My new mac; converged me?

I finally got myself a new MacBook and it is absolutely fantastic! My trusty old 12″ PowerBook is long overdue for retirement. Even though it is only six years for the past year and a half it have had a DVD stuck in the drive and to be honest the PowerPC just doesn’t deliver the multimedia performance that my web ways require these days. It will be missed…

Luckily Apple understands what I want in my IT equipment. Not only on the hardware side (it is gorgeous!) but also on the software that is installed on the system. It feels so right and it is the kind of stuff that really makes me want to be creative and do stuff. When will I find the time. My first project has to be to import all my photos and music. Then I need to populate my newly acquired web site on www.velasquez.dk It will be great I am sure. Everything just looks better on the Mac.

So now I really feel I have a converged machine. It has got my favourite software for all the home and recreation stuff that I do like photos, web publishing and video editin. It all comes with iLife and for the work stuff I got a very good emulator in Terminal and the MacBook comes with X11 already installed. It is truly a converged system that allows me to live my digital work and home life with ease.

I trying to write some software for my iPhone. Apple provides and entire SDK for doing just that. Following a tutorial I am sure I will have my first “Hello World!” app up and running in now time. I will keep you posted. Hello World!

Converged hardware – virtual hardware

It never fails to make me smile when new “innovative” technology is introduced on the PC server scene. Remember when Citrix desktop revolutionized a whole industry by delivering applications and desktops on remote workstations? UNIX was doing that for a decade before Citrix using X11 and still to this date X is more flexible and easier to use… VMware was cool (and still is!) but mostly because it enables LPAR like functionality on the PC platform. Still it wasn’t really new and still not as integrated as ye old LPAR… or is it?

New VMware software (is it called 3i?) runs from a USB stick or even integrated on the system itself and delivers LPAR functionality for PC servers. Very cool. So converged hardware to me is a PC platform with a build-in hypervisor. I love it!

Converged hardware also include the blade systems with build-in storage. HP has some of those systems out and they seem ideal for closed VMware environments. Perhaps a storage vendor (Hello EMC) will bring a storage box with build-in VMware?

UNIX tribes

Having worked in many different environments I have come into contact with many different administrators. Not being one to stereotype people… well, what can I say. Here are my BOFH stereotypes.

Firstly those who loves UNIX. Those are the xBSD, AIX and HP-UX ‘triebes’. Very efficient folks who gets the work done with ingenious shell scripts that can save the world from a crontab. Have no problems running Windows as long as it saves them some time.

Then there are hard-core Sun tribes. They don’t like anything else than Solaris on SPARC. Very elegant solutions that works perfectly every time. Has nice GUIs and expensive software. Here are some real UNIX snobs.

Then you have the ‘lost boys’ who runs Linux and never wants to grow up. They don’t like UNIX as much as they hate Windows. They will bend over backwards to make Linux run some exotic software and spend hours doing so when it all could have been up and running in 10 minutes on a Windows platform. Linux has a cute logo.

Last you have the Windows admins. Where many of the above are home schooled the Windows crowd have nicely framed certificates and expensive titles that shows they know how things runs in a perfect world where every installation is done by clicking ‘next, next, next, finished’. The Microsoft portfolio includes stuff like a network OS, SQL databases, flight simulators and game consoles.

So there you have it…

What’s up?

The question of if we are up or not can sometimes be a tricky one to answer. Just because your monitoring software says your httpd is running and the database is up does not necessarily mean that all is well in Userland. In fact sluggish response times and or external connectivity problems may cause your services to be deemed down by the users.

To answer the question better and so everybody agrees to whether your services are up or not you will need to develop telemetric parameters that are generally accepted in your company.

It’s a storage storage world

No IT infrastructure is complete without a SAN for consolidated storage services. The importance of storage services are on the rise as more and more infrastructure is virtualized. Software like Xen and VMware transforms our servers and switches from boxes in a rack to files on disks and server deployment or retirement is done by copying or deleting files and without even involving a screwdriver.

Service delivery

When delivering IT services to your customers be they internal or external, it can be very difficult to determine the quality of the products you are providing. Most non-IT companies have little or no knowledge of what is going on in the IT operations department being their patch cables. This even though they are deeply dependent on the services provided.

For whom the bells tolls

When a service crashes and users are effected two things happens: IT staff starts figuring out how to get back to normal operation and users starts calling the IT department to hear what is going on. Having to answer phone calls steals time from getting the service back online and ignoring phone calls keeps users in the dark which is very frustrating.

So what to do?

Do you speak Geek?

Sometimes a little language goes a long way. Users and IT staff belongs to different tribes and have very different languages and dialects. This often results in misunderstanding and confusion. Therefore I have tried to make a small compilation of terms and phrases often heard in user/admin conversations.

Sometimes you can’t make IT on your own

When running an IT operations you soon realize the need for standards and procedures. In order to deliver a high quality IT product every time you have to consider how your processes and standards work together and more importantly how do you make sure that they are enforced. Making your IT operations success visible is also very hard to do. By nature IT services is only noticed when they are not working. If you are just setting out to standardize your IT production there are two pitfalls to be aware of: The actual change and the day to day operations.