LOL, nope not even my BS, but I have been a lead consultant before and I'm currently a technical manager (with 1 report, I still very much do technical things). I've found that understanding the thinking process of business people greatly helps in getting my way. It's much easier to show them the value you bring to the company than it is to beg for budget dollars. I think that's why so many people are disappointed in their position in IT, they are stuck in classic cost center models where they are seen as at best a necessary evil to the larger business rather than a strategic partner and enabler.
A good example is the multi-million dollar ERP project we completed in early 2007. On top of the ERP platform we built a largely automated accounts payable system. Come early 2009 and retail is in tatters, because of the system we built we got a certain class of bills out to our tenants in February meaning they mostly still had money to pay us. Before the new systems were in place the AP department was twice as big and needed outside help to get the billings out by June.
OCSP/CRL, certificate revocation list. If you have found a fraudulent site or a legit site who's cert has been compromised contact the signer and have them add it to their CRL/OCSP blacklist. I'm not sure if there is any mechanism for a local CRL, though you can certainly stop trusting a signer if they show a significant lack of diligence in screening their clients.
If you are doing your job you should be doing more than not getting in the businesses way, you should be leading the company to higher efficiencies. Trust me my IT group gets recognition from the CEO on down, but we are doing industry leading decision support solutions with a very small staff. I wouldn't call it glory, more like rightly deserved recognition for the contribution we make to the company.
Dude, no way in hell I would pay that fee, or any fines on the fee. So what if they turn me in to the credit agencies, one bad debt like that wouldn't hurt your score much. I refuse to pay for other peoples laziness, incompetence, or corruption. I guess that's one advantage of having my financial house in order, one ding against my 800+ credit score means squat to me so anyone who tries to pull that kind of stunt loses my business and they can stuff their bogus fees.
SMTP is insecure, most corporate email systems ARE secure/authenticated, that's one of the advantages. Btw I did this to our former helpdesk manager. He kept leaving his workstation unlocked despite my repeated reminders so one day I sent an email from him to his boss confessing to be an idiot who left his workstation unlocked. He came running from a meeting when he saw the message on his Blackberry. He was pissed at me but our boss just laughed and told him to stop being so stupid and to follow company policy. I'd love to be allowed to do something like the Sunray smart cards or use locked screensaver policies but whenever I've brought it up it's been shot down. Maybe now that I have a new SVP I should bring it up again.
Nope, sorry but I would MUCH rather spend $1k than have my neck suffer 23G's of acceleration (what can occur in a 15mph crash without cushioning). That $1k represents a fraction of the monthly earnings for the average first world family, it's much cheaper to fix the car than fix the person.
I am as well, I get 4-6 hours most nights when I'm NOT having an insomnia episode and both of my grandmothers have Alzheimer's. I think my only hope is that medical science will have evolved enough in the next 30 years that they will have some way to remove the plaques before they start to rob me of my cognitive functions. I have already told my kids that they are to take me on a hike into the backwoods of Yellowstone in the fall if I ever get to the point where they want to put me in a home, at least there my corpse will do some good.
Those must have been IBM's. I'm annoyed by the increased boot times from the HP G5 line to the G6 line, but they still boot in well under 5 minutes (we page if a server is down 5 minutes). Since the memory tests are not likely to catch anything (memtest86+ can take hours or days to catch anything) they don't need to rigorous and with modern BIOS code they can be divied up per core. HDD's can be spun up in bunches rather than sequentially (you have a 400-1000W PSU, use it!), etc.
Yes but the per-port cost of 10Gb ethernet is astronomical compared to something that would go in a consumer device. I imagine this technology has many, many compromises to achieve lower cost that would not work well for a more generalized transport like ethernet (ie this is probably meant to go to less than 3m).
Uh, hehe 20 functions, how cute. No, my users unfortunately run large parts of the business on Excel spreadsheets. We're doing all we can to get away from that (we'll be up to 5 reporting tools by years end) but it's our reality. They have tons of linked spreadsheets with each spreadsheet being 10-50 tabs and many of them pulling from 1-3 ODBC databases or using 3rd party addons to pull information from databases. There are power Excel users and then there are guru's and for better or worse all of our top financial guys and gals are level 10 Excel guru's so I don't think I'll be springing Office 2007 on them any time soon (not to mention 2/3rds the addons we use aren't available/certified on 2007).
