On Tuesday it snowed in Austin, TX. And when large, puffy white things fall from the sky, all of us at GCS, like many Austinites, fall into a catatonic state. "Look at the pretty snow." That lasts about 5 minutes until we realize we have to drive home with other Austinites equally mesmerized but traveling 70 miles per hour. After weighing our options we elected to close the office early. This was an easy decision because IT DID NOT AFFECT OUR OUTPUT! The Great Snow Day of 2010 was just another Real World Emergency Test of our remote access systems.

At GCS the phone rings about 300 times per day. It is the primary communication tool between GCS and our clients. Each phone call represents a client service request and revenue to be earned. This is very similar to most businesses in the world. How were we able to handle 300 calls per day without an open office? The Telecommuter mode on the Avaya IP Office.

Avaya Telecommuter mode is an add-on to the Phone Manager desktop application for the IP office. The standard Phone Manager product allows you to control your phone from your desktop (answer, hang-up, transfer, etc), but requires you to be near your phone for the actual call. With Telecommuter mode, you can tell the system you are out of the office and give it a phone number where you can be reached. This number can be a cell phone, home phone or any other phone number. When a call comes in to your office phone, the IP Office routes that call your remote phone. If you don't answer it pulls the call back and sends it to your business voicemail. If you do answer, you have the full range of Phone Manager features (transfer, conference, hold, etc) at your disposal to manage the call. 

You can even make outbound calls through the system without showing the caller ID of your home or cell phone! Simply type the number you want to call and click "Connect." The IP Office first calls your remote phone and waits for you to pick up. When you pick up the phone, it then dials out to the number you dialed. You have all the same features on an outbound call that you have on incoming calls.

Our staff left very early on Tuesday. Upon reaching their homes, they were able to receive both hunt group calls (like our incoming Help Desk, Sales, and Accounting groups) and direct calls to their extensions or DIDs. Most GCS staff members relied on their cell phones as the remote line. All of this took less than an hour, mostly drive time, with no decrease in the performance of our major business functions.

Telecommuter performed exceptionally well for us.  Our office was completely dark from 12:00pm through 6:00pm, yet we continued to provide a high level of service to our clients.

With recently acquired Apple certification in hand, JP McInnis is quickly expanding his Apple knowledge. First up, telephony integration! Mac users have suffered for years due to a lack of support for the Mac OS from most major telephone system manufacturers. On his Snow Leopard 10.6.2, JP mixed up some VMware Fusion 3.0.2 and a VM running XP Pro SP3. A short install of Avaya's Phone Manager later and enabling "Unity Mode" in Fusion, and voilà:

All typical functionality was present. We did not test TAPI on this system yet, but it's on the list!

The Microsoft US VAR Champions Club program is designed to recognize partners for their exceptional performance in delivering Microsoft technology to the marketplace. Var Champions have exemplified an outstanding level of commitment and were chosen out of an extensive field of partners for their leadership and impact in driving Microsoft technology in the U.S.

Eric Martorano, Director of Channel Strategy at Microsoft elaborates, “The Microsoft® US VAR Champions Club program recognizes our partners for their exceptional performance, tremendous contributions and outstanding achievements in the past year and highlights their commitment of delivering solutions and applications to customers.”

GCS is a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner.

The HP Proliant G7s are due out soon but we've heard nothing about it. Our own Nostradamus, Marquis Calmes, has a bold (and completely speculative) prediction. The G7s will include integrated battery backup, ala Google's custom built systems. Why? Who needs reasons when making BOLD PREDICTIONS! Now our first introduction to the G7s is next week and will be covered by our NDA. Therefore this is the last you'll hear from us on this topic for a little while.

Also, our favorite SAN, the HP Lefthand, is losing its cool moniker. Now known as the HP Storageworks P4000 G2 (blah!) it includes a number of new features. Improved capacity efficiency, application integrated snapshots and a Unified NAS Gateway sound pretty cool. I'll break these down after hands-on training next week.

