I've been out with the flu for the past week and haven't even thought about blogging. I have dropped 8 pounds in 4 days - not a bad start on my weight loss program - but I wouldn't recommend the Influenza Diet as an option. I'm back among the living now but won't be back online for a few more weeks.
We've finally reached the end of the line and on the ERP project and this comming weekend is the cutover / go-live date for the project. Though we've been preparing for this for months and should - the next few weeks will be fairly busy and pretty turbulent - so I don't expect to be immersed in the bloggosphere until we get on the other side of this. Then on the other hand things could all go completely smooth and I could be sitting here next weekend twiddling my thumbs and reading... here's hoping.
Monday, February 25, 2008
Monday, February 18, 2008
Stuck Inside of Management with the Programmer Blues Again
Sometimes it's a good idea to let blog posts marinate a bit before releasing them to the world.... the post that went with this title was a long whine about the fact that I've lost my Notes developer skills and miss the chance to do heads down coding.
I went on and on about my history with 4GLs, database development IDEs and scripting languages. My job history leading to my current over taxed technical management / systems administration job and how the developing bug has been woken back up recently after having to poke through a few older databases and reading through some developer blogs.
Truth is... I don't have time to immerse myself in development. My last structured programming was COBOL and Turbo Pascal in college over twenty years ago. I did plenty of programming but it was all with proprietary 4GL languages or scripting systems where the idea was to do more with less coding. The great thing about Notes development when I was involved (Release 3 and 4) was the RAD development, forms designer and formula language.
The bulk of our early Notes development was small single database programs for tracking support calls or computer equipment or IT projects. The best used the functions Notes was great at unstructured data and workflow ... the worst just used Notes as a useful tool and could have been written in MS Access... the important thing was we didn't use Access and didn't walk down the Microsoft path. Remarkably they're still there - butt ugly but running fine on Domino 7.
What I'd really like is a quick and dirty way to pretty up the old databases I created in R3. Extreme Makeover Lotus Notes Edition. I'd also love a way to quickly add Blackberry support to older databases that are still in use and a way to re-skin old apps that used non-web supported functions like layout regions for use on the web. A large number of our early Notes 3 apps will work on the web but they look pitiful. It would also be great to be able to apply a single common style to all the old non-standard ugly old databases we wrote when we thought turquoise or yellow were visually appealing user interface colors.
Short of finding a magical tool that will let me do all this...I need a resource for guerilla Notes development - something that doesn't expect me to learn Lotuscript or Java but teaches me how to go back and quickly update the visual elements of my old programs. I need a tutorial or sample code to allow me to add Blackberry support for existing apps. I need a good tutorial on webifying existing data.... and I need a tutorial that walks me through the basics of designing forms, views and actions in the current IDE to let me resurrect the skills I did have with R3 to create small, useful, one-off programs with Notes - so I don't have to find a developer or use another tool.
I went on and on about my history with 4GLs, database development IDEs and scripting languages. My job history leading to my current over taxed technical management / systems administration job and how the developing bug has been woken back up recently after having to poke through a few older databases and reading through some developer blogs.
Truth is... I don't have time to immerse myself in development. My last structured programming was COBOL and Turbo Pascal in college over twenty years ago. I did plenty of programming but it was all with proprietary 4GL languages or scripting systems where the idea was to do more with less coding. The great thing about Notes development when I was involved (Release 3 and 4) was the RAD development, forms designer and formula language.
The bulk of our early Notes development was small single database programs for tracking support calls or computer equipment or IT projects. The best used the functions Notes was great at unstructured data and workflow ... the worst just used Notes as a useful tool and could have been written in MS Access... the important thing was we didn't use Access and didn't walk down the Microsoft path. Remarkably they're still there - butt ugly but running fine on Domino 7.
What I'd really like is a quick and dirty way to pretty up the old databases I created in R3. Extreme Makeover Lotus Notes Edition. I'd also love a way to quickly add Blackberry support to older databases that are still in use and a way to re-skin old apps that used non-web supported functions like layout regions for use on the web. A large number of our early Notes 3 apps will work on the web but they look pitiful. It would also be great to be able to apply a single common style to all the old non-standard ugly old databases we wrote when we thought turquoise or yellow were visually appealing user interface colors.
