Beware The Utility Pole

by Scott Kantner, November 2nd, 2011 in CTO

Winter served early notice this past weekend in the Northeast. The official family measuring device, an heirloom yardstick with the name of my father’s business on it, recorded close to 10 inches of October snow before utility power failed.


Within an hour, our broadband connection followed suit, after which we arrived back to my mother’s future – a world with no electricity or telecommunications. It’s actually a very quiet and peaceful place, but gets old quickly. Firing up our backup infrastructure catapulted us back to the 21st century with heat, water and light, but with no data service and little I could do about it. This, faithful reader, is the Achilles Heel of cloud computing. Read more »

Know Your Clouds

by Scott Kantner, August 5th, 2011 in Cloud Computing, CTO

Unlike the founding of the Internet, where the name Al Gore seems to always come up, trying to determine who coined the term “cloud computing” is it bit more elusive. Regardless of origin however, we’ve reach the point where standardizing on a set of cloud terms will help bring more clarity to discussions both in our shops and with vendors. Having some basic cloud definitions in mind will help you understand and classify the growing number of cloud offerings in the market, whether they make sense for you, and what you should expect a cloud provider to deliver.

Whenever I hear someone say “cloud could never work in my business,” I always listen carefully for the reason because more often than not, there’s a very narrow definition of cloud lurking beneath it. There are certainly situations where cloud does not fit, but my main concern when working with clients is always to make sure they arrive at a conclusion with the right facts in hand. Having a common understanding of the basic terms is always a good place to start. Read more »

Why the Public Cloud May Not Be Right For You

by Scott Kantner, July 29th, 2011 in Cloud Computing, CTO

A couple of days ago I noticed the noise level on Twitter about Google Docs downtime was a bit higher than usual. Ironically, I happened to be reading about Microsoft’s Office 365 offering and Google’s slinging mud at it at about the same time. An old pot calling the new kettle black, it seemed to me. Both MS and Google are making grand assumptions about your business that may not be true for you.

If you’re thinking about moving your critical apps to a public cloud, there are some important common sense issues in play that the providers are in a bit of denial about, somewhat in a Scarlet O’Hara sort of way.

Read more »

Mac OS X is Not a Tame Lion, and Why That’s Good for You

by Scott Kantner, July 25th, 2011 in CTO

Narnia fans are well acquainted with the phrase “He’s not a tame lion…but he is good” referring to Aslan, who represents Jesus Christ in the Chronicles of Narnia series. Lion is certainly not the Second Coming, but after performing, or should I say experiencing, the upgrade process on a couple of machines, I do think Apple has taken their “It Just Works” theme to a new level. A silent earthquake hit the software industry yesterday, but it wasn’t Lion itself. While most folks will neither notice nor care, the big turning point that occurred yesterday was in the way that Lion was delivered.

Electronic distribution of software is not a trivial undertaking. I spent a good portion of the 90′s doing it in enterprise environments, and it’s a thankless world of vexing technical challenges, hundreds of variables, and a lot of long nights. Today the Apple App Store does it so well that we don’t even stop to consider what’s going on behind the curtain to make it happen. This turns out to be a Very Good Thing for both Apple customers and eventually, non-Apple customers alike. Read more »

3 Reasons Why Your DR Plan Will Fail

by Scott Kantner, July 14th, 2011 in Disaster Recovery

Last week I made the claim that disaster recovery plans are a lot like Tastykakes – they have an expiration date after which they’re not as effective as you need them to be. Yet even with a perfectly up-to-date plan, you can still find yourself in failure mode if you actually need to declare a disaster. Here are three reasons why:

  1. The plan has never been successfully tested. When did you last do a truly successful, comprehensive end-to-end test of your plan?  Partials don’t count unless you’re planning on a partial disaster. There are lessons learned from every practice event, but is each test getting incrementally better as a result, or is your team getting hung up in the same problems? If it doesn’t work at practice… Read more »

The Ghost of DR Present

by Scott Kantner, July 6th, 2011 in Backup/Restore, Disaster Recovery

“Coal is momentary and coal is costly.” So said Ebenezer Scrooge in my favorite 1984 version of the Dickens classic “A Christmas Carol.”

Scrooge could have easily been talking about disaster recovery plans too, because DR plans are both costly and tragically momentary, relatively speaking. The problem lies in the fact that a DR plan is never really finished. As soon as you hit “Save”, something, somewhere in your organization has probably already changed that affects your newly revised plan. Every DR plan has an expiration date.

Expiry

To further paraphrase Dickens, “There is no doubt that Marley was dead I despise DR planning. This must be distinctly understood, or nothing wonderful can come of the story points I am about to share.”

Most days I would rather chew glass than work on a DR plan, yet it’s something of critical importance that falls to me in our organization, and I take it seriously. As a builder at heart, I like to build something well, one time, and then move on to the next project. Unfortunately, the Ghosts of Disaster Recovery do not permit that. It simply is not the nature of DR Planning. Read more »

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