2 weeks of unproductive time * #employees in company = $$$$$, and for for what exactly? Do you think any minor efficiency gains will overcome the 2 weeks of lost productivity over the normal deployment time of Office 2007?
9600 GSO (384/768) and 9600 GT are both very capable DX9 and passable DX10 parts that come in passive flavors. On the ATI side of things there's a passive 4850.
Personally I would love a reduced core version of the 5870 with even lower idle power and low enough max power (~75W) to allow passive cooling.
It's not a single core, it's quad core (octal core with HT enabled), but it's still insanely expensive. I can get dual 5560's and 72GB of ram for about the same price from HP. The "loaded" system with 80 cores and 240GB of ram and low end 5520 CPU's is at least in the realm of reasonable pricing especially if it includes all the interconnect gear (I'm assuming they aren't using ethernet or else it really makes no sense to buy this).
We have a remote telco shelf powered by enough batteries to last 48 hours (not that they have ever been drained down past 30 seconds except during a battery test) and the equipment they talk to is likewise powered by two sets of such batteries (but only 1 generator). Soon we are going to have feeds to two CO's which take different egress paths from the city (one East, one West). We have dual generators, dual transfer switches, dual UPS's and all equipment is obviously dual power supplied. The only potential wrinkle would be actual delivery on our fuel contracts, our tanks are big enough to run for 48-72 hours and we pay to be right behind hospitals and 911 centers for fuel but you never know until the event if they will actually deliver. On the positive front we have a new generator with a massive tank to power our new building and once it was obvious that it was going to be an extended outage we would likely send everyone home and could siphon fuel from that tank to power the two datacenter generators. Over half our company is located outside our power grid so if we can stay up we should be able to keep the company functioning even in an extended outage.
Exactly, unless the short in the transfer switch somehow gets through the UPS how is it going to affect a truly redundant setup? I know if one of my transfer switches dies it wouldn't do anything as the systems would just go along powered by the other power feed. If there is ANY single point of failure in your design it WILL fail at some point, that's why the design guidelines matter.
EPO buttons aren't allowed to work like that in most jurisdictions, the fire fighters want to know that when they hit the red button that ALL power to the room is off.
If you are large enough to survive one or more site outages then sure you can go for a cheaper $/sq ft design without redundant power and cooling. If on the other hand you are like most small to medium shops then you probably can't afford the downtime because you haven't reached the scale where you can geographically diversify your operations. In that case downtime is probably still much more costly than even the most expensive of hosting facilities. I know when we looked for a site to host our DR site we were only looking at tier-IV datacenters because the assumption is that if our primary facility is gone we will have to timeshare the significantly reduced performance facilities we have at DR and so downtime wouldn't really be acceptable. By going that route we saved ~$500k on equipment to make DR equivalent to production at a cost of a few thousand a month for a top tier datacenter, those numbers are easy to work.
Experience? Windows 2003 SP1 works just fine for us TYVM. SQL 2005 SP3 is also just fine for us. I wouldn't have run SQL 2005 pre-SP1 either. I probably wouldn't have gone with vsphere either if it wasn't for some cutting edge features we needed and the fact that VMWare seems to have a much better testing team than MS (license invalidation bug from 3.5 was an exception).
Not sure of the specifics of Cayuga lake but if it's anything like the Great Lakes then there is a large area of cold water that is basically devoid of life. One recent plant used the incoming city water supply which is drawn from a cold deep region as a thermal sink, since the water was just going to heat to ground temperature anyways the net effect was slightly lower heat load on the earth surrounding the cities water pipes. Of course the energy sink potential isn't infinite, but it's potentially very large and if it reduces the one side of the energy equation by ~80% then that's all the fewer resources we have to use up. Pardon me if you take offense but you sound a bit like the people in the Greenpeace movement who can't see the forest for the trees, we need to take advantage of things like freecooling and nuclear power so we can reduce the immediate resource usage that is occurring. If we find better ways to do things down the road that's great going for cleaner (not clean) options today is better than waiting decades for something perfect to come about if ever. We aren't going back to hunter gatherers so we need to do what we can we the technology we have to minimize our impact.
