CIOUpdate had a good article today on SOA and Cloud Computing by Regunath.  You can read it here:

http://www.cioupdate.com/features/article.php/3853076/How-SOA-and-the-Cloud-Relate.htm

This was sent by a friend and is a helpful tip that one can use in their day to day work life so we are posting it here.   He wrote:

Sometimes we forget to attach an attachment that we meant to send in the Outlook email. I found a small macro program that checks for the actual attachment file when it sees a keyword “attach” in your message body before sending the email. If doesn’t see the attachment file, it shows an alert similar to shown below:

The script and the instructions are available from Mark Bird’s google page over here:

http://mark.bird.googlepages.com/home

A simple and helpful tip indeed.  Thanks Mark.

Yahoo and MSFT entered into a partnership to improve the web search experience for users and advertisers.  A combined approach is seen as a big threat to Google’s search capabilities – where there is vendor competition, the consumers always stand to gain so this is a good change.  You can read more on this here:

http://www.choicevalueinnovation.com/thedeal/Default.aspx

If you think that Microsoft Surface was cool and reminded you of Tom Cruise shifting thorugh a myraid of images in Minority Report, wait till you see this presentation by Pattie Maes at Ted.  The project was designed, developed and implemented in the MIT labs and spear headed by Pranav Mistry.

The sixth sense is a wearable device with a camera and projector which can understand gestural movements by hand and interact with physical world around us be it in a super market or in a book store or displaying cell phone keyboard on your palm and dialing number from there.   Please click on the link below and see the 9 minute long video to realize the power of technology and how it is going to affect our day to day life in the future:

http://www.ted.com/talks/pattie_maes_demos_the_sixth_sense.html

Recently at one of our client sites, we were troubleshooting a slowness issue in the application, which occurs only on weekends. System is working normally during weekdays. Different components of systems were checked and it all came out clean. So we decided to perform basic ftp test on good day vs. bad day. If time taken is more on bad day compared to the timing on good day then we know for sure that there is problem somewhere either on the machines involved and/or in the network between them. This is not the true test to identify the slowness as application might be communicating on the port other than the ftp port but it will give us some idea in general.

Now to perform ftp from one machine to another and vice versa we need a physical file of some size and hence need the disk storage as well. But IBM support person working with us suggested a very good approach to ftp data without involving a file and as result without involving any disk storage. Following is the basic syntax of the put command once we establish the ftp session with remote server.

put “|dd if=/dev/zero bs=32k count=1000″ /dev/null

In above syntax, we are using dd command to transfer the 1000 blocks of data with each data block of 32k and we are using /dev/zero as input and /dev/null as output. Using this syntax we can transfer large file without involving disk. We can put it even in a shell script and then schedule the shell script as cron job to run at regular interval. Following is the shell script wrapped around the command.

/usr/bin/ftp -n <IP address of machine> <<END
verbose on
user <userID> <Password>
bin
put “|dd if=/dev/zero bs=32k count=10000″ /dev/null
bye
END

Copy above lines into the file and save it as a .sh file. Please make sure to change the values in the <> brackets with correct IP address of the machine you want to perform ftp to. Also change the user line (line# 3) with appropriate user credentials. You will save this file and execute it on the machine from which you want to perform ftp.

Obviously this is not the route we took immediately after facing the issue. We resorted to ftp option after exhaustive checking of application and database and not finding anything suspicious. We performed above test on AIX servers. To know more about dd command, please refer to AIX manual pages (man dd) on any of the AIX servers in your environment.

Resources:

• IBM Article – here.

Read a very nice post at GigaOm on the MSFT Azure services platform – here.  Cloud computing is becoming more and more real by each passing day … exciting times are ahead.

And here is a very nice video from Steve Marx. He even gives the details of how he made it which is pretty neat.

Cloud Computing – A buzz word that is frequently murmured everywhere by the IT folks or even by the non-IT people recently. This post describes what it really means to the beginners those who are interested or looking into cloud computing.

