Dave Oliver's Blog

Continuing my series of great free stuff for SQL Server I’ve pulled a rabbit out of the hat for you today!

In this economic climate one of the first things that seems to get cut is the training budget so anything that can help get your head around stuff is a big plus.

To help Microsoft has released SQL Server 2008 Developer Training Kit

So what does the Training Kit contain …

 

• Presentations (6)
  • Filestream
  • Spatial
  • T-SQL
  • Date and Time Types
  • SQLCLR
  • Reporting Services
• Demos (12)
  • AdventureWorks Racing All-Up SQL Server 2008 Demo
  • SQL Server 2008 All-Up Spatial Demo
  • Spatial Types Demo
  • Intro to Filestream Demo
  • SQL CLR Nullable Types Demo
  • Programming with Filestream Demo
  • Reporting Services Web Application Integration Demo
  • Date and Time Support in SQL Server 2008 Demo
  • T-SQL Table-Valued Parameters Demo
  • T-SQL Row Constructors Demo
  • T-SQL Grouping Sets Demo
  • T-SQL Merge Demo
• Hands-on Labs (3)
  • Using Spatial Data in TSQL
  • Using Spatial Data in Managed Code
  • Using SQL CLR in SQL Server 2008

Important!

To install it you are going to need a copy of SQL Server 2008 (at least Express Edition with Advanced Services) Visual Studio (the free versions will work just fine) and the Adventure Works 2008 sample databases installed first!

Now it says in the recommended operating systems that XP is supported, I was getting error messages when I installed it on XP that didn’t appear when I installed it onto Windows 2008, so my advice would be not to install it on a desktop version of the OS.

Codeplex is a wonderful site. However not just for the .Net coder but the SQL Server guy/gal can find plenty of goodies there as well.

One such goody is the FineBuild utility that does as the name suggest helps create a ‘Fine Build’ of your SQL Server install.

All to often installing SQL Server can turn into a day long process with the various additional service packs, CU’s, tools and utility to install. Well FineBuild can automate all of that so all you need to do is run the start script, go off to lunch and it’s all done for when you come back.

So this makes a DBA life easier, big deal! What about developers? Well how often have you heard or said, it works in development but it doesn’t work in Live! What’s the difference?

In SQL Server this is likely to be one of two common reasons,

• Using a feature or setting that is present in the development environment but not so in live.
• Or the very frustration, using a different collation especially as many collation have been deprecated (did you know that?)

The answer is creating a standard build that is consistently used and agree on throughout all the stages of the development lifecycle that is also easy to change and can work with server building utilities such as Altiris. Work on desktops as well and can be installed many times over as SQL Instances.

FineBuild ticks all these boxes and comes in a 2005 flavour and a release candidate for 2008 both of which are free.

Even if you use the default settings you will be onto a winner from the start but I would advise reading the comprehensive instructions and tailoring settings and scripts to suite your particular environment as it will save you lots of time and stress later on.

 

As promised, what is my verdict after using BingUK for a week?

To be perfectly honest it’s been distinctly unremarkable … and this is a good thing for Microsoft!

BingUK is lacking the killer features that the US version has, the ‘get out’ for the UK version is that it’s still in Beta and will be for sometime. So perhaps BingUK is still more of a search engine than a decision engine at the moment.

So how does it compare with Google? Well to be honest, it didn’t use Google much in the first place only on my iPhone and on those occasions I used Chrome. I know I’m that person who doesn’t use Google! I switched to using Ask.co.uk sometime back, made it my default search provider in IE8 and stayed. I never thought to change as Ask.co.uk was pulling back the search results I needed. Why switch?

In all honesty the BingUK isn’t a better or worse search than Ask.co.uk or Google in my opinion, however I did find I was continually using the preview function in BingUK and missing it when using Google or Ask.

Ask.co.uk  has always used Multimap as it’s default mapping site. Google has the excellent Google Maps which as an iPhone user I know and love. Now, I thought that Microsoft had it’s own maps site but curiously I found that the default for BingUK was in fact Multimap, weird? So after some digging around I found the the Bing Maps does have a UK version … so why isn’t this the default? I had to go via the US portal to find it because even the old UK URL’s took me to Multimap. Now I wouldn’t have minded so much if Multimap was a better product than Bing Maps, but it’s just not. Multimap is full of adverts so the actual map area is smaller and lacks the bird eye view feature which I find extremely useful for getting to see areas from different vantage points before I actually go there.

I have read allot of articles that compare Google and Bing over the last week and find myself perplexed as many seem to have picked the winner before reviewing and just using the article to backup their original decision. In my opinion there really isn’t that much between all of them on the daily searches I have performed but I will continue using BingUK because of the preview function that I find extremely useful because it has saved that extra click. With the iPhone I can’t change the search provider in Safari from Google but as an alternative I have downloaded the Inquisitor search tool from Yahoo which I would highly recommend trying to see if you like it.

So with conclusions I find myself asking why is Google search so popular? I’m not seeing better or worse results than the others so I’m not actually getting why they are so highly regarded? All I can conclude is that Google always has a buzz and x-factor around them which sadly I do not seem to be quite tuned into. So I’m going to change to using Google for a few days and see what the fuss is all about.

So far I haven’t exactly been bowled with Google. Take Google Squared as it does seem a little to green to have put infront of the public, I just don’t get why people don’t mind to have their time wasted? Google seems to have allot of their offerings in beta which must be a constant source of embarrassment. Take Gmail it’s been in beta for so long and in that time Facebook has risen, gained a second version and practically reinvented how people email their friends. It just seems half baked, not what you would expect from one of our industries lead lights. Anyway, I will report back in afew days … but first I must clear my head of opinions and give Google a fair go.

