So, here is my question: if I had an antenna and a transcoder at my residence, could someone still act as a Network-based DVR? I'm a bit unclear at which part of their service is considered a public transmission... If I'm providing the content (as in my theory here) and then playing it back for myself, would this still be a no-no in accordance with this ruling? Network-based DVR would still be permitted, right? Or am I misreading/misunderstanding the ruling?
Bingo. In an enterprise, you run these legacy apps inside of Terminal Services or as a XenApp, ThinApp, App-V, etc. And you restrict them from accessing the Internet. Then you can drop a safer, more modern browser on the desktop itself.
For any decent size enterprise, they have so much legacy code that they wouldn't even know where to begin with an overhaul. For at least some businesses, this is the same reason that mainframes are still around. A few years ago I worked for a US telco who ran their main ticketing system off of a mainframe. They wanted to replace it (since the developers were pretty much writing their own paychecks), but they couldn't even quantify how much money it would cost to replace it with a new system (Remedy, if I recall correctly). Countless hours spent trying to figure out how to replace and provide automated circuit testing, cable/pair mappings, billing, dispatch scheduling, etc. Plus, there were so many integrations with various other systems over the decades since it's inception that no one knew how everything worked. The people who did know had long since left (or had been terminated). Not a good situation for anyone to find themselves in...
I feel the exact opposite as you. When I go in to the office, I feel trapped and unable to escape. I generally feel "stuck" until well past time to leave to go home. It feels as though my e-mail follows me home and demands my attention late into the night.
When I work from home, quitting time rolls around and I just shut everything off.
Part of the problem for me is that productivity is so low while at the office. Because of the workplace distractions, it feels as though I get nothing accomplished until somewhere in the area of 3pm or later. By then, I feel as though I still have to get my 8 hours of work in, which puts me working late, even though I've already been in the office all day spinning my wheels. When I work from home, I rarely get bothered by anyone until after lunch, which means I already have over half a day of "real work" accomplished. I can grab some food while listening in on that "emergency" conference call that has absolutely nothing to do with me. Plus I save a 45 minute commute each direction.
If I could lock myself into a quiet room at the office, and people were somehow prohibited from bothering me for stupid stuff that isn't my problem, then I would absolutely be more productive in the office than at home. However, that isn't the case, so the interruptions are frequent and unnecessary, and people are continuously consuming my time for problems that I don't even have anything to do with.
A phone call can also work wonders. If that doesn't do the trick, a quick video chat can sometimes be even better. If that doesn't work out, then you can still meet up for a few pints.
That being said, I understand that there are still certain benefits to handling some situations in person. However, I've never worked in an environment that has required in-person communications multiple times daily. I guess if that is an environment that one finds themselves in, then it means that telecommuting simply isn't an option for them.
Ditto. I have a 1 year old, and I am still more productive from home than when in the office.
I think part of the problem is that the distractions while in the office are more "distracting" than those at home (at least for me). They either pull me away from my desk or create a sufficient enough diversion that I have to break my train of thought. Even a 30 second interruption can take a significant amount of time to recover from, especially since it continues being a topic of conversation long after it has went away (I share an office with a co-worker). Inevitably, there are also the individuals that decide to drop by and hang out for an unwelcome chat for an excessive amount of time - no, I don't care about your weekend, and I'd rather not tell you about mine.
Yes, there are distractions at home also, but those are frequently ones that are mindless and/or menial and do not break my train of thought. Generally, the worst distractions I get at home are the endless conference calls (and work-related phone calls) that seem to have no point other than to waste time.
why tax abstract entities at all? Set CIT to 0 and tax the money when it goes to live people if you really have to. People are material and it's them who use roads, police protection and what not. The corps on the other hand are an idea that can uproot and move with few strokes of a pen, good like pinning it down.
I think that, in theory, this makes the most sense. However, doesn't corporate personhood mean that corporations would essentially be getting access to government resources free of charge?
Depends on the business. I work for a financial company, and there are regulations that require recording of many customer facing conversations. With the advent of Dodd Frank, it appears that the recording regulations are going to extend to mobile devices. Oddly enough, it is quite difficult to record cell phone conversations in a non-intrusive and reliable manner. Sure, there are spyware applications, but those are designed for consumer use, and aren't particularly workable in the enterprise (especially since most of them require rooted devices, which isn't easy to accommodate in an enterprise environment). We've also looked into recording Skype conversations, and there aren't a lot of reliable solutions for that either. Many of them have to run on the same machine as the client, which makes retrieving the conversations a nightmare.
