What’s IT all about?

If you’re of a certain age then you will probably have seen, and may even have owned, one of these calculators…a Sharp EL-508A. Back in my schooldays in Ireland, they were very popular. And after I met my wife and we moved in together I was pleasantly surprised to see she not only had been the owner of the calculator pictured above, but still had it and used it pretty frequently. In fact, she originally got the calculator in Year 4, so she would probably have been 9 years old, and at the time we met the calculator would have been about 13 year old. Well, that was about 15 years ago, and in the intervening years the calculator has been used pretty regularly.

Until, that is, a couple of months ago when the gradually fading display refused to fire up any more. The general consensus was that it had given up the ghost, it was an ex-calculator. It isn’t the only calculator in the house so there was no overriding need to replace it immediately, and so since then we have left it lying around, loathe to discard it after 28 years of sterling service. Today I picked it up and, being the curious soul that I am, decided to have a peek inside. A bit of a post-mortem, I guess. So I opened it and saw that it was powered by two AA batteries. “Hmmm, I wonder” said a little voice, and so I put a couple of new batteries in, closed the cover, and lo and behold it started working again. Amazing!

I wonder if we’ll get another 28 years out of it? It might become a family heirloom at this rate.

I am a self-confessed technology fan. I shy away from the term geek, pointing at my wife and kids as examples on the ‘normal’ life I lead, but truth be told it’s probably not too shy of the mark. As a result of this bias towards technology, I naturally gravitate towards technological solutions to problems rather than anything else. Sometimes this is the right choice to make, sometimes it complicates matters. More and mroe I am learning that, at times, it’s better to take the simple approach to begin with and build up from there.

One consequence of my constant dabbling in technology is that I am very aware of its propensity to fail. Behind all the glitz and glamour, the promises of doing twice as much in half the time, the snazzy Web 2.0 interface, and so on, is an infrastructure that sometimes hangs together on wishes and prayers. Having been a tech support manager, I know that usually when the geeks disappear into the computer room it’s so that they can scratch their heads and kick the hardware without anyone seeing. It’s the computer equivalent of a car mechanic’s slow intake of breath through gritted teeth, followed by some meaningless gobbledygook designed to persuade you to leave the car there so they can bang different parts of the engine with a hammer in the hope it starts going again.

OK, I exaggerate somewhat, but the point is, even your trusted IT support expert doesn’t know everything there is to know about your computer. And even if they did, they would not be able to predict just when it will fail. It might be that they can recover from that failure pretty quickly, but that’s not guaranteed. Catastrophic hard disk failure can frequently result in you ending up with an interesting paperweight. And it’s usually at that point that you realise that your backup strategy (you do have a backup strategy, don’t you?) could have been better.

So what can you do? Well, essentially you need to plan for failure. Plan in such a way that if you were to lose your computer/server tomorrow you would be able to recover quickly and painlessly. Because, believe me, your business cannot easily survive a major outage. I attended a Business Continuity event a couple of years ago, and was quite shocked to hear that over 80% of businesses that have a disaster of one form or another are not trading 12 months later. That’s all businesses, whether that have a business continuity plan or not. Although, of course, many don’t have such a plan.

So how do you plan for failure? Well, as I said earlier, the best thing to do is keep it simple. It’s all very well having a complex plan on paper, but the more complex a system is, the more likely it is to fail. So think through the aspects of your business that you would struggle if they disappeared tomorrow (including staff and management too) and consider what you could put in place to mitigate that situation. If you have a business that cannot afford any downtime then it’s worth considering the use of Business Continuity experts to help you put a plan together. And above all, test the plan out….regularly. You can pretty much guarantee it won’t work if you never test it.

Many businesses don;t have a good business continuity plan because they say it costs too much. Those are the businesses that haven’t considered the cost of not having a plan. You will have insurance on your house and car and business premises, why not insure the running of your business too?

Traditionally, the decision to install your own Private Branch Exchange (PBX) was pretty simple. If you had more internal phones than outside (trunk) lines, then you needed a mechanism to allocate internal extensions to outside lines as needed. (Although another reason for having your own PBX might be to enable free internal calls, call transfer and call conferencing.) Initially, the line allocation mechanism was manual, your internal operator plugged you (literally) into an available outside line and you made your call. That was superseeded by automatic systems, usually requiring the entry of a digit (9 most often, sometimes 0) to request an outside line before the external number was dialled.

And that was how it stayed for many years, with gradual improvements in the capabilities of the PBX. And then came internet telephony, and the decision suddenly became a bit more difficult. Instead of having phone numbers delivered to your office either individually, or bundled in an ISDN package over an E1 or T1 line, you now had to add routing of calls via the internet into the mix. So, in theory, you could run your phone system without having to go anywhere near a trunk line, and it does happen.