Short of finding a magical tool that will let me do all this...I need a resource for guerilla Notes development - something that doesn't expect me to learn Lotuscript or Java but teaches me how to go back and quickly update the visual elements of my old programs. I need a tutorial or sample code to allow me to add Blackberry support for existing apps. I need a good tutorial on webifying existing data.... and I need a tutorial that walks me through the basics of designing forms, views and actions in the current IDE to let me resurrect the skills I did have with R3 to create small, useful, one-off programs with Notes - so I don't have to find a developer or use another tool.
Wednesday, February 13, 2008
Disaster Recovery Express
This is not specifically a Notes/Domino post - but in a small business you have to wear lots of hats... and one of mine is the disaster recovery plan. Since Domino is one of the essential enterprise services I have to be able to recover I think it's relevant.
I've received several marketing emails from IBM over the past few days about this item. Yes the Express brand extends to more than just software. Here we have a 7U chassis that runs on regular power, includes bays for up to 9 terabytes of disk storage, that can hold hot-swap modules for Gigabit Ethernet, supports Intel and AMD Opteron blades and comes with easy management tools to control the environment - they even offer an office enablement kit that adds an acoustical module to dampen sound - with a locking front door and 4U of additional space. When coupled with VMWare VI3 software, a DataDomain virtual tape library appliance (3U) and a router (1U) you have a configuration with the potential to be the perfect disaster recovery platform for a small business.
Small businesses need disaster recovery plans as much as large businesses - in fact probably more since small businesses tend to be less geographically diverse - ask any small business along the Mississippi Gulf Coast or in New Orleans. Protecting your corporate data can mean the difference between the business continuing of failing after a disaster strikes. For those of us whose companies are publicly traded it's not really even an option to not have a disaster recovery plan.... generally though smaller businesses have to outsource their disaster recovery site to a business recovery service like IBM BRS or Sungard.
Several years ago we reviewed what we were paying for outsourced disaster recovery and what the cost would be if we ever moved beyond the annual two day disaster recovery test and actually had to use the service and we decided that we could do it cheaper in-house. Luckily we have a subsidiary geographically distant enough to make it possible and some surplus older (or refurbished) equipment that could be configured to handle our core business processes. Product offerings like the one above make this process much more possible for a small business.
With the BladeCenter you will need at least two blades running VMWare with a third running VMWares Virtual Center management software,your corporate backup software and all the normal network management tools normally needed. Using P2V conversion tools that come with VMWare VI3 you can create a virtual server version of each of your core business servers (Windows, Linux and most Intel versions of Unix are supported as VMs). With the VMs converted you have a base version of your system.
The weakest link in any tape backup system is the tape. How many times have you attempted to restore from tape only to find that the tape was defective or the backup operation had failed? Tapes also require storage, movement from primary site to DR site and must be loaded and watched during restore operations. Fortunately there are now solutions to get rid of tape - and I'm not suggesting writing to DVDs. We discovered and implemented a DataDomain virtual tape library this year to help us ease the burden of backing up SAP.
DataDomain devices can appear to your backup software as a regular tape library but they include an intelligent storage server with raid protected disk storage and employ a data deduplication technique that allows for enormous compression of data. We are currently experienceing a 10.5 to 1 compression ratio - your mileage may vary depending on the type of data you store. DataDomain devices also support replication and they replicate the deduplicated data. This allows you to install a pair of their libraries at your primary and disaster recovery site and with sufficient bandwidth - replicate your data over either a private data link or a VPN connection.
If you don't have a disaster recovery plan - you need one. No matter how small a business - even if you aren't in an area effected by hurricanes, tornados, wild fires or floods - what happens when you have a fire? when the toilet in the restroom upstairs overflows?
If you have your disaster recovery site out-sourced - consider your options? Is there a business partner, supplier or associated company in the area who you could work out a deal with? What are the options in your area for co-location space? Business Partners - do you have small customers who might be able to use this as a service? The idea could be scalable - with the infrastructure supporting multiple smaller sites.
