Migration Services

Throughout my experiences I have always worked on building my strongest customer relations through migration services.  How important are migration services?

Hosting companies and consultants alike may offer a broad range of migration services however there may be a level of uncertainty or confidence going forward.   I have worked with partners and competitors alike whose migration services have ranged from site visits to the customer site or the hosting facility as well as complete remote satellite migrations with multiple participants across the globe.

The most critical understand in a migration is that the reputation in committing to do so means everything.

–          How much time will it take?

–          How much does it cost?

–          Security?

When it’s done should never be stated, an approximation should be as close as possible and in any event a discovery process in order to have a more accurate response to this question before hand.
This should also be where it is discussed whether the migration is to take place over a single business day an entire weekend or over the course of several nights during off peak hours depending on the nature of the business that is being migrated.

The cost factor should also tie in things such as if there are on site system administrators or a team of engineers as well as if there are any other hosting providers migrating off of that will be involved in this project.   If there are multiple parties involved then there should be a agreement as to what the conditions are financially to secure this cost, will it be billed hourly where there may be idling waiting for a third party.

Security is always crucial to maintain the trust and integrity of information.  If the migrate attendee is in an industry with compliance regulations don’t just take a word on it.  Security is not just a service it is a pervasive concern for everything that needs to be done.

I’d also like to add transparency.  In several industries such as SaaS providers where uptime and running is 100% of the business there may be a need for such a high level of commitment that everything in regards to a migration needs to be completely transparent.  This can be done with the right hands and a level of experience in doing so.   Building things in parallel and maintaining a production and staging environment while transitionally replicating information is a start where this would converge.

Contact me or come visit my New York office and I would love to discuss in more details.  For all others feel free to use my information if it provides any expert guidance.

Posted via email from IT Rockstar

Brocade and fabric-based servers

For product planners at Dell, HP, IBM, Juniper and Sun, the talk about fabric-based servers moved from philosophical discussion to urgent-must-take-action status when Cisco introduced the Unified Computing System. 

The presence of UCS from the networking giant is tangible evidence that a large piece of the future server value proposition will be intellectual property related to the network embedded in the server.

Blade server vendors pioneered embedded server networks by integrating adapter cards and switches from networking vendors. If Cisco is right, successful server vendors in the future will separate themselves from their competitors with their own sophisticated networking technology that is needed to connect virtual servers, networks and storage residing in environments ranging from a single chassis to part of a public cloud that stretches around the globe.

None of the aforementioned server and networking vendors, including HP with the acquisition of 3Com, has introduced their own FCoE intellectual property with which to compete against Cisco. I believe this is why all of these vendors still covet the Brocade portfolio that spans Ethernet and Fibre Channel, servers to fabric, and from core to edge.

Source: Frank Berry @ networkcomputing.com

Posted via email from IT Rockstar

Amazon Kindle DX HOHOHO Happy Holidays

Amazon Kindle DX HOHOHO Happy Holidays

Santa never sleeps and in the spirit of giving Logicworks has their own Santa.
Mr. Carter Burden has continued the tradition of gifting us with pure awesomeness.
This year all Logicworks employees have received Amazon Kindle DX.

Some of the main features to begin with you will notice this massive
9.7” screen, full QWERTY keyboard and 3.3GB of user-accessible space.
PDF support is a nice addition.  The Amazon Whispernet wireless is another
great feature.  Put on your reading glasses and enjoy, this bad boy is going
with me on my next vacation.

Posted via email from IT Rockstar

Administrating and Migrating Exchange mail servers

Imagine that your company uses Microsoft exchange mail services to store valuable information.
Mail servers these days are treated as databases they are repositories for tons of information.

Engineers might use notes memos or messages in Exchange to store instructions, reminders, IP information and correspondence with others regarding solutions and then utilize their mail client to query this information whenever necessary.

Sales agents, executives and accountants may also store similar like data within their exchange mailboxes simply due to the fact there is such portability.  Handhelds and various other devices now provide us with anywhere access to our personal databases which reside on exchange.

Throughout my engineering experience I have worked on exchange servers which have had sensitive and vast amounts of data stored up to a decade historically.  Migrated with each successor of the exchange product this sensitive data was continued through the various revisions.   I have implemented and maintained mail servers for over 15 years.  Now it’s all a part of the great migration.

Being cutting edge and having a team of savvy System Administrator’s full time in house unless you are against early migrations for whatever reason you will hop right onto each exchange revision.

What is the total cost of ownership for managing and maintaining an Exchange system in house?
Let’s have a look here, Google has written up a nice for comparison;

Over 3 years which is the medium for a mail platform before a successor is introduced it will cost over $177,713 to maintain an in house exchange service.  Now this does not include the cost of DR (Disaster Recovery).  This also does not provide you with an SLA policy in the event of downtime.

There are 3 amazing players that I am aware of in the Managed E-Mail hosting industry, in no particular order or grade I will name them.  Microsoft, Google, Rackspace.

Compliance is another factor, if you are using your mail platform to house sensitive data is your institute compliant?

From an Engineering perspective I was proud of having my Exchange servers in house.  Whether in-house was meaning that they were collocated at a top tier datacenter or managed hosting provider such as Logicworks the bare metal layer was an added level of accomplishment and security on my investment.

At this point in no way do I find Microsoft Exchange servers as a less capable mail server.  I am ecstatic about communication platforms and I find that Exchange is the most highly used in the industry.

To think outside of the box let’s conclude that the providers whom offer these services as managed remove the single point and lower the cost, specialization is the best one has to offer.

Posted via email from IT Rockstar

Determine if TCP port is open

nc -zw2 http://www.example.com 80 && echo open

A crucial part of an Administrators toolbox is access to a 24x7x365 available shell.
Whether it’s Cygwin a virtual machine or bare metal we need to shell out and execute commands.

Another trick of the trade I want to share with the community is an outstanding resource that is better than man pages. Please take a look at http://www.commandlinefu.com the level of awesome this site has to offer is beyond expression, If you need a quick resource, a syntax example or guiding in the right direction to execute a function, this is the site to be on. The site supports OpenID and also has a twitter feed.