A trip to Morton's was called for to have a nice pheed in preparation phor the New Year. But folks, it was not our visit that was memorable, rather it was a table of fellow diners that caused all-round comment.
As you know, Morton's isn't the very best steakhouse chain but it's up there. It's sure as hell a long way above an Outback Steakhouse, let's just say that.
Bringing your own refreshments into Mr Morton's beef and lobster emporium isn't frowned upon but you'd expect that if someone is coming in to spend a minimum of $15 each on an appetizer and a further $40 each on a steak before the salads, vegetables and associated trimmings kick in you'd expect at least half-decent bottles of wine to be brought along.
Imagine then, the comments that came forth when a party came in with their very own bottle of:
1) Extra Dry Andre at $5 per bottle (http://www1.shopping.com/xDN-wine-andre_champagne)
2) Yellow Tail at @ $11 a throw (http://www.google.com/products?q=yellow+tail+wine&rls=com.microsoft:en-us:IE-SearchBox&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&sourceid=ie7&rlz=1I7SUNA_en&um=1&sa=X&oi=product_result_group&resnum=4&ct=title)
Yes indeed folks, the waiter picked up the bottle from the cooler in the corner of the room and uttered "Oh for gods sake".
If I'd known what the guy pulled out I'd have bought the people a bottle of something and sent the bill to Jimmy Andersson purely so that it didn't offend the waiters' sensibilities.
Only in America people.
December 31, 2008
VDI - Desktop Virtualization & Windows
It's now patently obvious to even the most shortsighted IT professional that virtualization into thin/thinest/gone clients is back on the agenda. The journey started out a thousand years ago as mainframes and green screens. It progressed, despite the best efforts of the Microsoft sabotage machine, through Citrix Metaframe and into Presentation Manager. It kind of died a death in the early 'nought-ies' and now, thanks to VMware & Citrix (Xen), coupled with a desire for Green IT has stormed back onto centre stage.
VMware View (formerly VDI but that's now a generic term rather than a product) will present your users with independently operating guest images, just the same as your virtualized servers. So far so good. Stateful and Stateless guests will look after the whinging users who want control over their desktops as opposed to those users who are just happy to do the job for which they are paid and aren't terribly bothered about their grandmas' cat on their desktop.
It will come as no surprise to you that in order to do all this and gain outstanding space efficiencies you'll need a NetApp storage platform (quell surprise there folks, eh!) because it's only by going down that route can we leverage the FlexCloning and De-Duplication (previous posts) that deliver those efficiencies. There's a slight downside in that VMware are coming out with similar space-saving technologies that will impact on the NetApp value proposition a little. It's still true however that Microsoft are several years away from a similar solution* and the same can be said of the Xen offering. To get a feeling for the NetApp provisioning solution you can catch a Youtube presentation on the company 'channel'
But, here's the rub. What do you deliver to the clients? Windows XP, Vista, Ubuntu (etc), MacOS, what? The more processing and memory requirements a Windows desktop requires, the less the business benefit of delivering that Windows desktop from a virtual platform.
At the moment anyone delivering Vista has to cope with a disgracefully bloated, resource hungry monster. The fatter the desktop the fewer guests you can run per host. Sure, the FlexClone and De-dupe will eliminate the space issues but can do nothing about the processor and memory impact.
It's not an unfair statement to say that Microsoft are potentially killing a hugely valuable revenue stream if they pursue the model that gave life to the beast that is Vista. It makes a helluva lot of sense for organizations to come up with a Linux guest, tied down really well and able to deliver exactly what a user needs without making them arse about with settings and configurations that, to date, Microsoft do so much better. A large number of locked down Ubuntu guests, FlexCloned out is far more manageable than the same number of physical PCs running the same OS.
Think of it; a VMware hypervisor, Linux desktops, open source office solution saving PDFs or Office format documents makes organizations address whether they need Exchange and SQL. Perhaps they do, perhaps they don't, but if you take the desktop away from Microsoft it's more likely that you'll have more time to review the back-end.
Bottom line? Unless Windows 7 is an incredibly lean, mean phightin' machine, Microsoft are going to lose desktop share at an ever increasing rate rather than the slow drip they are suffering to the Mac.
* Remember that Hyper-V is very much a version 1 hypervisor product and Microsoft are focussing on getting the platform right rather than developing desktop saving offerings. I'd love to know the roadmap that shows in what year Microsoft expect to be where VMware are today, when Microsoft expect to be on a par with the VMware offerings (VMware are not going to stand still) and finally when Microsoft expect to have something that VMware or Xen cannot, or have not, delivered.
VMware View (formerly VDI but that's now a generic term rather than a product) will present your users with independently operating guest images, just the same as your virtualized servers. So far so good. Stateful and Stateless guests will look after the whinging users who want control over their desktops as opposed to those users who are just happy to do the job for which they are paid and aren't terribly bothered about their grandmas' cat on their desktop.