If you have any questions about using VMWare or DataDomain or about disaster recovery in general let me know. If I don't have the answers I do have resources.
I've received several marketing emails from IBM over the past few days about this item. Yes the Express brand extends to more than just software. Here we have a 7U chassis that runs on regular power, includes bays for up to 9 terabytes of disk storage, that can hold hot-swap modules for Gigabit Ethernet, supports Intel and AMD Opteron blades and comes with easy management tools to control the environment - they even offer an office enablement kit that adds an acoustical module to dampen sound - with a locking front door and 4U of additional space. When coupled with VMWare VI3 software, a DataDomain virtual tape library appliance (3U) and a router (1U) you have a configuration with the potential to be the perfect disaster recovery platform for a small business.
Small businesses need disaster recovery plans as much as large businesses - in fact probably more since small businesses tend to be less geographically diverse - ask any small business along the Mississippi Gulf Coast or in New Orleans. Protecting your corporate data can mean the difference between the business continuing of failing after a disaster strikes. For those of us whose companies are publicly traded it's not really even an option to not have a disaster recovery plan.... generally though smaller businesses have to outsource their disaster recovery site to a business recovery service like IBM BRS or Sungard.
Several years ago we reviewed what we were paying for outsourced disaster recovery and what the cost would be if we ever moved beyond the annual two day disaster recovery test and actually had to use the service and we decided that we could do it cheaper in-house. Luckily we have a subsidiary geographically distant enough to make it possible and some surplus older (or refurbished) equipment that could be configured to handle our core business processes. Product offerings like the one above make this process much more possible for a small business.
With the BladeCenter you will need at least two blades running VMWare with a third running VMWares Virtual Center management software,your corporate backup software and all the normal network management tools normally needed. Using P2V conversion tools that come with VMWare VI3 you can create a virtual server version of each of your core business servers (Windows, Linux and most Intel versions of Unix are supported as VMs). With the VMs converted you have a base version of your system.
The weakest link in any tape backup system is the tape. How many times have you attempted to restore from tape only to find that the tape was defective or the backup operation had failed? Tapes also require storage, movement from primary site to DR site and must be loaded and watched during restore operations. Fortunately there are now solutions to get rid of tape - and I'm not suggesting writing to DVDs. We discovered and implemented a DataDomain virtual tape library this year to help us ease the burden of backing up SAP.
DataDomain devices can appear to your backup software as a regular tape library but they include an intelligent storage server with raid protected disk storage and employ a data deduplication technique that allows for enormous compression of data. We are currently experienceing a 10.5 to 1 compression ratio - your mileage may vary depending on the type of data you store. DataDomain devices also support replication and they replicate the deduplicated data. This allows you to install a pair of their libraries at your primary and disaster recovery site and with sufficient bandwidth - replicate your data over either a private data link or a VPN connection.
If you don't have a disaster recovery plan - you need one. No matter how small a business - even if you aren't in an area effected by hurricanes, tornados, wild fires or floods - what happens when you have a fire? when the toilet in the restroom upstairs overflows?
If you have your disaster recovery site out-sourced - consider your options? Is there a business partner, supplier or associated company in the area who you could work out a deal with? What are the options in your area for co-location space? Business Partners - do you have small customers who might be able to use this as a service? The idea could be scalable - with the infrastructure supporting multiple smaller sites.
If you have any questions about using VMWare or DataDomain or about disaster recovery in general let me know. If I don't have the answers I do have resources.
Friday, February 8, 2008
Revisiting the Nifty Fifty
Thirteen years ago - the year after we rolled out our first company wide LAN, my boss asked me into his office to discuss the idea of adding an email system to the mix to join the file and print services we were providing our users. This was before Exchange existed but he had heard of cc:Mail and Microsoft Mail and Eudora. I told him I'd read about something different something Lotus Software was selling called Notes that they described as groupware.
I explained that Notes was a system that combined email, document and discussion databases and development tools in one package. I had read about the product when it was first released and was affordable for very large organizations like GM or GE or IBM...but they'd just changed their licensing so we could now afford to buy and run Notes in our organization.
