Blog with Integrity
Spending FaceTime with clients and family
21 Oct2011
One of the more brilliant features included with the iPhone 4, and now the iPhone 4S, is something Apple calls FaceTime. It’s a video chat service that is dead simple to setup and use. For other iPhone users, it uses your phone number to identify you (no additional account needed) and for other Macs and iOS devices, it uses your ubiquitous Apple ID or email address to identify you. It works like a phone, so there are no screen names (a la Skype or AIM) to remember or setup.
This past week, I received a call from my next-door neighbor and friend, Kendall, who is a food rep. He was traveling to Charleston to present a new line of meats to a restaurant but the other food rep who would be working with him would need to drive over 8 hours from Florida in order to join the meeting. Instead, he asked what would be involved in having him video chat for the meeting. Kendall is not a Mac or iPhone owner, but I told him about Skype and that we’d need to buy a web cam for his laptop. Then it dawned on me, tell him about FaceTime.
Our family has had a lot of experience, this year, with FaceTime. Either my wife or I both have been traveling for work almost every month this year. Many times, due to my wife’s job change in February, we have not been able to afford the time off to travel together, and so one of us would be home with our daughter while the other traveled. FaceTime has enabled us to talk while we’re in hotels and traveling and see each other. It has performed as well as all the Apple ads have portrayed it and really, it is a feature I would really, really miss if I lost it today. It has let me and my wife talk with our girl about her day, let her tell us her stories and let us tuck her in at night before bed. My wife was able to read the nightly bedtime story, just like she were at home (especially since my daughter has a few favorite books and my wife has memorized those).
As I relayed this story to Kendall, I could hear his enthusiasm grow. “Philip, you might be on to something there,” he said. And surely, we were. So, I offered to lend him our family iPad and work with him to get everything setup. We added a set of external speakers to make the audio louder, because were concerned that the restaurant might be noisy during the meeting. The only other step was to add a contact for his associate, and we were all set. (As a failback, we also setup Skype, just in case, but it was not needed).
Kendall’s business associate had an iPad and one quick phone conversation had him we were testing FaceTime from home. Kendall traveled to Charleston as planned and tested everything from the restaurant the night before and it performed great.
On the day of the meeting, the restaurant staff gathered around for the presentation. Kendall setup the iPad and started the FaceTime call with his his iOS enabled business associate. And the presentation began. There were few thoughts about the underlying technology that enabled it because it just worked. The only issue of the day was that some of the staff could not see the remote associate well on the iPad screen depending on their angle, but they could hear him and he could see everything going on there. And the ability to see what was going on in the room made the presentation go off fantastic. Kendall was the arms and legs for the presentation, able to talk to and cater to the staff while his associate spoke and watched remotely. All of this enabled by two 1lb. gadgets that are easily transportable and WiFi in the hotel and restaurant.
Certainly, this isn’t an Apple only ability. Skype and other video chat applications could do the same and pre-date FaceTime, but with so many iOS devices and Macs in the world, the ability to have a platform like FaceTime that just works is a huge advantage for customers. Skype will run on PC’s and other tablets and lots of devices, so it has its advantages, too, certainly. But, one of the biggest for FaceTime is that it is dead simple to use and that goes a long way with less technically inclined folks.
Up next for FaceTime – a birthday party… I just sent off an email to my in-laws who will not be able to make it to my daughter’s birthday party this year, but I hope that they will attend using FaceTime. They have recently made the Apple transition with iPhones and Macs, so we will try to let them join us virtually, wish their grand-daughter a happy birthday, and even watch live as she opens her present from them… Those miles between us just shrank to nothing, and that is a huge accomplishment.
The future is all about (cloud) apps
29 Sep2011
After having a month to reflect on the organized chaos that was VMworld 2011, one message still stands out to me most of anything we heard during that week. VMware conveyed loud and clear that apps, and more specifically the frameworks and middleware to enable cloud apps, are the big area of innovation for the next era of computing. In the VMware world, they are calling it all vFabric. Cloud applications are going to take rethinking, rewriting and re-architecting to really make use of cloud.
