Microsoft Web platform Installer

I happened upon the Microsoft Web Platform Installer 2.0 Beta today: http://www.microsoft.com/web/downloads/platform.aspx and am very impressed by what I found. Recently I started looking into Ubuntu as a web server for delivering a website I wish to develop, the website would contain forums and wikis etc and Linux seems the ideal platform for web dev due to its native open source support from database engines to application platforms.

Wow is all I can say about the effort from Microsoft on the Web Platform installer, it’s very integrated, I installed Wiki’s and blog sites with a click ‘next’ ‘next’ and ‘finish’, my first surprise was seeing a MySQL installer for a product being promoted with the Microsoft Platform installer. All of my requirements were met by products recommended by the installer and couldn’t be easier to install.

On the linux side I have installed Alfresco and a php based forum site but its just not as integrated.

Over the next several weeks I plan to work out what platform I use to provide a web server for my new business project. Linux or Windows, only one can prevail, licensing costs are only a small part of the price to pay so a server license is almost negligible in the greater scheme of things.

Just as a clarification - Alfresco by itself is a great product and a viable competitor to SharePoint server for many tasks, I tested it to determine whether it could deliver what I require and have the look and feel I desire.

Apple Mac mini breakdown

Just found an interesting breakdown of the Apple Mac mini pricing based on the components included: http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Desktops-and-Notebooks/Apples-600-Mac-Mini-Costs-It-Nearly-400-to-Make-Says-iSuppli-163404/?kc=rss

This gives me some belief in Apple as a company, we all know companies are there to make money for shareholders, the fact that an external company can provide information to indicate that Apple's pricing is fair based on the hardware is great news to me.

Cloud computing to fly?

Cloud computing simply becomes another way to fragment and further complicate an already complicated IT infrastructure unless it is done properly and the organisation moving to hosted infrastructure understands exactly what they will receive.

I see Cloud computing being excellent for the SME market where their internal IT resources may not be experts on subjects such as Exchange, Office communications server, Sharepoint etc or the SME has no expertise at all and relies on IT expertise as required from SME IT specialists.

For large companies who are likely to have experienced Windows Server administrators and who maintain very high availability figures for their customer; the benefits of hosted infrastructure are diminished.
Unless there is a cost saving, the larger the company is the better their economies of scale are already and there is more reason to keep systems inhouse with internal IT staff.
Cloud vendors have to make money and as margins tighten, their internal staff to end customer ratio drops; or the vendor offshores the support of the infrastructure, where quality may diminish to the point where the original reason for migrating to the Cloud becomes a moot point.
Once a customer is at this point, what is their return path? Which Cloud vendors are offering data export services? My experience is a vendor will not help a customer migrate from their platform (it is not in their interest to) so what do I do as the data owner?

Desktop applications as they are currently licensed and used are often not suitable for cloud computing and while a user still has a local PC or Laptop with the ability to run all the applications they require locally, the transition to cloud based apps will not be easy.
An OS license may already be consumed by the client pc and if running local applications another license for each application is required, ramping up the cost of providing an economical solution.
If history teaches anything, Citrix was the last great money saver for IT departments and its adoption was not high, many customers had small Citrix implementations inhouse for particular users and applications but very few rolled it out as it was intended - to save money on hardware refresh and desktop management as new PC's still needed to be purchased.

Maybe a hybrid approach will prevail where a customer will purchase hosted email for example with the Outlook client published using Citrix Presentation server or Quest vWorkspace, the Outlook application never actually belongs to the end user but the full functionality of Outlook is available. Specialist Applications like http://www.xero.com or http://www.salesforce.com are well designed for hosted platforms not Visio or a Enterprise Discovery application.

Lastly I believe that only certain tasks are suitable for hosting, hosting a managed desktop for the majority of users I can't see being a viable long term option unless the hardware providing the solution is provided inhouse as some hybrid hosted solutions are now doing.

Organisational Storage considerations

This week I had a chance to spend two days with a proactive and
forward thinking Storage team within a large organisation (I can't
provide the customer name unfortunately).

This customer had over 750 Terabyes of San storage across four EMC
Symmetrix Sans, covering production and BCP copies of all configured
storage.
A real eye opener was the level of duplication inherent in a modern
High Availability (HA) system. In this particular case 4 times the
storage was required - for every Terabyte of usable storage, 3
Terabytes are standing by ready for a disaster. The cost overheads to
maintain 75% more infrastructure must be huge for any company.