It’s not often we get stuff for free but Microsoft has decided to give away a complete book, not just afew sample chapters.

All you have to do is go to this link , press the ‘Sign Up’ button, leave some details about yourself, if you’ve registered with MSDN before it’ll just pick up you existing details and then pdf will download.

So what’s the catch? Well you will be signing up to Microsoft Press Book Connection monthly newsletter and learn about new books on Microsoft SQL Server 2008 and other topics, plus special offers.

So Microsoft want to give you a free book and keep you informed. I call this a win-win!

Microsoft have completely re-written Live Search, the new offering Bing!

Bing is being marketed as a ‘decision engine’ as it tries to workout what you are looking for rather always giving the top ranking website out of an algorithm.

Microsoft has commissioned allot of research to work out what people are actually trying to do for when they use a search engine. It is clear Microsoft cannot ‘out search’ Google but could gain market share by finding an edge and that edge is adding more depth.

Achieving this new depth comes from adding features that make the whole experience of searching easier, more pleasant and most importantly, less time consuming.

A good example is the UPS demo in this Channel 9 video where typing UPS will make a ‘tracking document’ box appear on the Bing search page for the simple reason is that 90% of visitors to the UPS website want to discover where their document or parcel is! However this feature as yet doesn’t work outside of the US infact I haven’t found this feature working on any UK searches even the most obvious ones like post-code search. I hope they are in the pipeline but I have to remember that Bing is still in Beta.

I’m not going to really draw many majors conclusion on the first day of it’s launch so I’m going to use it for a week as my default search and then see.

However a nice feature I like very much is the website summary. Just hovering at right of and entry will make a small circle appear, placing the mouse over the circle will make the website summary appear so I can decide whether I want to click the link and visit the site.

This is one of those features that has appeared because research concluded that the most used frequently used browser feature, when performing any search is the Back button .

Another nice feature that I liked very much is the daily hi-res background image. The image doesn’t noticeably add to the loading time of the site and makes the site more attractive to use.

So lets get to the point, why bother? To me, it seems like the search market is ripe for Microsoft's new offering and strategy. Google has gotten big and fat, it's branching into areas away from core search, and it's facing possible antitrust investigations by the US government. And why change things? Google is number 1.

Certainly Microsoft won't be toppling Google any time soon, but there's plenty of market-share to go after—and plenty of room for improvement on Microsoft's part.

For us the consumer we need a decent competitor to Google as it’s not healthy to have a monopoly on search one organisation controlling what sites we can find.

Anyway, I will report back in a week and tell you if I’m still using Bing and what more I’ve discovered.

R2 !

As you may know I’m abit of a SQL Server nut so I was particularly interested in the announcement at the recent TechEd of SQL Server 2008 R2.

R2 is the combination of the Kilimanjaro, Madison and Gemini projects.

Kilimanjaro is adding support for up to 256 processors to the existing code base.

Whilst Madison follows on from the purchase of DataAllegro last year moving data to handling petabytes of data.

Lastly Gemini is about taking on Qlikview and providing Analysis Services using column-oriented in-memory technologies running inside Excel 2010.

A CTP version of R2 is expected this July.

 

“CEOs don’t pay attention to technology unless something breaks down” according to Jim Champy, Chairman of Consulting for Perot Systems.

Michael Krigsman of ZDNET has written about this experiences at this weeks MIT CIO Symposium on a panel discussing ‘Aligning Business with IT’ here. Michael draws the conclusion that improving integration between IT and business requires focus and collaborative effort from both CEO and CIO. However, as with all dances, even starting to address this issue requires two committed partners.

I find it extremely sad that some parts of business see’s IT as a bunch of services that are beholden to their demands or an annoyance that slows them down or stops them from doing what they want to do.

IT is a critical friend to the business not a servant or a disruptive influence. Often all is required is a better understanding between both IT and business and this only comes from talking and listening.

In these modern times it is the smart person that realises that IT is the how business does business.

All to often these days successful businesses have become that way by leveraging and enhancing their IT capability and providing their people with the knowledge to effectively use IT.

Many business leaders would say it’s still all about the money, yes it is … but when was the last time they received a cheque in the mail? Money moves around and in and out of their business electronically in various forms.

CEOs need to understand their organisations IT as much as they understand the products they sell, the business model, the customers & shareholders because IT is the central nervous system of the modern business.

I was extremely sadden to hear the news that Eileen Brown’s role at Microsoft was at risk of redundancy as part of the second round of layoff at Microsoft.

I do sincerely hope that Eileen finds another role soon. I’m also amazed that this has happen to Eileen as she is such an ambassador for Microsoft in not just IT Pro and Connecting Women in IT but has been instrumental in linking people from outside Microsoft to the right people inside Microsoft which as anyone knows who deals with Microsoft this is an art in itself so I an utterly perplexed why this has happened?

I can only concluded that Microsoft is yet again demonstrating its insatiable desire to point a loaded at it’s own feet and pull the trigger.

In my opinion moves like these only confirm a suspicion that Microsoft is changing and not for the better.

To Microsoft’s credit their Architecture resources are much improving. The excellent free Architecture Journal and the MSDN Architecture Centre have been going for sometime but I noticed recently that there is a new UK centric Architecture Portal written by the UK DPE Architect Team with the new free monthly Arc Magazine.

The first editions of the Arc Magazine tackle the highly logical new buzz ‘Software + Services’ with links to the Microsoft Strategy Software + Services Home Page. I will talk about this is greater depth in later posts.

It is clear that they are keen to hear what we think so they have a Polls Portal (written using Zoho Polls I notice)

One other really cool link I found off the page was a link to recordings of all of the Architecture stream PDC sessions from last year so another piece of Architecture resource gold!

