IT reflections on the superstorm

IT reflections on the superstorm - Spiceworks

"We had a few customer service reps work from home, letting our biggest customers know what the situation was. Before we had wanted to discourage users working from home, but now it turned out to be something we needed to do badly. The CSRs can get basic email service via our outsourced email webmail interface, but the problem is they don't have the supporting documents. They don't have access to email addresses, customer info, order info and so forth."

"Another important thing to remember in a large event like this is that communications gets really difficult. Cell phones don't work and the power is out. Internet connections fail and roads may be impassable and gas in short supply. Getting a simple message to another person becomes a real task. And one important thing that got forgotten was that both the fire and burglar alarms might not work either, since even though they use POTS lines as backups, they still go through the same poles.
To give us emergency Internet connection, we now have a simple cell phone router installed. The cost of the device is low, and, since the device supports two carriers (AT&T and T-Mobile) instead of just one carrier, a single device gives us triple the amount of possible carriers. Similar devices exist that route analog phone devices to the cellular network."

How to work around Amazon EC2 outages « James Cohen

How to work around Amazon EC2 outages « James Cohen

I am working on a AWS design for high availability and found this insight from the school of hard knocks very helpful.

C. Scott Andreas says:

April 21, 2011 at 19:29

A few of these options are good in principle, but are not necessarily informed by the reality of operational experience with the more-common failure modes of AWS at a medium to larger scale (~50-100+ instances).

The author recommends using EBS volumes to provide for backups and snapshots. However, Amazon’s EBS system is one of the more failure-prone components of the AWS infrastructure, and lies at the heart of this morning’s outage [1]. Any steps you can take to reduce your dependence upon a service that is both critical to operation and failure-prone will limit the surface of your vulnerability to such outages. While the snapshotting ability of EBS is nice, waking up to a buzzing pager to find that half of the EBS volumes in your cluster have dropped out, hosing each of the striped RAID arrays you’ve set up to achieve reasonable IO throughput, is not. Instead, consider using the ephemeral drives of your EC2 instances, switching to a non-snapshot-based backup strategy, and replicating data to other instances and AZ’s to improve resilience.

The author also recommends Elastic Load Balancers to distribute load across services in multiple availability zones. Load balancing across availability zones is excellent advice in principle, but still succumbs to the problem above in the instance of EBS unavailability: ELB instances are also backed by Amazon’s EBS infrastructure. ELB’s can be excellent day-to-day and provide some great monitoring and introspection. However, having a quick chef script to spin up an Nginx or HAProxy balancer and flipping DNS could save your bacon in the event of an outage that also affected ELBs, like today.

With each service provider incident, you learn more about your availability, dependencies, and assumptions, along with what must improve. Proportional investment following each incident should reduce the impact of subsequent provider issues. Naming and shaming providers in angry Twitter posts will not solve your problem, and it most certainly won’t solve your users’ problem. Owning your availability by taking concrete steps following each outage to analyze what went down and why, mitigating your exposure to these factors, and measuring your progress during the next incident will. It is exciting to see these investments pay off.

Some of these:

– *Painfully* thorough monitoring of every subsystem of every component of your infrastructure. When you get paged, it’s good to know *exactly* what’s having issues rather than checking each manually in blind suspicion.

– Threshold-based alerting.

– Keeping failover for all systems as automated, quick, and transparent as is reasonably possible.

– Spreading your systems across multiple availability zones and regions, with the ideal goal of being able to lose an entire AZ/region without a complete production outage.

– Team operational reviews and incident analysis that expose the root cause of an issue, but also spider out across your system’s dependencies to preemptively identify other components which are vulnerable to the same sort of problem.

—

[1] See the response from AWS in the first reply here: https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?messageID=239106&tstart=0

Reply

Forrester Research : Research : File Storage Costs Less In The Cloud Than In-House

Forrester Research : Research : File Storage Costs Less In The Cloud Than In-House

FOR INFRASTRUCTURE & OPERATIONS PROFESSIONALS

FILE STORAGE COSTS LESS IN THE CLOUD THAN IN-HOUSE

We Calculate A 74% Cost Reduction, But It's Hard To Compare Apples To Apples

by Andrew Reichman

with Robert Whiteley, Eric Chi

There's a great deal of hype surrounding cloud delivery models of all flavors, with the assumption that it will usher in a new era of cheaper, better IT. But most I&O organizations struggle to compare the capital, operational, and staffing cost differences between internal and cloud storage. This document will break down the cost differences by modeling a common workload — file storage — built and deployed traditionally versus consumed through the public cloud. Our models reveal a significant cost difference, with the cloud-based model coming in 74% less expensive than I&O running it in-house. However, we encourage I&O leaders to use this document and the associated "Cost Analysis Tool: Cloud Versus Internal File Storage" Excel workbook as a tool and methodology for comparison. Customize the tool with numbers from your own environment and make a better decision as to whether cloud file storage makes sense in your business technology environment.