VMware is positioning itself as the developers’ friend, much in the same way Microsoft did when the desktop era dawned. The 2009 acquisition of SpringSource that left many, including myself, wondering what VMware was thinking, but the technology is now emerging as a critical part of the VMware ecosystem and vision for the future. The middleware for developers is a critical third piece of the VMware vision of cloud which will bridge the two other primary foci of the company.
VMware has long been the king of the virtual infrastructure game. Their vSphere suite and the type 1 ESX hypervisor are a mainstay in nearly all datacenters around the world. VMware also got its beginnings with its type 2 Workstation and now VMware Fusion hypervisors. But as enabling the cloud, a true run-anywhere architecture and bring your own hardware initiatives have emerged, the two disparate product areas left a gap the company has been working to fill.
Based around the virtual infrastructure VMware has developed, the cloud posed a new set of problems that could only be solved by rewriting traditional client/server applications into cloud apps with distributed data models, distributed processing and distributed display logic across multiple datacenters. And when thinking of cloud, the first thing to come to mind are applications that Google and Facebook have written and how they are architected to be highly available and redundant.
What is vFabric?
The vFabric line up is a multi-product library of solutions to provide developers with the frameworks and middleware needed to build out products on cloud architecture. The focus is clearly on web applications using customized or VMware-branded versions of the Apache Web Server and Apache Tomcat, known as vFabric Web Server and vFabric tc Server, to develop Java web applications which use the Spring framework. In addition to the presentation and processing layers, there are also products to handle messaging, monitoring and data storage. In particular, this year VMware announced innovation to add to the GemFire data models, including a new in-memory SQL solution called SQLFire. GemFire and SQLFire both seek to upend competitors like Oracle and Microsoft’s traditional relational database products, which VMware is calling out as bottlenecks. Even while the bottleneck may be true, the real idea is a distributed data model where the data does not exist in a single instance database but rather in a mesh of systems on a cloud architecture. To me, that is the real difference and news with GemFire.
Looking back & moving forward
While I don’t claim to be a Java developer, I can certainly see a clearer picture of the vision VMware has for cloud. I was not fortunate enough to attend VMware 2010, so perhaps things would have began to be clearer had I attended, but 2011 certainly provided the clarity I needed.
The unfortunate side to all of this is that VMware is now attempting to engage a new audience of developers, which are catered to in a very different way than the systems administrators and infrastructure staff they have traditionally engaged with. Saying it in a different way – they have moved past me a bit, as one of the systems guys, and are working on things that excite me less. I realize we must have applications, but I’m not the guy who writes them, so the thrill of announcements at VMworld 2011 was less for me, than at past conferences.
VMware certainly has a learning curve of how to engage developers, too, but the SpringSource acquisition provided them with a solid foundation and a good set of roots in the open-source community. For now, I hear that the user communities will remain separate with VMUG’s and Spring User Groups existing beside one other, which is smart. Hopefully, the same will hold true for the future with VMworld and other events as well. What I most hope is that their message does not become muddled and muddy because they now have two different audiences to cater to.
Step onto the cloud with HP CloudStart
14 Sep2011
HP is looking to make it easy for companies to step on the cloud. They are offering a solution called HP CloudStart that will deliver a fully functional cloud onto your site in 30 days or less. For companies looking to give cloud technology a spin, CloudStart is an easy first step with the ability to grow as cloud adoption grows in your company.
CloudStart is a fixed-engagement service from HP’s to deliver a fully functional cloud and system library to your site. As a starter kit, it is fully functional and allow you the basic building blocks to begin deploying systems in a fully-automated cloud on your premises.
The CloudStart option comes with the CloudSystem Matrix software package that ships with CloudSystem (covered here, earlier). One of the major values of HP CloudSystem and CloudStart are the pre-defined workflows to setup and deploy applications on the cloud, something HP called CloudMaps. HP has spent a considerable amount of time with their software partners developing the CloudMap workflows to deploy their software successfully in a fraction of the time normally required. As part of the services engagement, HP will also work with you to bring up four fully functional applications on the cloud.