Microsoft in recent years certainly has gone from ‘zero to hero’ in terms of Architecture my only real criticisms are that they are to software development centric still and need to get in touch more with their inner IT Pro.

Also Architecture is a practice of balancing Software Yin, and Hardware Yang, so it is also important to talk about specification and configuration of hardware and networking in a bit more depth than just the current light touch. This could be an opportunity to see more joint articles with key hardware partner such as Dell & HP as Architects also need to know about what is happening in this fast paced side of the industry and how it effects software.

All in all a good start and certainly somewhere I will regularly visit and another two RSS feed’s (Features RSS Feed and News RSS feed) to subscribe to.

They are also keen to hear what you think so email your comments to ukarch@microsoft.com.

Cloud computing is the buzzword of the moment .  It seems that applying the "cloud" label is a real desire for a lot of people out there in the marketplace.  This of course leads to the arguments about whether the "cloud" label is appropriate or just marketing spin.

Why on earth is Cloud Computing so appealing?

I think there are a lot of factors.  I'll outline a few of the main ones below …

• Trendy

  To a certain extent delivering a cloud solution suggests that organisations are on the cutting edge of technology - and this hints that there is something worthwhile in the technology being delivered.  Also the important important human-factor of the innate desire to follow fashion and trends.

• Cost effective

  One of the big claims of Cloud Computing is that it delivers the lowest cost of hardware possible.  Not only are the servers uniform, they are designed in a way to scale broadly so that even large applications can be hosted without requiring special hardware.  This is one of the reasons why Cloud Computing is sometimes called "Utility computing".  That is, hardware that functions like a utility... it's just there. 

• High availability

  Overall most cloud computing environments are designed to provide high availability - if one physical machine goes down, there is always another one to seamlessly pop in and pick up the load.  As software-based services are being delivered via the cloud, this is a critical component to be concerned with.  If you want to have 50,000,000 users, they have an expectation that their service will be there when they want it.  Cloud computing generally helps manage this risk.

• Operational Simplicity

  It's a great relief to have someone else manage the infrastructure.  Putting the hardware together is one thing, being stuck operating it forever is quite another.  People who operate cloud computing farms generally have gotten the process down to a very efficient science.  Of course this also helps out the cost profile, but it also means that the management is efficient.  It is a big deal.

• Financial Scalability

  Cloud computing is often a "pay as you go" kind of deal.  This minimizes the up-front costs and allows a small ISV to get into the game with a quality infrastructure that otherwise they might not be able to afford.  When you pay by the CPU minute, then you can really trim down your costs to just what you are actually consuming.  When it comes to matching costs to revenues (which you do hope to have), getting the costs down to actual with no extra is a nice deal.

Cons

It’s pretty clear that Cloud Computing as a concept has many problems to iron out before it can be considered a viable option by the Enterprise; the two mains ones are confidence and standards maturity.

The confidence problem centres around security concerns and belief. Questions such as, Who else can read my data when it is submitted to the Cloud? Are the claims of the benefits of Cloud computing really all to good to be true, what’s the catch?

It is also clear that the main players in Cloud Computing cannot agree on whether there should be standards right now or not. My feeling is that standards are usually better after a good dose of pragmatism and experience so as so many Cloud offers are still in beta this wouldn’t a prudent time.

There is also calls that having Standard’s bodies are little more than exclusive clubs designed to lock competitors out by using the ‘moral high-ground’ of standards as nothing more than a competitive edge, so the questions is whether Standards Bodies are really about benefitting the customer and the industry.

To add to the doubts how many Cloud services have published Service Level Agreements? I getting the feeling that this is still work in progress for many.

In Summary

Bottom line, using cloud computing is a sign of an advanced or very current application.  It suggests scalability and availability.  It is a cost efficient way to go for most ISVs.  But it comes with a cost.  You often need to look under the surface to discover if it really is of real benefit to you.

The potential is huge especially if not your organisation isn’t an Enterprise, this technology allows even a humble start-up to compete at the same scale as an established Enterprise.

With Cloud Computing many organisation such as Microsoft, HP and Amazon have committed significant sums on money and will be keen to have returns on their investments hence why the ‘hype-machine’ is going fall-tilt at the moment. The danger of this is that it will attract the same individuals that also hyped SOA that were quick to leave as potential wasn’t immediately realised damaging a perfectly viable architectural approach.

Interesting times for Cloud Computing, I will watch how things develop with interest.

Laptops are the client machine of choice in the Enterprise. They are an essential component of modern business allowing the workforce to turn almost anywhere into an office and place of business.

In the Enterprise the laptop will steadily taken over the place of many desktops in business, there will be a place for them in static workforces but for everyone else it will be the default device.

Because laptops play such an important role in the Enterprise, no Enterprise Technology blog would be any good without comment and review on this technology so I have invited Simon Moore and other guest authors from the independent review website, LaptopLogic.com to present articles here.

LaptopLogic.com provide unbiased laptop reviews, news from the mobile tech industry and also is a resource for guides with tips and how-to’s from the world of mobile computing. There are articles, tips and tricks are for all types of users and operating systems, including, Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.

It is clear that the editorial team at LaptopLogic.com clearly enjoys what they do, and this reflects in the content – for that reason, Laptop Logic is a great resource for laptop reviews, tutorials, and other valuable information regardless of what computer or operating system you use. So I would like to welcome Simon and his colleagues to this blog.

As you can guess from the title I have written this post completely on my iPhone.

A part from the obvious restrictions, such as the small keyboard, it wasn't a wholly unpleasant experience making the whole notion of using a device like this to construct posts a viable option.