Plus, things like abbreviated dialing between global offices, least cost routing, TEHO, etc, would cause telephone costs to skyrocket if desk phones were eliminated. Our International rates for our dedicated voice circuits is significantly cheaper than those of cell phones.
So, in our environment, at least, about the only conversation you could have would be replacing desk phones with soft phones. With as many people as we have who have more than 8 lines on their phones, I don't think there is a soft phone client that is reliable enough to replicate the experience.
Even for me personally, I have a much more pleasant experience using speaker phone on my desk phone than trying to use speakers and a mic on my computer. Headsets either way suck. I can't even imagine only using a soft phone or only using my cell phone. Heck, as it is, I generally call people back from my desk phone if they call me on my cell phone. Same thing if I accidentally pick up a call on my soft phone. For those of you who enjoy not having a desk phone, kudos to you! For me, I'm going to hold on to mine as long as I can!
I know this is easier to say than to actually implement, but you could add a "support" menu option or link, and if it's paid software, have the licensing information, including account number, populate to the support page (including the number to call for support if it's paid). If it's the free version, you can provide information there about how to get support, costs, etc.
Then, on your phone system, you can explain quickly how to find the account information, and provide a redirect option for paid support for the free software version.
That way, you don't have to worry about "buried" account or other support numbers.
Great, and what about counter-examples like ICE domain seizures?
The ICE seizures were completely ineffective. There were a couple of sites that I accessed that were seized by ICE and both were back up and operating with new domain names (that were easily located via a Google search) within a day. The ones that didn't come back probably were doing something illegitimate and didn't feel that it was in their best interest to return. For sure, the ICE seizures were stupid, and a terrible move by the US. But, I'll take that over the great firewall of China any day.
I also agree that the US can no longer pretend to be a protector of the freedoms of the Internet either. However, I still don't believe that things are going to get any better with the ITU. There must be a reason that countries like Iran and China are pushing so hard for this. Perhaps they believe that they can leverage the ITU in some way to make things easier for themselves to censor their citizens. If these countries are simply seeking independence from IANA, there is nothing stopping them from operating their own DNS servers. They can even still selectively synchronize things from the IANA DNS servers if they choose.
Additionally, Amazon has Cisco Nexus switches in colo space in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Not sure which product line it was supporting, but they had lots and lots of them.
It all depends on who you are. At my last company, the local Cisco account team wanted us as a reference account. Our discount from Cisco (before distribution and the partner took their cut) was 59%. Our final discount was 55% or 57% (depending on whether we went through disti or direct from Cisco).
At my current company, our discount from Cisco (again before disti and partner) is 55%. Our price after partner and disti is 47% (yes, our partner is taking a ridiculous cut).
The problem is that most customers don't have any idea what list price is, and so they have no clue whether they are even getting a reasonable price. Sadly, Cisco, along with their partners, do their best to hide this information from their customers.
Source? If Cisco was pitching a solution that was heavy on Nexus, it sounds like they were pitching a different solution than everyone else. If anything, that means that they didn't follow instructions properly, not that they were legitimately that much higher.
Yes, the US has regulations in place that require carriers provide "lawful intercept", which the government can use for pretty much anything whether it's actually lawful or not. But, guess what? This still requires carrier interaction, so the US can't spy on anyone and everyone around the globe just because they "own" the Internet. We can probably still spy on our Allies, assuming those countries ask their carriers to comply with US government regulations.
On the other hand, if Hauwei or ZTE are actually building backdoors (which hasn't actually been proven to my knowledge) in equipment so that the Chinese government can gain access to any traffic, anywhere in the world, regardless of carrier collusion (other than them purchasing the hardware itself), then we are no longer talking about an apples to apples comparison here.
What exactly are they "competing" with? The U.S. blocks DNS for some websites - hardly an effective prevention mechanism. The WATTC will be meeting in Dubai, and the UAE certainly has a long-standing reputation for an open and free Internet, don't they? And, lo and behold, some of the most vocal proponents of changes to the Internet are China and India.
Let's pretend for a moment that the US does relinquish Command and Control of the Internet (because honestly, for the most part "The Internet" is just the root DNS servers and control of IANA and ICANN) - and UAE, India and China get a hand in the pot of controlling it. Do you really think things are going to get better, or do you think they are going to get worse?
Now, if we were talking about Switzerland or Sweden getting control of the Internet, then that would likely be an improvement. But, to my knowledge, the countries who would be likely to improve the Internet climate as a whole are not the ones who have been vocal about an interest in "control" over the Internet.