It will come as no surprise to you that in order to do all this and gain outstanding space efficiencies you'll need a NetApp storage platform (quell surprise there folks, eh!) because it's only by going down that route can we leverage the FlexCloning and De-Duplication (previous posts) that deliver those efficiencies. There's a slight downside in that VMware are coming out with similar space-saving technologies that will impact on the NetApp value proposition a little. It's still true however that Microsoft are several years away from a similar solution* and the same can be said of the Xen offering. To get a feeling for the NetApp provisioning solution you can catch a Youtube presentation on the company 'channel'
But, here's the rub. What do you deliver to the clients? Windows XP, Vista, Ubuntu (etc), MacOS, what? The more processing and memory requirements a Windows desktop requires, the less the business benefit of delivering that Windows desktop from a virtual platform.
At the moment anyone delivering Vista has to cope with a disgracefully bloated, resource hungry monster. The fatter the desktop the fewer guests you can run per host. Sure, the FlexClone and De-dupe will eliminate the space issues but can do nothing about the processor and memory impact.
It's not an unfair statement to say that Microsoft are potentially killing a hugely valuable revenue stream if they pursue the model that gave life to the beast that is Vista. It makes a helluva lot of sense for organizations to come up with a Linux guest, tied down really well and able to deliver exactly what a user needs without making them arse about with settings and configurations that, to date, Microsoft do so much better. A large number of locked down Ubuntu guests, FlexCloned out is far more manageable than the same number of physical PCs running the same OS.
Think of it; a VMware hypervisor, Linux desktops, open source office solution saving PDFs or Office format documents makes organizations address whether they need Exchange and SQL. Perhaps they do, perhaps they don't, but if you take the desktop away from Microsoft it's more likely that you'll have more time to review the back-end.
Bottom line? Unless Windows 7 is an incredibly lean, mean phightin' machine, Microsoft are going to lose desktop share at an ever increasing rate rather than the slow drip they are suffering to the Mac.
* Remember that Hyper-V is very much a version 1 hypervisor product and Microsoft are focussing on getting the platform right rather than developing desktop saving offerings. I'd love to know the roadmap that shows in what year Microsoft expect to be where VMware are today, when Microsoft expect to be on a par with the VMware offerings (VMware are not going to stand still) and finally when Microsoft expect to have something that VMware or Xen cannot, or have not, delivered.
December 30, 2008
SharePoint Granular Restores
The latest piece from Jason Buffington on Data Protection Manager got me thinking about SharePoint and NetApp. Obviously the NetApp / Exchange story is very well documented and the reason that in 999 out of 998 situations customers with a solid grasp of TCO choose networked over direct attached storage but the SharePoint story isn't quite so well publicised outside of those customers who are embarking on SharePoint projects. At the moment NetApp are seeing mid-hundred percent growth in our SnapManager for SharePoint business which, as the late Blaster Bates said, is knocking on in anybody's language.
So, dear reader, what's it all about?
Want to do a backup?
Easy. SnapManager for SharePoint (SMMOSS) and SnapManager for SQL (SMSQL) are well integrated, unique in the market today I think. SMMOSS calls SMSQL to carry out a SnapShot backup and the SMMOSS component makes sure that the index it creates are consistent with the SQL data. Just because the two components are on different systems is no barrier to having accurate and time-consistent backups. And that index? Yeah, you put it on a NetApp LUN and SnapMirror that off to your DR site so even in a DR you can have historic, item level recovery of your data, once you've put the whole DR platform up.
Want to do a site restore?
That's where the real value-add kicks in and in a big way.
Restore an item, folder, whatever?
Yes. SMMOSS will initiate the FlexCloning of a SQL database, mount it, get the item you need back, drop it into wherever you want it - it doesn't have to be the same place or even the same site - and then clean up after itself by dropping the FlexClone.
Restore a complete site?
Betcha.
Restore the whole shebang over the top? Yup, SMMOSS and SMSQL work in tandem to roll you back to where you were at a given point in time (the point in time you specified and the point in time you can achieve based on your snapshot frequencies)
Restore to somewhere else? Yes indeed. We do need you to have a SharePoint site installed in the 'somewhere' you're recovering to but beyond that we'll FlexClone you the database and retrieve the site information then present it up to the site you specified. If you're just doing this for development effort (the recovery 'somewhere else' can be a different server of course) you won't want to do anything else. However, if you've done the restore for some other purpose you might want to have a permanent copy. Needless to say you can just do a FlexClone split and the previous deltas-only volume will be populated with an actual copy of the data from the point in time the snapshot on which the FlexClone was based, combined with the changes made by any work done on the FlexCloned copy.
