18702 North Creek Pkwy. #208Loading
Volume 4, Issue 4 - April, 2009 - © 2009 by Moose Logic, All Rights Reserved
Cover Story: The Moose Logic Economic Stimulus Plan
Product Spotlight: Freedom9 Internet Content Recorder
Thomas Jefferson Trivia
Tax Time Humor
Moose Logic Coming Events
April Recommended Reading
(Moose Views is a monthly newsletter prepared by Moose Logic to bring you information and tips on maintaining a trouble-free network)
The Moose Logic Economic Stimulus Plan
(More Ideas for Cost Savings)
What do you do when your servers are approaching three years old, and the extended Warranty you bought is about
to expire? Many three-year-old servers are perfectly adequate, and could probably run for another couple of
years...but if something does go wrong, you may find it difficult to find spare parts.One option is to purchase an extension of your manufacturer’s Warranty. Our experience is that in most cases you can extend the Warranty for another couple of years for less than $1,000. Then, if the hardware breaks, it’s up to the manufacturer to come up with the necessary parts to repair it.
If you do need to add or replace servers, don’t overlook the possibility of purchasing used equipment! When economic times get bad, some companies don’t make it, and their equipment shows up on the secondary market, including eBay. In many cases you can pick up servers that are only a couple of years old, still under Warranty, for significantly less than the cost of new equipment. We’ll even help you procure it, and test and certify it for you.
Some manufacturers offer remanufactured equipment, such as HP’s “Renew Program,” which offers the same Warranty on remanufactured servers as they offer on new servers.
But, you say, that still means that you’re running business-critical workloads on servers that are 3+ years old, and clearly the risk of failure is greater than it would be on a new server.
That’s true—but consider this: For a long time we have depended on something called RAID, which stands for “Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks,” to protect our data against loss if a single disk drive fails. We believe that, by leveraging XenServer (which, by the way, is now free), you can implement a “Redundant Array of Inexpensive Servers.” (Do you think that we can get “RAIS” to catch on as a standard industry acronym?)
If you have individual workloads running directly on 3-year-old servers, and a server fails, that workload is down until you repair or replace the server. Even with an extended Warranty, that could take a few days. But if your workloads are running on a pool of XenServers that was designed with some excess capacity, and a server fails, the workloads running on that server are only down for as long as it takes to re-start those servers on the other XenServers in your pool.
Personally, I feel much more comfortable running my critical workloads on aging equipment if a server failure only results in a five minute outage as opposed to a two day outage.
Now, to really make the “RAIS” concept work, you also need shared storage, so that all of the XenServers in your pool can get to where the virtual guest server files reside. But we’ve got some ideas there, too.
DataCore’s SANmelody product can turn any Windows Server into a powerful iSCSI “disk server” storage node. In several cases, we’ve been able to re-purpose customers’ existing systems as SANmelody storage nodes. We recommend a pair of SANmelody nodes, with your data replicated between them, so that the storage nodes themselves don’t represent single points of failure.
SANmelody includes advanced features such as:
- Snapshot software
- Thin Provisioning
- Asynchronous IP replication (that can get a copy of your most critical data off-site to another SANmelody node)
- Synchronous mirroring between a pair of disk server for local high availability
- Performance acceleration by using the server’s local RAM for I/O read and write caching to improve application response
Product Spotlight: Freedom9 Internet Content Recorder
Hopefully all of our readers have a formal Internet “acceptable use policy” for their businesses. The first step toward avoiding abuse and preventing legal problems is to make sure that employees know what is expected of them. But often that still isn’t enough.
Some of you are bound by various regulatory requirements to retain email for a specific amount of time. You may also find that the same regulations require you to capture and retain Instant Messaging (IM) traffic, and Web mail—so users can’t circumvent your email content and archive policies by using their Hotmail or Gmail accounts.
But even if you aren’t legally required to retain messaging traffic, it’s still a good idea, and can literally mean the difference between winning and losing a lawsuit. And, no, we are not just talking about email.