What put me off attempting to do this before was indeed screen-size but the iPhone does just about cross the boundary in a useable experience.

So I'm a little late to the iPhone party with all the fuss happening last year but it never struck me how good this device was and just how far my Windows Smartphone had to go.

My good friend, Alan Dean, is in love with his Google Android device but again I think that they have a mountain to climb especially in the usersbility stakes which is ultimately key with devices this small were an easy to use interface is of paramount importance.

However the iPhone isn't perfect I do have some wishes ...
1) the screen was a bit bigger and like the wonderfull (and very expensive) HTC Touch HD
2) the keyboard could flip horizontally and vertically in all applications not just some
3) do something smart for blokes big fingers. Some controls are just unusable for the man with cm wide fingers
4) a micro SD slot and a micro USB port please
5) can I also not have to use iTunes as this isn't a good application to have loaded on a work PC

Anyway my attention in future posts will be towards laptops and SQL Server so look out for that. You never know I may write about them using the iPhone again.

There really has never been a better time to get into Enterprise Architecture as the global economic downturn means that smart companies will be looking at making efficiency savings through strategic implementations and process streamlining, identification of function duplication and better IT/business alignment. Enterprise Architecture is a hard thing to get off the ground so why try and re-invent the wheel and benefit from the experiences of others in many different organisations. Using a framework can help and this is what TOGAF is.

TOGAF is one of the most popular Enterprise Architecture frameworks for many different reasons and justifies a post on it's own. The latest version is an incremental step in it's evolution. Seemingly the Open Group have avoided far-reaching changes seen in previous versions and mainly sticking to enhancements and bringing other areas right uptodate.

In our organisation we have spend a great deal of time and effort working out our own metamodel that shows the independent relationships between business process, application, data and technology. Working this out can help in understanding the knock-on effects of changes implement any sort of change.

What I found particularly please was this metamodel does look very close to ours and show some things that we haven't considered so I'm very much looking forward to Enterprise Architecture software like CaseWise and Telelogic/IBM System Architect having these metamodel templates.

TOGAF's ADM now has additional guidance that will make developers cheer! As it has support for iterations so the ADM can be mapped to Agile development techniques such as XP.

 

Also additionally the ADM has guidance on

Applying different enterprise levels

Security architecture

Defining SOA governance

These are just a couple of things I've picked up on, I'm sure as I pick though there will be more that I will comment on, anyway the download is free so well worth having a look through whether and Enterprise Architect or not.

 

Google's 40 minute outage, which I reported, was caused by 'human error' according to a report by the BBC.

Reading the account it seemed that several basic tasks weren't done.

1) The Live site is not checked after updates are performed on it

2) The risk that incorrectly updating the Stopbadware.org list file was something that could stop the site from working properly was not identified.

3) The site is not very regularly checked to see if it still working properly

Any Web-Master will tell you that identifying risks and checking the site works after updates and at regular periods are some of the basics of maintaining a service.

You could argue that with a site as large as Google's this is almost impossible, well just like backing up the Walmart database you do have to make the seemingly impossible -possible in protecting your service and your business. 

These days confidence can be lost so quickly, the recent past has shown that house-hold names and successful businesses are not immune.

To Google's credit they did find the problem and fixed it very quickly.

So have I changed search provider? Up until yesterday I had used Google on the odd occasion, my prefered Search Engine is Ask.co.uk because I like it's design, so when I did try it, sods-law, it's not working!

 

I notices that all my searches on google where coming up with ... "This site may harm your computer" message.

So, I got Google to do a search on itself and this is the result ...

The BBC has now picked up the issues ...  http://tinyurl.com/acbvaq.

 

Hmmm, this does make you think about Cloud Computing and the importance of getting a decent SLA ! 

 

 

 

 

 

I, like many others, download Windows 7 Beta build 7000 on the day it hit MSDN after reading about its availability from Bink.nu. It came as an ISO so was easy to build into a virtual machine however on my home laptop I've partitioned my HDD and had XP in one partition and Vista in the other. Vista rarely gets to see the light of day simple because it is always doing something with the hard-disk! Checking! Scanning! Indexing! All driving me nuts as it slows down the performance of my machine. So I thought, I'm not in love with my Vista partition lets see if Windows 7 is any good? then and hit the upgrade button.

The first thing I noticed about the upgrade was the lack of many questions, for the most part it just chugged along and announced it had finished 3 hours later.

The second thing I noticed was the changes to the Taskbar. At first I didn't understand the loss of one of my most treasured parts of the Taskbar, the Quick-Launch and actually felt annoyed until I got around to reading 'Learn about Windows 7' from the 'Getting Started' menu on the Start button menu. This is when it dawn on me that the Taskbar and Quick-Launch had merged into one! Very clever, a good piece of evolution. Also with a simple and subtle graphical clue to tell at a glance when more than one instance of a program is running.

Gliding the mouse-pointer over the icons in the Taskbar is a very satisfying, miniature versions of the Windows appear, like in Vista, but the movement from one icon to the next brings a smooth fading transition animation calculated on the fly, where the content of the previous miniature window is replaced by the new one.  It is a small thing but even more satisfying because I haven't managed to make it break or glitch up. The really clever thing is that there is less icons on the Taskbar now which means I can have them at a much bigger size so no hitting the wrong icon by mistake because it is so small.

The third thing I noticed way the System Tray has been uncluttered!

Five undistracting icons and the time/date and that's it! The Show Hidden Icon has turned into a discreet triangle that hides the cacophony of icons to prevent the eye-jarring colour overload. Yes this feature was available in both XP and Vista but in away this small change adequately demonstrates what Windows 7 is all about and that is evolution not revolution.

