This week I am sitting the Stratus everRun Enterprise Technical Certification course, held at Stratus Technologies, headquartered in Maynard, MA. Much to my delight this is an accelerated course where they cram five days of training into three! I have worked with this and similar technologies originally designed and offered by Marathon Technologies since the nineties, so it’s like old home week coming here. Last year Stratus purchased Marathon and ultimately this is good for the evolution of the everRun product line. This week’s course is designed to train experienced technicians on the newly redesigned everRun Enterprise and I can say that I am very impressed with the new system. Originally built on Citrix XenServer the new product is built on Centos Linux 6.5 and uses the KVM hypervisor. I am a big fan of XenServer but working with this new version of everRun I see the wisdom the Stratus has leveraged in designing this impressive product. The everRun product line is designed to provide a highly fault tolerant server platform to run workloads that require up to five nines of “up time” (less than six minutes of downtime per year). This product is highly regarded as one of the best solutions in the industry for protecting critical applications and data. If you operate computer systems that cannot afford to be down you owe it to yourself to look at this system. Class wraps up tomorrow and I’ll be dashing to the airport to head home to sunny Seattle!
Category Archives: Education
Scott’s Book Arrived!
We are pleased to announce that Scott’s books have arrived! ‘The Business Owner’s Essential Guide to I.T.’ is 217 pages packed full of pertinent information.
For those of you who pre-purchased your books, Thank You! Your books have already been signed and shipped, you should receive them shortly and we hope you enjoy them as much as Scott enjoyed writing for you.
If you haven’t purchased your copy, click here, purchase a signed copy from us and all proceeds will be donated to the WA chapter of Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD).
My first trip to a DataCenter
Friday, the technology leadership of VirtualQube (and me) descended upon Austin, Texas to meet with our datacenter vendor. It was a meeting long overdue as we had been doing business together for almost four years, but this was the first face-to-face meeting for the entire team.
Our vendor did their homework and took us out to dinner to Bob’s Steakhouse on Lavaca in downtown Austin the night before. It was a GREAT meal, and we had a blast checking out a number of watering holes in the area. According to our hosts, we apparently stopped the festivities just before entering the “seedy” part of the city. I feel like that was the perfect amount of fun to have, especially since we had a 4 hour meeting starting at 9am the next day.
The first thing we started with was a tour of the facility. Our vendor is in a CyrusOne Type Four Level II datacenter. For the uninitiated, this means it’s the best of the best. Fully redundant everything, generally with another safety valve or failover in addition. And the majority of these failovers were tested MONTHLY. Whoa, that’s impressive. We even saw the four huge generators outside that were gas powered and would support the entire building in case of a loss of electricity. Looking inside them (which we weren’t supposed to be allowed to do) was awe inspiring. Basically a V-12 design, with a filter on each cylinder due to its size. I didn’t get the specs, and I would have gotten a photo but security showed up right as I had grabbed for my phone. Just believe me that this building had thought of everything that could go wrong.
I broke the rules and took a picture of all the blinking lights. Kinda looks like my home theater, only more expensive (which is tough to do!).
After the tour we talked about ways to work together for the coming years and both teams came away with a list of action items to make our collective futures brighter. And I’m off to get started on one of those projects now!
Why Not Amazon Web Services?
Thinking about moving to Amazon Web Services? Address these 4 Concerns FIRST
We’ve been hearing a lot of debate recently about using Amazon Web Services for all or part of a cloud infrastructure. Many people sing their praises whole-heartedly, and we here at VirtualQube have even explored their offerings to see if there was an opportunity to bend our own cost curve. But there really is a mixed bag of benefits and features. How do you know if the move is right for you? We’ve narrowed it down to 4 concerns you should address in light of your own circumstances before making the move.
1. Business impact
First of all, let’s analyze the business model for AWS. Amazon rents out virtual machines for a reasonable price per desktop. But in order to get their best price, you have to pony up 36 months of service fees in advance to rent the space. If you’re an enterprise with three years of IT budget available, this is a great deal. If not, take a closer look.
The pricing from AWS also assumes that virtual machines will be spinning-down 40% of the day. If your workforce mostly logs in within an 8:30am – 6:00pm time frame, you will greatly benefit from this pricing. If your employees have much more flexibility in their schedules (due to travel, seasonal workload spikes, or shifting hours for coverage), then you may need to look at another provider.
AWS also allows for 1GB of data to flow into their cloud for free, and only charges for the outflow of data. This is great for storage if you only use it sparingly, or in the case of a disaster, but can add-up quickly if you need to access your data frequently. While this doesn’t seem to be a concern now, as businesses exchange more and larger files, the cost of this pricing model could quickly outweigh the benefits.
2. Operations impact
The operational capabilities of Amazon truly are world-class. However, to achieve scale and offer its best price/experience the lowest cost of operations, AWS has one set way of operating and its customers are required to interact with AWS in this one way alone. So AWS may not offer the flexibility that would make it easy for you to add services to your existing operations.
