This week I am getting up close and personal with a  new addition to our fleet of computers, the famous (or infamous, depending on your point of view) Apple iPad.

I have several reasons for doing this:

1. I love my iPhone 3GS with IOS4 and I am excited to see if I will fall in love with a larger HD version of it. More is better when it comes to screen size right?
2. Many of our clients (large and small) are either interested in, or have already decided to support iPads in their IT environment. And many of those who haven’t already decided to support them are feeling huge pressure from their users to provide some level of support.
3. Honestly, my biggest reason for taking this on is that I am a huge geek and love to tinker with new technology to see how it might enhance my life.  If it doesn’t make my life better in some way, then it will end up collecting dust on a shelf or sold on eBay.

Even though the iPad has been out for a while, I wanted to share my unbiased, honest opinion from an IT consumer who also happens to be a technician and consultant.  It might interest you to know that I am a PC and a MAC (and Linux and iPhone and…) – I look at all of these as wonderful tools, and I keep them all in my toolkit and consider which one to reach for depending on the the job at hand.

My first experience with the iPad involved buying one and I grade this experience as a D-.  I simply do not like to purchase a computer online. I want to go see one, touch it, feel it, buy it and take it home.  I visited the Apple store a half-dozen times, and, after not being able to do that (because they were perpetually out of stock), I decided not to buy one.  But after six months or so, I gave in and decided to take Apple up on their standard offer to place my order online. I purchased a 16GB Wi-Fi + 3G model and an Apple iPad Case for $629 and $39, respectively, expecting to have an iPad in my hand in a couple of days. (And I would have, if FedEx hadn’t kept trying to deliver it to my office after hours when no one was there to accept it…but that’s another story.)

The case promises to protect your iPad and be a convenient stand.  My first observation is the case looks like its worth maybe $7 and while it does offer some amount of protection it is a terrible stand.  So my first impressions are not all that great regarding the purchase and the case.

How do I feel about the device itself?  I am going to save the juicy details for my next posting but I will say that after nearly 24 hours I am highly impressed with some features and functions and highly unimpressed with some others. Please stay tuned as I share my experience – I am going to be brutally honest and would invite you to share your thoughts and tips. I may miss some things that you think are important, and would appreciate your tips and observations, both pro and con. Hopefully we can learn from each other how to make this exciting device sing!

I am a big fan of Storage Area Network (“SAN”) technology. SAN technology offers high performance, highly flexible storage for Physical and Virtual Systems and is particularly valuable to empower advanced features for virtualization solutions such as VMWare, XENServer, and Hyper-V Virtual Hosts to name a few. 

The moral of this story is that you need to know that SANs have some very different management requirements compared to traditional Direct Attached Storage (“DAS”).  Many if not most IT Staff in small to medium size organizations are most familiar with throwing hard disks into physical servers in single or RAID configurations.  Now that they are are purchasing and deploying SAN technology we find that many problems occur if they do not fully understand how to implement and manage these new beasts. 

I would suggest that the difference between DAS and SAN technology is similar in spirit to the difference between a passenger car and a high performance race car.  Most passenger cars are designed to be slower and more forgiving than race cars, if you get into trouble it’s much easier for the average driver to recover.  Race cars will do many things that passenger cars won’t, but if you push them too far you will require very specific skills to recover or you will spin out of control.  SANs are in my opinion similar to this analogy, they will do many things that DAS won’t but if you don’t design and manage them properly you may quickly find yourself in spinning out of control. 

Here are a couple of things you need to know.

1. Most popular SAN’s offer some impressive features such as “Thin Provisioning.”  Thin provisioning is one of those features that you will absolutely love, that is, until you don’t.  Thin Provisioning is a feature that allows you to provision gobs of storage – more, in fact, than you actually have – to Physical and Virtual Systems.  For example, you might have a SAN with 2 terabytes of physical storage, but then “provision” 10 individual 2 terabyte “volumes" and present them to your physical and virtual servers.  Your servers will see this as a combined total of 20 terabytes of storage. This is great but requires you to be very careful.  The reason is that you have offered 20 terabytes of “Virtual Storage” but of course you really only have 2TB of actual or “physical” storage.  So while your systems believe there is 20TB of available storage you have to insure that you do not attempt to put more than 2TB of physical data on this system or bad things will happen. 

   What bad things? Well in most cases once you fill up the physical space the volume will become unusable.  You must make sure you carefully monitor the system and pay close attention to it so that if you start reaching capacity, you’ll know in time to do something about it.  Our own SANs alert us when total available free space reaches 20%.  We have from time to time been between 70% and 90% utilization of our total capacity, and while everything is running just fine we know we have to watch this carefully.  If we hit 100% (intentionally or otherwise), the result could be catastrophic: the storage could immediately shut down and the recovery might not be quick. 