BIM, SaaS and mobile driving Newforma developments

Great article by Paul Wilkinson

BIM, SaaS and mobile driving Newforma developments

Once scathing of the attractions of Software-as-a-Service, Newforma is now actively embracing the cloud, SaaS, BIM and mobile, and eyeing potential social media ideas for future product development.

BIM-in-The-Cloud Has New Competition With Newforma | ENR: Engineering News Record | McGraw-Hill Construction

BIM-in-The-Cloud Has New Competition With Newforma | ENR: Engineering News Record | McGraw-Hill Construction  $$

Model-driven project delivery on jobsites could be taking a big leap forward with a license deal between project information management (PIM) provider Newforma and M-SIX's 3D software platform, called VEO.
...
Accessing BIM models on projects by construction teams "can be a challenge for mere mortals to master," Batcheler says. Using the VEO platform, project teams can access the geometry of commonly-used 3D models through the cloud "without the risk of an untrained person damaging or corrupting the model," he adds.

Nasuni Enables AEC Organizations To Securely Store Files And Easily Share Them... -- NATICK, Mass., July 24, 2012 /PRNewswire/ --

Nasuni Enables AEC Organizations To Securely Store Files And Easily Share Them Among Offices (via PR Newswire)

NATICK, Mass., July 24, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- Nasuni®, a provider of enterprise storage to large, distributed organizations, today described how its solution is ideally suited to solve the specific IT storage challenges that global architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) organizations face…

---

"With the increase in collaboration across geographies, we need to give our people access to the files they need with good performance," said Mike Driscoll, infrastructure architect at Walsh Group. "Nasuni synchronizes all our file data, gives our users the feel and performance of local access and enables us to effectively address an ever-growing volume of files while making it possible to easily and securely share those files with our employees no matter where they are located. It is very much a set it and forget it experience, and I've not gotten much feedback from my people, which is a good thing. No phone calls complaining that they can't get to the data they need means Nasuni is doing what it needs to do."

"The AEC industry is facing IT storage challenges that traditional storage solutions cannot overcome," said Andres Rodriguez, CEO of Nasuni. "With Nasuni, AEC organizations can provide primary storage to every office with instant access to as much storage capacity as needed.  It's a first for the storage industry and finally enables AEC IT professionals to stop worrying constantly about storage capacity and management of complicated remote access schemes, so they can focus on more strategic initiatives."

PR Newswire (http://s.tt/1iQZz)

The Top 500 Design Firms Start to Rise Above Economic Woes | ENR: Engineering News Record | McGraw-Hill Construction

The Top 500 Design Firms Start to Rise Above Economic Woes | ENR: Engineering News Record | McGraw-Hill Construction

After four years, it appears the U.S. construction market has bottomed out and is beginning the slow climb out of recession. For many large U.S. design firms, this development is cause for both relief and celebration. But for other design firms, particularly in the public infrastructure markets, uncertainty about the future remains a constant.

20 IWMS, CAFM and CMMS Blogs To Watch in 2012

20 IWMS, CAFM and CMMS Blogs To Watch in 2012

Review of The VID Delusion by Brian Madden, et al.

 The VDI Delusion by Brian Madden, et al. reminds me of what one professor wrote on my Hunter "Thompson styled narration: "floats like a butterfly, but ....where's the sting." I recommend this book to clarify the industry and understand some of the greatest blog, tweet, flames going on in the industry today.

http://www.brianmadden.com/ is fantastic resource on vid with a great podcast.

It really does describe a lot of the chaos caused by company marketing as well as technology challenges. Also adds to confusion about some of the acronyms. Great explanation of different technologies here http://www.virtuall.nl/request-whitepaper-access

I think the book misses on two major points:


1. "It's the data, stupid". In some industries, we are already in a multi-device, multi-os scenario that is not being solved by iCloud  or dropbox. Add to this the requirement for multi-company collaboration on large data-sets. The compute power must be reside with the data and it must be accessible from multiple remote locations without planning or device constraint - ie the application I need to make since of the data doesn't execute on my iPad or my iPhone or my Android or my Macbook or on the little standard issue $300 XP based PC the corporation gave me.


2. My 10-50 person company doesn't have an IT department to handle all of the tasks outlined as the successful, time-proven desktop strategies  to solve the desktop dilemmas. Outsourcing the entire desktop to a provider can be a good solution.

10 most powerful IaaS companies - in alphabetical order

10 most powerful IaaS companies

"We assembled this list with help from analysts at Cloud Technology Partners, Current Analysis, Enterprise Strategy Group, Gartner, IDC, and Neovise who watch the public cloud Infrastructure as a Service scene very closely. Each was asked to name the companies they believed have the most influence – whether that’s measured in market share, mind share, revenue, existing enterprise pull or underlying technology links – in the world of IaaS. They are listed here in alphabetical order."