The major new consideration (apart from the obvious opportunity to seriously slash your phone bill) is location. Before VoIP there was the option of having home workers appear to be in the office by hooking them up to a PBX hosted by your telephony provider. But this was not especially cheap, and as with any ‘old school’ PBX, changes were not easy to implement (many a telephony consultant has made good money simply by being able to administer a PBX). Now, however, using Voice over IP (VoIP) makes this scenario extremely affordable and flexible. Your remote worker with their IP phone (either a physical one or just software on their PC/laptop) hooked up to their broadband internet connection and connected to the central IP-PBX via a secure Virtual Private Network (VPN), can log in to their phone at home or at work and all calls to their DDI are routed to the appropriate place.

So if you are a growing business, and you want to have much more flexibility than the ‘one phone, one line’ model then it makes a lot of sense to consider VoIP. Right now the major players (Cisco, Avaya, etc.) are aiming systems at enterprise-level businesses, but there are options out there for SME’s, which I will discuss in Part 2.

Many of the large, end-user oriented open source projects require many developers, mainly because to make something slick and user-friendly is not a small undertaking, and almost certainly beyond the means of one or two people within a reasonable time frame. Therefore, the larger companies with a stake in open source software (e.g. IBM, Novell, etc.) offer up development resources in the knowledge that the end-result will benefit them as well as the wider OS community.

A project that was announced back in Feb 2005, namely Hula, is one such application. Hula, to quote their website, “is a mail and calendar server with a friendly web-interface designed for a great user experience.” In other words, a threat to Exchange. Oh sure, it doesn’t have the breadth of capability that Exchange does, but then how many businesses find themselves ‘upgrading’ to Exchange only to use the most basic of its functions (that same could be said for Office too).

As you can see from the Hula website, the major supporter of this project is Novell. Now hang on a second, didn’t Novell recently announce a new collaborative relationship with Microsoft ? Call me cynical, but is it possible that Microsoft saw a significant threat to their Exchange cash cow, and that the easiest way to kill it was to use the old Microsoft strategy of embracing it? And who loses out? Anyone that might have considered an alternative to Exchange, so a huge chunk of the business email market.

You know, I really hope someone else picks up the Hula project and runs with it. After all, it’s open source (albeit based on Novell’s NetMail product) so it should be possible.

In the past, you may have used your spare CPU cycles (as I have) to benefit the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) project, or to research a cure for cancer. Both are worthy uses, although one more than the other, depending on your point of view. More recently I have not been utilising my computer in this way, mainly because it costs to keep computers running 24×7 if you were not planning to do that beforehand (and before anyone comments, I know you don’t have to keep your computer going all the time to contribute, but if you’re going to offer it as a resource, it seems churlish not to keep it running). When I say cost, it’s not the pounds and pence coming from my pocket I’m worried about, it’s the cost to the planet of the power needed to keep the PC active.

Then I came across Local Cooling. Similar concept in the way it’s offered to the public (sign up and then share your stats with the world), but this time it’s reducing power consumption and not increasing it. So I have signed up (hence the nice little banner on the right) and I encourage you to do so. Go on, you know it makes sense.

From Jack Dausman

Been wondering why there’s so much more spam lately? Bet you’ve been thinking that those pesky Russians, or Chinese have been stoking up their servers and sending more and more spam our way? Well, actually, most spam, whilst it might eventually be traced back to Russia or China or even the good old US of A, is sent by zombies. Yes, really, although in computing terms they are referred to as botnets.

The interesting thing about the most recent spam flurry is the OS being run by the machines that are sending it. You may have thought that it’s the older, less secure OS’s that would predominate. But no, it’s actually Microsoft’s shining star, Windows XP….with, wait for it, Service Pack 2. Yup, that’s right, the service pack that was designed to stop all this malarkey.

So the lesson is, be vigilant. Keep your anti-virus and anti-spyware measures up to date (you have got some, haven’t you ?).
And keep an eye on your broadband router….if you’re not expecting it to be active, but the activity light’s merrily flashing away, then investigate.

I’ve been doing quite a bit of Virtual stuff recently, and apologies if that’s not your thing. Normal service will be resumed soon

Anyway, on the subject of virtualisation, I attended a demo of the new-ish VMWare Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) last Friday, and I must say it’s pretty impressive. Now I haven’t had a lot of exposure to Citrix, but from what I’ve seen it does have it’s limitations. High amongst those it the need to ensure that whatever application you’re serving by Citrix behaves itself in that environment. One rogue application can take down the server if you’re not careful, and that results in a lot of irate users.

VMWare’s answer to the server-based computing question is, not surprisingly, to run a complete version of your chosen OS (WinXP most likely, but it can be any OS that VMWare supports) for each user. So essentially, rather than have a box on your desktop that requires a reasonably hefty spec to run WinXP, say, you can have a pretty hefty server that runs multiple copies of WinXP. All you need to connect to your virtual desktop is a device that will wun RDP, or VNC or whatever other remote access solution you wish to use.

What really impressed me, though, was the number of desktops an ESX Server could run. Of course, it’s wise to take this with a pinch of salt, but a not unusually powerful server (2 x dual-core processors, 4GB memory) hooked up to a SAN can run between 25 and 40 WinXP desktops (single processor, 256MB - 384MB RAM). All of a sudden the ROI is very apparent !

