

-RJB

Following my previous post about the Sun Grid I stub bled upon the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) – Limited Beta announcement. It appears that there is a commercial resurgence of time-sharing. IBM is in the mix and has launched e-business on demand as part of this offering they are providing free grid time to ISV.

The community grid concept works, the proof is in the SETI@home project. Today the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) provides the ability for users to join an open source grid community and offer cpu ticks to cure diseases, study global warming, discover pulsars, and do many other types of scientific research.

-RJB

Time-Sharing refers to sharing a computing resource among many users by multitasking. Time-Sharing was very popular in the early mainframe and minicomputer days when most could not afford to outright purchase computer systems. Users and organizations would buy time slices on large mainframe systems. Fast forward to 2006, SUN Microsystems has revived the concept of Time-Sharing with the Sun Grid. What a great idea, now users and organizations have and economical way to satisfy a temporary need for compute power. Organizations can manage infrastructure that accommodates the majority of the requirements and leverage the Sun Grid for the overflow.

-RJB

• 64bit only
• 50 databases per server
• 50 storage groups
• 5 DBs per storage group
• No MAPI support
• Preferred backup method will be VSS coupled with replication
• Two supported replication options
  • local continuous replication (LCR) – local replica to distinct disk
    • LCR is a log based replication to local server, backup can happen from the replica
  • cluster continuous replication (CCR) – mscs clustered replication between nodes
    • CCR is based on MSCS – log shipping to replica server distinct from primary server
• VSS backups of exchange
  • Backup programs will require Exchange server 2007 server aware VSS requestor
  • eseutil is no longer required
  • Windows server 2003 NTBackup does not have a VSS 2007 requestor
  • Exchange server 2007 db and transaction log must be backed up via the VSS requester
• Supported VSS backup methods
  • full: .edb, .log, and .chk are backed up, logs are truncated after backup completes
  • copy: the same as full but no truncate
  • incremental: only *.log, truncates log
  • differential: *.log all the way back to full backup, but no truncating
• Recovery
  • VSS now allows restores directly to recover storage group
  • restores to alternate location, different path, different server, different storage group
  • log files can be replayed without mounting it first
    recovery will be much more granular: mailbox or even
• message level
  • I would expect that MS will leverage Data Protection Manager (DPM) to facilitate enhanced RPO and RTO

-RJB

I am often asked how where I gather information from, so I thought I would begin to trickle out some of my key sources.? I encourage readers to check out my blogroll but in addition here are two sites that I visit fairly often.

http://beet.tv/ a?great vlog.

http://tv.blinkx.com/?a great video search engine that uses?speech recognition to index audio content.? Very cool!

-RJB

After an exhausting 5 weeks on the road I took the opportunity this weekend to relax, read and recharge. I finished a book my wife gave to me for my birthday entitled “Naked Conversations” by Robert Scoble and Shel Israel. For those of you who don’t know Rober Scoble he is the author of http://scobleizer.wordpress.com/. Robert was one of the early bloggers at Microsoft and his blog continues to be one of the most popular on the web.

The book provided tons of great tips on how to publicize blogs. Because there are some many ways to build blog awareness I thought I would cover a different topic in a multi-part blog series. Last night I setup feedburner, I am hoping that this will drive increased traffic to my site.

Feedburner provides some great tools:

Republish feeds as html pages:

Subscribe to RSS headline updates from: http://feeds.feedburner.com/GotItSolutions”>
Powered by FeedBurner

Add a feed banner to your e-mail signature:

PingShot which notifies popular blog rating services when you publish.

Email Subscriptions:

FeedCount which displays the number of subscribed users:

I am really excited about this, in the last six hours I have added 8 subscribers but only time will tell how effective this actually is. I recommend checkingin it out.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/GotItSolutions

For those of you who are using WordPress, I highly recommend the feedburner plugin.

-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.

Part 1 – The state of data protection. 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.

-RJB

Today we finished the 3 week 9 city “Evolution of Disaster Recovery” tour with our most interactive session thus far. Congratulation San Diego you were by far one of the most interactive groups. We are thinking about what our next road show topic might be. Maybe “Intelligent Information Management for the SMB”, I am interested in what the folks who attended this road show would like to hear about. Thanks again for taking time out of your busy schedules to come and listen to us. If you have any suggestions on the next show topic please do not hesitate to post a comments. Thanks again!

-RJB

Inline with my previous post “The simple value of archiving…” I thought I would post a CAS (Content Addressable Storage) overview because again it was something that I presented during the “Evolution of Disaster Recovery” seminar series that I felt we could have gone much deeper. Unlike traditional storage “Content Addressable Storage” (CAS) uses a content address or globally unique ID to represent the binary contents of the file, location of the file, etch… in contrast traditional file systems such as UFS and NTFS which use file names to identify files. A content address is typically calculated using an algorithm called a file digest (i.e. MD5, SHA-1, SHA-256, SHA-512) and a hash is created to identify the file contents.

Exercise 1:
If you are curious to see how hashing works you can download md5sum from here , Next open MS Word, Notepad, VI, etc… and type something and save the doc as “filename.doc” now open a command prompt (DOS window) and run “md5sum filename.doc” this will return something like this “b3a6616fb5cee0f1669b1d13dd4c98cb *filename.doc” now open the file “filename.doc” and change a couple of letters do not delete or add characters because this will change the file size (makes the demonstration a little less powerful). For instance if you typed “Hello dad” change it to “Hello mom” and save as “filename.doc” the file should be identical in size to the previous version, now run the “md5sum “filename.doc” the output is a globally unique identifier and it is different because it is examining the binary makeup of the file not the file name, location, etc… Right now on you file system you only have one document called “filename.doc” which contains “Hello mom” the version containing “Hello dad” is gone. If this had been saved to a content addressable storage device both instance would have been saved because although they have the same name they are in fact unique. After this excise you can probably see the value for compliance, corporate governance, revision control, etc…

Exercise 2:
Create another doc named “filename.doc”, run “md5sum filename.doc”. Now copy “filename.doc” to “filename.doc” and “filename3.doc”, run “md5sum ….” on these two new instances of filename.doc you will notice that the hash is identical. On a traditional file system we have consumed 3x the space required because the only identifier is the file name which is unique, on a CAS device the file names would be stored with pointers to “filename.doc” this is what we call single instance storage. The practical application of this scenario dramatically reduces storage capacity required by dramatically reducing the amount of duplication present on most traditional file systems.

The following graphic is a simplistic representation of how “Content Addressable Storage” works:

Hope this adds some additional clarification to the discussions we had at the seminars. If you have an comments, concerns, corrections or questions please comment on this post.

-RJB