In a few weeks we received a shipment of bright yellow boxes of Lotus Notes R3 for OS/2. We set up our first server on a spare workstation running OS/2. We discovered not only did we have email and the standard database templates... there was also a set of sample applications called the "Nifty Fifty". We quickly began playing with these applications and used them to initially learn to develop our own databases.
A slightly modified version of the absense approval database wound up in use in one department and there are still users here using it today... It's just as but ugly as it was twelve years ago but it works.
Many others in the blogging community have argued over the past five years for a resurection of the Nifty Fifty. I'd like to propose something similar. IBM/Lotus is focusing anew on the SMB market - it's the right time for a Lotus Notes Small Business Bundle.
One constant problem at a smaller businesses is lack of resources for custom development. If Lotus (or the openNTF community) were to put together a set of well designed, functional starter templates for Notes that focused on the needs of smaller firms it could be a great selling tool for small businesses. Even better - if the templates were designed to work as a teaching tool with all design elements open to view - well documented in help documents with well documented structured object oriented Lotusscript code, they could serve as building blocks for new small business developers like the nifty fifty did for us long ago.
I can think of several ideas - an HR intranet template - or even a generic department intranet template, a basic purchase request template, a basic help desk ticketing template, a company survey template - to name a few. What about you? What templates would you like to see in a Small Business Bundle?
I explained that Notes was a system that combined email, document and discussion databases and development tools in one package. I had read about the product when it was first released and was affordable for very large organizations like GM or GE or IBM...but they'd just changed their licensing so we could now afford to buy and run Notes in our organization.
In a few weeks we received a shipment of bright yellow boxes of Lotus Notes R3 for OS/2. We set up our first server on a spare workstation running OS/2. We discovered not only did we have email and the standard database templates... there was also a set of sample applications called the "Nifty Fifty". We quickly began playing with these applications and used them to initially learn to develop our own databases.
A slightly modified version of the absense approval database wound up in use in one department and there are still users here using it today... It's just as but ugly as it was twelve years ago but it works.
Many others in the blogging community have argued over the past five years for a resurection of the Nifty Fifty. I'd like to propose something similar. IBM/Lotus is focusing anew on the SMB market - it's the right time for a Lotus Notes Small Business Bundle.
One constant problem at a smaller businesses is lack of resources for custom development. If Lotus (or the openNTF community) were to put together a set of well designed, functional starter templates for Notes that focused on the needs of smaller firms it could be a great selling tool for small businesses. Even better - if the templates were designed to work as a teaching tool with all design elements open to view - well documented in help documents with well documented structured object oriented Lotusscript code, they could serve as building blocks for new small business developers like the nifty fifty did for us long ago.
I can think of several ideas - an HR intranet template - or even a generic department intranet template, a basic purchase request template, a basic help desk ticketing template, a company survey template - to name a few. What about you? What templates would you like to see in a Small Business Bundle?
Saturday, February 2, 2008
Virtual Confusion
Server Virtualization is a hot topic in the computer press this year and this is not just a concern for large businesses. Smaller organizations with limited staff and floorspace can gain a great return on investment by using these technologies. VMWare has recognized this and offers specific tools for the SMB market.
Mature technologies are available from various hardware and software vendors that provide a greater degree of robustness and allow organizations to maximize their hardware utilization. Processors and operating systems are increasingly savvy about virtualization. Applications vendors are realizing that they must support customers running their software in virtual environments. The primary area where things still lag behind in the nature and complexity of licensing agreements on virtualized or partitioned hardware.
Microsoft recently simplified the license options for virtualized environments for it's server operating systems and software. They offer clear easy to understand rules about what licenses are required in a virtual environment. Their license model allows for subcapacity licensing also clearly realizes the fact that virtual machines may float between physical servers. One of the great deals to come out of this change in mindset about virtual environments is Microsoft 2003 Datacenter Server license "retails" for $2,999 per processor (two processor - socket- minimum) - while this may seem like a costly alternative considering Windows Standard edition lists for $999 - a Datacenter Server license gives the license holder the right to run an unlimited number of Windows 2003 or Windows 2000 virtual server environments on the hardware - whether they will be using Microsoft's virtualization software or VMWare. By purchasing copies of Datacenter Server for the four blades in our VMWare VI3 cluster I never have to worry about to tracking license counts en our VMWare environment. Unfortunately Datacenter Server is positioned for much larger organizations so I had to talk to three software vendors before finding one who would sell it to me since we are a small business.