Cloud computing is a computing model where the infrastructure and the application (even the platform) is offered as a service over the Internet. The infrastructure cloud could include servers and storage and the application cloud includes various applications.  This is a major shift in the industry in the way that software and services are going to be delivered in the future.  At the center of cloud computing is the virtualization technology which we have talked about a lot in the past.  Virtualization technology through resource pooling provides the engine that drives much of the cloud.  Companies such as Google, Amazon have already started using their server farms and offering services and Microsoft is not far behind with their Azure service.

Even though cloud computing can be classified into many different types, the major ones are Public clouds, Private clouds, Hybrid clouds and Community Clouds.

Public clouds – As the name suggests, it is usually offered by a company who has invested a lot building their datacenter and offering a part of its infrastructure and platform for a monthly fee. Amazon, Terremark, RackSpace and Google are great examples of public clouds. And Microsoft is joining the game as well with their Azure services platform.

Private clouds – This is something that enterprises build by themselves to be utilized across their organization. This allows them to consolidate their servers (and storage) as a single entity that can be offered to their different business units as needed. There is an interesting article from Network World can be found here.

Hybrid clouds – This is an emerging area of cloud computing where the private and public clouds can be integrated. There are many factors such as security and application compatibility needs to be considered in this model.

Community clouds – These are clouds that are shared by organizations having common interests.  This is similar to the IT-SSO post that we had done a couple of days ago.

Driving factors for moving towards cloud omputing:

The recent developments in the virtualization technology gave a big boost to cloud computing. There are many reasons that drive the cloud computing. Some of them are:

•    Rapid deployment of servers and applications
•    Easier scalability
•    Allowing IT to run as a cost center by running multiple datacenters as single entity which can be shared and charged back based on usage
•    Cost efficient “pay as you go/use” pricing model
•    Greener initiative due to less power consumption since the shared capacity of a virtualized cloud data center reduces the power consumption for everyone.

Apart from its benefits, there are still few concerns about the security, compliance, performance and the application compatibility with cloud computing. However, they are being addressed by the cloud vendors.

We will look into some of the cloud services in-depth in Part II

A client of ours recently asked this question: “Are you aware of the trend of companies establishing shared IT services organizations with other companies – not cloud or outsourcing with managed providers but two companies deciding to share data centers or certain applications as an example.“  So, we asked our IT manager to look more into it and provide some more information.  We would like to share that with our readers:

One thing to understand is that IT Shared Services Organization (or IT-SSO as it is called sometimes) could be an external organization that services the needs of multiple organizations OR two (or more) companies can decide to form a cost center by combining their IT organizations…these companies can also decide to have separate IT organizations but they share the load, act as each other’s backup or collaborate on projects and establish DR/HA practices.  The first one where a company does the managed services for several companies has been around for years (example: IBM managed services in their data centers), what he was interested in here is the second trend where a couple of companies decide to form a cost center by forming an IT Shared Services Organization.

Before we dive into the details of it, first thing to understand is why is there even a need for IT-SSO for the second trend that we are seeing in the industry.  Why would any corporation even consider looking into it?

In order to understand the need, consider this scenario – In a city, how many companies and within those companies, how many departments have their own dedicated network and cabling, each with their own:

-              Internal Data Centers or Server Rooms,
-              Desktops
-              Telecommunications
-              Infrastructure security layers
-              Network management
-              Help Desk management
-              Application Hosting
-              Content Management
-              Hardware infrastructure,
-              Their own patch management standards
-              Same kind of software and hardware licenses
-              IT Staff
-              Energy consumption
-              Under utilized hardware and storage resources

About 15-20% of the costs of any SMB organization goes towards IT.  For Tier-1 Organizations, this number is even higher.  Many of these organizations do not go with the managed services from large players like IBM etc. because of cost and more importantly because they want their own teams doing this work to do proper justice to the business and the turn-around times.  Having a team of employees v/s an outside company doing it for you has differences in terms of turnaround time on projects, accountability and protecting your IP for any of the critical business applications.

