Using DataCore Sansymphony-V to manage your virtual storage

DataCore’s latest version of its storage networking management tool solves the biggest problem stalling server and desktop virtualization projects. It provides a powerful and graphical mechanism to set up storage pools and provide multipath and continuous data protection for a wide variety of SANs.

Pricing: DataCore-authorized solution providers offer packages starting under $10K for a two-node, high-availability environment.

Requirements: Windows Server 2008 R2

Management console runs on Windows desktop versions from XP SP3 to Windows 7.

You can watch my three minute screencast video review here.

The Internet Kill Switch

My first car had what is called a kill switch that I put in shortly after I had bought it. I was living in LA at the time, the capital of car thefts, and I even though it wasn’t all that fancy a vehicle I wanted to make sure that it was somewhat protected. It was a simple thing: you had to turn the headlights on before you started the car. I thought I was in good shape until I found out how many valets could figure out the sequence (in LA you have to leave your car with valets a lot). This is a good analogy for the same process when it comes time to turn off Internet access to an entire country, whether it is for cybersecurity or censorship. Someone clever will always figure out a way around the blockade.

The idea to protect our own Internet access has been around for some time, and various people have proposed that we do something about it, including Senator Joe Lieberman.

The senator got his wish for a simple on/off switch for the Internet, but it didn’t go down quite as he had planned when he first proposed the idea before Congress last year. Early last Friday just after midnight local time, the Egyptian telecoms authority turned off almost all Internet and cell phone access to its 80 million residents. What is astounding is how easy and effective this action seemed to be. While no one directly involved is actually talking, savvy folks have figured out it was a series of phone calls to the network operations staffs of the service providers involved. Egypt is served by only a few Internet providers and cell carriers. Within a few minutes, the entire country went offline. SInce then, some cell service has been restored.

What makes this noteworthy is that there are dozens of countries that try to control their net access with a series of firewalls and content filters, most notably Iran and China. These countries allow most Internet traffic through. Egypt has been wide open over the past in terms of what packets flowed through its pipes. Indeed, just as its location is critical for shipping traffic on the Suez canal, major international fiber routes pass through the country. These long-haul connections are still operating.

But there is very little traffic coming in or out of the country, according to Renasys, which tracks this kind of thing and the source of the graphic above. So the first step towards total control ironically is to first set yourself up as a free society, to prevent anyone from even thinking that you can just flip the switch. The more you tend to block, the more motivated others are to figure out ways around it, as my own experience with my first car illustrates.

There are some countries that use more than just an off switch for their blockades: they rate-limit the traffic, slowing down access to make it all but useless for people looking for forbidden content or IP addresses. This is a time-tested technique by many IT directors who don’t want their user populations surfing Facebook or streaming videos during the workday. They don’t turn access off completely; just slow it down enough that most users will move on to another destination. Earlier last week, Egyptian authorities blocked Twitter and Facebook access. When that wasn’t working, they went with the nuclear option and turned everything off.

Finally, what also helped Egypt’s ability to turn off its Internet is it has a few providers to give everyone the sense of competition. This ironically made it less of an issue for people to seek out alternatives that are outside of domestic control. In places that have fewer providers, people are more afraid of potential censorship and find proxies and other routes around the domestic network.

I hope this column becomes quickly obsolete and access is turned on in Egypt. But in the meantime, they have provided a roadmap that others should take heed.

Baseline: Successful cloud implementations

Moving to the cloud might save money on hardware purchases, but poor planning and lack of the right combination of skills can quickly eat up those savings. Nevertheless, there are quite a few strategies that can ensure a successful cloud-based solution.

You can read the complete story in Baseline magazine this month here.

Techtarget: Does Microsoft Kinect have a future in the enterprise?

A game controller that sold 4 million units in its first six weeks may seem like an unlikely prospect for an enterprise computing application. But since Microsoft Kinect launched in November, computer programmers have purchased units for applications in robotics, videoconferencing, image processing, augmented reality systems, 3-D rendering and other corporate uses.

You can read my article on SearchEnterpriseDesktop.com, here.

How to become an expert by using online Q&A sites

When I do seminars to help out of work folks, I always talk about how to create your own Web site, set up your email with your own domain, and start an email list. All of these activities are centered on becoming a known expert in a very particular niche, something that has served me well in the almost 20 years that I have been out running my own business. But what about those people that don’t want to invest all their time with this tech?

There is an alternative, and it is as simple as answering a few questions. Okay, maybe not that simple, but still a lot easier than learning WordPress and Mailman and how Google sets up email for its Apps.

What I am talking about here is being able to post some comments, and answering some questions online to show your expertise. It doesn’t take all that much time, it can be fun, and it can help spread the word about your skill set and what you know.

Why is this important? Job seekers often forget how much they actually know about their particular niche or niches and take this knowledge for granted. When you are doing your job search, you are more focused on trying to find the right openings or increasing your network by meeting particular people, both of which are great activities.

But they can be complementary ones. So how to get started? Well, LinkedIn is one place, and the corner of this service that even the more experienced members don’t spend much time with is called Answers. Click on the More tab on the top menu bar and then Answers, and you’ll enter this universe. The format is simple: you ask a question that you want someone else to answer or you search for and then answer someone else’s question. I suggest the latter option for the first-timers. You can search for particular topics that LinkedIn has culled from its database that it thinks you are expert in, or you can go find them yourself.

I used this feature to collect a bunch of different pointers to innovative GPS applications for a story that I wrote several years ago. And I periodically answer some questions that are relevant to my particular business, computer networking and Internet applications and social media. Answers gets more useful the more you spend time with it.