Leaving Systems administration five years ago, Sans were just becoming
affordable, NAS devices weren't really featuring and my organisation
was still relying on Raid 5 for most data types and Raid 1 for
databases (including Exchange). HBA's were so expensive that only
selected applications would have been candidates for a direct
connection to storage.

In that scenario, 33-50 percent overhead was required for redundancy
of business systems, granted that no secondary site was configured
with a DR copy of production data; how much is no downtime worth to an
organisation?

Any opinions are welcome, I want to learn more.

--
Sent from my mobile device

Microsoft Bing vs Google

Microsoft Bing was released recently to limited fanfare, some tech sites raved about the quality of results while others had a more of a ‘We’ll see’ attitude. Interesting is that Google appears to be very worried about Bing, not ‘just’ standard worried but really very concerned http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/42847/140/ and I understand why; http://blindsearch.fejus.com/ runs comparative searches across Google Search, Bing and Yahoo and the results are very interesting; the site results are anonymous though it is an Microsoft employees web page.

The searches I ran gave one vote for Bing and one Yahoo and none for Google, which leaves me wondering what formula Microsoft has finally got right in their search algorithms. Onsite with customers earlier this week I had the opportunity to see other IT professionals using Bing search and augmenting the results with a Google search for comparison so Bing is making its way across the tech community.

Personally I believe Microsoft have not got the UI sorted yet, Google search is basically a text search page and contains no distraction, the images decorating; Http://www.bing.com don’t appeal to me, but then Microsoft have a history of over the top images and colours. I prefer the bland Google experience as I go to search - I know exactly where the search box is.

I find the Google search window to be less intrusive, I am not sure of the reasons but the Bing search frame below, jumps out as not being ‘Clean’. The feeling to me as a layman seems to be that Bing is pushing me somewhere (There is no advertising), odd?

Maybe the background image will become Prime advertising real estate, Coca-Cola anyone?

Sort your product out Microsoft?

Finished reading an article on Microsoft and their new free virus scanning software, which is about to come out of beta and realised its just another case of a behemoth company that has no idea of marketing and brand.

Link is here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8095932.stm and in this article Microsoft are talking about the discontinuation of Live OneCare, a Microsoft product that didn’t succeed against Symantec. History is littered with Microsoft technology that doesn’t succeed, yet, time after time Microsoft will try and build a product after x iterations. Microsoft pushed into online markets and search in the 90’s starting with their Microsoft Network, which became MSN, then Live Search and now Bing. Where did that strategy get them? they weren’t fast enough and didn’t understand the market, letting Google capture the search and ad market. Interestingly their loyalty scheme where the vendor and customer get discounts by shopping through adverts, didn’t seem to work either to buy market share from Google.

For a company the size of Microsoft, branding and direction must be difficult, but, humans and especially not the technology led iterations, get used to familiarity, using Yahoo mail or AOL mail because thats the mail client they are used to, rather than move to a better mail solution for example.

Same with favorite web sites, people use Google for search because its familiar and we know what the page will look like every time. When Microsoft come out with a new and improved search, they just wasted the 100s’ of millions of dollars used for marketing their last search brand and its not getting them closer to Google. Google is part of the vocabulary of almost every single human on this planet and it is all because their search was nice and simple, returns relevant results and doesn’t change every two years. Will Bing be part of the internet vocabulary in two years time? lets wait and see - I will wager that there is still a branding change to come, Zune maybe?

A company has to have key proficiencies - this is where all marketing, development and research focus should be placed, not throw money at a challenge to make it work, which incidentally is exactly how Microsoft has made the Xbox 360 as successful as it is.

A straight-out flawed product that MS executives knew was faulty at the time of release - fixed by throwing $ 3 billion US at repairs, if only all companies could be this grossly inefficient and still succeed eventually with customers continuing to support them by buying their products.

The way Microsoft market and sell leaves much opportunity for 3rd party vendors to move in and improve what MS does, but the position is not a comfortable one as MS will always build anything that looks profitable once they have viewed the sales of their niche partners, fair enough - its all competition but generally what MS will build is no match for a third party product and their marketing spin will still shutdown customer spending until Microsoft are ready, ILM 2.0?, Microsoft Systems Center Virtual Machine manager, Microsoft VDI broker etc.