Other vendors are not quite as clear or are not quite as helpful in their pricing on partitioned or virtual environments. The Oracle Licensing page in the Oracle FAQs WIKI states "As at February 13 2006, Oracle still did not recognize "soft partitioning" technologies such as VMWare and Microsoft Virtual Server when licensing by processor/CPU. Instead you must license by the physical processor in the underlying hardware."
IBM does recognize partitioning and allows subcapacity licensing of products under a Passport agreement but while their sets of documents to explain in detail all the options for a logically partitioned (LPARed) environment the rules are still quite hazy about the VMWare option and which products are offered under subcapacity licensing is also unclear. I would love to have a simple straightforward statement on running Lotus Domino, Sametime and Quickr under a VMWare cluster - do I have to have licenses for each system in the cluster? Can I use subcapacity licensing with VMWare and only license for one socket or core?
With vendors of more specialized products the problem gets even worse. We passed on the purchase of a commercial PGP encryption application to run in an 2 processor logical partition on one of our consolidated AIX systems because the vendor's pricing was prohibitive since they only licensed based on the physical hardware - a 16 processor box.
What about you? Are you using virtualization in your business? Have you run into any licensing nightmares? Which vendors do you think need to get the message most?
Mature technologies are available from various hardware and software vendors that provide a greater degree of robustness and allow organizations to maximize their hardware utilization. Processors and operating systems are increasingly savvy about virtualization. Applications vendors are realizing that they must support customers running their software in virtual environments. The primary area where things still lag behind in the nature and complexity of licensing agreements on virtualized or partitioned hardware.
Microsoft recently simplified the license options for virtualized environments for it's server operating systems and software. They offer clear easy to understand rules about what licenses are required in a virtual environment. Their license model allows for subcapacity licensing also clearly realizes the fact that virtual machines may float between physical servers. One of the great deals to come out of this change in mindset about virtual environments is Microsoft 2003 Datacenter Server license "retails" for $2,999 per processor (two processor - socket- minimum) - while this may seem like a costly alternative considering Windows Standard edition lists for $999 - a Datacenter Server license gives the license holder the right to run an unlimited number of Windows 2003 or Windows 2000 virtual server environments on the hardware - whether they will be using Microsoft's virtualization software or VMWare. By purchasing copies of Datacenter Server for the four blades in our VMWare VI3 cluster I never have to worry about to tracking license counts en our VMWare environment. Unfortunately Datacenter Server is positioned for much larger organizations so I had to talk to three software vendors before finding one who would sell it to me since we are a small business.
Other vendors are not quite as clear or are not quite as helpful in their pricing on partitioned or virtual environments. The Oracle Licensing page in the Oracle FAQs WIKI states "As at February 13 2006, Oracle still did not recognize "soft partitioning" technologies such as VMWare and Microsoft Virtual Server when licensing by processor/CPU. Instead you must license by the physical processor in the underlying hardware."
IBM does recognize partitioning and allows subcapacity licensing of products under a Passport agreement but while their sets of documents to explain in detail all the options for a logically partitioned (LPARed) environment the rules are still quite hazy about the VMWare option and which products are offered under subcapacity licensing is also unclear. I would love to have a simple straightforward statement on running Lotus Domino, Sametime and Quickr under a VMWare cluster - do I have to have licenses for each system in the cluster? Can I use subcapacity licensing with VMWare and only license for one socket or core?
With vendors of more specialized products the problem gets even worse. We passed on the purchase of a commercial PGP encryption application to run in an 2 processor logical partition on one of our consolidated AIX systems because the vendor's pricing was prohibitive since they only licensed based on the physical hardware - a 16 processor box.
What about you? Are you using virtualization in your business? Have you run into any licensing nightmares? Which vendors do you think need to get the message most?
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