Why is Windows 7's Performance so much better?

The key change, for me, isn't a feature, it's the reverse of my biggest problem with Vista. Performance. Windows 7 certainly gives the appearance that it is a faster operating system in many respects to Vista. The reality is that Microsoft have been a lot smarter with the way the Service Controller and background processing work.

At any given point, Windows is executing a lot of code. Some of this code runs in the background as services. In older versions of Windows some services were set to auto run even though the configuration of the system (installed apps, hardware, etc) did not warrant them running.

This has a four-fold effects,
1) Windows might start up slower as the service fire up
2) Sluggish performance as the service takes up processing and memory resources
3) Windows might take a long time to shut down as the service shuts down, unwinding itself and cleaning up it's resources
4) ... and most worryingly the surface area for code-level security breaches is larger.

The Windows kernel Development team spent a great deal of time thinking about and rectifying these problems by re-architecting the Windows 7 Service Controller. They also identified services that didn't need to auto run (like a TabletPC Pen service that need not ever run on a desktop machine by default). But they went much further than simply figuring out which services can be set to manual start-up state in Windows 7. They added a new feature for service developers based on the trigger pattern: services can be started and shut down via triggers - this means developers are able to specify programmatically when a service needs to start or stop. This allows Windows to control services in a much more dynamic way so less code has to run in any given user session. The Service Controller monitors and reacts to trigger events as opposed to just running services marked as auto when the system starts. Less code running in the background on Windows means more resources available for foreground processing, faster start up of sessions and faster shut down.

If you want to know more there is White paper here on Designing Efficient Background Processes.

Will I buy Windows 7 ?

The acid test is will I put my hands in my pocket and buy Windows 7 ? The answer is Yes ... but the BIG caveat is, only if the price is right. I will be disappointed if the price is significantly more than the price of an Xbox game and that will make me stay with XP going out of support or not.

I was lucky with my laptop that I received ann upgrade voucher for Vista but when it came to my home desktop I didn't buy it because the price was to high. I couldn't see enough benefit to justify the expense.

This year there will be far less disposable cash around to spend on operating systems upgrades not just me I fear. With all the new goodness in '7 still isn't going to be enough to make people take the jump.

The wider concern is I'm still stuck for that killer reason for the business case and expense justification. Faster than Vista -yes but faster than -XP? - yes but is that a good enough reason? -No! Just saying, because XP is going out of support, is just going to piss people off.

Just because something is faster doesn't mean you are going to go out and buy it. Take cars for example, speed is a factor but a lot of other stuff comes into play such as fuel economy, comfort, ease of use, practicality to name but a few things that race through your head on the Car Show-room fore-court.

Is the Operating System Days Number ?

There is a school of thought that certainly shows that there is a trends by a large portion of the market to move towards commodity devices, such as a Games-Console for games a Netbook for couch-surfing, Facebook and the odd Twitt.

At work, people are getting Thin-Client devices with barely enough operating system on them to run a Browser where their applications are delivered to them via web technologies such as HTML or AJAX or remotely via Vmware's View (formerly VDI), Citrix XenApp and now App-V from Microsoft delivering their stalwarts of Office and alike and this is even before we start talking about Cloud Computing.

All this add up to less people at home and business needing much of an operating system to get at what they want. In the old days people realised that Windows, Linux and OSX were the almighty prerequisite. Now people have suddenly gotten used to not caring because they use what comes with the machine. 

Some could argue that having Windows pre-installed on PC's was the one thing that brought Windows to prominence but as soon as manufacturers realised that they actually had choices was the start of the decline. What I will concede is that there is far less need to buy Windows these days, it's not the only game in town.

Is Window's going down like the Titanic ?

I firmly believe that the demise of Windows is over-stated but just like Manchester United, Windows is going to have to share the top of the Premiership with other teams, some years it wins others it doesn't. This however is not a bad thing as we know that Microsoft are uber-competitive and will keep trying to find ways to entice us back to pressing the Start-button in another new version.

Some how I do feel that change is in the air, some people will try and avoid it others will embrace it as the next big thing and people like me will try and work out business benefits for justification cases.

However I am a real believer in change. Much as I love '7 and happy to jump on the bandwagon and say it is the best Windows version yet, I find myself thinking in ten years have we really gone much further than this ?

 

Servers are the backbone of enterprise computing today, most websites for example run on either Apache or IIS and will be running on a server of some description.

Perhaps because of servers ubiquity it is easy to become complacent about them especially as they are rarely seen but understanding what a server can offer you and it's limitations will definitely help with software development.

Servers on the whole are built more of the practicality side than for the esthetics, there is no need to make them look pretty if they are going to spend most of there time in a Data-Centre rarely seen. The server will only have a visit if something goes physically wrong, everything else should be looked after remotely. Ultimately the success of a server is measured in the the amount of time spent looking after it and it performing the task(s) you have set it.

The Differences Between Servers and Desktops

The main difference between Servers and Desktops are Servers are designed to run 24/7 desktop aren't. The components in a server can usually handle higher stress and handle redundancy by having two or more of critical components so if one fails there still is another keeping the server up and the service it is running available. 

The Different Types of Server

There are different types of server then mains ones are,

Pedestal/Tower

A Pedestal Server (which is often know as a Tower) isn't rack mounted as the main intention of it's design is to work primarily in an office environment not in a Data-Centre. These machines are usually found as file or print servers.