Moving large amounts of data offsite is a difficult thing to do. It is difficult to beat tape drives and an automobile for rapid data replication. Obviously this method has serious limitations. With the rise of Shared Storage, most replication today occurs at the Storage layer. Though application layer replication offers major advantages, it is usually pursued in addition to storage replication.

What is storage replication? Most SANs and many NAS devices offers licensed replication as a feature. GCS' two favorite devices, the HP Lefthand and Dell Equallogic, include these licenses at no cost. By placing a SAN in-office and one at a remote data center, then connecting the sites with sufficient bandwidth, the SANs will replicate data between the two at the block level. This is an efficient method. Unfortunately, the SANs cannot differentiate between legitimate data changes (ie, a saved Word doc) and temporary data changes such as SQL log files. Everything is pushed across the connection. This tends to require large amounts of bandwidth.

The HP Lefthand offers both asynchronous and synchronous replication options. With asynch replication changed data is pushed at scheduled intervals. With synchronous replication the devices attempt near real-time replication. The HP Lefthand only offers synchronous when there is less than 20ms of latency between the sites. The HP Lefthand also offers bandwidth management on the SAN to help restrict the amount of bandwidth consumed on your site-to-site connection.

A readily apparent benefit of SAN replication is virtual machine replication. If my VMs are stored on my SAN, they are replicated to my remote sites. This dramatically reduces recovery time in a variety of outages.

GCS also recommends Microsoft DFS-R for replication of file stores. Simple, reliable and efficient, this technology allows Windows NAS devices to replicate between sites and provide failover in the event of an outage.

I am pleased to announce that GCS has achieved Professional Partner status with VMware. Though a single step in our long term VMware strategy, this status enables GCS to branch into other VMware product lines beyond vSphere 4. GCS is currently piloting VMware View 4 with several clients and looks forward to deploying desktop virtualization around this platform. GCS deploys server virtualization solutions built on both VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V.

Petri reviews the new VMWare vSphere Data Recovery feature in a recent post. Most important to note is that there is added support for VSS for Windows VMs, no tape drive support and no agent/plugin support for SQL, Exchange, etc. This highlights one of the advantages Microsoft's Hyper-V has in comparison to VMWare, Microsoft's Data Protection Manager (DPM).  DPM is a mature, reliable backup software that offers tape support, VSS support, Exchange/SQL/Sharepoint agents and DPM-to-DPM replication. Now DPM Server is not included in Microsoft's System Center Server Management Suite Enterprise or Datacenter. However all agents for DPM are included. For another $600 you get a complete backup application.

In the pile of junk mail today was a damnable claim by Google that a 10 person company can save $35,000 per year by using Google Apps. Huh? If I bought 10 new PCs with Office EVERYTHING and backed them up and formatted/reinstalled them 37 times, it wouldn't come close to $35,000!!! I seriously hope this is a typo. If not, I'm willing to sign up today.

The flash on the phone's camera obscures some text. It reads "Number of employees in company."

Its no secret Macs are making significant inroads as the computing device of choice among many of our client's employees. My wild guess is at least 30% of all mobile phones used by GCS clients are now iPhones.  The new year's first market trend at GCS is even more Mac. Mac servers, Mac desktops and notebooks, Mac iPhones, and even Mac and Cheese (my 3 year old's favorite). Last year we quoted three significant deals that included Mac support. In three weeks of January we've matched that total!

Soon GCS will boast of our first certified Mac technician. As I see no reason for this trend to abate, we will continue adding support resources for Macs. We'll also ensure our networks accommodate a range of end user devices.

We've been installing these ProLiant G6s for a while now and were really impressed with the noise reduction on the 1 Us. One of our technicians, Nikolai Wunderlin, had his camera with him on an install and captured a few minutes of the silence for you. Don't let the first shaky seconds deter you - he gets on a roll about 5 seconds into it! Thanks Nik!

Three weeks without a blog post makes me feel guilty. Thank goodness I'm genetically incapable of feeling guilt for more than about 10 seconds.

