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Volume 2, Issue 9 - October, 2007 - © 2009 by Moose Logic, All Rights Reserved
Cover Story: Want to Hear Something Really Scary?
10 Best Excuses To Use When Caught Sleeping At Your Desk:
The Citrix Corner—The (Net/WAN)Scaler Products
Moose Logic’s Virtualization Practice Grows!
Halloween Holiday Trivia: I Bet You Didn’t Know...
Survey Reveals Who Has The Most Stressful Profession; Do You Agree?
Moose Logic Coming Events
(Moose Views is a monthly newsletter prepared by Moose Logic to bring you information and tips on maintaining a trouble-free network)
Want to Hear Something Really Scary?
According to a recent Gartner study, 75% of enterprises will, by the end of 2007, be infected by undetected,
financially motivated, targeted malware that evades their perimeter security systems.
If that’s not scary enough, how about this: Fifty percent of companies that suffer a catastrophic data loss go out of business immediately, and ninety percent don’t survive more than two years. And, by the way, only three percent of all data loss is caused by a disastrous event such as a fire or flood. 42% percent is caused by hardware or system malfunction, 32% by human error, 14% by software corruption, and 7% by viruses and malware.
And, depending on what study you read, somewhere between 25% and 33% of computer users, and up to 90% of businesses will suffer some degree of data loss this year.
So what can you do to beat the odds? Here are some things to think about:
You Still Have to Secure the Perimeter
If you’re a large enterprise, you’ve probably got IT professionals whose entire purpose in life is to make sure your network is secure. But if you’re not a large enterprise, you may not have that level of expertise in-house. That’s where we can help.
Moose Logic is a Watchguard Expert Partner. We can recommend a firewall appliance with a Unified Threat Management bundle. UTM goes beyond traditional firewall functionality to actually watch for specific “signatures” or patterns in the data that are indicative of intrusion attempts, and shut them down. It also provides an additional layer of malware protection for inbound mail.
We believe in multiple layers of malware protection. Through our MooseGuardTM filtering service, we can block most viruses and spam before it ever reaches your perimeter. But we still recommend virus filtering at the firewall level, and anti-virus / anti-spyware software on your workstations and servers.
If the nature of your business is such that you need a serious security audit by certified security professionals we can provide those services as well, up to and including penetration testing.
Store Critical Data on Servers
Make sure users are storing critical data on servers, and make sure those servers have some level of disk redundancy. If you’re looking at storage consolidation, we can help there as well. We can help you design a shared storage system that’s appropriate to your business, and that can provide replication of critical data so there is no single point of failure that can cause data loss.
Back Up Your Data
That seems obvious, doesn’t it? But it’s no longer as easy as it sounds. The amount of data that even a small business must back up these days can easily exceed the capacity of a traditional tape drive, and can take so much time that the night isn’t long enough any more to back up all your data. We can help you design a backup system and procedures that are appropriate to your business. Our MooseGuardTM Managed Backup Service can even control the process remotely from our central management server so you never again have to worry about whether the backup job completed properly.
Get Critical Data Out of the Building
There are lots of ways to do this, and the “right way” is going to depend on what level of disaster recovery you need. If your primary data center goes away, how soon do you need to be back in operation (“Recovery Time Objective”)? And how much data is it OK to have lost in the process (“Recovery Point Objective”)? Whatever the answers are to these two questions, we can help you put together a system that meets the business need.
In business, the things that keep us awake at night don’t go away at sunrise on November 1. Moose Logic can help you sleep a little better!
10 Best Excuses To Use When Caught Sleeping At Your Desk:
- They told me at the blood bank this might happen.
- Whew! I must have left the top off the liquid paper!
- This is one of the habits of highly successful people.
- I was just taking a 15-minute power nap like they raved about in the last time-management course you sent me to.
- I was just meditating on the company mission statement and envisioning a new paradigm.
- Actually, I’m doing a Stress Level Elimination Exercise Plan (SLEEP) that I learned at the last mandatory seminar you sent me to.
- Darn! Why did you interrupt me? I had almost figured out the solution to our biggest problem!
- The coffee machine is broken.
- Boy, that cold medicine I took last night just won’t wear off!
- I wasn’t sleeping...I just got done eating a sticky orange and was trying to pick up my contact lens without using my hands.
The Citrix Corner—The (Net/WAN)Scaler Products
Remember this drawing from last month’s issue? We talked then about how Citrix has assembled a family of products that are deployed along the “line of sight” between data centers and end users to insure the successful, reliable delivery of any application to any user in any location. This month we’ll be talking about the NetScaler and WANScaler products, which can be deployed independently, but can also complement each other in certain scenarios.
NetScaler
It is estimated that 75% of Internet users touch a NetScaler on any given day. If you’ve ever done a search on Google or Yahoo, participated in an auction on eBay, or bought a book from Amazon.com, your traffic has passed through a NetScaler. If you are deploying Web applications to your users, customers, or business partners, or planning to, you need to know about NetScaler. Here’s why:
Web applications are notoriously “chatty.” It’s just the nature of the HTTP protocol. If you throw SSL into the picture, you have now placed additional processing loads on your Web servers as they negotiate SSL sessions and encrypt and decrypt the traffic. It’s no wonder that we have performance problems with Web applications.
