18702 North Creek Pkwy. #208Loading
Volume 3, Issue 10 - October, 2008 - © 2008 by Moose Logic, All Rights Reserved
Cover Story: In Uncertain Times, What Should You Spend Your IT Budget On?
Halloween Fun Facts
New Citrix Product: Branch Office Repeater
This Month in History
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)
In Uncertain Times, What Should You Spend Your IT Budget On?
The economic landscape has changed dramatically since our last issue! At the moment, and with a few obvious exceptions, the Pacific Northwest seems to be doing better than many other areas of the country, but there is no question that there is uncertainty on everyone’s mind.So, in times like these, what should you spend your IT budget on? This may surprise you, but I believe that the answer is no different than it is during the good times: You should spend your money on things that will make your business better.
Some of us love technology for its own sake. That’s why we’re in this business. But we also believe that PCs, servers, and applications are fundamentally just tools that you use to either take cost out of your business, drive more revenue, or meet regulatory compliance requirements. And what you really want and need is for the darned things to just work. When you pick up the telephone, you expect to hear dial tone. When you log onto your computer, you expect your information and applications to be at your fingertips.
So here are some of the ways we use technology to make our customers’ businesses better:
Predictable Support Costs
Wouldn’t it be nice to know what it’s going to cost you to keep your critical systems running in 2009? Our MooseGuardTM Gold and Platinum customers know, because for a fixed monthly fee, we’re monitoring their systems on a 7 x 24 basis, and if a critical issue crops up, the work effort to fix it is covered. So we’ll be doing everything we can to make sure critical issues don’t crop up (which is really what you want, anyway)!
Reduce Telecom Costs
Here’s an axiom to remember: You only buy hardware once, but bandwidth costs go on forever! For over a decade, that’s been one of the driving forces behind the Citrix product line.
XenApp (formerly Presentation Server) reduces bandwidth consumption by letting applications live and run on Terminal Servers in your datacenter, with only keystrokes, mouse movements, and screen updates traversing the communications link between a Terminal Server and a remote client device.
XenDesktop allows you to provide the same level of access to a Vista or Windows XP PC running (typically on a XenServer virtualization platform) in the datacenter.
WANscaler and the new Branch Office Repeater use a variety of compression, caching, and optimization techniques to squeeze more traffic over less bandwidth with better performance.
Reduced Storage Costs
Traditionally, every server in the datacenter had its own local hard disks. But as the environment evolves, some servers need more storage that others. What do you do when a server runs out of storage space, and it doesn’t have room to install more hard disks? That server over there may have plenty of free space, but it doesn’t help me if this server is running out!
Not many years ago, so-called Storage Area Networks, or “SANs,” cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Today you can implement an iSCSI SAN for not much more than the cost of a new server. Then you can allocate storage from one consolidated storage pool to the servers that actually need it, instead of overbuying storage for every single server in an attempt to make sure that you don’t run out.
And if you do have a SAN, and you’re looking at some kind of desktop virtualization, you need to be looking at the Citrix Provisioning Server (which is included with some versions of XenDesktop). With most “VDI” (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) deployments, every single virtual PC is consuming storage space on your SAN. If your standard “C:” drive is, say, 20 Gb, and you have 50 virtual PCs, there goes a terabyte of SAN storage. With Provisioning Server, all 50 virtual PCs boot and run from a single read-only image, saving you 980 Gbytes of SAN storage.
Reduced Desktop Support Costs
If you follow the trade press at all, you already know the benefits of server virtualization: fewer physical servers to manage, better utilization of the hardware you have, lower power consumption which also leads to reduced cooling costs, etc. We’ve already reached the “tipping point” - according to Gartner, more than half of the new servers deployed this year will be virtualized.
Better Remote Access (which means more productive employees)
This has been another key value proposition for Citrix for over a decade: secure, reliable access to the information and applications you need to do your job from anywhere, over any connection, with just about any kind of client device.
How can we help you make your business better?
Halloween Fun Facts
The pumpkin, a staple of the Native American diet, has been growing in the
Americas for the past 5,000 years. The pumpkins we know are orange and usually weigh between
15 and 30 pounds, but they can also be white or yellow and can tip the scales at as much as 200 pounds.A variation of trick-or-treat may have originated in Ireland, where a bowl of special mashed potatoes mixed with cabbage or kale was traditionally served on All Hallows Eve. Hidden in the bowl of potatoes were several trinkets that diners would find served up to them in the potatoes. If one found a ring, he or she would be married within the year. A thimble or a button meant that the person would never marry. A horseshoe would mean good fortune and a coin meant that person would be rich.