   This happened to a client last week. They started a backup, and when they realized that this was causing one of their thinly-provisioned SAN volumes to fill up to capacity, they immediately stopped the backup and deleted the data.  Unfortunately this caused the volume to fill to 100% and immediately shut down.  Fortunately this volume was mirrored to a second SAN and since there was a little more room on the mirror volume the workload actually stayed online until we could assist the client in recovering from this problem.  If the mirrored side had filled to 100% as well, the result would have been an immediate failure of a critical SQL server workload. 

   The client didn’t realize that copying all this backup data to a Windows Server VM would fill up the SAN volume, nor did they realize that simply deleting that data from the VM would not necessarily delete it from the SAN.  We were able to configure a new volume and replace the full half of the mirror with an empty volume, but only because their was some un-provisioned space available to use for this purpose.

2. And that brings me to my second point – which is that deleting data from a Physical or Virtual server that is using SAN storage may not in many cases free the physical space on the SAN.  Again, DAS is like the passenger car, if you over-commit your storage you can simply press the brake (a.k.a. delete key) and recover immediately. With SAN storage it is common that once the space is committed you may have to perform specific tasks to free up this space.  This task might require special tools or utilities, or even require adding more physical disks.  In extreme cases it may require that you remove and recreate the over-committed SAN Volumes, and that is time consuming and painful.  In this scenario an ounce of prevention is worth a hundred pounds of cure. 

   We have been running our SAN over-provisioned for years with no ill affects or degradation in performance…but we know we are “on the bubble” and we carefully monitor and maintain this situation.

So please be aware that SAN technology is wonderful, but its important to learn some new skills to keep the systems performing their best.

This is my second test of a Blog Authoring tool or as this one is called a “Blog Entry Poster” for the Linux Gnome Desktop Environment. This post is uploaded to our WordPress blog site using Gnome Blog Entry Poster on a Sabayon Linux machine.

I have only tried two Blog Authoring tools, and so far I like them both. Windows Live Writer is a fine product with a nice array of features and Gnome Blog Entry Writer is a simple app that lives in the Panel on my Sabayon Linux desktop. It’s spartan (or better yet it “has a simple elegance!”), but it does at least have a spell checker, the single most important feature I would say! Both of these applications make it easy to send off a blog post from my desktop and are a breeze to use!

Windows Live Writer worked so well it brought a tear to my eye!  (phrase farmed from www.centernetworks.com/wordpress-desktop-blogging). 

Today I am looking for ways to use technology to improve my life!  Actually now that I think of it I do that most every day!  I find that if I provide myself the right working environment, so that I enjoy working on something, then the whole process is improved, AND I have more fun doing it! 


It might sound like i am trying to justify going out and buying an iPad, but actually I am happy to simply download a free app and save my money!  Besides I have a lovely tablet that I have been using for five years. In fact it has been the only thing that made my MAC friends envious! 

Several years ago after several family events where the topic seemed always switch to “look how cool my new MAC is”, I pulled out my Motion Tablet and started writing on the screen and as they looked on my handwriting turned to text and the same thing happened when I started speaking to it.  They were like “Dang you can do that with WinDOZE and i was like “Nah, this is x64-Vista baby!”. 

So today I went searching for Blog Authoring Tools and here is my first test.  I am writing this blog entry today using Windows Live Writer, and so far, I am reasonably impressed and the fun level is pretty good. 

My next endeavor if I have time before my XENServer 5.0 to 5.5 Upgrade this evening is to try a a Blog Authoring tool on one of my Linux Desktops.    (Testing one two three……..) 

I am a big fan of virtualization. My feeling is that many – if not most – workloads in small to medium sized enterprises should be running as Virtual Machines on Virtual Servers. BUT please be very, very careful how you build those systems!

The truth about virtualization is that it is a platform with which you can provide a highly flexible computing environment. This includes a ton of wonderful features and benefits. But, before you go trip over your pants leg, here is a tip: highly available virtualization environments do sometimes fail! (Sooner or later, everything does.) So my recommendation is to be very careful in designing and protecting your HA solutions – provide two or more of everything. Virtualization technologies will save you boatloads of money if you build them right, so don’t scrimp on the details!