In 2010 GCS is expanding our cloud service offerings in online file storage, backup, email, application hosting, platform hosting, and infrastructure hosting. Our first type of offering is a web based file server. While researching the possibilities only one vendor met all of our requirements, Egnyte. Their On Demand File Server provides an simple web interface to access files, mapped network drive using WebDav, a ton of storage and other advanced features. Key among these features is their Local Cloud product. Internet connection speeds are still too slow to move large files from cloud storage to local use on a regular basis. Egnyte's Local Cloud products allows you to work locally and have those changes synchronized to the cloud. When you later access change the document in the cloud, it syncs changes back to the local storage.

With prices starting at $75 for 1TB of storage, this product looks incredibly enticing. In true "eating our own dog food" fashion, we're in the midst of an internal deployment after a successful round of testing.  More to come soon! Happy New Year!

Just buy an OS license per user, right? Not so fast, there. Behold the glory that is the Virtual Enterprise Centralized Desktop or VECD. This special license, with an even more special name, is required for every virtualized desktop. And the best part is that it's only sold Per Device. Connect from your PC at work - that's 1 license. Once in a while from a laptop? That's a second license. Microsoft does allow access from home without requiring a second license. And you can receive up to 4 virtual instances per license, which is nice.

Per Device licensing has always seemed a bit strict for those organizations that nearly match in users and devices. Usually Microsoft offers both Per Device and Per User options. This is even more so for those users that login from multiple devices, which is a rapidly growing segment of the workforce. I connect from four different devices regularly.

With the recent release of Microsoft Exchange 2010, most of our client base is faced with yet another upgrade. Exchange 2010 offers three compelling features that should justify the upgrade. The addition of email archival functionality is a long-awaited tool typically performed by expensive third-party add-ons. A hybrid model of mailbox storage allows both on-premise and cloud-based mailboxes. This eases the transition to the cloud while maintaing large, slow mailboxes in a high performing environment. Improvements to the failover functionality make highly available email much easier for small and mid-market clients.

Many clients and prospects have no email archival strategy at this time. Compliance with federal and industry standards such as Sarbanes Oxley represent only one benefit. Email is the primary communication tool used by business today. Promises are made, orders placed, complaints lodged and bad behavior recorded. Storing this data in an easily accessible manner ensures that committments are upheld and risks mitigated.

Adding a variable cost element to your email system without sacrificing the superior performance, storage and customization of an on-premise Exchange server is desired by many companies. A recent prospect has a few hundred seasonal employees with mailboxes and another few dozen year round staff. The year round staff average nearly 5GB per mailbox. By splitting this storage up between on-premise and cloud the prospect can elimate mailbox costs during the slow season. This can be accomplished in Exchange 2007 as well but is more elegant in Exchange 2010.

The disaster recovery improvements in Exchange 2010 allow easier failover and failback during outages. Many of our clients have embraced virtualization for hardware redundancy. Exchange 2010 allows for equally graceful level of software and data redundancy.

VARs love selling maintenance contracts. They constitute about the only margin left on hardware. There can be very little cost to the VAR in service that maintenance contract. Why? Because they're usually a horrible deal for the client. Why spend $50k on a phone system and then spend $10k per year on a maintenance contract? Why not keep spare parts on hand for an extra $5k, one time expense? I rarely meet any client with any maintenance contract that doesn't complain about nickel and diming. Avoid this hassle by either not renewing maintenance contracts or by going with a lower end contract. If your systems are redundant, a lower end contract is an easy way to save thousands of dollars.

The one exception to this is for systems with non-standardized equipment. If your server rack is a mix of HP, Dell, IBMs purchased sporadically over the last 3 years, stocking parts may be difficult. Of course, since you're going to virtualize on standardized servers anyway this is a moot point.

Being called "a worst case scenario of cloud computing" on Twitter demanded I pick this book up. It is actually a terrifyingly good read that demonstrates Suarez's technical knowledge as well as his ability to craft a great thriller. In his fantasy world thousands of corporate networks are penetrated with an advanced botnet. Oh wait, that's the real world too. In Daemon the botnet is controlled by a deceased game developer with enough money to ensure his ambitions persist beyond the grave. These ambitions include murder, mayhem, extortion, and more. Good times!