You can complement your expertise on LinkedIn by participating in its discussions on the various groups that you belong to. What, you don’t belong to any groups? Now is the time to start.

But there are other places that you think about, including Business Week’s Business Exchange, Quora, Replyz and Fluther.

All of these work in similar fashion to Answers. You can search for particular topics, and post questions or answers to them. Some also link to your LinkedIn or Facebook accounts, for easy access and can post your replies to your Twitter feed, again to spread the joy of your knowledge.

Paul Gillin and I have prepared a short podcast (Is Q&A the new black) as part of our continuing MediaBlather series here that you are welcome to download and take a listen to.

Mediablather podcast: Is Q&A the new black?

This week, Paul Gillin and David return to the airwaves with the latest of their MediaBlather podcasts. They talk about the new wave of question-and-answer sites.  The soaring popularity of Quora, the new social network that has people scrambling to deliver the best answers to each other’s questions, has created new interest in a tried-and-true metaphor. LinkedIn and Yahoo both have had its Answers sections for quite some time now. You can use these answer sites to build your professional credibility and visibility in the smallest of niches, but how do you know where to place your chips with so many options from which to choose? The duo discuss this growing trend.

You can download and listen to our podcast here.

Visualizing the Internet

I came across an interesting site by the BBC that they put together as part of series of their TV Superpower programs that began running last fall. The information presented brings up a lot of thoughts and I hope it will thrill and amuse you as much as it did for me.

There is a list of the 26 Internet-related billionaires, including eight from Japan and China. What is depressing to me is, apart from the Stanford professor that introduced the Google guys and Chuck Schwab, everyone else is younger than I. Not that I have any hope of making it into that club anytime soon, but still, a guy can dream, right?

Some of the previous occupations listed by the BBC are pretty amusing: do you know which billionaire started out as a Pizza Hut manager? Anyone know who was a bar tender? How many of the billionaires had some relationship to Stanford? (That is going to be harder to figure out, but my guess is at least a third.)

Also on the BBC site are other data maps that are interesting, such as a display showing the top 100 Web sites by traffic that you can sort and drill down and explore further. And there is another map of the world showing you the growth of Internet usage over the past ten years.

For those of us that are Americans, we tend to forget that the first two words of the Web are world wide, and there are many people speaking many different languages other than English that are using the Internet and creating their own content. China now has more Internet users that we have total population, and it is growing quickly. There are companies that generate tons of traffic overseas that we don’t usually hear about here in the States, such as the social networking site Orkut and news site UOL, both of which are big in Brazil but not elsewhere. The charts and graphics created by the BBC help to illustrate this.

Kudos to the BBC for a job well done.

Aluratek Bump: small speaker packs a punch

I have been using the same $10 speakers on my current computer that I purchased with a PC about a million users ago, so imagine my surprise when I tried out the Aluratek Bump. It is a small speaker about the size of half of a soda can, and the sound quality is fantastic. Paired with a subwoofer, you have really tremendous sound coming out of your computer. There are two ways to connect it: First, using the standard mini audio jack. This is fine for most of us.

But if you want some flexibility where you are going to place the speaker in your home or office, the second method is more appealing. You connect a USB dongle to your PC and you can play music wirelessly to the Bump. It worked fine on my Windows PC, but I had trouble with the wireless connection on my Mac. I could move the speaker about 30 feet away from the computer without any loss of sonic quality.

The speaker has a rechargeable battery that will last several hours, the charging cable is a standard mini-USB. And for $80, it is reasonably priced.

You can purchase the speaker here.

Things that weren’t sold this past holiday season

The announcement of a long-expected Verizon iPhone has highlighted my own frustration with handheld gadgets. And while it is too late (or way too early) to compile a holiday shopping list, it does seem as if the tech industry is MIA this past holiday season. To wit:

– I want a smartphone that I can use as a Wifi hot spot to easily tether (as the term is called) at least a couple of computers to use its broadband Internet connection. The word “easily” is the challenge. Yes, there are Android phones that can do this, but the process is fraught with bad software. Yes, there is the Sprint MyFi that is yet another separate device and data plan. And I don’t want to hire a lawyer and an accountant to figure out what the charges and which data plan I will need to do this, either.

– I want an eReader from someone other than Amazon that allows me to effortlessly add and share my eBooks with others. The Barnes and Noble Nook comes closest, but its sharing features also require the lawyer to read all the fine print, exceptions and limitations. Why not just buy the Kindle and wait until Amazon gets its sharing act together? I want to give someone else a chance and support my local bookstores at the same time. The Google eBooks uses Adobe rights management, which is also bad software. For some eBook downloads, I need three separate accounts to start reading my selection. This is a mess. None of these devices will keep Borders afloat.

– I want a 7-inch tablet from someone other than Apple (yes, I know the iPad has a bigger screen but it is only a matter of time before they have something smaller) that doesn’t require a data plan or a two-year subscription to reduce its $600 price tag. It defies all things reasonable that I can I buy two netbook computers with bigger screens for the same money, just because they are running the non-touch versions of XP or even Windows 7.

– I want Google to figure out which browser-based OS is going to win: Android or Chrome. They need to put all their might behind one of them if they are going to get anywhere with Microsoft. This perplexes me and I wonder why no one else has raised this issue.

Yes, I know I am being ornery and difficult. But it does seem that the tech industry really continues to miss the mark. I shouldn’t complain, because these misses just mean more work for me to explain why all this other stuff doesn’t work as intended.

Techtarget: Connecting to virtual servers in the cloud

My latest article for Techtarget’s SearchCloudComputing.com site covers the various ways you can connect to your virtual servers in a cloud infrastructure, including remote access, FTP, and VPNs. You can read the entire piece here.