An Enterprise RAID array isn't strictly about redundancy (although it sounds like that was the point Score Whore was trying to make). It is also about performance. Let's say you are trying to make a 100TB SAN. You can do this using the strategy you outlined, by using 3TB drives and doing a RAID 1 on them. So, 100TB / 3TB = 34 drives * 2 (RAID 1) = 68 drives. Each spindle on a 7200 RPM SATA drive only delivers about 75 IOPs, so that gives you 5100 IOPs Total.
In an Enterprise environment, you are probably going to need a lot more than 5100 IOPs in a 100TB SAN. So, let's say you decide to use 300GB 15k SAS drives. Those give you about 175 IOPs per spindle. If you use the RAID 6 strategy you outlined, which I am fond of myself, (6+2, or 2 failures out of every 8 drives), that would put you around 448 disks total (448 / 8 disks per RAID set = 56 sets * 6 usable drives per set = 336 usable drives * 300 GB = 100800GB). With the 448 spindles, 448 * 175 IOPs = 78400 IOPs. That's a little bit closer to what we're looking for. Throw in a few spares at 30:1 (15 drives), to put you to 463 drives.
How many SATA drives would it take to match the IOPs in a RAID 1 configuration? 78400 IOPs / 75 IOPs per drive = 1046 drives. Spares at around 30:1 means another 35 disks, for 1081 total.
Next we factor power into that. With a Google search, I averaged typical power consumption from 8 7200 RPM 3TB SATA drives (8.6875 W), giving you 9391.188 W for the SATA array. For the 15k 300GB 3.5" SAS drive, it seemed like the most common Google results came back to the Samsung Cheetah, and the data sheet for that one says 7.92 W typical, or 3666.96 W for the SAS array, which means that the SATA array would require 2.5 times the power. More drives, more power means more cooling (and obviously more space as well).
It all depends on what you are trying to accomplish. In an enterprise environment, space, cooling and power are often big concerns. Depending on your environmental limitations and other factors (i.e. regulations, compliance, etc), money isn't always the primary motivator - that all depends on the nature of the business. If you work in a business that is heavily regulated, then you will likely not bet your job on a bunch of SATA disks to store your 5 (or 7, 10, or more) years worth of data that must be searchable, discoverable, highly available, etc (ok, you might bet your job on it, but I'm not going to bet mine on it). Most likely, you are going to tell your company that to protect that data (and potentially your job, depending on your responsibilities), they need to shell out for a costly SAN. Perhaps even 2 geo-redundant SANs that are replicated. Then, you might put a bunch of SATA disks behind that with a backup agent for another layer of protection. Then you might also dump that data to tapes. Which you then ship offsite. Because if things get ugly, you don't want to be the decision maker or recommender who proposed the SATA disks because they were the good enough solution.
Or maybe you do want to be in that position. But I sure don't want to be there. I'm a big fan of well-developed DR/BC plans and highly available infrastructure. When things are working, there are many solutions that can work well. However, when things stop working, you have to have a well-formed plan in mind to recover from the failure. And "we'll just get replacement drives from COSTCO" isn't a particularly well-formed plan (in fact, where I work, even suggesting that would probably result in termination). If you have to wait more than 4 hours to get replacement drives from HP, you should probably look at another storage vendor. Besides, your array should have enough hot spares for the array to rebuild itself even in the event that you don't get those drives in a timely manner.
TL;DR Higher performance disks may be required over cheap disks. It's not always just about redundancy. The same shoe doesn't fit everyone!
If I were going to relocate internationally, Brazil would be high on my list (although I don't know what their immigration policy is, and whether it's even possible). I was sent to Sao Paulo and Campinas recently for work, and although I didn't particularly care for Sao Paulo, I found Campinas to be quite beautiful - it would certainly be on my list of possibilities for relocation.
I can say from experience that working with various telcos (Algar, Embratel, GVT) and even the colo we put equipment in (Terremark Sao Paulo) is a serious challenge if you don't speak Portuguese. As more and more foreign companies start to look at Brazil for various reasons, more and more of these Brazilian companies are going to be looking to hire people who can speak both Portuguese and English. From our IT staff we have down there (who speak both Portuguese and English), the differences in salary compared to the US aren't that large, and there are other variances in compensation that make up even some of that difference (for example, they appear to have a lot more holidays and PTO than we do).
As AC mentioned, I did enjoy the slower pace, and everyone seemed fairly happy. Heck, even in the worst traffic in Sao Paulo, I didn't hear that many people blaring their car horns. Unlike places like New York City where almost everyone uses them constantly.
