Hello, my name is Craig, and I am addicted to Google Analytics.  I feel better having said that. If you aren’t using Google Analytics for your website, you are missing out on all the fun. Why might you ask? Well, what’s the point of having a website if you don’t know how people are using it?

 

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When I first heard the term cloud computing, I thought it was just putting your server in a data center and accessing it from anywhere. This is a similar concept, and has its benefits. About a year ago we lost power in our office for about 3 hours. All of our servers were in-house, connected to a big UPS battery backup that lasted all of about 20 minutes. We rely heavily on our servers to report the status and health of our clients’ networks, and to provide remote support and maintenance. It was an awful feeling. I started sending people home where they at least had internet access, but without our servers, it did us no good. It was then we decided we needed to make some changes. We started pricing power generators and special air conditioners. These just weren’t realistic, and still had limitations. We moved all of our critical servers to a datacenter. Redundant power, cooling and internet are just what we wanted to be able to work from anywhere. Even if our office has no power, we can find an internet connection and get to work. Now we host several client servers at our datacenter, so they can have the same benefits.

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A couple of years ago we decided to dive into the world of server virtualization.  This is an amazing technology that allows us to run multiple operating systems on a single server. One server can act like many.  Microsoft servers run better when their tasks are focused. Take a mail server for example.   You wouldn’t want your mail server to also host your data files, database, web site and terminal server.  Maybe you have a program that doesn’t play nice with others.  Before virtualization, you would need to purchase a separate server for each of these tasks to have an ideal environment.  I’ve seen plenty of servers overloaded with tons of applications by clients trying to stretch their server dollar. Heck, I built some of them.  Servers can get expensive, especially when you need several.

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i.t.NOW is a Microsoft Shop. We support Macintosh, Linux, VMWare, and various other platforms, but the vast majority of our clients are running Microsoft servers and workstations. Our office, as well, is mostly Microsoft. Even down to the smartphones that we use. However, I stand alone with my Blackberry. And, sorry Microsoft, I am never going back.

I recently bought a new phone, since my Pearl had worn out (or at least that is the excuse I gave my wife). It is only available from T-Mobile right now, the Curve 8900 (or Curve II as some people call it). Switching over to the new phone reminded me why I love my Blackberry. Before I drove to the store to buy my Phone, I logged into our Blackberry Enterprise Server (personally, a must if you are going to use a Blackberry with Exchange) and set my activation password. As I was finishing the purchase, I put in my old SIM card, and activated my phone with our Enterprise Server. By the time I left the store, my new phone had pulled down all of my contacts, my calendar, my email, and my tasks. Not only that, it had set up my speed dial, and even the custom settings I applied to the buttons on the side of my phone. Plain and simple, it just works. That is more than what I can say for any of the dozen Windows Mobile smartphones I have used in the past.

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Have you ever been so mad at your computer that you scream? Admit it, we all do. This video proves that screaming at your computer might not be the best thing.
 

Without being too geeky, this person is measuring the speed of the drives and when he screams at them, there is a peak showing latency, or slower response time.

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If I’d asked anyone what a thousand gigabytes is called 10 years ago, they’d look at my like I was crazy.  No one could even fathom that much storage. 

A few months ago, Seagate announced the worlds largest desktop hard drive, 1.5 TB.  That TB means terabytes, otherwise known as 1,500 gigabytes, 1,500,000 megabytes, 1,500,000,000 kilobytes, you get the idea.  To put this in perspective do you remember those 5.25" black floppy drives?  It would take 2,343,750 of those disks to equal the size of this new harddrive.  Assuming they are 1/8" thick that would make a stack 292,968 Inches tall (That is 4.62 miles or 24,414 feet).  All this storage has been compressed into a rectangle that is only 1" thick.

That’s a lot of storage.  But is it really?  Do we need that much space on a desktop computer?  Why not?  Storage is cheap compared to what it was just a few years ago.  My first PC had a 10 megabyte hard drive.  That means I could store 10,000,000 characters of text.  Ten million wow!  Sure sounds like a lot until you compare it to todays world-that would barely hold 2 music downloads. 

