Hosting

Availability and Security, you can’t have too much of either.

Yesterday’s Gmail outage http://news.zdnet.co.uk/internet/0,1000000097,39617755,00.htm brought to light the issue that will blight every Cloud Service, what happens if it’s not working. Being in the data centre business for far too long now I used to battle against the ideology of IT Managers for having servers within arms reach, Typically in less than suitable environments. The idea being that if something went wrong they had the ability to fix it.

A fair point. However, the advantages of having an environment specifically designed to ensure that your system stays up and couple that with a managed service where you have teams monitoring and pro-actively managing the platform to ensure it’s available and secure. This has to go hand-in-hand with development teams to ensure that an update to a system won’t bring the system down or in yesterdays case wipe out the whole data centre.

I completely endorse the idea of consuming services rather than investing in an IT infrastructure that needs managing. However, the big question now is, who is providing my service and how secure is my data?
IT Managers who opt down this path must weigh up these considerations as equally as the cost savings they’ll make. What is the impact of a loss of service?

I fear it’s only a matter of time before Microsoft’s Business Productivity Online Services suffers a similar fate. Especially if it’s hosted in those crazy mobile data centers. I like my data centres hosting my data to be completely immobile please.
http://video.msn.com/video.aspx?mkt=en-us&vid=b4d189d3-19bd-42b3-85d7-6ca46d97fe40

So what compensation will those business who suffered yesterday receive?
I went to see a company this week whose e-commerce shop-front was offline for 30 hours causing upto £20k loss of revenue. This is a speciality retailer who can’t afford this unrecoverable loss of income – who can these days? For breaking their SLA’s the hosting company offered standard remuneration of free hosting for every hour lost – why on earth you’d want free hosting after such a horrendous outage baffles me.
But at least he got *something* all those businesses running Gmail yesterday aren’t so lucky only being asked to sign-up for Gmail Labs instead. Asking your customers to upgrade and pay more after you’ve lost their service for half a day may bring in some extra revenue but damages the respectability of Google and a Cloud Computing future.

I'm jumping on the bandwagon of what seems to be typical at this festive time of year, The Diet/Excersise Celebrity DVD.
So, I’m launching My Get-Fit-For-Summer-Workout-Plan.

That’s right Ladies and Gentlemen I’m going to save you from excess Server-Spread brought on by year upon year of single role servers used by long since forgotten projects that your business deemed critical at the time. I’m going to help you shed those pounds of application servers that are only used by a bloke in HR, rid you of the 26 Domain Controllers you have and exorcise (ha !) those demonic database servers that are so idle you sometimes catch them playing solitaire.

Now, I can’t do this for you, but I’ll be with you every step of the way. It’s going to be tough, there’ll be tears (especially from that bloke in HR when you prise away that server of his) but in the end you know that you’ll be mean and lean ready to service your businesses more sensibly than before.

Six little words... which used to mean a chance to boast but now makes you feel very guilty indeed......

How Many Servers Do You Manage?

Be honest with me now ! I’m not just talking about physical servers, you still have to manage those VM’s too...
I wonder what the stats would look like for this question? I think around 30% could answer straight away, 60% would need to look at a spreadsheet or RDP/console config and 10% wouldn’t know. I’m pretty sure that 50% wouldn’t have the correct answer.

This was prompted by seeing a customer this week who wanted to virtualise their infrastructure, all 100+ servers worth. The reason this shocked me was that this wasn’t a huge company, just a medium sized ISV. Building a virtual infrastructure whittles this down to 4 physical servers plus storage, a great saving in tin and associated power/heating costs as well as all those vendor warranties needed.
Great idea but it still leaves them with not only 100+ servers to manage but a VM infrastructure also!! 100+ servers to backup and patch, manage and monitor which takes an awful lot of effort.

The reason they have so many servers is that they host customer servers (running their own developed app) and each customer has its own shiny, new server to themselves. First thing I asked was if their application was multi-tenanted, apparently the newest version was tested and it is. I suggested that it would be a better idea if we began consolidation first before moving to a VM infrastructure. With less servers the VM infrastructure would be cheaper and more importantly the whole infrastructure would be much more manageable.

So, make this your New Year’s resolution. Look at your servers and shed some pounds, you’ll feel much better for it !


Merry Christmas & A Happy (and slimmer) New Year

Hello again !

October brought me the chance to sit alongside DELL, Intel & VMWare for ZDNet’s Breakfast Briefing on virtualisation, and also brought me a virus infection that totally floored me for 3 weeks which scuppered the former invitation. It also brought me a little baby daughter called Daisy who sleeps very soundly and is a wonderful complement to her 3 brothers. I know what you’re thinking – Yes, We do have a telly, but the reception isn’t very good at times.