Yes, Brazil still has issues (corruption, poverty, etc) - but every country has issues of some sort. Pick your poison.
Here are a couple of places to look to get you started. This practice is generally disguised as "Lawful Intercept". The net effect is that any government agency can trap any data that they want to. If you look at the Google search, you will see Cisco configuration guides on how to set this feature up.
Keep in mind, this is just the published part that we know. What other capabilities exist that aren't published? It would probably scare all of us.
The reason that the government (and everyone else) is so concerned about Huawei is because vendors here in the US already have the capabilities to capture whatever the government wants. Why would China be any different? The only difference is that Huawei isn't publishing configuration guides for their implementation...
Sao Paulo. The delta between the rich and the poor is obvious just driving around the city. Granted, Sao Paulo may be the exception rather than the rule, but there are an awful lot of people there, which makes it a really big exception.
It sounds to me that the "Use" of the Exchange infrastructure in question may have grown larger than the infrastructure could, which yes, would cause issues, physical or virtual. Or perhaps the SAN environment being used wasn't very "friendly" to Exchange.
Agreed. If virtualizing Exchange broke the environment, then the environment wasn't sized properly. Too few servers, not enough IOPS, something. Of all things, Exchange is the one thing that I would almost never consider running physical. 2003, 2007, 2010 - all work flawlessly virtualized. The only thing I've not tested is the Unified Messaging role, which until recently wasn't supported virtualized.
- Telephony and rea-time voice/video servers (Asterisk for example). You don't want to explain to your big boss why his phone lines are having hiccups
Cisco fully supports virtualizing most of their telephony components, and most of their stuff runs on RHEL. I don't see any reason Asterisk couldn't work - it's not like Cisco is doing anything magical that others couldn't replicate.
...So there is really no consolidation argument that should need to happen at the OS level, in the same way that there is not a valid argument to virtualize your hypervisors to achieve a higher level of consolidation, since at the end of the day you are limited by your physical hardware anyways...
There is an argument to be made that if you have a very non-performant and underutilized database server, virtualizing would help with consolidation by eliminating excess hardware (and power, heat, management, etc.) from the environment. But I fully agree with you on highly performant database servers - virtualizing won't help you consolidate. In that scenario, virtualizing would give you some different maintenance and protection options. For example, once virtualized, you can more easily move the database VM to different hardware if the need arises. This can be a little more time consuming in the physical realm.
There are always compromises. You just have to figure out what is most important to you. If your goal is 100% virtualization, then you are going to have to be more diligent about designing, planning, and maintaining the environment. If you are not the only person who will be responsible for the environment, you have to make sure that you put in a solution that whoever else is touching the environment can support as well - one well-meaning, but improperly-informed person can do a lot of damage in even the best-planned environment.
Personally, I would always leave at least one physical server for AD/DNS (which I would give the PDC Emulator role, since it's a fairly resource intensive one and you're likely to have plenty of spare cycles on the physical server).
As long as your environment isn't especially complex, you will probably be better off virtualizing vCenter. However, depending on your environment, there may be justification for keeping vCenter physical.
I like to have some kind of monitoring platform that is physical - it's never good to have a catastrophic failure that you don't get notified of because your monitoring software was one of the affected VMs, or your mail server VM was down and the alerts didn't make it to you (or you can virtualize your monitoring platform, and have something physical that monitors your monitoring platform - possibly something with a SMS gateway, which frequently only seem to work right with physical servers anyways). Generally, you can put this on either your physical AD/DNS server, or you vCenter server if you have one.
Any server that relies on any specific hardware to operate is certainly not a virtualization candidate, unless the vendor has a solution. Fax servers (typically requiring fax boards), servers with hardware dongles for licensing (although, sometimes you can use USB or Serial over IP devices to work around this limitation), etc.
Any highly performant database server (especially if clustered) deserves a second look before virtualizing. Not that it can't be done, but there can be an awful lot of suffering if you don't get it right the first time.
Any software vendor with whom you have support contracts should be consulted before virtualizing the corresponding server - some simply refuse to support their products when virtualized. Sometimes you can lie about it and still get support, but some of them will remote in and check for VMware services, processes, etc and not provide support if they are found.
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So, here is my question: if I had an antenna and a transcoder at my residence, could someone still act as a Network-based DVR? I'm a bit unclear at which part of their service is considered a public transmission... If I'm providing the content (as in my theory here) and then playing it back for myself, would this still be a no-no in accordance with this ruling? Network-based DVR would still be permitted, right? Or am I misreading/misunderstanding the ruling?