I was lucky though, most PC’s in the late 80’s didn’t have hard drives at all, just a 5.25” floppy drive.  You’d put in the operating system floppy to boot up, then insert your program floppy to load the program you wanted to run, then insert a data floppy if you wanted to save what you were working on.  All this fit into 640 kilobytes of memory.  Pretty impressive in its day. 

In 1980, a 10 mb hard drive (just the drive, not the computer needed to run it) went for $3400.  Fortunately I got mine used from the university for $50 several years after.  We live in a digital age.  Almost anything can be stored in 1’s or 0’s; music, photos, videos, documents, you name it.  And it all takes up space.  And if its important 1’s and 0’s, like babies first steps on home video, it needs to be backed up, requiring more storage. 

I’m a fan of using a PC as a media hub in the home.  I will store all the kids DVD’s on my PC’s hard drive so we don’t have to worry about scratching or loosing disks.  These movies, uncompressed can take up to 8GB of space each.  With the introduction of Blu-Ray movies, these can take 50GB of space.  While these movies could be compressed, you loose quality in picture and sound.  I prefer to leave them in their native format, I don’t want to loose a single Pixar pixel.  My music is all stored on my hard drive and can be streamed to any room in the house.  Photos going back 10 years since my first digital camera are stored on my hard drive and can be easily brought up on the big screen for slide show night.  We never pull out photo albums anymore, and if it isn’t digitized, it gets lost.  So who needs all that space?  I’m certainly glad to have it.  Who knows, in a few years I may be boasting the benefits of my petabyte drive, amazed I used to fit it all in a few terabytes.

Terabytes in use
•    Wal-Mart's data warehouse in Middletown, Connecticut contains 500 terabytes of data as of 2004.
•    The U.S. Library of Congress Web Capture team has claimed that "as of May 2008, the Library has collected more than 82.6 terabytes of data"
•    Ancestry.com claims approximately 600 terabytes of genealogical data with the inclusion of US Census data from 1790 to 1930.
•    LaCie released the world's first 1 TB external hard drive in early 2004.
•    Hitachi introduced the world's first one terabyte internal hard drive in 2007.
•    In 1993 total internet traffic was around 100 terabytes for the year.  As of June 2008, Cisco Systems estimated internet traffic at 160 terabytes per second.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terabyte
 

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For those who know me, you know that I love technology. I am the one who has a new cell phone every six to nine months. My house has more computers than it does people. I am always reading blogs that tell me about new products that are coming out. I am often asked why I love technology so much (usually by my wife as I tell her about the new cell phone I have to buy) so I often wonder, is it simply because I want the newest gadget out there? I would like to think there is a better reason than that. I think the reason is simply I like solving problems. For me, I don’t want a new cell phone simply because it is new; I want a new cell phone in hopes that it will solve everything I hated about my old cell phone. And when that doesn’t work, I have to try again in six months or so.

This same problem solver mentality is seen as I design networks for clients. Usually we install a network and don’t have to change any equipment for three years. Recently, at one of our clients, we replaced a server that we installed about 18 months ago. It made me realize how far technology has come and how powerful it can be. When we installed their server 18 months ago, it was about a 16 hour job. It involved a technician going on-site after business hours, taking the entire network down, and migrating data to the new server. It also involved a technician being on-site the first two hours of business operations to finish the migration and update client computers. While we did an excellent job and it was seamless in the client’s eyes, it was a labor intensive job requiring a technician on-site for several overtime hours.

When it came time to replace the client’s second, aging server, we were able to dramatically change how the work was done using a technology we have been using heavily for the past year, VMware. VMware allows multiple servers to run virtually on a single piece of hardware. For this client, we replaced the 18 month old server and the much older server with a single new server running VMware. The previous server replacement took 16 hours with a technician on-site for most of that time, and it only involved replacing a single server. This time around, we were able to replace both servers with only two hours on-site, and three hours of remote labor. The best part is in three to five years when the client looks at replacing that piece of hardware, it will be a one hour job. That’s why I love technology.

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