When I first heard the term cloud computing, I thought it was just putting your server in a data center and accessing it from anywhere. This is a similar concept, and has its benefits. About a year ago we lost power in our office for about 3 hours. All of our servers were in-house, connected to a big UPS battery backup that lasted all of about 20 minutes. We rely heavily on our servers to report the status and health of our clients’ networks, and to provide remote support and maintenance. It was an awful feeling. I started sending people home where they at least had internet access, but without our servers, it did us no good. It was then we decided we needed to make some changes. We started pricing power generators and special air conditioners. These just weren’t realistic, and still had limitations. We moved all of our critical servers to a datacenter. Redundant power, cooling and internet are just what we wanted to be able to work from anywhere. Even if our office has no power, we can find an internet connection and get to work. Now we host several client servers at our datacenter, so they can have the same benefits.

Comment (0)

A couple of years ago we decided to dive into the world of server virtualization.  This is an amazing technology that allows us to run multiple operating systems on a single server. One server can act like many.  Microsoft servers run better when their tasks are focused. Take a mail server for example.   You wouldn’t want your mail server to also host your data files, database, web site and terminal server.  Maybe you have a program that doesn’t play nice with others.  Before virtualization, you would need to purchase a separate server for each of these tasks to have an ideal environment.  I’ve seen plenty of servers overloaded with tons of applications by clients trying to stretch their server dollar. Heck, I built some of them.  Servers can get expensive, especially when you need several.

Comment (0)

If I’d asked anyone what a thousand gigabytes is called 10 years ago, they’d look at my like I was crazy.  No one could even fathom that much storage. 

A few months ago, Seagate announced the worlds largest desktop hard drive, 1.5 TB.  That TB means terabytes, otherwise known as 1,500 gigabytes, 1,500,000 megabytes, 1,500,000,000 kilobytes, you get the idea.  To put this in perspective do you remember those 5.25" black floppy drives?  It would take 2,343,750 of those disks to equal the size of this new harddrive.  Assuming they are 1/8" thick that would make a stack 292,968 Inches tall (That is 4.62 miles or 24,414 feet).  All this storage has been compressed into a rectangle that is only 1" thick.

That’s a lot of storage.  But is it really?  Do we need that much space on a desktop computer?  Why not?  Storage is cheap compared to what it was just a few years ago.  My first PC had a 10 megabyte hard drive.  That means I could store 10,000,000 characters of text.  Ten million wow!  Sure sounds like a lot until you compare it to todays world-that would barely hold 2 music downloads. 

I was lucky though, most PC’s in the late 80’s didn’t have hard drives at all, just a 5.25” floppy drive.  You’d put in the operating system floppy to boot up, then insert your program floppy to load the program you wanted to run, then insert a data floppy if you wanted to save what you were working on.  All this fit into 640 kilobytes of memory.  Pretty impressive in its day. 

In 1980, a 10 mb hard drive (just the drive, not the computer needed to run it) went for $3400.  Fortunately I got mine used from the university for $50 several years after.  We live in a digital age.  Almost anything can be stored in 1’s or 0’s; music, photos, videos, documents, you name it.  And it all takes up space.  And if its important 1’s and 0’s, like babies first steps on home video, it needs to be backed up, requiring more storage. 

I’m a fan of using a PC as a media hub in the home.  I will store all the kids DVD’s on my PC’s hard drive so we don’t have to worry about scratching or loosing disks.  These movies, uncompressed can take up to 8GB of space each.  With the introduction of Blu-Ray movies, these can take 50GB of space.  While these movies could be compressed, you loose quality in picture and sound.  I prefer to leave them in their native format, I don’t want to loose a single Pixar pixel.  My music is all stored on my hard drive and can be streamed to any room in the house.  Photos going back 10 years since my first digital camera are stored on my hard drive and can be easily brought up on the big screen for slide show night.  We never pull out photo albums anymore, and if it isn’t digitized, it gets lost.  So who needs all that space?  I’m certainly glad to have it.  Who knows, in a few years I may be boasting the benefits of my petabyte drive, amazed I used to fit it all in a few terabytes.

Terabytes in use
•    Wal-Mart's data warehouse in Middletown, Connecticut contains 500 terabytes of data as of 2004.
•    The U.S. Library of Congress Web Capture team has claimed that "as of May 2008, the Library has collected more than 82.6 terabytes of data"
•    Ancestry.com claims approximately 600 terabytes of genealogical data with the inclusion of US Census data from 1790 to 1930.
•    LaCie released the world's first 1 TB external hard drive in early 2004.
•    Hitachi introduced the world's first one terabyte internal hard drive in 2007.
•    In 1993 total internet traffic was around 100 terabytes for the year.  As of June 2008, Cisco Systems estimated internet traffic at 160 terabytes per second.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terabyte
 

Comment (0)

A few months back we had a client’s network compromised by a former employee, stealing information for a competitor.  This network had a high end firewall, an encrypted wireless network, and security measures in place to prevent something like this from happening, yet it still happened. 

It happened because people don’t like to remember a lot of passwords.  I can’t say I blame them, I think we’re all guilty of using the same password all over the place sometimes for years.  Unbeknownst to me, everyone in this company new the boss’ password.  It’s the same password he used on everything, which forced him to let others know what it was so they could do things like configure the security system, login to web sites, setup the phones, etc.  This ex-employee used that password to login to their system after he was released, and downloaded critical data he used to better his position where he was working for a competitor.

I showed him how to change his password after this employee was let go, which he did.  However, putting a “1” at the end of the existing password in my mind doesn’t constitute a password change. 

I can’t stress enough the importance of complex passwords.  Sometimes we will setup a new server for a client who has never had passwords before, and they complain like crazy that I’m forcing them to have a password to sign in, especially complex ones.  To them I say, “wah.”  A complex password must include 3 out of 4 character types: uppercase, lowercase, numbers or symbols.  If you are using a password that doesn’t meet these requirements, I suggest you change it.  Hackers can perform what are called dictionary attacks, where a program will automatically try every word in the dictionary with your username, attempting to get to your data.  Complex passwords aren’t in the dictionary, and are harder to crack with other types of attacks as well. 

If you have a server in your office, changing your password can be easy.  Simply press ctrl-alt-del all at once.  If you see a change password button, click it and follow the instructions.  For machines without a server, the password can be changed in the control panel, under the users section.  It is especially critical for server based networks, as one password could protect access to your machine locally or remotely, as well as access to email or other data. 

Don’t put it on a sticky note underneath your keyboard either. 

Its not difficult to make an existing password meet complexity requirements, just change a lowercase letter to uppercase, through a symbol at the end, and your password becomes complex, and hopefully you can still remember it.  Changing it at least every 6 months or so is not a bad idea either.  Even if you don’t think you’re data is worth protecting, think of the damage it could do in the wrong hands.

Top 7 password mistakes:

Comment (0)