Bingo. In an enterprise, you run these legacy apps inside of Terminal Services or as a XenApp, ThinApp, App-V, etc. And you restrict them from accessing the Internet. Then you can drop a safer, more modern browser on the desktop itself.
For any decent size enterprise, they have so much legacy code that they wouldn't even know where to begin with an overhaul. For at least some businesses, this is the same reason that mainframes are still around. A few years ago I worked for a US telco who ran their main ticketing system off of a mainframe. They wanted to replace it (since the developers were pretty much writing their own paychecks), but they couldn't even quantify how much money it would cost to replace it with a new system (Remedy, if I recall correctly). Countless hours spent trying to figure out how to replace and provide automated circuit testing, cable/pair mappings, billing, dispatch scheduling, etc. Plus, there were so many integrations with various other systems over the decades since it's inception that no one knew how everything worked. The people who did know had long since left (or had been terminated). Not a good situation for anyone to find themselves in...
I feel the exact opposite as you. When I go in to the office, I feel trapped and unable to escape. I generally feel "stuck" until well past time to leave to go home. It feels as though my e-mail follows me home and demands my attention late into the night.
When I work from home, quitting time rolls around and I just shut everything off.
Part of the problem for me is that productivity is so low while at the office. Because of the workplace distractions, it feels as though I get nothing accomplished until somewhere in the area of 3pm or later. By then, I feel as though I still have to get my 8 hours of work in, which puts me working late, even though I've already been in the office all day spinning my wheels. When I work from home, I rarely get bothered by anyone until after lunch, which means I already have over half a day of "real work" accomplished. I can grab some food while listening in on that "emergency" conference call that has absolutely nothing to do with me. Plus I save a 45 minute commute each direction.
If I could lock myself into a quiet room at the office, and people were somehow prohibited from bothering me for stupid stuff that isn't my problem, then I would absolutely be more productive in the office than at home. However, that isn't the case, so the interruptions are frequent and unnecessary, and people are continuously consuming my time for problems that I don't even have anything to do with.
A phone call can also work wonders. If that doesn't do the trick, a quick video chat can sometimes be even better. If that doesn't work out, then you can still meet up for a few pints.
That being said, I understand that there are still certain benefits to handling some situations in person. However, I've never worked in an environment that has required in-person communications multiple times daily. I guess if that is an environment that one finds themselves in, then it means that telecommuting simply isn't an option for them.
Ditto. I have a 1 year old, and I am still more productive from home than when in the office.
I think part of the problem is that the distractions while in the office are more "distracting" than those at home (at least for me). They either pull me away from my desk or create a sufficient enough diversion that I have to break my train of thought. Even a 30 second interruption can take a significant amount of time to recover from, especially since it continues being a topic of conversation long after it has went away (I share an office with a co-worker). Inevitably, there are also the individuals that decide to drop by and hang out for an unwelcome chat for an excessive amount of time - no, I don't care about your weekend, and I'd rather not tell you about mine.
Yes, there are distractions at home also, but those are frequently ones that are mindless and/or menial and do not break my train of thought. Generally, the worst distractions I get at home are the endless conference calls (and work-related phone calls) that seem to have no point other than to waste time.
why tax abstract entities at all? Set CIT to 0 and tax the money when it goes to live people if you really have to. People are material and it's them who use roads, police protection and what not. The corps on the other hand are an idea that can uproot and move with few strokes of a pen, good like pinning it down.
I think that, in theory, this makes the most sense. However, doesn't corporate personhood mean that corporations would essentially be getting access to government resources free of charge?
Depends on the business. I work for a financial company, and there are regulations that require recording of many customer facing conversations. With the advent of Dodd Frank, it appears that the recording regulations are going to extend to mobile devices. Oddly enough, it is quite difficult to record cell phone conversations in a non-intrusive and reliable manner. Sure, there are spyware applications, but those are designed for consumer use, and aren't particularly workable in the enterprise (especially since most of them require rooted devices, which isn't easy to accommodate in an enterprise environment). We've also looked into recording Skype conversations, and there aren't a lot of reliable solutions for that either. Many of them have to run on the same machine as the client, which makes retrieving the conversations a nightmare.
Plus, things like abbreviated dialing between global offices, least cost routing, TEHO, etc, would cause telephone costs to skyrocket if desk phones were eliminated. Our International rates for our dedicated voice circuits is significantly cheaper than those of cell phones.