You may have heard that President Obama’s White House staff has been told that they may not use IM. Why? Because, as Reginald Brown (a former associate White House counsel during the Bush administration) observed, the White House lawyers “come out of a law firm environment and know how onerous e-discovery has been for clients.”
But if you’re not up on the latest e-discovery issues, you’re not alone. According to a post on the calattorneysfees.com Web site, LiveOffice released some findings a couple of years ago that were based on a national survey that revealed (quoting from the post):
- “53% of 400 IT Managers and consumers admitted that they were not in position to meet federal court discovery requirements and 52% did not have an “e-discovery plan” prepared by legal counsel, despite the fact that 63% had been required to produce emails during the course of litigation;
- “28.9% of the responding managers/ consumers were not even aware of federal procedural discovery obligations; and
- “Almost a third of the respondents were unable to produce any emails that were over one year old, likely due to document purging policies.”
One of the axioms of management is that you can’t manage what you can’t measure. If you care about the productivity impact of non-business Internet use, you need a way to measure it or you don’t have a prayer of managing it.
The Freedom9 Internet Content Recorder goes beyond simple email archiving. It can actually capture records of HTTP (Web surfing), SMTP, POP3, IMAP, IM, Web Mail, FTP, P2P, and TELNET content. If you want, it can simply track the URLs that are visited on the Web, or it can capture a snapshot of the actual Web page. It can also block things like IM and P2P traffic if you simply don’t want that traffic on your network.
It will also watch for suspicious activity on the network that might indicate that a workstation has become infected with a virus or worm and automatically block that workstation from reaching the Internet.
For more information on the Freedom9 Internet Content Recorder, give us a call, or visit their Web site.
You may find that it pays for itself in the productivity savings alone!
Thomas Jefferson Trivia
April 13 is Thomas Jefferson Day. (You probably didn’t know that, because we don’t get the day off!) Test how much you know about one of our most influential Founding Fathers with this trivia quiz (answers below):
- Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, but he had originally asked someone else to draft it. Who was that?
- Which college did Thomas Jefferson found?
- True or false: Thomas Jefferson’s wife, Martha, died from complications from childbirth.
- Thomas Jefferson had two vice presidents. Who were they?
- True or false: Thomas Jefferson died on July 4th.
- There was only one state added to the Union during Jefferson’s eight years as president. Which state was it?
- In 1802, Jefferson authorized the first United States military academy. Where is it located?
- How much did Jefferson pay for the Louisiana Purchase?
- Jefferson grew his favorite vegetable in his garden at Monticello. What was it?
- Jefferson’s inauguration was the first to take place where?
Tax Time Humor
Ah, Spring...when the green returns to the grass, the trees, and the IRS. Here are a few quotes to help you lighten up:“Next to being shot at and missed, nothing is really quite as satisfying as an income tax refund.” - F. J. Raymond
“Why does a slight tax increase cost you two hundred dollars and a substantial tax cut save you thirty cents?” - Peg Bracken
“There is only one thing worse than the flu season—the tax season. You can recover from the flu” - Anonymous
“The only difference between a tax man and a taxidermist is that the taxidermist leaves the skin.” - Mark Twain
“Isn’t it appropriate that the month of the tax begins with April Fools’ Day and ends with cries of ‘May Day!’” - Rob Knauerhase
“Intaxication (n.): Euphoria at getting a tax refund, which lasts until you realize it was your money to start with.” - Anonymous
“Income tax returns are the most imaginative fiction being written today.” - Herman Wouk
“America is a land of taxation that was founded to avoid taxation.” - Dr. Laurence J. Peter
“The hardest thing in the world to understand is the income tax.” - Albert Einstein
“The difference between death and taxes is death doesn’t get worse every time Congress meets.” - Will Rogers
Answers to Jefferson Trivia Quiz
- John Adams
- University of Virginia
- True
- Aaron Burr and George Clinton
- True
- Ohio
- West Point, New York
- $15 million
- The English pea
- Washington, DC