CloudStart and CloudSystem delivers a multi-vendor cloud system natively, with support VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V and Citrix. During the HP Discover this year, I was able to talk with one of the CloudSystem architects about the CloudStart option in more detail. Something I found surprisingly refreshing, is that HP is supporting third party server and storage hardware with CloudSystem, making it truly multi-vendor at all levels, so customers have choice. Although CloudStart is more of a fixed delivery, customers are free to choose your hypervisor, storage, and x86-based servers in the future and avoid vendor lock-in.
CRN reports that the all-inclusive price for a CloudStart system is $450,000. For an all-inclusive set of servers, storage, networking, it doesn’t sound like a bad price to me.
- In: HP|HP Discover|Virtualization
- Tags: CloudSystem, HP, HP Discover
Integrity and standards for the new world
13 Sep2011
Blogging is fantastic for a number of reasons. It provides anyone, regardless of affiliation, with the ability to voice what they feel, observe and believe. The growth of blogs or citizen journalism has provided writers with the ability to disseminate their work without the need for a vehicle like traditional newspapers and magazines. At the same time that it has leveled the playing field, it has also made it easy for people without good intentions to disseminate hatred and misinformation with the express purpose of hurting rivals or anyone who does not agree.
It is the shady side that hurts the legitimacy of all bloggers. With traditional journalists, there is a code of ethics and standards and anyone who does not abide by those standards is black-balled and fired. In the blogging world, the journalistic standards are not enforced and the sensational, tabloid world, where dirt and all-out lies sell issues, has made it over into the blogosphere. Even worse, people pose as someone they are not in order to persuade and influence decisions of readers. Read the rest of this entry »
- In: Blogging|Everything Else
- Tags: blogging, Integrity
The Political Challenge of Moving to the Cloud
31 Aug2011
The way that I see it, VMware is up for a political fight in many of its customers’ IT departments. Two things have become evident to me this week at VMworld 2011 – first, moving to the cloud is going to involve rewriting a lot of our applications and two, this is going to to be as much a political shift in our companies as a technical shift.
I think that the political issue is easier to explain, so I’ll begin there. Unlike virtualization or virtual infrastructure, the decision to move to the cloud is not going to come from the systems group in most companies. The systems groups may be able to advocate the change and provide the reasons for it, but it is going to have to be a strategic move from higher management. The tangible monetary benefits of cloud are less clear than with virtualization, whose primary motivators were increasing utilization of physical machines and reducing the number of physical machines required which saved money. In other words, the IT systems group is not going to be the primary advocate or decision maker when moving to the cloud. Cloud is going to need to meet some higher business need rather than a technical need, although there are technical benefits. Read the rest of this entry »
The past month has been one of the most fun and challenging things since I started blogging. I have been participating with Thomas Jones’ Bloggers Reality Contest. We posted our third and final posts of the contest last week and each of us has been patiently waiting for the final results this week at VMworld.
On Monday, we all took part in an interview on VMware Community TV, which you can watch on-demand at the bottom of this post. The interview was fun and included our sponsors, the contestants and our judges. From the sounds of the interview, we all grew and learned out of this experience.
Last night, we had a fantastic wrap dinner with everyone involved and our sponsors and our winners and prizes were awarded. Congrats to Luigi Danakos (@Nerdblurt), the winner of the Gold bracket, and to Michael Letschin (@mletschin), the winner of the Silver bracket. Both of these guys did a tremendous job during the contest and I think we have all learned from each other on how we approach our posts and tips and tricks we have learned along the way. You can see a full recap from Thomas on his site, NikeTown588.
And, as a recap, I wanted to provide some of the highlights I found in the competition:
1) Professional Judges Feedback – Quite possibly, this is the biggest, long-term benefit of the competition.
2) Discovery - I have ‘met’ a lot of people online thanks to this competition. A good thing about participating is what I’d call cross pollination between your own readers and the others in the competition. This years contestants did a good job of promoting each other to their Twitter followers, readers and the community. It is win-win for everyone.