Great Tool to Help You Configure the Size of your Vault Server

IBM Vault Sizing Guide - WikiHelp

IBM Vault Sizing Guide

Welcome to the IBM Vault Sizing Guide.  Autodesk and IBM have worked together to help you save time and money by recommending suitable hardware configurations for your anticipated Autodesk Vault implementation.  This guide features consistent and reliable recommendations based on the latest IBM hardware in conjunction with the software environment variables that you enter.

Each recommendation in this guide considers a number of parameters you provide based on your anticipated Autodesk Vault environment.  Input parameters include:

•             Total number of users

•             Percentage of simultaneous users

•             Amortization period of server

•             New Vault implementation vs. migration from an older version

•             Total size & number of files

Goto IBM Sizing Tool

BIM and Spec Software Continued - BSD's Speclink-e and Linkman-e

This presentation by Beth Stroshane will provide you with an in depth look at Building System Design Speclink-e and Linkman-e from a user point of view.

The presentation will include the following:
- An overview of the features of the software.
- A discussion of how the out of the box features can be used to help solve old and new challenges:
- Coordination and terminology.
- Tracking information for the 2030 Challenge for Products, Red list, Specification Status or many more.

Come learn what one firm is doing and start thinking about how you might use the same features in the same way, or in completely different ways, to raise the bar and move your practice and the industry forward.

Beth Stroshane is a Certified Construction Specifier who has worked with BIM specification systems on large complex architectural projects for the last 6 years with NBBJ and ZGF Architects. Prior to writing specifications, Beth achieved bachelor's degrees in structural engineering and construction management, and worked as a construction engineer for Mortenson Construction.

ESG Lab Report Validates Nasuni as a Superior Solution for Multi-Site Storage Access - MarketWatch

ESG Lab Report Validates Nasuni as a Superior Solution for Multi-Site Storage Access - MarketWatch

 PRESS RELEASE

March 13, 2012, 11:39 a.m. EDT

ESG Lab Report Validates Nasuni as a Superior Solution for Multi-Site Storage Access

Report Highlights Performance, Ease of Use, Ease of Deployment and Reliability; Nasuni Enables Enterprises to Eliminate Costly and Cumbersome WAN Optimization and Replication Schemes for Sharing Storage Access

Nasuni Migrates Terabytes of Customer Primary Storage Data Between Clouds Without Disrupting IT Operations – Press Releases – News

Nasuni Migrates Terabytes of Customer Primary Storage Data Between Clouds Without Disrupting IT Operations – Press Releases – News

A large energy services company recently consolidated all of its storage under Nasuni’s SLA backed service to take advantage of both the 100 percent availability guarantee and multi-site capabilities. Their data included files for finance, IT, account management and operations that needed to be migrated from legacy cloud providers to one of Nasuni’s preferred providers.

“I never felt a glitch,” said the IT manager responsible for primary storage. “It was smoother than I’d have ever thought possible, and our users never knew the difference.”

Nasuni moved all of the data from the original cloud provider to Amazon S3 using Amazon EC2 so as to avoid overloading the customer’s own network. Per Nasuni’s security model, all data was encrypted at all times; Nasuni never had any visibility into the data. The customer now has over 15 TB of data with Nasuni.

“Now this truly is a ‘set it and forget it’ type of service,” said the IT manager. “In addition, thanks to Nasuni’s multi-site capability, our users and sister companies no longer need to use a VPN to get access to their data. Not only does this make data access more convenient for our remote users, but it also greatly improved data retrieval when compared to going through a VPN tunnel, as was the case before.”

We use and resell this product - Nasuni click here if you want to evaluate it http://www.nasuni.com/partner/lrplot

Amazon's gateway to mainstream public cloud | Technology Spectator

"It is hard to imagine Amazon becoming a hardware supplier in order to overcome this issue. Even if it did, the gateway would still have the second major disadvantage: supporting only Amazon S3. This is a problem because the other gateways offer a choice of back-end clouds, and so provide customers with a way to avoid cloud lock-in."

Amazon's gateway to mainstream public cloud | Technology Spectator

Construction Operations Building Information Exchange (COBie) | Whole Building Design Guide

Construction Operations Building Information Exchange (COBie) | Whole Building Design Guide

INTRODUCTION

Today, most contracts require the handover of paper documentscontaining equipment lists, product data sheets, warranties, spare part lists, preventive maintenance schedules, and other information. This information is essential to support theoperations, maintenance, and the management of the facilities assets by the owner and/or property manager.

"Normally it takes us 3 years to get as-builts after the financial closeout of a project. Now I can get a pre-built equipment list before the building even breaks ground? Outstanding!"
– Deputy Director, Department of Public Works

Gathering this information at the end of the job, today's standard practice, is expensive, since most of the information has to be recreated from information created earlier. COBie simplifies the work required to capture and record project handover data.

The COBie approach is to enter the data as it is created during design, construction, and commissioning, see Figure 1. Designers provide floor, space, and equipment layouts. Contractors provide make, model, and serial numbers of installed equipment. Much of the data provided by contractors comes directly from product manufacturers who can also participate in COBie.