Enhance Collaboration and Automate Business Processes using an ECM

The use of shared folders as a means of allowing multiple persons to access documents may seem like an efficient approach but in a world where decisions taken minutes too late could cost millions there is a greater need for more efficient solutions.

Enterprise Content Management (ECM) Systems provides a more efficient means of storing, searching and capturing hard and soft copies of your documents. An ECM also allows greater collaboration by allowing the assignment of business rules and workflows to your documents. Unlike traditional shared folders an ECM allows owners of content such as Word files to be able to share their content without the intervention of a Systems Administrator.

Lets say you work in insurance and your business process dictates the following. The collections department collects applications from potential customers and reviews them for completeness. If the collected application is complete route to your risk department, if the application is incomplete reject the application. The risk department will either approve the application and assign an insurance cost or reject the application. The risk departments’ decision can be communicated via email to both the customer and the collections department.

By assigning business rules to these applications, if-then-else logic can be applied to these documents. Metadata can be added to documents to store the validity, the decision taken on a application and any other Metadata deemed useful. This Metadata can be used as conditions in your business logic.

At LTGJAMAICA we want to help your company become as efficient as possible.

 

Building a Vmware Powered Hybrid Cloud using Ecalyptus

The Cloud means many things to many different persons,but personally I view a Cloud as a distinct pool of  computing resources that can be manage centrally, provides the ability to scale resources via pre configured policies and lastly provides the ability to automate manual requests such as Virtual Machine creation and deployment.

Though not recommended by many IT professionals, I am planning on making our IT department an internal service provider. In this vain it is my vision to build out a Private Cloud that can provide self service to authorized internal clients such as our developers and application administrators.Currently we utilize a Vmware Vsphere platform, but in another few months this platform will possess all the attributes of a true cloud.To provide the functions necessary I have decided that we will look at the Open Source Eucalyptus platform.

Eucalyptus is Open Source so it reduces our initial capital expenditure ,it is compatible with Vmware and it has the ability to support Amazon based workloads thus providing a Hybrid platform mangement tool.

At Stage one, we will roll out a Private Cloud  that will allow authorized internal clients to perform various tasks related to a an assigned blocked of computing resources.

At Stage two we will seek to allow the migration of workloads between Amazon and our Vmware based private cloud,this should provide Disaster recovery and scalability benefits to our group.

 

 

Nexus 7000 Virtual Data Centers

Virtual data centers allows enterprises and Service providers to create truly distinct DCs that overlay a single physical infrastructure.The Cisco nexus provides the ability to virtualize all three planes namely the control,forwarding and management planes. For enterprises the ability to create logical virtual networks for testing purposes can provide significant cost savings since the need to buy test equipment is eliminated.

 

DATA CENTER + SDN EQUALS TRUE VIRTUAL NETWORKS

Multi Tenant data centers being used to provide cloud services has led to a number of network requirements that are difficult to meet using VRF, Q-In-Q or other tunneling techniques.A Cloud data center customer needs to be able to provision network resources such as virtual switches and RFC 1918 IP addresses  without needing to consider similar resources being used by other tenants. Software Defined networking seeks to provide an END-to-END virtual network that consists of virtual forwarding tables ,virtual routers,virtual switches and controllers.  Software Defined Networking can be used to create logical networks that consist of virtual network gear. SDN tracks the state of the underlying physical data center network along with the overlaying virtual networks.

State changes are recorded and the Physical or Logical components affected by these said state changes are configured to have their settings and operations updated to support the changes made by the data center’s customer. Software defined networking’s ability to provide distributed,rule driven control of large physical network elements presents a new way of virtualizing network resources.

 

 

HTML5 May Make Mobile Apps Redundant

Mobile Applications are the rage right now and as they like to say they is an APP for everything or almost everything.

With the move to mobile, users are now able to access services from anywhere using any of three popular Mobile Operating Systems,this convenience is cool but comes with a  few disadvantages that i feel will lead to Apps becoming a thing of that past on mobile devices,especially smart phones.

The memory used by some apps make them unsuitable for lower end devices.

The functionality of some mobile apps such as facebook for android is way below that of a Web Browser on a PC

Mobile Apps require frequent updates which have to be downloaded to your device,A HTML5 browser based app can be upgraded from the server side

The development effort required in app development may be a little higher than native wep app development. While most mobile apps are developed in JAVA there will still be some tweaking required on a per OS basis for things to work out. If apps are developed in a device agnostic manner, developers will be able to quickly reach a wide market and a larger ecosystem in one development cycle.

HTML5 has the potential to not only replace FLASH but also to provide app functionality in a web browser. HTML5 supports offline apps, Multimedia APIs and Built-in database support. Drag an drop functionality along with with the ability to utilize existing scripting language means that existing web programmers will still be able to leverage existing skills to create rich application experiences. By executing complex code on the server side,low end phones with a capable browser may be able to provide their owners with the capabilities currently provided by apps.

 

Trying to Achieve Server Load Balancing on a Cisco 3560 switch.

Server Load Balancing is an advanced feature supported by Cisco Switches in the 45XX and 65XX Line of Multi-Layer Switches.

The Feature allows a Virtual IP address to be configured on the switch. This Virtual Ip Address or VIP will be used to represent a cluster of servers on a given network.Most persons will never require a 65XX or even a 45XX series switch in their Lans but we all would like have highly available systems. While they are Hardware and Software Load Balancing solutions it would be great to leverage your existing investment in your cisco switches so here is an idea may be able to support Server Load Balancing on a Cisco 35XX series switch.

Let say We need to load balance two MS Exchange 2010 front end servers. First Configure a loopback adaptor on each Server. The IP address of the loopback adaptors will be our chosen Virtual IP address. so lets say our VIP is 172.16.1.1  both loop back adaptors will be assigned this address.