3) Learning Opportunities - I personally enjoy learning and getting exposed to new tech ideas and products. Its what gets me up in the morning. So, getting to see new things is exciting to me. Knowledge is something no one else can take away… Even though it was a competition, the other contestant shared freely with the group.
I urge any bloggers to jump at the chance to participate in this contest in the future. It is great for personal growth and for learning. I can’t wait to see what Thomas and the sponsors have in store for 2012.
BRC2K11 Community TV Interviews
- In: Blogger Reality Show|Contests
- Tags: #BRC2K11, Blogger Reality Show, blogging
What I’m passionate about: Apple, Inc.
27 Aug2011
When I first began the blog, to introduce myself and who I am to the audience, I did a series of posts about companies and products that I admired. I started, but never completed, a post about Apple – a company that I very much admire. I found it hard to put into word why I was enamored with Apple. This week, Steve Jobs resigned as CEO of Apple, so I thought it was a befitting time to finally release this post.
Apple has shaped a lot of my personal beliefs on how to succeed, long-term in business. A study of their resurgence is a study in how to optimize, simplify and really meet your customer’s needs. I wanted to pull out some things that I think have made Apple and Steve Jobs immensely successful. Read the rest of this entry »
- In: Apple
- Tags: Apple, Customer Service, Respect, Steve Jobs
The week ahead > VMworld 2011
25 Aug2011
The upcoming week is another exciting one with VMworld on the horizon. I will be on site at VMworld thanks to Thomas Jones’ Bloggers Reality Contest, just one of the perks of participating in the competition.
VMworld 2011 will have a lot of new information to share about the newly released vSphere 5, which went live yesterday. vSphere 5 has a slew of new features, including the introduction of Storage DRS, rearchitected high availblity (HA), port mirroring in vSwitches, VMFS5 and filesystem enhancements, and many more. I hope to learn more and write about Storage DRS in more depth, as its one of the bigger feature sets added and it encompasses a lot of technology and capabilities.
The week is also one of the best networking (as in people, not wires) events of the year. With over 17,000 attendees planned this year, it is by far the largest of events I have ever attended. I’m looking forward to seeing some folks I met at HP Discover this year and hopefully meet some other folks I’ve run into on Twitter.
All in all, I’m really looking forward to next week. I always come back to work with some grand ideas after VMworld, so I expect this year to be no different.
- In: Conferences|Virtualization|VMware|VMworld
- Tags: ESX, VMware, VMworld, VMworld 2011
This week, we shine the spotlight on network convergence and management in the FlexNetwork portfolio, specifically the HP Virtual Connect FlexFabric modules and the Intelligent Management Control (IMC) software. Networking is generally not my forte, so some of this is a stretch for me, but I use and understand Virtual Connect. FlexFabric is an implementation of Virtual Connect while IMC has been branded as FlexManagement in the portfolio and is used to encompass management for all of the FlexNetwork portfolio.
Some Basics on Virtual Connect
FlexFabric is a particular type of Virtual Connect module and fits into the FlexNetwork portfolio. Virtual Connect attempts to address many problems, but primarily it is about reducing the amount of physical wiring and switch ports required to cable a blade system, about reducing human-caused errors due to complex cabling, and about adding the ability to pre-wire the entire enclosure for life and pre-allocate all Ethernet and SAN requirements during first install. Read the rest of this entry »
- In: Contests|Customer Service|HP|Networks
- Tags: Convergence, HP, Management, Network, networking, Virtualization
All IT solutions will experience problems at some point in their life. Supporting IT solutions is difficult, time-consuming and costly, but also a fact of life – a fact as a systems administrator I am thankful for. It means, I have a job. Problem solving skills are absolutely necessary, but all administrators need the expert help of vendors’ support departments when our knowledge runs into something we just don’t know.
Unfortunately, when multiple vendors’ products are coupled together as a solution, support can become nasty as vendors point back and forth at each other while trying to get to a resolution. The more complex the solution, for instance a SAN, the more difficult to troubleshoot through the multiple layers of software, firmware and hardware, even multiple vendors of the solution. And, I believe, the hassle has made customers seek a better way. Read the rest of this entry »