If your firm fits AWS’s standard use case, it could lead to an easy transition, but if you have unique requirements, the friction caused with your organization could quickly lead to discord, operational changes, and many other business costs while trying to fit the mold AWS promotes.
3. Technology impact
The technology benefit of AWS is really second-to-none. Their infrastructure has the best hardware and capabilities offered by any of the cloud vendors. The efficiencies of scale mean you can get access to best-of-breed hardware faster than you would otherwise. The only caveat is this could give you a false sense of security.
How we approach business is to think of all the things that CAN go wrong, because many times they eventually do. We coach our customers to prepare for the times when technology will fail. And fail it will. We have consistently seen multi-million dollar technology fail unpredictably, even in hundred million dollar installations. These cases are NOT supposed to happen, and may not happen frequently, but they will happen. And if the failure impacts your business, it doesn’t matter how expensive the underlying technology is. And when the technology does fail, will you be able to get a senior engineer on the phone to immediately address your concerns?
4. Flexibility impact
The ability for AWS to match your business needs during hyper-growth and/or significant volatility could make the business case alone. With AWS’s web interface, your internal technology leader can order additional computing capabilities and they will be ready as soon as you hit “Enter.” The days of placing hardware into a room, hooking up cables, creating and testing images are truly over for all cloud users, and AWS does shorten the timeline for creating these technologies from minutes to seconds. Companies with significant growth who are doubling or tripling in size within a year many years in a row are a perfect match for AWS. No question.
Your final decision…
To sum it all up: AWS works well for you if:
- You have a scale of operations and support for tens of thousands of users
- There is three years of IT spend on the balance sheet and it can be invested today
- You are a typical player in your industry, which fits AWS’s definition of your industry
- Your IT needs to meet business demands that fluctuate exponentially, immediately, and unpredictably
- You take advantage of some advanced features for business continuity
For an more in-depth discussion on this topic, check out this: LINK. For an in-depth cost analysis, check out this: LINK. Please note, you will have to be a Citrix Service Partner to access the cost analysis.
Ingram Micro Cloud Summit Recap
Last night was the finale of the Ingram Micro Cloud Summit. This was a conference I hope to come back to next year. The sessions were great, the location was amazing, and the people/events were top notch. The three days concluded with an Awards Ceremony, which was really just a chance for everyone to get all gussied up and strut their stuff. Immediately afterwards, everyone strolled over to the Piano Bar across the street and got the chance to show off why we are in technology.
That’s the play-by-play of the event, but there was something else consistent here: industry peers who were looking to work together, to create packaged deals and offerings together, basically everyone seemed to be looking for opportunity not to sell, but to create solutions for their customers on many more fronts than their current offerings could satisfy. There were also loads of industry experts willing to share their experiences and expertise to every attendee. In fact, I checked out a session led by Erick Simpson of MSPU covered here: http://searchitchannel.techtarget.com/news/2240217838/Ingram-Micro-Cloud-Summit-2014-MSP-best-practices Erick was willing to share the knowledge he and his company have gained over the past two decades, knowing that the customer base for all who attend would benefit. It was this eagerness to make everything better for all MSP customers that resonated with me.
It reminded me of my days in Management Consulting. One of our senior leaders trained a group of up-and-comers in the Boston office. His 3 part framework was (summarily): “First, you define how much money there is in front of the customer. Then you describe what is in the way of the customer getting to that money. Finally, you prescribe a set of actions that would need to take place for the customer to get that money. Only if you have provided value to the customer and served his interest with integrity, you have earned to right to answer his question of ‘How can your firm help us get there?’ “
A very similar philosophy was described to the audience during a session led by Rafael Sanguily. Raf is the CEO of Tensai Consulting, a leader in the IT Services Marketing and Advertising space. Raf’s session was the last one in the event guide, and I only attended it because an attendee mentioned he was a good presenter. By the third day of a conference, with 4-5 sessions per day, your mind gets pretty numb. But I was sitting up straight and fully engaged in the teachings, having them hit memory chords from my previous training. Rafael’s session talked about the difference in activities between being a sales person and a sales professional. Raf preached knowing your customer’s industry, their strategy, their roadmap, their performance metrics they focus on, their backgrounds and where they had struggled. Basically, Raf was saying “If you don’t know what it’s like to BE your customer, they won’t BE your customer.” At least, that’s how I would phrase it.
Looking back, I can see why people at this conference were so engaging, and why they mentioned Raf’s sessions with such enthusiasm: They had learned to be better servants to their clients, thus increasing their business. And this wasn’t a conference to find new sales, it was really a conference to find ways to better serve their clients’ needs when they returned home. Maybe that’s the way we should look at ALL conferences. It’s the way I will from now on.
