Month: February 2009

MS has released a training kit for Azure services:

“The Azure Services Training Kit includes a comprehensive set of technical content including hands-on labs, presentations, and demos that are designed to help you learn how to use the Azure Services Platform. The February release includes the following updates:

• 19 demo scripts that walkthrough several of the services
• 10 presentations covering the entire Azure Services Platform
• 3 additional hands-on labs for Live Services

This technical content covers services including: Windows Azure, .NET Services, SQL Services, and Live Services”.

We sell secure online backup and data protection services at work based on the Iron Mountain technologies.  I’ve got the Connected laptop/PC backup product on my work laptop.  It uses VSS to grab the file blocks that have changed, encrypts them using AES128, compressed the data and sends it up to a vault in our physically secure data centre where we replicated it onto another independent store.  Of course, that’s all managed using MS System Center 🙂

It’s easy to talk all the marketing stuff and sell the story but it’s another thing to put it to test.  I work from home quite a lot thanks to technology like VM’s, VPN, ILO, RDP, IM, etc.  I’ve a simple policy set up for my Connected agent to backup once a day Monday to Friday – we can do it much more frequently but I don’t need it.  I generated a lot of data over the last 24 hours, 355.1MB to be precise.  This is what happened when today’s backup took place just recently:

Connected identified the new blocks on my file system that were unique, i.e. not backed up already as parts of other files.  It then compressed the data and encrypted it.  I may have generated over 355MB of data but only 23.6MB was actually transmitted over my small domestic ADSL line and I didn’t even notice it while working.  That’s sweet … and my data is securely and reliably backed up.

I do what I preach so my laptop is configured with redirected folders and offline files.  When I go back to the office on Monday my “My Documents” folder will synchronise with our SBS box.  And there, LiveVault will backup my data once to triplicate independent stores in our Dublin-based tier IV physically secure data centre … after de-duplicating, compressing and encrypting it with AES256.

The important thing is that I’m effectively a road warrior generating files that are valuable to the business.  The business cannot afford to lose data while I’m away from the office.  So Connected takes care of that by securely backing up the folders I want it to back up (or are set by policy).  If the laptop is lost then my data is safely encrypted and can be remotely destroyed thanks to DataDefense.  I can safely restore my laptop data onto either a new laptop or our server in the office using the Connected web portal.

How is this solution different to the myriad of offerings out there?  Firstly it is secure.  I mean really secure.  Security starts at the front door and unlike some computer room service providers the Tier IV facility we use has 24 * 7 security with at least 2 people on site.  You do not get in there without them expecting or authorising you.  I know of one place where people have been known to walk in off the street and into the computer room without meeting anyone.  The level of encryption and compression is excellent – we can’t even read customer data unless they give us their key which they can store in escrow with Iron Mountain outside of our access.  Data for laptops/PC’s is duplicated on independent stores while data for servers is stored in triplicate on independent stores.  The technology is reliable.  Iron Mountain claim a 99.999% recoverability rate and we’ve yet to have a failure *touch wood*.  The software is easy to use … it is “backup as a service” so you can access a secure web portal to manage backups and restore data.  It’s reseller friendly.  Most of all, if you’re worried about the Data Protection Act or regulatory compliance (IFSRA, SOX, HIPAA, etc) then this is the solution for you.  For Irish companies, a big question is, “where is your data?”.  You’ll probably be contravening one of the above regulations if it’s gone outside of Ireland so when looking at online backup you should ask “where will my data be?”.  Our backups never leave Ireland.

That’s my story on that.  Back to regularly scheduled programming.

Silicon Republic has a couple of interesting stories yesterday.  First up is HP claiming that things are good, despite the recession – oooh he said the “R” word!!!  A few hours later we read that HP are cutting salaries across the corporation.  I wonder what will come next?

I’ve heard rumours from reliable sources that a certain h/w company’s Irish division is considering letting go their senior engineers because they don’t have enough work to justify their salaries.

The details for the TechDays events in Galway, Cork, Dublin and Belfast are being locked in.  Places are disappearing fast.  If this is something you want to go to then register now.  The venues are large but early registration took up lots of the places.

I’ll be doing 3 of the sessions over the 4 days:

• The Accidental DBA:  (Galway and Belfast) I’ll introduce the subject.  It’s a common scenario.  You’re an IT Pro that looks after SharePoint and has some things like WSUS, ConfigMgr, OpsMgr, etc.  Do you know how to take care of the security, backup/recovery, fault tolerance, etc, of your SQL?  It’s based on a concept and a term used by Mark Minasi back in 2004 for admins who had to deal with lots of MSDE installations on their network.  SQL MVP Niall Flanagan will present the meat of this one.
• Windows 7 & Windows Server 2008 R2 working Great Together and WS 2008 R2 Virtualisation (Cork, Dublin and Belfast): I’ll be doing the presentations and Dave Northey from MS Ireland will be doing the demos.  Yes, you will get to see Hyper-V Live Migration in action.  I’ll also be explaining how it works behind the scenes.  MS and a sponsor are making a great deal of effort to make these demonstrations something special.
• Windows 7 and Digital Photography: (Dublin and Belfast) This is part of the “IT Pro Microsoft @ Home” sessions that have separate schedules and registrations.  When I’m not in front of a computer bashing away at servers with my ample forehead, I’m out an about with my camera, playing at being a photographer.  I’ll be showing how you can use Windows 7 to assist with your digital photography.  I used it last night at the photography club that I help run and it impressed people.

The range of speakers at the events is impressive.  And it isn’t just the “usual” names and faces.

The session “An Introduction to Windows 7 and Quick Overview of Client Deployment Tools” will be presented by Rhonda Layfield, author, journalist, trainer, speaker, deployment MVP, hostess extraordinaire … known by some of us as the Queen of Deployment.  What Rhonda doesn’t know about deploying operating systems doesn’t need to be known.  She’s always ahead of the pack and has worked in some huge organisations.  This will be an excellent session that will give you the foundation to start looking at how to deploy Windows 7 when it is released.