A few thoughts:

1) Though much of the technology is still in early stages of adoption, it exists today. If you can hunt a deer over the internet, you obviously can kill a man.

2) Security breaches of the sort required to perpetrate a more realistic version of this attack occur constantly.

3) The book incorporates interesting socio-economic themes as well. Suarez is obviously under the impression that private industry exercises near absolute control over our government. I, for one, welcome our corporate overlords.

4) The disaffection of corporate IT employees from the business was another key theme. Similar to Heinlein's "The Roads Must Roll" in which a technical class realizes the power they can exert over those dependent on their abilities. A massive, unionized strike flexes their muscle. If you're an IT executive this should be yet another thing to keep you awake at night.

5) For anyone not using offline storage such as tape, read this book. Offline storage is a critical last defense against many attacks. Unfortunately a large percentage of IT execs don't value it to the extend it demands. In much the same way accounting standards dictate separation of tasks, offline backup tasks should be split from normal IT tasks and, where possible, from your IT staff. Let offline storage be your panic room.

Check this book out soon. The next installment of the story is released in January. I hope there are a dozen in this series.

I was invited to be a guest speaker at the Texas Organization for Rural Community Hospitals' weekly webinar. This week's topic was an overview of IT Security for IT Executives and managers. My presentation covered basic risk assessment, common types of attacks and prevention strategies. I discussed several up and coming technologies such as application whitelisting, layer 7 firewalls, and network access protection. I also discussed various security standards such as SAS 70, PCI, and HIPAA.

As promised to the attendees, here is the slide deck:IT Security Overview.ppt (6.67 mb)

Cloud computing is already disrupting staffing, procurement and support practices in IT departments around the world. GCS' Early Happy Hour event will provide insight into the coming changes to your business practices. We'll profile solutions from vendors such as Amazon, Microsoft, Rackspace, Terremark and more. We'll look at private clouds and public clouds while breaking down the differences between I-a-a-S, P-a-a-S, and S-a-a-S.

We will present a high level strategy discussion on the topic of cloud computing. We hope that our attendees will share their cloud experiences and opinions with us in an open format.

The Early Happy Hour will be Thursday, December 3rd from 3:00PM to 5:00PM at Sullivan's Ring Side. GCS will provide refreshments including adult beverages.

Click here to RSVP. An RSVP is required. If you have any questions please email joe@gcsaustin.com.

http://www.gcsaustin.com/seminar/

When considering a hosted or cloud provider, ask the 10 simple questions below to further your analysis.

Data Center: Are your servers stored in a data center? Please describe your power, data and cooling redundancies?

Compliance: Are you compliant with PCI and SAS 70 standards?

Longevity: What happens in the event your business fails? How do we recover our data? How do we use it, once recovered?

Backup Systems: How do you backup the data? How often is it stored offsite? How is it backed up onsite?

Architecture: Do you utilize virtualization with shared storage?

Reliability: Do you offer a Service Level Agreement? How much credit do we receive when you are down? At what amount of downtime do I receive the credit?

Performance: How does our user count compare to your largest client and to your total user count?

Bandwidth: Approximately how much bandwidth per user is required at our office?

Ownership: Do you own the equipment and licenses on which you're hosted?

Support: What are your support departments hours of operation? How is after hours support provided?

This is a quick start but should start separating the real providers from the pretenders.

A great, in depth article on the DirectAccess feature in Windows 7 was posted recently on Informit.com. They nailed down the architecture well.

So, can DirectAccess kill your VPN? Yes and no. It is not intended to work on non-company owned PCs. Why would you want it to? You'll still need VPN for that. I've seen many organizations utilize VPN for vendor access. DirectAccess is not a replacement for vendor access. DirectAccess also requires IPV6. Oh. Though many organizations are unintentionally running IPV6 already, this will present some pause to many IT Managers.