Virtualization to save my company money?

Working for a software vendor puts me in touch with many different customers every day, most looking to save money and looking to the market and vendors to provide them with the product to reduce cost.

Unfortunately vendors want a customer to buy their products which makes them biased and not a wholly reliable / neutral reference.

A market was created a few years ago and touchingly labeled ‘Virtual Desktop Infrastructure’ (or VDI) and at first glance looked to be a huge benefit to any organisation struggling with high IT administrative costs and burgeoning desktop sprawl, but does it?

The historical ‘King of the Hill’ was Citrix who licensed Terminal Services to Microsoft and continues to package Citrix as many feature enhancements over MS Terminal Services alone.

Microsoft Terminal Services with a broker like Quest vWorkspace or Citrix is a solution that reduces the Total Cost of Ownership (or TCO) of Desktop Hardware if deployed intelligently, its easily proven:

Maintaining older desktops for users, reduction in hardware purchases

Centralised application servers, no application breakages for end users, lower support

Centralised management, One IT administrator can do the job of many desktop support engineers

Lower power consumption, older machines tend to require less power (to a point)

Citrix Servers are mid class hardware, not beefy very standard servers

For 80% of an organisation user base, a Terminal server based environment will provide all the applications that are required (MS Word, Excel, Outlook, Internet Explorer, financials).

A single Terminal server can provide applications for 40-50 users with no more than 4 GB ram and a modern dual core processor.

For Virtual desktop virtualization, the whole equation changes instead of the above a single server now requires 32 GB ram to support 50-60 users, significantly more CPU cores are required and as each virtual desktop is an entity in its own right, management becomes only slightly more efficient than actual physical desktops.

Energy costs are substantially more than a TS based solution

Administration is no different to individual desktops

Application deployment relies on whatever deployment technology deployed, effectively desktop application deployment.

Hardware costs for the VMware servers are substantial, Ram and multi-socket servers are vastly more expensive than a commodity dual core server.

Substantial disk space is required for each Virtual Desktop client (10-20 GB per desktop)

One day I will do a cost comparison, For the moment the above is purely my opinion, there is a place for Virtual desktops (20% of a user base) where users require custom applications that may have a specific hardware requirement. But in many cases a TS based solution with the RDP enhancements a product like Quest vWorkspace provides allows a full desktop experience for a Terminal server based infrastructure while allowing Brokering services to Virtual desktops and Application Virtualization from many vendors.

Recession, what is it good for?

Going shopping in the past several months has become a completely different experience to before the ‘recession’, retail parks used to be full on weekends and our local town Basingstoke was heaving with shoppers on both Saturdays and Sundays, shops didn’t discount except for end of season and end of line products.

Recently I have been buying shoes that are ‘actually’ discounted from £100 to £30 because no one will buy them - I use the word ‘actually’ because a ‘dishonest’ feature of United Kingdom retail is the ‘Sale price is not necessarily a Sale price’ trick. Due to a rule that states so long as a product is listed at a different and higher price sometime during the year then that higher price becomes the full retail price, unfortunately the goods are not worth anywhere near that amount.

Very often furniture retailers are having a 50% sale and giving another 10% off the sale price! - now furniture retailers have resorted to interest free for 1-3 years with no payments for 12-24 months so there must be sufficient margin still built into the products.

Anyway I digress, when unemployment lifts by 1-2 percent, there are still a huge majority of people working, for all the people working with mortgages they will likely have had mortgage interest rates decreasing and therefore have more disposable income.

In a normal economy this allows individuals to continue living and spending and following that through into a recessionary environment should still hold true for the majority (after all only additional 1-2 per 100 people are out of work), so what actually happens?

We overspent, times were good and goods were easy to buy and conveniently available so we buy more, we buy gadgets we don’t need and spend on food that we wouldn’t normally buy and we go out for dinner regularly - everyone is happy, retailers and restaurants are making money.

Surely the lesson from the current recession, is, that you should start to live within your means and not give up all luxuries - be sensible, because this spending is what keeps the entire retail sector afloat, which in turn keeps Manufacturing, which in turn keeps research and discovery, mining etc alive.

After all we don’t all live in the US where the military machine keeps a huge portion of the economy within the borders and drives research and development.