Sounds complex but a customer recently was moved to a purchase order based merely on the speed with which and the small number of clicks it took (all GUI, no knowledge required of either NetApp filers or PowerShell - so simple, even a developer can do it) to bring an item, a folder, a collection and a site back to life both over the top and somewhere else.
AvePoint?
Yeah, it's based around that but there's a massive value-add to SMMOSS and that's the SQL & SnapShot integration. Any solution can use the most excellent AvePoint but only NetApp can tie this in with highly space-efficient snaps of the SQL data.
Frankly you SharePoint boys and girls out there should be drooling at what SMMOSS and SMSQL can do to reduce your recovery infrastructure and increase your recoverability granularity.
Again, Shiny.
So, dear reader, what's it all about?
Want to do a backup?
Easy. SnapManager for SharePoint (SMMOSS) and SnapManager for SQL (SMSQL) are well integrated, unique in the market today I think. SMMOSS calls SMSQL to carry out a SnapShot backup and the SMMOSS component makes sure that the index it creates are consistent with the SQL data. Just because the two components are on different systems is no barrier to having accurate and time-consistent backups. And that index? Yeah, you put it on a NetApp LUN and SnapMirror that off to your DR site so even in a DR you can have historic, item level recovery of your data, once you've put the whole DR platform up.
Want to do a site restore?
That's where the real value-add kicks in and in a big way.
Restore an item, folder, whatever?
Yes. SMMOSS will initiate the FlexCloning of a SQL database, mount it, get the item you need back, drop it into wherever you want it - it doesn't have to be the same place or even the same site - and then clean up after itself by dropping the FlexClone.
Restore a complete site?
Betcha.
Restore the whole shebang over the top? Yup, SMMOSS and SMSQL work in tandem to roll you back to where you were at a given point in time (the point in time you specified and the point in time you can achieve based on your snapshot frequencies)
Restore to somewhere else? Yes indeed. We do need you to have a SharePoint site installed in the 'somewhere' you're recovering to but beyond that we'll FlexClone you the database and retrieve the site information then present it up to the site you specified. If you're just doing this for development effort (the recovery 'somewhere else' can be a different server of course) you won't want to do anything else. However, if you've done the restore for some other purpose you might want to have a permanent copy. Needless to say you can just do a FlexClone split and the previous deltas-only volume will be populated with an actual copy of the data from the point in time the snapshot on which the FlexClone was based, combined with the changes made by any work done on the FlexCloned copy.
Sounds complex but a customer recently was moved to a purchase order based merely on the speed with which and the small number of clicks it took (all GUI, no knowledge required of either NetApp filers or PowerShell - so simple, even a developer can do it) to bring an item, a folder, a collection and a site back to life both over the top and somewhere else.
AvePoint?
Yeah, it's based around that but there's a massive value-add to SMMOSS and that's the SQL & SnapShot integration. Any solution can use the most excellent AvePoint but only NetApp can tie this in with highly space-efficient snaps of the SQL data.
Frankly you SharePoint boys and girls out there should be drooling at what SMMOSS and SMSQL can do to reduce your recovery infrastructure and increase your recoverability granularity.
Again, Shiny.
December 02, 2008
SnapManager for Exchange - New Best Practice Guide
SnapManager 5 for Exchange has been out for a while now but was lacking a BPG. Whilst the basic functionality is the same so the previous guide is still useful but there is a new module included, at no extra cost.
What rocks? From the document itself:
"SME 5.0 features a new BC module that enables Exchange administrators to automate the process of failing over to a secondary Exchange Server in the event the source Exchange Server fails. Once a BC plan is defined and verified, an Exchange administrator can simply click the Execute link, and the BC module will fail over the entire Exchange environment and restore service on the secondary Exchange Server."
NetApp can now eliminate any business case for Exchange 2007 Standby Continuous Replication which replicates transaction logs at a file level from source to target. SnapMirror replicates the blocks and when coupled with FlexClone allows you to do all the testing you want of your DR implementation. It's the only reliable way to absolutley know for sure that a DR, when invoked, is documented properly and actually works.
I commend the solution to the House:
http://www.netapp.com/us/library/technical-reports/tr-3730.html
What rocks? From the document itself:
"SME 5.0 features a new BC module that enables Exchange administrators to automate the process of failing over to a secondary Exchange Server in the event the source Exchange Server fails. Once a BC plan is defined and verified, an Exchange administrator can simply click the Execute link, and the BC module will fail over the entire Exchange environment and restore service on the secondary Exchange Server."
NetApp can now eliminate any business case for Exchange 2007 Standby Continuous Replication which replicates transaction logs at a file level from source to target. SnapMirror replicates the blocks and when coupled with FlexClone allows you to do all the testing you want of your DR implementation. It's the only reliable way to absolutley know for sure that a DR, when invoked, is documented properly and actually works.
I commend the solution to the House:
http://www.netapp.com/us/library/technical-reports/tr-3730.html
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