A total lack of faith in existing anti-virus products has forced us to watch Application Whitelisting technology for a while. A comprehensive review of several top products was recently posted over on Computerworld.com. It was nice to see fellow Austinites, CoreTrace, score so well. The article correctly tagged one of CoreTrace's best features, buffer overflow protection.

Though we have a close eye on Application Whitelisting, we have yet to deploy it for a single client. Frankly I'm terrified of user adoption issues. For this technology to succeed we will have to convince the users that the trading flexibility for security is worth it, or work with organizations that can afford to ignore user complaints. Winning hearts and minds is a losers game. Today I'm more convinced than ever that Application Whitelisting will be a hard sell. For those organizations that can stomach it, it could dramatically reduce time spent on virus and spyware issues.

The first part of this comparison generated some heated interest in the blogosphere. It earned a response on Dell's Equallogic Blog as well as a couple of well composed comments from both HP and Dell. Dylan Locsin from Dell thought that a few of my points were inaccurate and he even insinuates that I may be misrepresenting myself. I'll respond to his points here:

1) Clustering: His point that my calling Equallogic "clustered" is inaccurate is completely correct. I should have call it "distributed." Equallogic does not offer true clustering across SANs. They don't offer a comparable feature to the Lefthand's Network RAID functionality which allows striping across SANs. Equallogic cannot pool IO resources as it scales.

2) Groups: Dylan interpreted my argument with Equallogic that "Data cannot span more than these two SANs" as a replication argument. It wasn't. With HP Lefthand SANs I can add performance and capacity with each node up to 16 nodes (and even beyond). This avoids silos of performance and storage. I did fail to point out that I was considering the PS4000 series which is the most commonly encountered Equallogic SAN considered device by my clients. The PS6000 series improves this situation.

Dylan wondered why I didn't offer a disclaimer that I sold HP Lefthand. If he scrolls down a bit he'll notice the disclaimer. I also prominently place the Lefthand SANs on my website. GCS does sell Dell servers, desktops and notebooks. We support MD3000i and Equallogic SANs from Dell. I think Equallogic is a fine product. However I firmly believe the HP Lefthand SAN offers the best value for my clients in the SMB market. That said, Dylan, I'm not opposed to also offering Equallogic to my clients that bleed blue. There are many of those, especially in Austin. I don't mean to insinuate that Equallogic is bad product. I've seen clients succeed with both options.

By far our clients and prospects have two SANs in mind, the Dell Equallogic and the HP Lefthand. While both are impressive SANs that are very similar, there are some critical differences.

Clustered Storage vs Cluster-able Storage: Both products offer clustered storage but only Lefthand can tout that out-of-the-box. Each Lefthand includes two chassis by default where-as Equallogic offers dual-controllers and an extremely reliable single chassis configuration. What is the actual difference in reliability? I have not found any real-world tests but if I can get two for the same price as one, I'll go that route. Advantage: Lefthand

Licensing: Both Dell and HP have listened to their clients anger at complicated licensing systems. Both the HP Lefthand and Dell Equallogic offer an all-inclusive licensing method. Unfortunately unless you buy the HP Lefthand Starter SAN Solution, you may need to be the Multi-Site/DR license in the future for real-time failover and failback. Advantage: Equallogic

Density: The HP Lefthand is essentially a ProLiant DL320s server. The Dell Equallogic is custom designed chassis. Because of this difference the Equallogic gets more spindles per U. This is certainly a consideration when you're ordering racks of SANs. It is much less of a concern when order a SAN or two. Advantage: Equallogic

Groups: EqualLogic PS series allows only two SANs in a group. Data cannot span more than these two SANs. With HP's SAN/IQ Network RAID you can span multiple SANs in a variety of configurations. This provides better performance and reliability. Advantage: Lefthand

Site to Site Replication: Out of the box both SANs offer site to site replication. Only the HP Lefthand supports synchronous data replication with automated failover and failback. The Lefthand supports multiple sites in all configurations. Advantage: Lefthand

Obviously a lot of features are excluded as they are quite similar between both products. The reason GCS chose to emphasize the HP Lefthand SAN was a significant price and value advantage. However it is not quite so apparent as when compared to other SAN vendors on the market.