Other vendors at the event included Wyse, who make some pretty nifty thin clients, and Leostream, who provide a virtual management system. This is essentially a server (which runs quite happily as a VM, by the way) sitting beytween the users and the VDI which allows you to divide your workforce and available VM’s into groups. For example you could have a group of sales people and a group of Sales VMs. Then requests for a Sales VM (based on the user id) are allocated an available Sales VM from the defined pool. VM’s can also be allocated on a ’sticky’ basis, so that, for instance, a developer gets the same VM every time.

If you’re looking into server-based desktop computing, then it’s certainly worth including VDI in the equation.

Whilst working in the home office one day last week, I had someone from a well-known widows and door replacement company knock on the door. You know the spiel “…not trying to sell you anything, but in the new year we’ll be having huge discounts on our range…have you considered replacing….”. Now, apart from the usual issue you’d expect me to have with this, I stopped the guy in mid-rant and asked if he had noticed the ‘No cold calling are’ notice at the top of the road. Rather than apologise he then tried to engage me in discussion over why people should object to double-glazing salesmen knocking on their door. I figured shutting the dor in his face was marginally less rude that laughing hysterically at him. Maybe I should have done both ?

Anyway, having had that experience, I then came across this in my RSS reader. You’ll need sound to get the full benefit, and believe me it’s worth it !

I wonder what it would take to pull such a prank on a door-to-door salesman ?

My recent post on the Effects of Open Source, which I reproduced on the Ecademy networking site (link) has evolved into an interesting discussion of the long-term viability of the OS model. It has been pointed out, quite rightly, that a significant amount of OS development is either carried out by developers in their spare time, or by teams that receive funding from universities, or philantropists. So, should the use of OSS continue to rise, will we reach a point where future development within the OS/GPL model will not be possible because the companies employing or funding the developers have gone out of business ?

To answer this, I think we need to look at the real reason why people are happy to spend money to purchase software. In my opinion, the reason is because people (not companies, because ultimately this decision boils down to individuals making decisions) believe that paying a company some money for their software obliges the supplier to deal with any issues that occur. You could argue that the customer is paying for development, but only indirectly. The customer couldn’t give two hoots as to home much time and effort went into getting the software where it is, their considerations are - will it do what I need it to do now; and will it carry on working for the foreseeable future (or for a specific time period if it has a pre-defined life-span).

The first of those considerations applies regardless of the licence that the software is distributed under. If it’s not fit for purpose then it won’t be used, free or not. If it is used, then the customer’s a fool who shouldn’t be let out in charge of a budget. So it’s the obligation to provide support that’s a key difference between the two licence models. And some OSS providers, particularly those of the more popular and business-oriented Linux distros,  are quite happy to charge you for that support, in terms of documentation, training, and an obligation to actively investigate and resolve any bugs that you identify, as long as those updates are fed back into the OS community (whilst they don’t have to be fed back as part of the GPL, it is common practice).

Ultimately, there are opportunities for the creators of OSS to make money without charging for licences. Currently, many of the commercial organisations in this space act in a way similar to charities, asking for donations and for public bodies (universities, etc.) to fund their work. I don’t believe this is sustainable should the OSS market grow significantly, and there does seem to be growing public acceptance of the quality and applicability of OSS applications. So the challenge will be to make money in other ways.

An interesting model right now is the OSDL, the current employer of Linus Torvalds and the overseer of ongoing Linux kernel development, who are funded by a consortium of large commercial organisations who already have a commitment to using Linux and see the benefit of having a say in the development of a constantly-improving, freely available operating system.

However, my suspicion is that, while OSS usage will continue to grow, there will always be room for commercially licenced software in the marketplace. OSS has a history of re-engineering software that already exists rather than being truly innovative, and I think this will continue. Commercial software developers may well find that their product lifespan comes down to 2 or 3 years because of OSS imitators, but this is no bad thing for the customer. Bloated organisations, mentioning no-one in particluar , tend to become lazy and concentrate on where the next dollar is coming from rather than looking 5 or 10 years down the road at where the market is heading.

Of course, there is another way to make money, and that is by hosting your application centrally and charging for continued use. There is currently a lot of innovation in the Web 2.0 sphere, and I can see this growing. The ironic thing, though, is that much of the underlying technology is OSS So will the software companies developing the Web 2.0 (or Web 3.0) applications use commercial or open source software ? I know where my money would be long term.

Your thoughts are welcome.

I’m a bit busy today with ‘real’ work (i.e. the stuff that’s billable), but in catching up with my RSS feeds, this caught my eye

Open source databases can save enterprises up to 60 per cent over proprietary products, according to data collected by Forrester Research.

Couple that with the no-longer-new news that IBM are offering a cut-down version of DB2 for free and the opportunities for small businesses to implement an enterprise-grade database is there. Althought there is still the cost of consultancy, development, support, etc. to consider, so maybe Access will stay in the workplace for a while yet