WRONG. Virtualized guests are treated exactly the same no matter the virtualization platform, and you can use the datacenter licensing route for VMWare, in fact MS specifically calls it out when they compare the cost of running vmware to hyper-v (ignoring the fact that many shops virtualize Linux workloads thus not needing any MS licensing).
Unless the application isn't supported on SQL 2005 (even in compatibility mode) or has known issues with SQL 2005. On the other hand I've never heard of an app that will run on SQL 2000 SP3 but not SP4, and you really want SP4 because the list of known issues and critical bugs with SP3 is rather long.
They say that VMWare still holds 80-90 percent of the market, that MS's Hyper-V will put serious pricing pressure on VMWare, and that the majority of the market erosion will be in the SMB space. They think that the revenue play going forward will be on management tools. They are already right as ESXi is now free but you can't manage it with vcenter without buying it a license which makes it kind of worthless. Xen gives you quite a bit of functionality in the free version but there are some things like automated recovery that require the licensed version. MS with Hyper-v R2 will have by far the largest featureset in the free space and the licensing for SCCM is a fraction of what vsphere+vcenter cost.
I have a midsized virtualization project that I am in the middle of right now and we went vsphere because we couldn't wait for Hyper-v R2 SP1 to come out (who uses MS products pre-SP1 for production?) but it's very possible that unless VMWare does some major price adjustments that we may end up on Hyper-v in 3 years when our support contract is up.
Normally it's stated as cash or cash equivalents which could mean all sorts of easily convertible short term holdings as well as actual account balances. Though one would hope you wouldn't have $4B in actual account balances as even with a return of less than a percent you are talking real money.
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LOL, nope not even my BS, but I have been a lead consultant before and I'm currently a technical manager (with 1 report, I still very much do technical things). I've found that understanding the thinking process of business people greatly helps in getting my way. It's much easier to show them the value you bring to the company than it is to beg for budget dollars. I think that's why so many people are disappointed in their position in IT, they are stuck in classic cost center models where they are seen as at best a necessary evil to the larger business rather than a strategic partner and enabler.
A good example is the multi-million dollar ERP project we completed in early 2007. On top of the ERP platform we built a largely automated accounts payable system. Come early 2009 and retail is in tatters, because of the system we built we got a certain class of bills out to our tenants in February meaning they mostly still had money to pay us. Before the new systems were in place the AP department was twice as big and needed outside help to get the billings out by June.
OCSP/CRL, certificate revocation list. If you have found a fraudulent site or a legit site who's cert has been compromised contact the signer and have them add it to their CRL/OCSP blacklist. I'm not sure if there is any mechanism for a local CRL, though you can certainly stop trusting a signer if they show a significant lack of diligence in screening their clients.
If you are doing your job you should be doing more than not getting in the businesses way, you should be leading the company to higher efficiencies. Trust me my IT group gets recognition from the CEO on down, but we are doing industry leading decision support solutions with a very small staff. I wouldn't call it glory, more like rightly deserved recognition for the contribution we make to the company.
Dude, no way in hell I would pay that fee, or any fines on the fee. So what if they turn me in to the credit agencies, one bad debt like that wouldn't hurt your score much. I refuse to pay for other peoples laziness, incompetence, or corruption. I guess that's one advantage of having my financial house in order, one ding against my 800+ credit score means squat to me so anyone who tries to pull that kind of stunt loses my business and they can stuff their bogus fees.
SMTP is insecure, most corporate email systems ARE secure/authenticated, that's one of the advantages. Btw I did this to our former helpdesk manager. He kept leaving his workstation unlocked despite my repeated reminders so one day I sent an email from him to his boss confessing to be an idiot who left his workstation unlocked. He came running from a meeting when he saw the message on his Blackberry. He was pissed at me but our boss just laughed and told him to stop being so stupid and to follow company policy. I'd love to be allowed to do something like the Sunray smart cards or use locked screensaver policies but whenever I've brought it up it's been shot down. Maybe now that I have a new SVP I should bring it up again.