If many of these companies start using an IT-SSO model, each of them would stand to gain from it.  Here are some of the benefits:

-                      Single Service Organization with better manpower utilization
-                      Cost benefits in terms of resources, hardware and software licenses
-                      Common Patch management and standards
-                      Companies can focus on their core business rather than IT infrastructure
-                      Shared Storage
-                      Cost savings in terms of energy consumption
-                      Cost savings in terms of contracts with external vendors & partners
-                      Uniform practices and standards – for different companies, these might be at varying degrees of maturity depending upon their adoption.
-                      Better scalability because of common pool of resources.
-                      Better insight into & adoption of new technologies so strategic advise and guidance can be obtained.
-                      Organizations can save huge costs on their Production and DR sites as they have their DR at their partner’s primary site and vice versa.
-                      Leveraged resources. With private cloud, the entire infrastructure can be considered as one pool and can be used by other organization during their spike traffic if the other organization doesn’t have much traffic during the same time.
-                      Leveraged knowledge – Both organizations can share their expertise on managing their infrastructure.
-                      Energy cost savings and better scalability due to consolidation – one can make use of VMWare’s VI3 infrastructure and blade servers

So, having said that, what kind of infrastructure and applications are we really talking about over here and do some companies fit this model better than others?  Ideally speaking, every company can fit this model – one main concern could be around security access to the data, their IP and compliance.  Before we delve into that, here are some of the applications and IT infrastructure needs that I think stand to gain from IT-SSO:

-                      Internal Desktop and Server IT infrastructure and support
-                      Internal Applications like:

• Accounting packages (Great Plains, SAP Business One etc.),
• HR software applications,
• MS Office (either through virtual desktop infrastructure or Online),
• Content management systems like MS Sharepoint
• Development and QA environments and software like VS2008, QC, Load Runner etc.
• Source code control systems like Sourcesafe, Subversion, TFS etc.
• Database Servers – Oracle, SQL Server, DB2 UDB etc.

-                      Phone Systems
-                      Major software systems like PeopleSoft, SAP, Oracle where a lot of differences between 2 organizations is merely in configuration.  The hardware and software requirements are nearly similar.
-                      Operating Systems & their patch management
-                      IM tools like internal facebook/twitter/yammer or MS Communicator
-                      Networking Systems

And what are the hurdles to this approach?  Before jumping on the bandwagon, it is important for the companies to understand how a shared services model fits successfully into the overall business strategy of the firm.  We think that the major changes involved when transitioning to shared services are process and communication related. Aligning the team members and gaining their commitment are necessary for success.  In addition, one clearly needs to understand their security and compliance needs and proper SLAs need to be in place.

So, here are some of the cons or rather hurdles to this approach:

-                      Requires proper buy in from the CxO levels as well as the IT & Development teams.  Easier said than done.  Even after the buy in, proper governance needs to be defined (more on this below).
-                      Defining SLAs would be a bit complex – the more the number of companies involved, the more complex it becomes.
-                      Needs a very strong project management regime/discipline to drive the collaboration activities.  This collaboration must generate business value and each and every step needs to be measurable.  Parties need to agree on the common goals and maintain a clear mode of communication involving the IT-SSO.
-                      Compliance issues – Both organizations need to make sure their information is secure and managed according to compliance regulations – depending upon the different business verticals, this can be a major point so it might make more sense for corporations in the same business domain to do this.  Example: A heathcare software company co-sharing the data center with say an online accounting software company would have totally different compliance requirements.
-                      Companies would have concern about their IP rights which can become a serious issue if the companies are in the same business space.

So, why now?  Because the advancements in technology (VMWare, Blade Servers, Geo Clusters) makes it easier to implement such solutions.  Not only that, the companies are realizing that benefits in terms of cost and time are to be gained if they consolidate and have a shared IT services organization with other companies.

