SMP clusters and virtualization post response

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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

Detaching and reataching a SQL Server Database

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I thought I would share some directions on detaching and reatching a database from the osql (SQL 7, 2000, MSDE) command line or the SQL 2005 the sqlcmd command line.

osql into the server: (i.e. – osql -u sa -p password)

Display all databases on the server:

sp_databases
go

Note:  If you do not know the location of the MDF and LDF files use the following to determine:

use <database_name>
go
sp_helpfile
go
use master
go
sp_detach_db 'existing_db_name'
go
sp_attach_db 'new_db_name', '<path to the database MDF file>', '<path to the database LDF file>'
go


Vacation Reading – Part 1

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So this week I am on vacation. I sitting on my deck (actually kind of cold outside, I am glad I had the pool closed yesterday) having a cup of coffee and replying to some Emails and reading through the stack of magazines that have been sitting in my office with sticky notes attached that say “Looks interesting”. With the massive amount of magazines I receive this is how I identify the stories I want to read and set them aside for a reading binge like vacation time.

This morning I read Business Week (Sept 18th issue) mostly because I was interested in two articles the first was about offshoring legal services to the Philippines and India and the second was about the boardroom leaks at HP when I stumbled across an article entitled the Best Places to Launch a Career. The article gives some ideas on how to recruit and retain young talent, specifically the Millennial generation:

  • Don’t fudge the sales pitch
    • Makes sense, the world is a different place. Applicants spend significant time interacting in social networks like MySpace where they can ping a virtual network of peers for information. The information gleamed from social networks far outweighs a balance sheet or corporate propaganda.
  • Let them have a life
    • Work hard and play hard (one of my personal favorites), Millennials expect this balance.
  • No time clocks, please
    • Measure quality not quantity. Again this makes perfect sense.
  • Give them responsibility
    • This refers back to my post on “The (Code) Linux”. Hillarie management makes this a difficult prophecy. Developing a web of trust allows ownership at the furthest edge of corporate infrastructure.
  • Feedback, and more feedback
    • Managers should assume the role of mentor not task master.
  • Giving back matters
    • Encourage altruistic behavior

This was an excellent article. Always interesting to see what companies are doing to attract talent and spur achievement and personal enrichment within corporate culture.

This my first post in a multi-part series entitled “Vacation Reading”. Look for Part 2 sometime later today or tomorrow.

-RJB

DR Roadshow Podcast – Part 2

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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

My Sunday…

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I spent last night and this morning at parents in Pennsylvania with my wife and daughter, we had a very nice time, thanks for asking. We live two hours away and my parents don’t see as much of their granddaughter as they might like but as you can imagine the time just gets away from you on the weekends. Anyway this morning my daughter awoke around 6AM and my wife snapped up from bed and spent 6-9AM with her at which time she usually goes down for a nap, but due to the strange surroundings this was not the case today. I had to take here for a walk, as usual she passed out about 15 minutes into it. I returned to my parents garage parked the stiller, open a folding chair and broke out my laptop an proceeded to watch “Revolution OS” (for the umteenth time).

While watching it dawned on me that while many people have heard of GNU and the copyleft license, many of them may not know the origin of GNU so I though I would publish the link to Richard Stallman’s GNU manifesto.

Wow, that was a long winded message for a link to the GNU manifesto.

-RJB

Encouraging statistics…

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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.

stats

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

The 15% rule…

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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

Grid cont’d…

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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

SMP clusters and virtualization

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I was recently forwarded an article by a co-worker entitled “Virtualization doesn’t solve any problems”. First let me say that I think the title should maybe be revised to “Virtualization doesn’t solve all problems”, but did anyone ever claim that it did? To say virtualization doesn’t solve any problems is a bit arrogant and I think uninformed. The intelligent virtualization user / implementer is aware of the current limitations such as I/O bandwidth constraints. Virtualization is not a one size fits all but it is a size today that fits a much larger market segment than SMP cluster ting. While there is a segment of the market such as life sciences that is dealing with the need for massive parallel processing and incredible I/O requirements a much larger market segment is struggling with aging infrastructure, massive under utilization, server sprawl, growing environmental costs (hvac, energy, floor space, etch..), and the need to simplify recovery. While SMP clusters are near and dear to my heart (I worked in the life sciences field tweaking code to streamline molecular modeling computational operations, we used SGI at the time Linux HPC and products like Beowulf were just not there) they still have a way to go before they become mainstream, one of the great things about virtualization is the plug-and-play befits, the ability to move from the physical to the virtual and realize benefit immediately. Often in the SMP world applications need to be modified to take advantage of the new compute power. Virtualization players VMware, XenSource, VirtualIron and others are working on hypervisors that hold the promise of the simplicity and functionality that more complex SMP clustering applications provide.

On a final note there is another interesting quote “Virtualization addresses the same problems, such as server glut and management complexity, as clustering does — and it doesn’t necessarily do a better job of solving them” I don’t think that I agree with this statement. There are soft benefits that are just as important as the hard benefits such as server consolidation, environmental cost savings, etc… VMware emerged as the early player in the mainstream visualization market as an offshoot of a Stanford project called the Hive OS, today the Hive OS project is part of a larger project at Stanford called FLASH (FLexible Architecture for Shared memory). I recommend reading about the Hive OS to understand the befits such as isolation that virtualization provides.

Anyway I think I am done for now. I would enjoy hearing your thoughts and/or comments.

-RJB

The return of Time-Sharing

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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