ITBE - Optimizing Infrastructure

Search390.com: After the initial hype-fueled introduction comes the realization that no technology, not even virtualization, is the be-all, end-all for the data center. For many, that's a welcome change to a market where the promises and potential of server and storage virtualization have become too huge and too rosy to be taken seriously. But the hype that led to so much customer confusion is now giving way to the real education about how virtualization is implemented, a sure sign of a maturing technology.

silicon.com: Often discussed as it relates to consumer technologies like music and video, corporate DRM is more concerned with setting controls on documents and other files to ensure they are read, stored, printed, forwarded and used only in ways that conform to set policies or laws. A document creator could check a box labeled "internal purposes only" that would in turn flag the e-mail server to reject any attempts to distribute it outside the company. DRM also enables the ability to trace exactly who has seen which documents and when and, to the delight of compliance officers and regulators, create a record that can be used for auditing or legal purposes. Those kinds of capabilities have many organizations looking at DRM as a means to enforce compliance with data handling, retention and privacy regulations like HIPAA, Sarbanes-Oxley and various Securities and Exchange Commission rules. And vendors like Microsoft and Adobe are quickly filling their document management software with such capabilities.

ComputerWeekly.com: Or, lessons on how to learn to love IM, or at least embrace it in a way that permits a little better management and control of its usage and prevalence, especially since the average IM user will double the volume of messages this year from 2004, according to Ovum and the European E-Mail Association. First, companies need to establish policies and coalesce around a standard program, rather than letting everyone run whatever they can download for free. Second, IM needs some sort of security oversight that monitors and stores all IM content. User education is also key, and acceptable/appropriate use needs to be clearly specified. Experts also caution against taking e-mail policies and applying them to IM — IM's immediacy and informality raise the potential risk for any organization where it's used vis-à-vis the content that gets exchanged. But done right, these same experts say, IM can be a useful and productive addition to the mix of collaborative technologies that most companies use.

eWEEK: Everything old is, well, still old, according to market consultancy AssetMetrix, whose latest findings show that Windows 2000 remains the dominant desktop operating system in the corporate realm, even though installations have declined to 48 percent in Q1 2005, down from 52 percent in Q4 2003. Its days of dominance are numbered, however, as companies upgrade to Windows XP and as the introduction of Longhorn, the next Windows version, looms sometime in late 2006. AssetMetrix said that XP has already become the most popular OS for companies with fewer than 250 PCs; XP and 2000 are in a dead heat in mid-sized companies. XP still lags in large companies, which are forced to do more compatibility testing for management and security purposes. Migrating to XP may take on more urgency as Microsoft plans to cut back on Windows 2000 support in July.

Government Technology: And Gartner ought to know. Here the consultancy reverses course and actually deflates a number of market dynamics it thinks might be warping IT's thinking, planning and spending. You can read in greater detail exactly why such threats are overblown, but in a nutshell, Gartner labels as misconceptions the insecurity of VoIP and the growing problem of viruses on cell phones or PDAs. It also points to the non-issue of the growth of so-called "Warhol Worms" that allegedly can infect the entire Internet in 15 minutes. While it's easy to tease the consultancy about hype, the paranoia level can get a little extreme sometimes for IT managers (or more likely, the executives who may manage them). So a little dose of reality is a welcome check to a technology sector beset by alarmist tendencies.

Enterprise Networking Planet: Deploying IPSec or Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) with a remote access server isn't your only option for VPN with IP. Multi-protocol label switching (MPLS) has matured enough in carrier networks that many corporate and government organizations are embracing it as a way to create virtual networks, or virtual LANs (VLANs), or subnets, or whatever your preferred nomenclature may be. Unlike the more common VPNs, MPLS-based subnets are more flexible and can be set up and turned down much more quickly than rigid, point-to-point VPNs. MPLS is also a lot smarter than a basic IP packet, since its eponymous label permits the payload to be routed around failures or congestion, all while limiting the delay or jitter that's fatal to real-time applications like VoIP. The quality of service mechanisms that can be applied to MPLS is also a lot more mature than best-effort IP networking, meaning service levels are sufficiently improved for carriers (and IT departments) to offer guarantees about throughput, uptime and recovery.

The Inquirer: Don't stop with GigE, according to this interestingly named columnist (the Cheap B*stard), who also says there are great deals to be had on DVD burners for less than $50. The units come from Samsung, which boasts +-R recordable media at 16x, rewritable DVD+-R media at 4x and dual-layer DVD+R at 5x, all certainly speedy (and flexible) enough for the money. He also likes the price-performance aspects of Gigabit Ethernet, especially the cabling, almost all of which permits gigabit over copper these days. Switches can be had for as little as $150 for a workgroup unit and PCI cards to enable computers for GigE are available for $35 or less. A few years ago, the same technology would have set you back four and five figures.

Question: You did a recent survey that showed broad user concern about the proficiency of their backup and the time it would take them to restore operations to normalcy. While every organization's requirements are different, what's a good average threshold to shoot for in terms of restore times?
Therrien: It depends on what is being restored. With single file restores, our customers tell us it takes from 30 minutes to an hour of an administrator's time to satisfy each restore request. As the industry evolves to Web-based restore screens and disk-based backup products, single file restores now take seconds and can be performed by anyone, not just backup administration gurus. With hundreds of random file requests, restores from disk-based backup environments will be hundreds of times faster than traditional tape-based restores.
For large databases and e-mail stores, these restores would involve the transfer of large sequential files from the restore medium. In this case, once you get to the file on a tape (minutes, days if offsite), both tape and disk transfer rates are close enough that the restore data transfer times should be about the same.