The first movers that we have seen or read about who are adopting this are either educational institutes, universities, small practices/hospitals and Federal Agencies.  As far as private companies go, we think that those that are either funded by the same venture group or those who have some of the same folks on their board, will be the next to move towards this.  Here is an article on computerworld that you would find interesting: http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9029160

We think that if proper governance is there, then moving towards IT-SSO is an achievable goal which has several benefits.  What do we mean by that?  By governance, in this case I mean that three questions need to be answered properly – these three questions were cited by Accenture in their study (Driving High Performance in Government: Maximizing the value of Public-Sector Shared Services, Accenture, Feb. 2005.) and also by Nancy Desormeau:

• Who decides what?  ==>  The decision-making roles and authorities for strategic direction and for ongoing operations.
• Who does what?  ==> The roles and responsibilities for achieving results, the form and composition of the decision-making bodies.
• Who answers for results? ==>  Accountability and recourse.

One needs to define the governance accountabilities at three tiers: Executive, Strategic Partnerships and Operational.  So, this can be done and is being done by different organizations in order to save on costs and also provide a more efficient and scalable solution to their organizations.  Whether it is a right solution for your organization, only you can tell.

Resources:

• ComputerWorld article referenced above.
• Accenture Study referenced above.
• Presentation by Nancy Desormeau – here.

Google introduced their Fusion Tables approach towards data management in the cloud.  You can read more on this from their Research Blog here:

http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2009/06/google-fusion-tables.html

And here is the infoworld article on the same topic:

http://www.infoworld.com/d/data-management/google-tests-revolutionary-cloud-based-database-290?source=rss_infoworld_news

We had an interesting issue that relates to networking and SQL heartbeat with one of our clients that we would like to share with our readers.

One of our clients has their servers distributed across 3 data centers in US. Let us call them A, B and C. They have a VPN tunnel connecting all their sites together using Cisco ASA firewalls. Their IT staff access the entire infrastructure through one data center (A) which has remote access VPN enabled in the Cisco ASA. They recently reported an issue of not being able to access the servers in SQL cluster across remote access VPN located in data center (B). However, those servers are accessible from data center A, C and within B itself and others servers in data center B were accessible through remote access VPN.

As their remote VPN connection terminates at Cisco ASA at data center (A), various teams were involved to find out the cause. The following were checked to identify the cause of this issue:

1. It was ensured that the remote access VPN subnet (10.1.1.x) is added to the crypto-map on the site to site VPN configuration.
2. We also made sure all the servers are connected to the same switch and residing on same VLAN.
3. There was no specific access list (ACL) or firewall or IPS or F5 configuration that was blocking traffic to the database servers from remote access VPN subnet (10.1.1.x).
4. We ensured all the servers have the same IP default gateway configured.

During packet tracing, it is found that the traffic reaches to the ASA at data center A and also reaches data center B. It is found that the traffic was not going back from the servers to the remote access VPN subnet. We realized that there would be something wrong on the SQL cluster servers and started looking in depth on its network configuration. We identified that SQL server’s heart beat NIC was configured with the IP address of 10.0.0.x with a subnet mask of 255.0.0.0 (/8) allowing to have 16777214 hosts where only 2 IP addresses are needed for heart beat. So, all the incoming traffic from remote access VPN was forwarded to the heart beat NIC on the SQL servers and not going back to the remote access VPN ASA.

Having a subnet mask of 255.255.255.252 on SQL servers heart beat network would have allowed it to have only two IP addresses that are needed for heartbeat on the SQL cluster. As it is a production SQL network, we did not want to change the heart beat network’s IP address or subnet mask. As an alternative workaround, we used persistent route in Windows 2003 to configure the remote access VPN traffic to reach the correct NIC and gateway. A helpful article on windows 2003 routing can be found here. Once we added the persistent route, the remote access VPN users were able to access the SQL servers.

Lesson’s learned:

1. Make sure you aware of all the network addresses and subnets involved in all the locations.
2. Assign a subnet mask for the required number of host addresses.