Rack Mounted

 

 

As the name suggests a rack mounted service lives in a rack. Placing servers on top of each other in a rack to support their weight and to provide them with services such as power and networking means that you can have lots of servers taking up less room and room in data-centre's are at a premium. A typical rack is 19 or 21 U (I will explain later what a U is)

Enterprise Class

 

Enterprise Class servers are free-standing like pedestals but you won't find them in an office! Because of their size, value and special requirements such as multi-phased power supply, larger than domestic voltages or specialist cooling they can only really live in a data-centre. As you can imagine this type of server doesn't come cheap. Enterprise Class machines would have been called 'Mainframes' in year gone by but as they run can happily run operating systems such as Linux, Unix and Windows (The IBM P Series pictured does not run Windows). Their main function today is as a consolidated platform as one of these servers can run the equivalent of several hundred Linux servers saving space and power.

Blade

In a typical rack you can get about 10 rack mounted servers. Blade servers on the other hand are designed for high density, i.e. more servers in the same amount of space. Take for example the HP C Class Blades, a U10 C7000 Blade Enclosure can have upto 16 468c G5 Blade Servers. So a normal rack can have 32 servers in it rather than 10. Blades servers make ideal candidates for hosting Virtualised servers such as Vmware, Hyper-V or XenSource.

The Worlds Most Popular Server

It is estimated by HP that the world most popular server is the ProLiant DL380 G5. As I haven't seen this claim undisputed I will use the DL380 as an example of a typical server as it is the one you are most likely to meet. This next section will give you a detailed overview of the machine.

HP's Official ProLiant DL 380 Overview

Front View:

1. Eight sockets for PC2-5300 Fully Buffered DIMMs (DDR2-667) - up to 64GB RAM is possible

2. Hot-plug fans, full redundancy - air is sucked through the machine from front to back.

3. Systems Insight Display

4. Quick release lever for rapid server access - lifting these levers will allow you to quickly pull the machine out of a rack.

5. Support for eight Small Form Factor hot plug hard drives bays - Typically SAS drive (discussed in the article on Storage) are installed here.

6. Front LEDs (show server status) and Unit Identification button/LED (for easy in rack server identification)

7. Two front USB ports (2 rear USB ports, 1 internal USB port)

8. Intel Xeon Processor (Performance models include two processors)

9. Hot plug power supply, redundancy option (High performance models include redundant power supply) - Yes two power supplies. One can be replaced whilst the server is still working for maximum up-time.

10. Three full-size PCI-E expansion slots in standard expansion cage (or optional mixed PCI-X/E expansion cage). Two additional low-profile PCI-E slots embedded on the system board. Four slots available for use; one consumed by Smart Array controller (Base and Performance models)

11. Quick removal access panel

Rear View:

1. Torx service tool - HP exclusively use a standard screw-driver head in their machines called the Torx T15 to help avoid screw-driver cam-out.

2. Optional pass through cable door

3. Two Embedded NC373i Multifunction Gigabit Server Adapters with TCP/IP Offload Engine

4. Hot plug power supply bays, redundancy option (High performance models include redundant power supply)

5. Integrated Lights-Out 2 (iLO 2) Remote management port. ILO is a remote management console that can turn a server on and off and take over the screen amongst other features. ILO usually has it's own dedicated VLAN. I will talk more about what that is in A Developers Guide to Networking. What you need to know but were afraid to ask.

6. Video Port

7. Two USB 2.0 Ports

8. Serial Port

9. Keyboard Port

10. Mouse PS/2 Port

11. Two low-profile PCI Express x8 slots. Slot 1 is consumed by the P400 Smart Array controller. (Base and Performance models)

12. Three full-size PCI Express slots in standard cage (or optional mixed PCI-X/E expansion cage)

 

Specifications

• Processors:
  • Quad-Core and Dual-Core Intel® Xeon® processors - systems support up to 2 processors
  • Intel® 5000P chipset
• Memory:
  • Up to 64 GB PC2-5300 Fully Buffered DIMMs (DDR2-667)
• Storage Controller:
  • Performance Models: 512MB (RAID 0/1/1+0/5/6)
  • High Efficiency and Base Models: 256MB Controller (RAID 0/1/1+0/5)
  • Entry Models: 64MB Controller (RAID 0/1/1+0)
• Internal Drive Support:
  • (8) small form factor (SFF) hot-plug drive bays to support Serial-attached SCSI (SAS) and Serial ATA (SATA) drives
  • Slimline media bay supporting Optical or Floppy drive
• Network Controller:
  • Two embedded Gigabit Network Adapters
• Expansion Slots:
  • Four PCI-Express slots
• USB Ports:
  • USB 2.0 support
  • 5 total ports: (2) ports up front; (2) ports in back; (1) port internal
• Integrated Hypervisors (Optional):
  • VMware & Citrix XenServer virtualization technology ... sadly not Microsoft yet!
• Redundancy:
  • Fully redundant hot plug fans (N+1)
  • Hot plug power supply with optional redundancy (Included in Performance models)
• Form Factor:
  • Rack (2U), (3.5-inch); Depth 26 inches (66 cm)

What is a U ?

A 'U' or Rack Unit is an Electronic Industry Alliance standard height (EIA 310) measure for a rack mounted server. The reason there is a server is so machines from multiple vendors can all use the same racking.

A U or 1U equates to 1.75 inches or 44.45 millimetres. A typical rack is either 19 or 23 U's high. Our example machine the HP DL 350 G5 is 2U (see Form Factor in previous section)

Good Questions to Ask

One of the most frequent question there is, is why is the system running slowly?

Often the answer to this question is one of the four resources on a server is getting maxed out. CPU, Memory are obvious but the problems usually lie with I/O in the form of networking and disk. So understand what networks the servers is connected to and what storage and how it is configured. Recently I found a SQL Server database was running like a dog because the mdb file was sitting on the same hard disk as many others so the disk was working flat out! However to solve the problem developers were off writing better SQL and .Net code which won't have helped at all.