So, in our environment, at least, about the only conversation you could have would be replacing desk phones with soft phones. With as many people as we have who have more than 8 lines on their phones, I don't think there is a soft phone client that is reliable enough to replicate the experience.
Even for me personally, I have a much more pleasant experience using speaker phone on my desk phone than trying to use speakers and a mic on my computer. Headsets either way suck. I can't even imagine only using a soft phone or only using my cell phone. Heck, as it is, I generally call people back from my desk phone if they call me on my cell phone. Same thing if I accidentally pick up a call on my soft phone. For those of you who enjoy not having a desk phone, kudos to you! For me, I'm going to hold on to mine as long as I can!
I know this is easier to say than to actually implement, but you could add a "support" menu option or link, and if it's paid software, have the licensing information, including account number, populate to the support page (including the number to call for support if it's paid). If it's the free version, you can provide information there about how to get support, costs, etc.
Then, on your phone system, you can explain quickly how to find the account information, and provide a redirect option for paid support for the free software version.
That way, you don't have to worry about "buried" account or other support numbers.
Great, and what about counter-examples like ICE domain seizures?
The ICE seizures were completely ineffective. There were a couple of sites that I accessed that were seized by ICE and both were back up and operating with new domain names (that were easily located via a Google search) within a day. The ones that didn't come back probably were doing something illegitimate and didn't feel that it was in their best interest to return. For sure, the ICE seizures were stupid, and a terrible move by the US. But, I'll take that over the great firewall of China any day.
I also agree that the US can no longer pretend to be a protector of the freedoms of the Internet either. However, I still don't believe that things are going to get any better with the ITU. There must be a reason that countries like Iran and China are pushing so hard for this. Perhaps they believe that they can leverage the ITU in some way to make things easier for themselves to censor their citizens. If these countries are simply seeking independence from IANA, there is nothing stopping them from operating their own DNS servers. They can even still selectively synchronize things from the IANA DNS servers if they choose.
There is nothing stopping other countries from running their own DNS servers and forcing providers to direct DNS queries to them...
Additionally, Amazon has Cisco Nexus switches in colo space in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Not sure which product line it was supporting, but they had lots and lots of them.
It all depends on who you are. At my last company, the local Cisco account team wanted us as a reference account. Our discount from Cisco (before distribution and the partner took their cut) was 59%. Our final discount was 55% or 57% (depending on whether we went through disti or direct from Cisco).
At my current company, our discount from Cisco (again before disti and partner) is 55%. Our price after partner and disti is 47% (yes, our partner is taking a ridiculous cut).
The problem is that most customers don't have any idea what list price is, and so they have no clue whether they are even getting a reasonable price. Sadly, Cisco, along with their partners, do their best to hide this information from their customers.
Source? If Cisco was pitching a solution that was heavy on Nexus, it sounds like they were pitching a different solution than everyone else. If anything, that means that they didn't follow instructions properly, not that they were legitimately that much higher.
Yes, the US has regulations in place that require carriers provide "lawful intercept", which the government can use for pretty much anything whether it's actually lawful or not. But, guess what? This still requires carrier interaction, so the US can't spy on anyone and everyone around the globe just because they "own" the Internet. We can probably still spy on our Allies, assuming those countries ask their carriers to comply with US government regulations.
On the other hand, if Hauwei or ZTE are actually building backdoors (which hasn't actually been proven to my knowledge) in equipment so that the Chinese government can gain access to any traffic, anywhere in the world, regardless of carrier collusion (other than them purchasing the hardware itself), then we are no longer talking about an apples to apples comparison here.
What exactly are they "competing" with? The U.S. blocks DNS for some websites - hardly an effective prevention mechanism. The WATTC will be meeting in Dubai, and the UAE certainly has a long-standing reputation for an open and free Internet, don't they? And, lo and behold, some of the most vocal proponents of changes to the Internet are China and India.
Let's pretend for a moment that the US does relinquish Command and Control of the Internet (because honestly, for the most part "The Internet" is just the root DNS servers and control of IANA and ICANN) - and UAE, India and China get a hand in the pot of controlling it. Do you really think things are going to get better, or do you think they are going to get worse?
Now, if we were talking about Switzerland or Sweden getting control of the Internet, then that would likely be an improvement. But, to my knowledge, the countries who would be likely to improve the Internet climate as a whole are not the ones who have been vocal about an interest in "control" over the Internet.