Back to business. Very busy here, companies obviously seeing data centre hosting as a more sensible way of reducing costs while still providing the services they need. It makes sense. Running kit in-house whilst meeting the business needs of more security and more availability is costly and a pain. Moving the kit to purpose built data centres that will ensure availability and security and still allow you the access you require seems to be the way forward for companies large and small.

Talking of Data Centres, loving this story which is on The Register but was on BBC site the day before... http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/12/03/inverness_data/ which informs us of a super-eco data centre, placed in Inverness and will therefore use less power for its HVAC systems because it’s already blooming cold up there. Wonderful !

I guess it illustrates how competitive the Hosting market is that people have to come up with such mad ideas to differentiate themselves. What about taking the idea that one step further and put a data centre on Ben Nevis.... Obviously better connectivity to TheCloud up there....

It’s seems like a long time since I had a chance to post another blog. We’ve entered silly-season here and there’s sometimes not enough hours in the day.

So, what have I missed? In the 6 weeks since my last blog I’ve read articles talking about the end of SaaS and that Cloud Computing will not take off the ground. If we can only get rid of virtualisation, consolidation or just servers in general my job would be so much easier....

The articles can be found here...
http://resources.zdnet.co.uk/articles/0,1000001991,39466346,00.htm and
http://community.zdnet.co.uk/blog/0,1000000567,10009015o-2000458459b,00.htm#comment20096497

Both articles make some good points, Ignoring the ‘People are Stupid’ comment and with all due respect, I disagree.

You see, fundamentally both Saas and Cloud Computing are very good ideas if properly implemented, managed and secured.
The ability to just consume services and not having to provision and manage yet another couple of servers that fit a sole purpose. What’s the point of that? When you can browse to a secured application and just use the service.
Moving on from this is Microsoft’s Software and Services which expands this principal by adding the service element to software consumption is the next step in this evolution.

Fundamentally this is a really good idea. How many of you know are planning consolidation projects because you’ve found yourselves with 30-40% of your server estate running single roles on decent hardware that isn’t breaking a sweat.
Consolidation and virtualisation are things that you’re all looking at now as there’s a need to reduce server estate, management and overhead. So having some of the services you use available as a service is going to help you achieve this.

As to Cloud Computing the ability to consume Storage and Backup and Desktop services remotely and securely is again fundamentally a good idea as long as it’s secure and managed properly and implemented well.
Those of you old enough to remember mainframes will feel a little justified that this idea is coming back around again.

I’m far too young of course...

IT Security consultants scare me. But I guess that’s their job isn’t it?

I have a very good appreciation for security. Belonging to a company that specialise in Data Centre Hosting, security is an important benefit of our service and we have a lot of both logical and physical systems in place to protect our customers and allow them to sleep soundly.

We were at Infosec in April, my first visit, and found ourselves surrounded by companies selling Firewall, IPS, IDS, Token authenticators or software to protect your data from the nasty, evil people out there. It made me feel a bit uneasy if I’m honest. You see, it’s easier to sell your wares to people who are feeling a little paranoid and generating this paranoia is the bit I’m uneasy about.
Because security isn’t always about having multiple little devices that check each packet in lightning speed before deciding what to do with them. We all know what a complete waste a Firewall is if not properly configured and managed yes?
But when purchasing all these devices to keep the nasties at bay do you ever consider physical security?

The reason I ask is that I’ve recently visited 2 companies that who haven’t really considered the very real need for physical security. You see for every successful hacking attempt, masterminded by evil teenagers from the other side of the world, there’s at least a few computers being stolen – don’t you think?

The first customer really scared me (even more than IT Security consultants). This business holds very sensitive user data and has been doing so for years. This data isn’t part of some nice encrypted SQL database, no, it’s Word Doc’s mostly. Feeling uneasy yet? The worse part of this is that the backup for this data is kept on an external USB harddrive and all this is located in an a Large Garden Shed/Office. My only recommendation to this customer was to get this data somewhere secure and encrypt it that day. I’ve a good feeling it’s still there.....

The other customer, far less scary, just optimistic or uninformed. Wanted to run an online casino platform from his own premises. Fine, no problems. It was a lovely building too. Glass fronted with a nice tint to block out those UV rays. The comms room was at the end of the large open plan office. I asked about physical security.... ‘The comms room is always locked’. Good. Good strong door I noted. Now, I’m not a professional burglar but as I said, I do have an appreciation for security. I looked at the door for a while – good strong door that one. Nice big windows next to it too.
Realistically, if someone was after a server for eBay then it wouldn’t take them long. The upshot of this is that the customer might be very unlucky and they take the database server along with all the customer data.
Do me a favour today, have a think about how long it would take you from the outside of the building to get inside and potentially take away your businesses crown jewels...

Oh my Gosh! Spreading paranoia, scaring people, I've become a Security Consultant !