Is the Live server the same as the Dev? If so, what else is the Live server running?

'It runs ok in development' is frequently heard and we all know that if development and testing environments could accurately simulate a Live environment then more problems could be found before go-live. A far easier thing to do is measure how much resource your new development consumes and profile it over a working cycle such as a day or through a month-end process, then examine the servers it's going to go live on, and watch the server through the same profile you will get a better idea whether your new development will fit, this will be easier than trying to reproduce a Live simulation in test or dev but if you can do that, that's great!

In Summary

I do like hardware! So I am bias but I do believe that getting to know hardware can help bridge divides and help solve problems because if programs don't work well infront of business users the whole of IT looks like smucks and the 'his fault not mine' looks extra lame.

Does your software or database run like a dog? Running out of space? Or doesn't recover well in a disaster? ... then your storage configuration may be one of the reasons. This is a short little post just to give you a heads-up on the basics. You may know bits of it already, hence why I have broken it up into a Q&A format so you can skip what you already now.

The Hard-Disk

Well we've all seen a hard-disk but the likelihood is that it was in a desktop and you're the only person that uses it at anyone time? Have you noticed that if you run more than one thing that accesses the disk at the same time, it sometimes slow down?

Hard-disk's are essentially serial devices where a head can only really read or write one thing at a time, they have got cleverer in recent years but still it's a bunch of heads hovering over a set of platters, each head taking it's turn to read or write.

These day's in servers and storage devices you are likely to find are SAS drives or Serial Attached SCSI. You would think that Parallel SCSI, the old standard, would be faster but as speeds increases the problem of timings and keeping data in sync or 'skewed' was proving difficult and expensive. SATA is self 'skewing' so we will see much larger increases in bandwidth in the next few years, typically it is 3Gb/s now this is likely to rise to 12Gb/s in the next few years.

Stripes?

Increasing performance has meant getting more disks then spreading segments of a file across them so each set of heads can read a part of the file at the same time as others speeding up the loading of a file. Hard-Disk in this configuration are said to be 'Stripped'.

Mirror?

Hard-disks have a life, they have moving part and will ware out in-time. However, we can't accurately predict when it will break-down so the simplest form of protecting the data on the disk from it's inevitable failure is making a copy. Backing up the data to another media takes time. To reduce the risk, data is copied to another disk called a mirror at around the same time it as the original. If the original fails the mirror takes over until the original is replace, then the mirror copies it contents to the new original. This is called unsurprisingly 'Mirroring'.

Parity/Error Correction?

Redundancy data is created and stored to allow problems to be detected and/or fixed. The redundancy data is calculated from sets of actual data values.

In detail, since computer data is stored as binary numbers it can use Boolean operators to transform data. One of these operators is Exclusive OR (XOR). The interesting and useful thing about XOR is that if performed twice in a row, it "undoes itself". This allows for calculating any single missing value from a set of values.

What is RAID?

Standard configurations combinations of disks in a Striped, Mirrored, with or without parity combinations are called the RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) with a corresponding numeric for common communication of the configuration.

There are various combinations giving different trade-offs of protection against data loss, capacity, and speed. RAID levels 0, 1, and 5 are the most commonly found, and cover most requirements. Here is a brief summary,

• RAID 0 (striped disks) distributes data across several disks in a way that gives improved speed and full capacity, but all data on all disks will be lost if any one disk fails.
• RAID 1 (mirrored settings/disks) could be described as a real-time backup solution. Two (or more) disks each store exactly the same data, at the same time, and at all times. Data is not lost as long as one disk survives. Total capacity of the array is simply the capacity of one disk. At any given instant, each disk in the array is simply identical to every other disk in the array.
• RAID 5 (striped disks) combines three or more disks in a way that protects data against loss of any one disk; the storage capacity of the array is reduced by one disk
• RAID 6 (striped disks with parity) can recover from the loss of two disks.
• RAID 10 (or 1+0) uses both striping and mirroring. "01" or "0+1" is sometimes distinguished from "10" or "1+0": a striped set of mirrored subsets and a mirrored set of striped subsets are both valid, but distinct, configurations.

At the heart of any storage solution disks will be in a RAID configuration of some description. The rule of thumb is that the more disks the more expensive so the idea is to keep the costs down by asking where would be the best place to put files. Unchanging files perhaps best placed on RAID 0 or 1 arrays and database files on RAID 5, not everything on a RAID 10 for example.

What is NAS?

As you can imagine the more disks a server has the more expensive it is and it's always the way, one server is running out of room whilst one near by has plenty of space spare. Things get messy if servers try to access each others storage and I/O starts to suffer. So the cool idea is to create servers dedicated to serving files to everyone else, i.e. the File-Server. However having a server just serving out files is a waste of CPU and RAM so dedicated devices were created to do the job, these are called Storage Arrays and array's being the row of hard-disk drives themselves.

Attaching Storage Array's to a network makes them a NAS, or Network Attach Storage.

Good examples of NAS are the Link and Tera Stations from Buffalo at the low end of the market and the Dell PowerVaults at the high end.

What is a DAS?

A DAS or Direct Attached Array, is a Storage Array that is directly attached to server or workstation because the machine is performing a specific role which means using a lot of data, needs the performance or the protection. Typical examples of this would be high-powered graphical work stations, office media libraries or sometimes found in the home attached to Media-Centre's to store Movies and Music.

A good example of DAS is the LaCie 4Big Quadra which can attached to a server or desktop via USB, Fiewwire or eSATA.

What is a LUN?

When you request an amount of storage a set of hard-disks are logically grouped together, this grouping is called a LUN or Logical Unit Number. Storage Array's are divided up into LUN's.