Question: What companies can afford in the backup and disaster recovery arena plays a part in their method(s) of choice. How do you steer customers who can't afford the latest disk-to-disk-to-tape (D2D2T) policy management software or continuous data replication to some distant, offsite storage facility?
Therrien: D2D2T's only real benefit is to reduce the backup window and possibly increase a small percentage of restores that are still buffered on disk. It adds cost and complexity and retains all of the headaches of full backups to tape every weekend. Continuous data protection (CDP) is a specialized application where the restore point objective (RPO) and restore time objective (RTO) are measured in seconds. Most applications don't require this level of recovery objective.
D2D solutions provide sophisticated capacity optimization techniques to eliminate the burden of managing tapes. Some capacity optimization solutions still require weekly full backups to be run, which is problematic. Others employ smart incremental-only backups and delta compression techniques to reduce backup capacity consumption on disk by as much as 20,000-to-one. With this kind of efficiency, D2D backup solutions can be extremely affordable and provide reasonable RTO and RPO in under an hour.

Question:Your surveyed users also cite concerns about backup and recovery effectiveness. What does a backup solution need to be considered truly effective?
Therrien: There are many dimensions to effectiveness:
     Reliability: Tape has historically not been very reliable during restore processes. The media is sensitive to environmental changes. When it gets shipped away in trucks, shock, humidity and thermal limits are often exceeded.
     Cost-effectiveness: Some 87 percent of the planet still does weekly full backups. We need to move to continual incremental-only backups, with continual virtual full creation; this makes both backup and restore operations efficient.
     Security: Tapes are getting lost and stolen. We need to replace these antiquated mechanisms of protecting data with secure encryption of data across networks to non-removable media like magnetic disk drives.
     Speed: Restore speed needs to be as fast as possible. In addition, the time to recover from an entire site disaster has traditionally taken days, even weeks to complete. There are cost-effective solutions that can bring data from a lost site back within an hour.

Network World: Level 5 Networks is positioning its EtherFabric network card and software as an InfiniBand alternative that it says will speed communication between servers and from servers to peripherals like Ethernet switches or storage appliances. Unlike InfiniBand, EtherFabric is less of a drain on host server CPUs and could enable customers to reduce the number of servers they use by up to 50 percent. Analysts point out that EtherFabric will have to compete against 10 Gigabit Ethernet, and that Cisco is most anxious to get as much of the EtherFabric-like intelligence into Cisco switches as possible. Whether big server vendors like HP, Sun and IBM decide to play ball with EtherFabric is the interesting variable in the equation. Level 5 said volume pricing for EtherFabric is $295 for a two-port, 1-gigabit card and software.

InfoWorld: There's a Skype ecosystem forming, states one analyst succinctly, to describe the third-party vendors that are adding functionality to the popular provider of VoIP services. Santa Cruz Networks, for instance, has new software that lets Skype users do videoconferencing and collaboration with as many as 200 other users. And Norwegian vendor IPDrum is selling a cable that connects a cell phone to a Skype-equipped PC for mobile VoIP. This is all made possible by an API that Skype published to encourage exactly these kinds of add-ons. We've come a long way since the Bell System sued inventor Thomas Carter for attaching a crude radio device to the landline phone network in the late '60s.

TechNewsWorld: Beleaguered Hewlett-Packard finds itself neck-and-neck with IBM for leadership of the server market, which only partly explains why HP decided to end its reliance on RISC-based processors and embrace Itanium, a move that will boost processing speed by 16 percent. The move may be intended to help HP in the UNIX server market, a place where the Windows operating system has been making inroads of its own of late. But analysts wondered why HP would undertake such a move when its current line is doing so well. Unfortunately, it can't cut prices a whole lot, since its platforms already sell for less than IBM's servers in the mid-range.

ExtremeTech: Here's a well-researched and documented taste test of three popular Serial ATA drives, which are quickly becoming the standard for high-speed internal and external disk drives. The testers put a trio of SATA drives through their paces, including units from Western Digital (Caviar RE 250GB), Samsung (HD160JJ) and Hitachi (Deskstar 7K500). In addition to making a strong case for transitioning to 3-gigabit-per-second SATA-II, the article looks at every single port and performance claim and measures them accordingly. While the Samsung unit is clearly the also-ran, the testers also make it clear that comparing the drives from Western Digital and Hitachi is not strictly apples-to-apples, due to differences in capacity, prices and cache density. That said, the Hitachi drive wins the highest marks for its performance and capacity, even though it's the most expensive of the trio at $420.

IT Manager's Journal: Very interested, but taking a wait-and-see attitude — that's probably the best description of the way the major electronics retailers are approaching the Linux PC market. One reason to be cheered: Open source computer vendor Linspire is moving 500 to 1,000 units around the world each day, including some at mega-retailer Wal-Mart. But the desktop PC market will continue its specialization and stratification, according to another retailer. Graphics users will go with Mac, accountants look to Windows, and those in need of a second or third computer may try Linux. An IDC analyst said that the average Wal-Mart customer is a terrible demographic match for a mainstream alternative like Linux. He may be right; such retailers aren't clearing off shelf space for Linux-based units and advertise them sparingly.

Cheap Hosting Directory: Batten down the hatches for some Category 5 marketing opportunism from disaster recovery vendors, in the wake of predictions of another record year for hurricanes. While some may find that view cynical, others with data centers or offices in Florida are still smarting from last year's hurricane-related damage. This is a decent and reasonably useful checklist of tips — things like keeping your customers informed of your status and threat potential and rehearsing your backup scenario. Organizations are also encouraged to make sure their plan covers wireless, wireline and Internet infrastructure, as well as ensuring that someone well outside the potential damage area is tracking and communicating for the company.