An Enterprise RAID array isn't strictly about redundancy (although it sounds like that was the point Score Whore was trying to make). It is also about performance. Let's say you are trying to make a 100TB SAN. You can do this using the strategy you outlined, by using 3TB drives and doing a RAID 1 on them. So, 100TB / 3TB = 34 drives * 2 (RAID 1) = 68 drives. Each spindle on a 7200 RPM SATA drive only delivers about 75 IOPs, so that gives you 5100 IOPs Total.
In an Enterprise environment, you are probably going to need a lot more than 5100 IOPs in a 100TB SAN. So, let's say you decide to use 300GB 15k SAS drives. Those give you about 175 IOPs per spindle. If you use the RAID 6 strategy you outlined, which I am fond of myself, (6+2, or 2 failures out of every 8 drives), that would put you around 448 disks total (448 / 8 disks per RAID set = 56 sets * 6 usable drives per set = 336 usable drives * 300 GB = 100800GB). With the 448 spindles, 448 * 175 IOPs = 78400 IOPs. That's a little bit closer to what we're looking for. Throw in a few spares at 30:1 (15 drives), to put you to 463 drives.
How many SATA drives would it take to match the IOPs in a RAID 1 configuration? 78400 IOPs / 75 IOPs per drive = 1046 drives. Spares at around 30:1 means another 35 disks, for 1081 total.
Next we factor power into that. With a Google search, I averaged typical power consumption from 8 7200 RPM 3TB SATA drives (8.6875 W), giving you 9391.188 W for the SATA array. For the 15k 300GB 3.5" SAS drive, it seemed like the most common Google results came back to the Samsung Cheetah, and the data sheet for that one says 7.92 W typical, or 3666.96 W for the SAS array, which means that the SATA array would require 2.5 times the power. More drives, more power means more cooling (and obviously more space as well).
It all depends on what you are trying to accomplish. In an enterprise environment, space, cooling and power are often big concerns. Depending on your environmental limitations and other factors (i.e. regulations, compliance, etc), money isn't always the primary motivator - that all depends on the nature of the business. If you work in a business that is heavily regulated, then you will likely not bet your job on a bunch of SATA disks to store your 5 (or 7, 10, or more) years worth of data that must be searchable, discoverable, highly available, etc (ok, you might bet your job on it, but I'm not going to bet mine on it). Most likely, you are going to tell your company that to protect that data (and potentially your job, depending on your responsibilities), they need to shell out for a costly SAN. Perhaps even 2 geo-redundant SANs that are replicated. Then, you might put a bunch of SATA disks behind that with a backup agent for another layer of protection. Then you might also dump that data to tapes. Which you then ship offsite. Because if things get ugly, you don't want to be the decision maker or recommender who proposed the SATA disks because they were the good enough solution.
Or maybe you do want to be in that position. But I sure don't want to be there. I'm a big fan of well-developed DR/BC plans and highly available infrastructure. When things are working, there are many solutions that can work well. However, when things stop working, you have to have a well-formed plan in mind to recover from the failure. And "we'll just get replacement drives from COSTCO" isn't a particularly well-formed plan (in fact, where I work, even suggesting that would probably result in termination). If you have to wait more than 4 hours to get replacement drives from HP, you should probably look at another storage vendor. Besides, your array should have enough hot spares for the array to rebuild itself even in the event that you don't get those drives in a timely manner.
TL;DR Higher performance disks may be required over cheap disks. It's not always just about redundancy. The same shoe doesn't fit everyone!
If I were going to relocate internationally, Brazil would be high on my list (although I don't know what their immigration policy is, and whether it's even possible). I was sent to Sao Paulo and Campinas recently for work, and although I didn't particularly care for Sao Paulo, I found Campinas to be quite beautiful - it would certainly be on my list of possibilities for relocation.
I can say from experience that working with various telcos (Algar, Embratel, GVT) and even the colo we put equipment in (Terremark Sao Paulo) is a serious challenge if you don't speak Portuguese. As more and more foreign companies start to look at Brazil for various reasons, more and more of these Brazilian companies are going to be looking to hire people who can speak both Portuguese and English. From our IT staff we have down there (who speak both Portuguese and English), the differences in salary compared to the US aren't that large, and there are other variances in compensation that make up even some of that difference (for example, they appear to have a lot more holidays and PTO than we do).
As AC mentioned, I did enjoy the slower pace, and everyone seemed fairly happy. Heck, even in the worst traffic in Sao Paulo, I didn't hear that many people blaring their car horns. Unlike places like New York City where almost everyone uses them constantly.
Yes, Brazil still has issues (corruption, poverty, etc) - but every country has issues of some sort. Pick your poison.