Traditionally, the solutions have been to buy more bandwidth, buy more Web servers, and maybe buy more point products: an appliance for SSL acceleration, an appliance for compression, an appliance for caching, perhaps an application firewall to protect our Web servers from things like SQL injection attacks and cross-site scripting. The results? We spend a lot of money, we end up with a very complex infrastructure, and we still have performance problems!
NetScaler offers a single solution that can start out with basic load balancing and traffic management, and grow as your needs grow. Need to add caching? Compression? SSL acceleration? SSL/VPN functionality? Global server load balancing between multiple server farms? Just buy the appropriate license key and unlock that functionality. Need high availability—redundant appliances that will automatically fail over? We’ve got that covered, too.
Concerned about meeting PCI requirements for your e-Commerce site? The application firewall can be just another function that you turn on with the appropriate license key.
The bottom line is, well, the bottom line. You only buy hardware once—but bandwidth goes on forever. If you can reduce your bandwidth requirement, that’s a good thing. If you can reduce the number of Web servers you need, which also reduces power consumption, air conditioning requirements, and physical space requirements in your server room, that’s a good thing too. Fewer servers mean less time required to manage them as well.
Increase performance (in many cases up to 5x), while reducing overall costs. What’s not to like about that?
WANScaler
WANScaler is targeted at improving performance for branch office or roaming users. For a branch office, you need a pair of appliances. For telecommuters or roaming users, you need at least one one appliance and the WANScaler Client software. (For multiple branch offices, you would generally have only one appliance at the data center, which would communicate with appliances at the branch offices and, optionally, could handle mobile client users as well.)
WANScaler has an intelligent AutoOptimizer engine that will analyze your traffic and automatically apply the combination of caching, compression, and acceleration that will give you the best performance improvement. Average performance increases can be as high as 30x. It’s also totally transparent, so there is no need for any changes to your current network management tools, firewalls, network services, or applications.
Example: If you’re trying to deploy SharePoint content to users across WAN links, you already know the challenges that can bring. Actual tests across a simulated T1 (1.5 Mbps) link with 1% packet loss showed that WANScaler could reduce the time required to open a 12 Mb Word document from over 4 minutes to only 11 seconds on the very first pass! Second pass performance, which would leverage the caching functionality of the WANScalers, was around half a second.
Tests using a 32 Kbps link with 708 ms latency (simulating a narrow band satellite connection) showed that operations that would normally take as long as 10 minutes (and therefore be unusable for any practical purpose) were completed in only a few seconds.
A large SharePoint deployment also turns out to be a scenario that can benefit from the combination of NetScaler and WANScaler: NetScaler to overcome the “chatty” nature of communicating with the SharePoint server(s) and to provide caching, compression, and acceleration at the data center, and WanScaler to accelerate performance for branch office users.
So if you’re dealing with any of these issues, before you decide to throw more bandwidth at the problem or buy more servers, you owe it to yourself (and your users, and your company) to take a look at the NetScaler and WANScaler appliances. Just give us a call.
Moose Logic’s Virtualization Practice Grows!
We’re happy to announce that we’re now a VMware Enterprise level partner in addition to being a XenSource Gold partner. We’ve also added LeftHand Networks iSCSI SANs to our “virtualization toolbox.” LeftHand’s innovative storage systems are perfect as the back-end shared storage to support your VMware or XenSource host servers. And we’ll be talking about more cool iSCSI technology in the next few months—we’ve got some things waiting in the wings that can make shared storage affordable even for our smaller mid-market customers. So if you’re looking at a server and/or storage consolidation project, we need to talk!Halloween Holiday Trivia: I Bet You Didn’t Know...
- Orange and black are Halloween colors because orange is associated with the fall harvest and black is associated with darkness and death.
- Jack o’ lanterns originated in Ireland where people placed candles in hollowed-out turnips to keep away spirits and ghosts on the Samhain holiday.
- Pumpkins also come in white, blue and green. Great for unique monster carvings!
- Halloween was brought to North America by immigrants from Europe who would celebrate the harvest around a bonfire, share ghost stories, sing, dance and tell fortunes.
- Tootsie Rolls were the first wrapped penny candy in America.
- The ancient Celts thought that spirits and ghosts roamed the countryside on Halloween night. They began wearing masks and costumes to avoid being recognized as human.
- Halloween candy sales average about 2 billion dollars annually in the United States.
- Chocolate candy bars top the list as the most popular candy for trick-or-treaters with Snickers #1.
- Halloween is the 2nd most commercially successful holiday, with Christmas being the first.
- Bobbing for apples is thought to have originated from the Roman harvest festival that honors Pomona, the goddess of fruit trees.
- Black cats were once believed to be witch's familiars who protected their powers.
Survey Reveals Who Has The Most Stressful Profession; Do You Agree?
According to a story by Louise Jaggs, a SkillSoft survey found that the top 10 most stressful professions are:- Information Technology Workers
- Medical or Healthcare Professionals
- Engineering
- Sales and Marketing
- Education
- Finance
- Human Resources
- Operations
- Production
- Clerical
- Workload
- Feeling undervalued
- Deadlines
- Type of work they had to do
- Having to do other people’s work
- Lack of job satisfaction
- Lack of control over the working day
- Having to work long hours
- Frustrations with the work environment
- Meeting targets