Here is a helpful comparison chart for HP and Dell's iSCSI SAN lines:

Calculating usable disk space on a SAN is dependent on a number of variables. Make sure you're buying the right model with GCS' HP Lefthand SAN Usable Disk Space Calculator. The calculator displays usable disk space across a variety of RAID and Network RAID configurations for the HP Lefthand P4000 SANs.

Most of our clients choose between an Entry Level or Mid-Level SAN, as described in Part 1 of this Buyer's Guide. In this post I'll identify the features that differentiate those two classes of SANs.

Clustering: Clustered SANs operate like clustered servers. If one fails the other takes over immediately. This is only available in the Mid-Level products such as HP Lefthand, Dell Equallogic, etc. Only HP's Lefthand offers true clustering out of the box. The minimum order for a Lefthand SAN is two completely separate units.

Thin Provisioning: Mid-level SANs allow  you to oversubscribe storage by allocating storage to a volume without reserving that storage. If you create a 100GB volume but only use 40GB, the remaining 60GB is free to be allocated to another volume. This feature is essential in maximizing the storage efficiency of a SAN.

Offsite Replication: Replication between SANs is the foundation for an excellent DR solution. Replicate all data and VMs to another site. Many of the mid-level SANs offer this solution but in some it is a licensed add-on. HP's Lefthand includes scheduled replication at no additional cost but real time replication and automated failover is an additional license fee.

Snapshots: Snapshotting technology is an on-array backup method that utilizes a relatively small amount of disk space. This is possible to restore entire volumes quickly without relying on external storage.

De-duplification: Long an enterprise only feature, integrated de-duplification is making its way into mid-level SANs. This can dramatically increase the efficiency of storage but can have a significant performance cost.

This brief guide will outline the different SAN classes available to the SMB buyer.

Entry Level: If you're buying a SAN, you need a few basic features. iSCSI support and vendor certification (Microsoft, VMware, Citrix) will meet minimal needs. These will enable your virtual environment to utilize high availability features in any of those vendor's environments. HP's MSA 2012i G2 and Dell's MD3000i both meet these criteria. Expect to spend as much as $15k on these devices. The HP will let you mix and match SAS and SATA drives in a single chassis for best use of your SAN dollars. Neither of these solutions offer thin provisioning or clustered storage. What's that mean? Less efficient per GB and much greater risk of failure. If you're concerned about putting all your VMs in one basket, and you should be, then look to the Mid Level, below.

Mid Level: This is what you want, if you can afford it. Two major features enter play here: thin provisioning and clustered storage. I'll touch on both of these now with more to come soon. Thin provisioning allows for oversubscription of storage. Don't worry about it, just do it. Clustered storage is like clustered servers. Two, or more, boxes configured for failover. The HP Lefthand provides the lowest entry cost to true clustered storage. Dell's Equallogic, Compellent, NetApp, Xiotech and others each offer some unique features. Expect to spend at least $30k on this device.

Enterprise: Forget about it. You can't afford it and wouldn't fit in your server closet if you could. Vendors such as HP, EMC, IBM, NetApp and others live here.

Virtual Storage Appliance: For those organizations that may already have a large investment in internal storage in servers or direct attached storage, a VSA may be the best bet. This software solution aggregates storage across your servers into an iSCSI SAN with similiar feature benefits to a full system. You will be able to support High Availabilty and VMotion/Live Migration with this solution. Obviously since you are only buying the software the entry cost is much lower than a hardware solution. HP's Lefthand offers a VSA for VMWare (Xen and Hyper-V are coming). StorMagic has an interesting option that currently supports only VMWare as well, but Hyper-V support is coming.

A not-too-brief market overview should whet your appetite. Look for more info on the features and key differences between vendors to come soon.