Did you know that Halloween is second only to Christmas in holiday spending? Halloween has turned into one of the major retail periods in the United States. The average consumer spends almost $65 on the holiday, with total spending reaching over $5 billion.
For children, the top three favorite costumes are princess, Spider-Man, and pirate. For adults, the top three are witch, pirate, and vampire.
New Citrix Product: Branch Office Repeater
Exactly a year ago, in the October, 2007, edition of Moose Views, we discussed the Citrix WANscaler appliance.
Now Citrix has done something that’s groundbreaking: they have come up with a software version of the WANscaler that will run on a Windows Server OS, and bundled that with a copy of Windows Server 2003 R2 on a 1U appliance.
Today, IT Administrators are often torn between the desire to remove all the servers from branch offices in order to reduce support costs, and the worry over what happens to the branch office if the Wide Area Network (WAN) link goes down.
The Branch Office Repeater is the ultimate solution to this conundrum. In a single, 1U appliance, you get:
- File and Print Services
- Active Directory Domain Controller—meaning that (1) you have an off-site copy of your Active Directory database, and (2) your branch office PCs have a local authentication point.
- Key services such as DNS and DHCP
- Optional ISA Server functionality for Web caching.
- All of the protocol optimization, compression, acceleration, and caching of a WANscaler appliance.
- Compatibility with management tools such as Microsoft’s System Center Operation Manger.
- Local staging point for streamed applications.
The solution is to push the application packages out overnight, cache them locally on the Branch Office Repeater, then stream them from there to the workstations in the branch office.
Working with a WANscaler appliance at headquarters, the Branch Office Repeater can increase performance over the WAN by as much as 30X. How?
TCP/IP by its nature will start slow, and speed up until it begins to experience packet loss. Then it will back off and gradually speed up again. The higher the latency on the WAN circuit, the slower the recovery time. If you were to graph this, it would be a classic “sawtooth” waveform.
So the first way that a WANscaler helps is that it “fills the pipe” and eliminates the unused bandwidth between the peaks of the “sawtooth.”
The second way it helps is through an auto-optimized multi-level compression engine that will automatically adjust to the line conditions.
The third way is through eliminating the “chattiness” of protocols like the Common Internet File System (CIFS), which comes into play whenever you browse a directory across the WAN, or drag/drop or copy/paste a file, or open a file from a remote directory. Actual tests across a simulated T1 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, was around half a second.
Finally, acceleration of the ICA protocol (which isn’t easy, because it’s already compressed) is currently in Beta testing, and should be released soon.
The Branch Office Repeater starts at just $5,500.00 MSRP.
This Month in History
October 1, 1961—Roger Maris breaks Babe Ruth’s single-season HR record
October 2, 1967—Thurgood Marshall sworn in as the nation’s first African American Supreme Court Justice
October 4, 1582—The Gregorian Calendar was established
October 5, 1921—World Series broadcast on radio for the first time
October 6, 3018* —Frodo Baggins attacked by the Nazgul on Weathertop (for you Lord of the Rings fans)
October 7, 1913—Henry Ford starts the world’s first continuously-moving assembly line in Highland Park, MI
October 8, 1871—Mrs. O’Leary’s cow kicked over a lantern in her barn, starting the Great Fire of Chicago
October 9, 1936—Hoover Dam began transmitting electricity to Los Angeles
October 11, 1975—Premier of “Saturday Night Live,” with guest host George Carlin
October 13, 1775—The U.S. Navy established by the Second Continental Congress
October 14, 1947—Chuck Yeager was the first man to fly faster than the speed of sound
October 19, 1982—Automobile executive John DeLorean arrested in Los Angeles on cocaine charges
October 20, 3018*—Frodo reaches Rivendell
October 21, 1797—The U.S.S. Constitution (“Old Ironsides”) launched and christened in Boston
October 23, 1971—Walt Disney World opened in Orlando
October 25, 3018*—Council of Elrond held in Rivendell
October 26, 1881—Gunfight at the O.K. Corral in Tombstone, Arizona
* Third Age of Middle Earth