On Your 3560 create two Static Routes pointing to our VIP via the Physical Addresses of the Servers.
# Locate VIP
ip route 172.16.1.1 255.255.0.0 172.16.1.2 with 172.16.1.2 being the address of one of the exchange servers
ip route 172.16.1.1 255.255.0.0 172.16.1.3 with 172.16.1.3 being the address of the second  exchange front End
Configure CEF Destination Load Sharing by issuing the command IP load-sharing per-destinantion. This command shares traffic based on source/destination address pairs. We can use IP SLA to track the

reachability of the physical hosts and assign a tracking object to the static route above.

Note I have yet to use the technique above but it should work in theory.

 

Memory Resident Malware Protection on Virtual Machines

The I/O and CPU requirements of most malware solutions are a serious impediment to the optimal performance of virtual machines and older physical hosts. In a virtual environment consisting of many virtual machines each executing their own copy of a single malware protection package, the underlying hypervisor utilizes many I/O and CPU cycles that are sourced from each of its guests which are constantly scanning various files and memory pages. The memory, I/O and CPU cycles utilized to process calls generated by the Virtual Machine‘s malware software can be greatly reduced by eliminating the practice of installing malware software within a guest operating system.

A hypervisor Resident program (HRP) can be used to scan VM memory pages some of which are shared via transparent memory sharing (TPS) which essentially is a technique used to allow many virtual machines to share identical memory pages thus reducing the memory requirements of the host machine.

 All writes and modification of guest memory pages should be examined by the HRP which should be developed to use signatures stored on shared solid state storage. The signatures required by the HRP will be transferred from central storage to memory as required, if possible all signatures should be memory resident. The HRP should also support Heuristic detection of malware as a means of reducing the amount of signatures needed and thus reducing the storage required for these said signatures.

The caching of memory pages that have already been scanned can be achieved by storing a checksum of each scanned memory page to a protected portion of memory, cached pages should only be re-scanned if the page has been modified. I/O requirements are reduced by eliminating on-access scanning of files being written and read from disk,it is assumed that all malware needs to be executed while stored in main memory

 

 

The Cisco Supervisor 2T Long live the King

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For those of us who manage networks with Cisco 6500 series switches in their core, I am sure the wide array of high bandwidth switches from Cisco and their competitors have caught your attention. The 6500 series provides 10GB performance at 80Gig per slot when coupled with supervisor 2T modules. The question you should be asking ,is how much throughput do I need in the future?. If your bandwidth needs are growing exponentially and you want to have data center traffic traverse your core switches then upgrading your 6500 switch might not be a such a good idea since data center and its aggregated bandwidth demands can be significant in a medium to large organization.

However the drawback to acquiring new switches relate to their price, a Supervisor Upgrade would be much cheaper than acquiring a similar sized switch. Size though also  does not truly reflect the state of affairs since they are now 2U sized switches that  are able to out perform an upgraded 6509, example of such a devices can be found in the Nexus 5000 series switching line. If you run separate data center and user networks (as you should) then a 6509 with a supervisor 2T module results in a  relatively inexpensive upgrade that will cause only minor disruptions and results in less headache at 3x your current performance. Upgrading your switch using a smaller unit will always pose challenges as it relate to re-cabling and re-arrangement of your core network which is always daunting due to the differences in the number of switch ports. Sometimes we need to stay put until we have a clear need for change, so if you are not oversubscribing your current infrastructure but want to future proof it then the supervisor 2T provides reasonable investment protection.

 

Managing Virtual Desktop Boot Storms

When designing a Virtual desktop solution IOPS is king. The rate at which data can be written and read from central storage is usually the main component that determines the acceptability of a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) solution. Usually large amounts of fast hard disks are used to provide the necessary IOPS needed to serve data to our virtual machines,  but eventually even the best designed systems struggle when confronted with boot storms.

A boot storm occurs when many users during a short time period, power on their virtual desktops. The IOPS required to load operating system and application files at boot usually surpasses the amount needed to perform daily tasks as such word processing. The entire system may grind to halt due to inadequate Storage performance.

Now how do we solve this issue ? We could throw more spindles (hard disks) at the problem which will result in a lot of wasted storage capacity or we could use solid state drives to store the files required by the Virtual Desktops at Boot. A solid state drive though expensive can be used to assist in dealing with boot storms since they are typically 25-30 time faster than  the fastest hard disk. While wonderful solid state drives are not cheap, so you may also take a look at storage area networks that are able to cache frequently requested blocks of data, these systems can also be used to provide greater boot time performance for your VDI setup and ensure end user acceptance of this solution.

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Lowering Branch Office Connectivity Costs

The days of business’s using expensive T1 lines and leased circuits are now coming to an end. MPLS and Metro Ethernet WAN solutions have now become the main WAN technologies being employed by most medium to large organizations with multiple branches such as banks.

While the advantages of these new high bandwidth WAN solutions are many, most small businesses especially those in Jamaica may not be able to foot the cost of acquiring even the most basic MPLS or Metro Ethernet WAN services.

Well a small business owner need not worry about creating his own Wide Area Network.Small businesses owners who are unable to finance the cost of these new WANs need to leverage Virtual Private Network (VPN) Technologies and the Low cost of High Capacity residential internet packages to create Wide area networks that are based upon site to site VPNS.

Three small stores each having an entry level router,a static ip address and a small business class broad band service can easily construct their own small WAN that can be used to transmit business,email and ip video data between these branches.This solution while not as scalable as the solutions sold by service providers, provides a cost effect way of providing wide area connectivity at a fraction of the cost.