Nope, sorry but I would MUCH rather spend $1k than have my neck suffer 23G's of acceleration (what can occur in a 15mph crash without cushioning). That $1k represents a fraction of the monthly earnings for the average first world family, it's much cheaper to fix the car than fix the person.
I am as well, I get 4-6 hours most nights when I'm NOT having an insomnia episode and both of my grandmothers have Alzheimer's. I think my only hope is that medical science will have evolved enough in the next 30 years that they will have some way to remove the plaques before they start to rob me of my cognitive functions. I have already told my kids that they are to take me on a hike into the backwoods of Yellowstone in the fall if I ever get to the point where they want to put me in a home, at least there my corpse will do some good.
Those must have been IBM's. I'm annoyed by the increased boot times from the HP G5 line to the G6 line, but they still boot in well under 5 minutes (we page if a server is down 5 minutes). Since the memory tests are not likely to catch anything (memtest86+ can take hours or days to catch anything) they don't need to rigorous and with modern BIOS code they can be divied up per core. HDD's can be spun up in bunches rather than sequentially (you have a 400-1000W PSU, use it!), etc.
Yes, but I don't see where it says it does 10Gb @ 100m =)
Yes but the per-port cost of 10Gb ethernet is astronomical compared to something that would go in a consumer device. I imagine this technology has many, many compromises to achieve lower cost that would not work well for a more generalized transport like ethernet (ie this is probably meant to go to less than 3m).
Uh, hehe 20 functions, how cute. No, my users unfortunately run large parts of the business on Excel spreadsheets. We're doing all we can to get away from that (we'll be up to 5 reporting tools by years end) but it's our reality. They have tons of linked spreadsheets with each spreadsheet being 10-50 tabs and many of them pulling from 1-3 ODBC databases or using 3rd party addons to pull information from databases. There are power Excel users and then there are guru's and for better or worse all of our top financial guys and gals are level 10 Excel guru's so I don't think I'll be springing Office 2007 on them any time soon (not to mention 2/3rds the addons we use aren't available/certified on 2007).
2 weeks of unproductive time * #employees in company = $$$$$, and for for what exactly? Do you think any minor efficiency gains will overcome the 2 weeks of lost productivity over the normal deployment time of Office 2007?
9600 GSO (384/768) and 9600 GT are both very capable DX9 and passable DX10 parts that come in passive flavors. On the ATI side of things there's a passive 4850.
Personally I would love a reduced core version of the 5870 with even lower idle power and low enough max power (~75W) to allow passive cooling.
It's not a single core, it's quad core (octal core with HT enabled), but it's still insanely expensive. I can get dual 5560's and 72GB of ram for about the same price from HP. The "loaded" system with 80 cores and 240GB of ram and low end 5520 CPU's is at least in the realm of reasonable pricing especially if it includes all the interconnect gear (I'm assuming they aren't using ethernet or else it really makes no sense to buy this).
We have a remote telco shelf powered by enough batteries to last 48 hours (not that they have ever been drained down past 30 seconds except during a battery test) and the equipment they talk to is likewise powered by two sets of such batteries (but only 1 generator). Soon we are going to have feeds to two CO's which take different egress paths from the city (one East, one West). We have dual generators, dual transfer switches, dual UPS's and all equipment is obviously dual power supplied. The only potential wrinkle would be actual delivery on our fuel contracts, our tanks are big enough to run for 48-72 hours and we pay to be right behind hospitals and 911 centers for fuel but you never know until the event if they will actually deliver. On the positive front we have a new generator with a massive tank to power our new building and once it was obvious that it was going to be an extended outage we would likely send everyone home and could siphon fuel from that tank to power the two datacenter generators. Over half our company is located outside our power grid so if we can stay up we should be able to keep the company functioning even in an extended outage.