So here are my simple rules:

1. Provide two or more Virtualization Hosts. Make sure they’re sized such that if one should fail, you have the capacity on the surviving host(s) to restart any critical workloads that are affected by the failure.
2. Shared storage (e.g., a SAN) is a necessity for “Live Motion,” which allows you to move running virtual machines from one host to another, either to balance the workload or to unload a host so you can perform maintenance on it. It’s also what enables you to restart critical workloads on a surviving host if one should fail. But to keep the SAN itself from becoming a single point of failure, you should provide at least two SAN nodes that are configured to replicate your data.
3. Back up your data and your VM’s using tools that allow both images and folder based backups. When recovering from a catastrophic failure, restoring a server image is often the fastest way to get things running again – but you don’t want to go to the trouble of restoring a complete server image if all you need are a couple of files. So a schedule that encompasses both kinds of backups is best.
4. Make certain that you get data and server images offsite religiously. Rule #1 for Disaster Recovery / Business Continuance is to get the data out of the building.

These simple rules allow for a significant amount of reliability and flexibility. Even with inexpensive hardware and software (there are a number of excellent software products that are free to use), your systems can continue to run or be easily restarted within minutes of hardware failure. In many cases even the total loss of two servers (one virtualization host and one SAN node, for example) would be a minor event in terms of its impact on operations. If you are religious about taking your data and image backups offsite your entire system could be up and running within a day even if you were not able to get to your main location for some reason.

Since a virtualized infrastructure is so resilient, you can afford to use computer systems that are not necessarily top-of-the-line, but you can’t afford not to build it right. A long-time customer (you know who you are) once told us, “The worst thing I could do would be to spend $25,000 on my new systems when I should have spent $30,000.” The dollar amounts aren’t the important thing here – it’s the concept that when you cut corners on something, the chances are high that sooner or later it will come back and bite you. You’ll never be sorry if you take the time and effort to make sure you do it right.

Welcome to the Moose Logic Blog!  There are many reasons why we launched this forum.  We want to provide information here that will be of value to you in terms of making your businesses better, making your jobs easier, and maybe even making your personal lives more fun and fulfilling.  And we hope that as you participate in the discussion here, you will help us do these things.  But we also hope that, by providing you with another way to communicate with us, you can help us get better at what we do.

Recently we participated in a Customer Satisfaction Survey with Microsoft.  This survey is one of many requirements we must fulfill in order to maintain our Microsoft Gold Certified Partner Status.  (Not that we’re complaining – there is nothing bad about doing a survey and getting feedback from your customers, and we appreciate the money and effort that Microsoft expends to make this available to us.) Being able to hear what people have to say about you is one way – and perhaps the best way – to improve. This particular survey is conducted by a third party and as such we don’t see the individual responses, only the overall averages for each category.

We do highly value the findings and spend numerous hours attempting to understand what these ratings actually mean.  We have been told by the company that produces these surveys that we ranked well above the industry averages in every category. Yet, we are mostly concerned with are the items we didn’t score 100% in.   So what this tells us is that we are better than average but we are not the best – and we are not satisfied with doing a “pretty good” job overall; frankly there is room for improvement.

Here are some of our key takeaways from this survey:

1. Quality of products – We pride ourselves in specializing in the absolute best technology products available, yet this is one of our lowest scores, are there recommendations on additional products we should offer?
2. Quality of Support – We know we had some struggles last year and some of this has been addressed.  Our score of course is reflective of these issues and we look forward to the next survey to see if our number in this area improves.
3. Our lowest score was “Value Received.” We find this a concern as one could argue that this is the most critical metric we can measure.  Our most important concern is that our clients receive tremendous value from working with us, so what do we need to do to improve on the “Value” you receive from working with us?  Okay, I know one could argue that if we worked for free that might improve our “Value” but of course we all understand that if we are not able to maintain a viable business then; 1) We won’t be here for long and 2) the quality of our work would not be up to acceptable levels.
4. 3 categories with 100% – Wow! I can’t thank everyone enough. To have many people take the survey and still come out with 100% is amazing. Funny that the other categories are not 100%, including “value received,” but you’d still buy from us again, recommend us to others, and rate “satisfaction” at 100%. The only conclusions I can come to is that our clients are happy and loyal and for that, thank you all.

Despite our best efforts this year to provide the best experience when buying, requesting support, or offering quality products, we see that we still have lots of room for improvement, and we need your feedback to help us improve. We hope that the Moose Logic Blog will give us another feedback channel – one that is more immediate than an annual survey. Please let us know how we can do better.

Finally, THANK YOU to all who participated, and thanks to everyone that has helped Moose Logic get to where it is today.  Please know that we welcome your input and will listen and learn from you.