What is a SAN?

However as you can imagine all this extra disk accessing traffic on the network to read and write files from servers to NAS devices is going to increase latency and take up bandwidth. This is were placing storage devices onto it's own dedicated network is best practice, this storage network is called a SAN or Storage Area Network.

A SAN concentrates on speed, ease of management and amazing resilience to disaster. It is about moving large volumes of data round quickly and safely.

SAN devices are at the cutting edge of storage technology and have advanced into specialist technologies that typically mean using the fastest mediums possible such as a dedicated fibre-optic networks for example. The Storage Array's themselves can also go a step further than NAS, take the HP Storage Works 9100 for example, 640 terabytes capacity.

The Storage Works 9100 has a shed load of RAM in it acting as a cache protecting you from the limitations of the hard-disks themselves. Ultimately Hard-Disks have there limitations however their days are numbered! As the size increases on Solid State Disk or SSD, these are increasingly being used in Storage Array's such as the EMC Symmetrix DMX-4. Most EMC devices are rebranded as IBM or Dell. The trend is only likely to continue.

Good Questions to Ask

The section covers some Q&A's to help ...

So what other applications are using the same Hard-Disk on the SAN? Could this explain those unpredictable slow downs?

Certainly Yes! Let me give you a typical example. SQL Server creates a file called TempDB, this is were it stores stuff it's workings out. If accessing TempDB slows down, SQL Server will slow down, looking at Task Manager isn't going to tell you that.

A typical reason why TempDB is slowing down is because the file is sharing a Hard-Disk with some other files that are getting accessed at the same time.

It is recommended that a TempDB file is created for each processing core just make sure that they aren't all sitting on the same Hard-Disk. For optimum speed make a TempDB file sit on a Hard-Disk all on it's own. Sounds like a waste? No, not if several databases and their queries are hanging off that TempDB file specially if you can get more performance out of existing SQL Server machines you won't need to buy more.

Should the file block size change?

Some applications read data in specifically size chunks at a time. SQL Server's is 16 kilobytes for example. So it makes sense that the Hard-Disks to also reads and write with the same block size as the applications it's serving.

Can storage help with Disaster recovery?

Many storage solutions are built with DR in mind and will not only copy data to another disk in a mirror setup but copy that data to another Storage Array in another Data-Centre. As you can imagine with the complexity of this operation there is more than one way to do it. For example Symantec Veritas Volume Replicator will create an exact copy in another Data-Centre be transferring only block level changes over an IP network keeping network traffic down.

However there is a debate whether technologies like Veritas Volume Replicator are good alternative to say SQL Server Database Mirroring, as Volume Replicator sends exact block level changes where Database Mirroring will send SQL commands that can update an infinite level of data depending on it's instruction, both of which can be sent over the same IP network but only works with SQL Server 2005 and above. So you can see there is pro's & con's.

The Checklist

This section covers question that your storage team will want to know about the software don't always rely on Business Analysis, Architects or Projects Managers to supply this information, better to have it twice than not at all even if you can't fill it all in.

Questions about the Software

• Initial Amount of Storage - how large will the system be when it goes live
• Storage growth - 6mths-  12 mths, 18mths, 3yrs, 5yrs
• User Growth 6mths -  12 mths, 18mths, 3yrs, 5yrs

Storage & Capacity planning teams can work out when is the best time to buy more storage.

• SLA - Survival Critical,Multiple Business Processes Critical, Business Process Supporting, Day to Day, Nice to Have - Business Day - 8am-6pm, 24hrs, World Region EMEA/ASIAPAC/AMERICAS
• Most Frequent Time of Use -  End of Month? End of Day? No Peak?
• Business Users and Location  
• Support Team

Storage Teams are operational so will want to know who they need to talk to if things go wrong or want to organise upgrades or outages. 

Questions about the Files

• File Name/Set - Size, Growth, 12 mths, 18mths, 3yrs, 5yrs
• Description of Use
• Type -  Sequential/Random
• Performance Required <25ms <100ms

Answering these types of question will help determine what type of RAID the file will sit on and the DR whether a local Data-Centre or who knows, it could be on the other side of the world!

In Summary

You don't have to become an expert in Storage, I'm not. Having an appreciation certainly is an advantage as it is a key subject of enterprise computing which many can wrongly believe they are abstracted from but clearly aren't, infact the opposite, total dependent on. Getting your head around storage could be one of those things in grow that 'Developer X-Factor' that turns you from a good developer to a great developer!

 

Hardware and Software are very much the modern day Yin and Yang, one serves little purpose without the other.

I have noticed that on the whole many developers know little about the environments that the software they are writing is going to work in falsely believing they are truly abstracted from it . Come 'Go Live' there are blank faces when for some 'inexplicably reason' the software doesn't work and the remark, 'it worked fine in test' is often heard.

Another common frustration is software that doesn't perform well from the start or starts to slow down after go live. Again blank faces and scratching of heads can be seen. All of this can be avoided not only by having better working practices and more testing which is well known but knowing more about the hardware dependencies on which the software relies which is less well known.

To help I've written a few handy guides on topics such as Storage, Servers, Networking and SCOM from a developers perspective. I believe having this knowledge is part of developing that X-Factor that makes a good developer a great developer!

Each guide will have some handy questions you can ask to get a greater understanding of your environments and some of my rules of thumb that you may find useful, I have deliberately kept the signal to noise ratio down. The first in the series is on Storage.

Developing an Infrastructure appreciation is a good way to help bridge the divide between the software and hardware camps and would make a great subject for a book. Now if any publishers are interested please drop me an email.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy. Feedback positive or negative is all most welcome.