Exactly, unless the short in the transfer switch somehow gets through the UPS how is it going to affect a truly redundant setup? I know if one of my transfer switches dies it wouldn't do anything as the systems would just go along powered by the other power feed. If there is ANY single point of failure in your design it WILL fail at some point, that's why the design guidelines matter.
EPO buttons aren't allowed to work like that in most jurisdictions, the fire fighters want to know that when they hit the red button that ALL power to the room is off.
If you are large enough to survive one or more site outages then sure you can go for a cheaper $/sq ft design without redundant power and cooling. If on the other hand you are like most small to medium shops then you probably can't afford the downtime because you haven't reached the scale where you can geographically diversify your operations. In that case downtime is probably still much more costly than even the most expensive of hosting facilities. I know when we looked for a site to host our DR site we were only looking at tier-IV datacenters because the assumption is that if our primary facility is gone we will have to timeshare the significantly reduced performance facilities we have at DR and so downtime wouldn't really be acceptable. By going that route we saved ~$500k on equipment to make DR equivalent to production at a cost of a few thousand a month for a top tier datacenter, those numbers are easy to work.
Experience? Windows 2003 SP1 works just fine for us TYVM. SQL 2005 SP3 is also just fine for us. I wouldn't have run SQL 2005 pre-SP1 either. I probably wouldn't have gone with vsphere either if it wasn't for some cutting edge features we needed and the fact that VMWare seems to have a much better testing team than MS (license invalidation bug from 3.5 was an exception).
Not sure of the specifics of Cayuga lake but if it's anything like the Great Lakes then there is a large area of cold water that is basically devoid of life. One recent plant used the incoming city water supply which is drawn from a cold deep region as a thermal sink, since the water was just going to heat to ground temperature anyways the net effect was slightly lower heat load on the earth surrounding the cities water pipes. Of course the energy sink potential isn't infinite, but it's potentially very large and if it reduces the one side of the energy equation by ~80% then that's all the fewer resources we have to use up. Pardon me if you take offense but you sound a bit like the people in the Greenpeace movement who can't see the forest for the trees, we need to take advantage of things like freecooling and nuclear power so we can reduce the immediate resource usage that is occurring. If we find better ways to do things down the road that's great going for cleaner (not clean) options today is better than waiting decades for something perfect to come about if ever. We aren't going back to hunter gatherers so we need to do what we can we the technology we have to minimize our impact.
WRONG. Virtualized guests are treated exactly the same no matter the virtualization platform, and you can use the datacenter licensing route for VMWare, in fact MS specifically calls it out when they compare the cost of running vmware to hyper-v (ignoring the fact that many shops virtualize Linux workloads thus not needing any MS licensing).
Unless the application isn't supported on SQL 2005 (even in compatibility mode) or has known issues with SQL 2005. On the other hand I've never heard of an app that will run on SQL 2000 SP3 but not SP4, and you really want SP4 because the list of known issues and critical bugs with SP3 is rather long.
They say that VMWare still holds 80-90 percent of the market, that MS's Hyper-V will put serious pricing pressure on VMWare, and that the majority of the market erosion will be in the SMB space. They think that the revenue play going forward will be on management tools. They are already right as ESXi is now free but you can't manage it with vcenter without buying it a license which makes it kind of worthless. Xen gives you quite a bit of functionality in the free version but there are some things like automated recovery that require the licensed version. MS with Hyper-v R2 will have by far the largest featureset in the free space and the licensing for SCCM is a fraction of what vsphere+vcenter cost.
I have a midsized virtualization project that I am in the middle of right now and we went vsphere because we couldn't wait for Hyper-v R2 SP1 to come out (who uses MS products pre-SP1 for production?) but it's very possible that unless VMWare does some major price adjustments that we may end up on Hyper-v in 3 years when our support contract is up.
Normally it's stated as cash or cash equivalents which could mean all sorts of easily convertible short term holdings as well as actual account balances. Though one would hope you wouldn't have $4B in actual account balances as even with a return of less than a percent you are talking real money.
The long rule is stupid, if you are going to use units as big as a million million just use scientific notation.