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.

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.

GCS' Early Happy Hour was filled to capacity by IT Executives from all over Central Texas. For many it was their first look at Windows 7. Many attendees agreed that the upgrade to Windows 7 is unavoidable. Following the demo, some attendees even looked forward to it! Our discussion highlighted the improved UI, Branch Caching, Windows XP Mode and AppLocker.

In addition to Windows 7 the attendees got a look at Windows Server 2008 R2. We spent quite a bit of time talking about Hyper-V, System Center Virtual Machine Manager R2 and the new Live Migration features. Marquis covered Clustered Shared Volumes in depth, as they pertain to Live Migration. We also covered the new Active Directory Recycle Bin and Branch Caching.

We wrapped up the event with a look at VMWare's VSphere 4. The new Fault Tolerance features garnered the most interest. VSphere's Fault Tolerance allows for failover between hosts without downtime. They have set the standard here. Unfortunately most of the new features in VSphere 4 are not included in the Essentials and Essentials Plus package which is the only version that is price competitive to Hyper-V.

We'll be hosting our next even soon, focused on Cloud Computing in the SMB environment.

HP's Proliant G6 maxes out at 144GB of RAM. 16 core processors are due out in 2012. How many VMs can you cram in a quad, 16-core box with a 144GB of RAM? Enough. Arthur Cole describes trends toward both mainframe-style aggregration and grids of smaller systems. Which is right your for you? One factor in determing the best strategy is:

Additional servers reduce the overhead for virtulization failover. Much like RAID configurations, with 2 servers you must allocate 50% overhead for failover capacity on each server. Three servers only need 33% overhead and so on.

When should I recommend Cloud solutions to my clients? I don't know. Today I'm going to start figuring it out. I'm going to compare an on-premise build with a cloud based solution for a hypothetical 50 employee organization. Allow me to skip a lot of details and say it will provide roughly equivalent features and security. Anything required in both solutions was a wash and therefore ignored. What you're left with is mostly a lot hardware (servers, SANs, firewalls, switches for iSCSI, etc), deployment services and hardware-level support.

NOTE: All pricing is retail and rounded. Individual proposals may vary. A greenfield is assumed - no data migration. Everything that was common to both solutions was excluded so this may represent a small portion of the overall project. 

Cloud Offering:

In the cloud we'll procure 20Ghz of processor capacity, 50GB RAM, 3 TBs storage with 10 Mbps of bandwidth to host 15-18 Virtual Machines. Onsite backup for 1.5 TBs. This will run about $10,000 per month.

On-Premise Offering:

On-premise will provide provide about 60Ghz (over 24 cores), 96GB RAM, 3TB direct attached storage for backup, 3TB iSCSI SAN. We'll plan on hosting 25-30 VMs on this platform. You'll get this for about $160,000 including 200 hours for installation and configuration. See my build here. Note we dropped 25% of capacity for high-availability.

To even the playing field we have to factor in datacenter costs for the On-Premise Offering. I see a rack, 10Mbps of bandwidth, and 40A of power. Say $3000 per month?

Conclusion:

Let's compare 3 years of costs. In the cloud you're out $360,000. At home, including the data center costs, you're looking at $268,000. The $92,000 delta has to cover the hardware support and maintenance for 3 years. There is some difference in capacity and reliability. I hope it helps your evaluation to say that the cloud offering, in this case, is 35% more expensive.

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A recent project has forced me to analyze two cloud computing providers - Terremark and Rackspace. In this post I'll discuss my analysis of the two services and use a recently completed Private Cloud project to provide cost comparison.

Terremark's Enterprise Cloud service fit the needs of my client best. This is a fully virtualized environment that completely divorces the client from hardware concerns. The Enterprise Cloud enables rapid deployment of Virtual Machines. All management services from the OS up and managed by the client.  It consists of HP ProLiant servers with a 3Par SAN. Redundant firewalls and load balancers are included in every package. All equipment is shared. Virtualization is performed using VMWare ESX 3.5. Server management occurs through a web application and includes many tasks that you would find in VMWare's management tools. Terremark offers packages at fixed Ghz and GB or RAM (entry is 5Ghz and 10GB RAM). You then add storage, backup and bandwidth. There is no incremental charge per VM, only for the resources it consumes.

Rackspace's Platform Hosting takes a different approach. They supply a mix of dedicated and shared resources to create a similar environment. Firewalls, load balancers and servers are dedicated. SAN resources are shared. Rackspace allows access to the VMware infrastructure tools so all functionality is exposed. Rackspace's price plans vary based on hardware redundancy and resources required.

Some interesting points:

• Terremark offers technical support 12 hours per day. Rackspace's support is 24/7/365.
• Terremark is hardened to withstand a CAT 5 hurricane. Good thing since they are based in Miami.
• Pricing favored Terremark by 25-30% when comparing environments with similar features.
• Network configuration is limited at Terremark. There is a maximum of 4 VLANs.
• Both solutions offer use of existing licenses or their hosted licenses
• Neither were excited about voice applications due to QoS concerns.
• Rackspace does not offer a backup service in the Platform Hosting option. Backup will require a dedicated server and regular offsite downloads.
• Rackspace included 6 TB of download and unlimited upload in their base plan. They claim it was the equivalent of 20Mbps sustained for the entire month.

Honestly I'm afraid I have to end this blog post by changing the name to a braindump. I am beginning a 30 day demo with Terremark immediately. I will continue to assess the two providers and post the information here. Look for follow up posts soon.

The Xilocore offsite backup solution came recommended from another VAR out of state. When I saw them at the CompTIA Breakaway Summit I made a point to spend some time at the booth. If you're not familar with Xilocore, it serves the same purpose as an offsite SAN replication of VMs and data without needing the offsite SAN, servers, data center, firewall, bandwidth, etc. An onsite appliance is installed that makes a local backup and then replicates the data offsite. In the event of a server failure you can run the VM on the Xilcore box locally. If a more serious or prolonged outage occurs, Xilocore can stand up your VMs at their data center and provide Citrix-based access to those servers. Turnaround times are offered at 24 and 48 hour intervals.

I looked at this solution in comparison to a proposal I was working on that featured offsite SAN replication with offsite server hardware for DR. This was a Hyper-V platform with System Center Management Suite (including DPM). Xilocore had a compelling offer but this client already had collocation, an MPLS WAN and gobs of spare hardware coming after the virtualization project completes. Though not a fit for this client, I'll circle back and investigate more on upcoming opportunities. I'll be sure to post the outcome.