Citation needed.
Here are a couple of places to look to get you started. This practice is generally disguised as "Lawful Intercept". The net effect is that any government agency can trap any data that they want to. If you look at the Google search, you will see Cisco configuration guides on how to set this feature up.
https://www.google.com/search?q=cisco+lawful+intercept
http://www.blackhat.com/presentations/bh-dc-10/Cross_Tom/BlackHat-DC-2010-Cross-Attacking-LawfulI-Intercept-wp.pdf
Keep in mind, this is just the published part that we know. What other capabilities exist that aren't published? It would probably scare all of us.
The reason that the government (and everyone else) is so concerned about Huawei is because vendors here in the US already have the capabilities to capture whatever the government wants. Why would China be any different? The only difference is that Huawei isn't publishing configuration guides for their implementation...
Sao Paulo. The delta between the rich and the poor is obvious just driving around the city. Granted, Sao Paulo may be the exception rather than the rule, but there are an awful lot of people there, which makes it a really big exception.
It sounds to me that the "Use" of the Exchange infrastructure in question may have grown larger than the infrastructure could, which yes, would cause issues, physical or virtual. Or perhaps the SAN environment being used wasn't very "friendly" to Exchange.
Agreed. If virtualizing Exchange broke the environment, then the environment wasn't sized properly. Too few servers, not enough IOPS, something. Of all things, Exchange is the one thing that I would almost never consider running physical. 2003, 2007, 2010 - all work flawlessly virtualized. The only thing I've not tested is the Unified Messaging role, which until recently wasn't supported virtualized.
- Telephony and rea-time voice/video servers (Asterisk for example). You don't want to explain to your big boss why his phone lines are having hiccups
Cisco fully supports virtualizing most of their telephony components, and most of their stuff runs on RHEL. I don't see any reason Asterisk couldn't work - it's not like Cisco is doing anything magical that others couldn't replicate.
Sadly, yes. Several (generally smaller) software companies still use them, especially in certain verticals.
USB pass-through doesn't help much with portability, though. In some cases, USB over IP (and Serial over IP) products can solve that problem.
...So there is really no consolidation argument that should need to happen at the OS level, in the same way that there is not a valid argument to virtualize your hypervisors to achieve a higher level of consolidation, since at the end of the day you are limited by your physical hardware anyways...
There is an argument to be made that if you have a very non-performant and underutilized database server, virtualizing would help with consolidation by eliminating excess hardware (and power, heat, management, etc.) from the environment. But I fully agree with you on highly performant database servers - virtualizing won't help you consolidate. In that scenario, virtualizing would give you some different maintenance and protection options. For example, once virtualized, you can more easily move the database VM to different hardware if the need arises. This can be a little more time consuming in the physical realm.
There are always compromises. You just have to figure out what is most important to you. If your goal is 100% virtualization, then you are going to have to be more diligent about designing, planning, and maintaining the environment. If you are not the only person who will be responsible for the environment, you have to make sure that you put in a solution that whoever else is touching the environment can support as well - one well-meaning, but improperly-informed person can do a lot of damage in even the best-planned environment.
Personally, I would always leave at least one physical server for AD/DNS (which I would give the PDC Emulator role, since it's a fairly resource intensive one and you're likely to have plenty of spare cycles on the physical server).
As long as your environment isn't especially complex, you will probably be better off virtualizing vCenter. However, depending on your environment, there may be justification for keeping vCenter physical.
I like to have some kind of monitoring platform that is physical - it's never good to have a catastrophic failure that you don't get notified of because your monitoring software was one of the affected VMs, or your mail server VM was down and the alerts didn't make it to you (or you can virtualize your monitoring platform, and have something physical that monitors your monitoring platform - possibly something with a SMS gateway, which frequently only seem to work right with physical servers anyways). Generally, you can put this on either your physical AD/DNS server, or you vCenter server if you have one.
Any server that relies on any specific hardware to operate is certainly not a virtualization candidate, unless the vendor has a solution. Fax servers (typically requiring fax boards), servers with hardware dongles for licensing (although, sometimes you can use USB or Serial over IP devices to work around this limitation), etc.
Any highly performant database server (especially if clustered) deserves a second look before virtualizing. Not that it can't be done, but there can be an awful lot of suffering if you don't get it right the first time.
Any software vendor with whom you have support contracts should be consulted before virtualizing the corresponding server - some simply refuse to support their products when virtualized. Sometimes you can lie about it and still get support, but some of them will remote in and check for VMware services, processes, etc and not provide support if they are found.