Mother Nature is seriously upset.

These catastrophic events have made it painfully obvious why you should be doing something now about protecting your business data and ensuring datacenter availability. Does your disaster recovery plan or failover strategy rely on someone else to save your bacon? In case you missed it, even the most trusted cloud service providers have had their datacenters go dark this year. There’s some background on Amazon’s recent operational mishaps in my “Lightning Strikes Twice…” blog.

Last winter I had an uneasy feeling about 2011. In fact, I tried to warn you about it on January 3rd, when I published Who’s Got Your Back? Novell Does. In that blog, I suggested that you look into PlateSpin Protect—a WorkloadIQ solution that safeguards workloads by continually replicating them. I also highlighted Zmanda Backup Appliance, a pre-configured virtual backup server powered by SUSE Linux Enterprise that runs on any VMware infrastructure. There’s a short customer testimonial which discusses some of the issues to consider when creating a cloud backup solution. You might want to check it out.

You may have seen an article in eWeek recently that looked back at the September 11^th tragedy a decade later. Everyone’s aware of the horrific loss of life and physical destruction that took place. The article pointed out a lesser known fact: “dozens of organizations lost all or most of their data in those New York City buildings which housed several datacenters.” It went on to state that “30 to 40 percent of all IT shops either have no disaster recovery system or don’t know how to use it correctly.” In this day and age, that’s unbelievable.

2011 has been downright disastrous for many companies that didn’t have a solid disaster recovery plan. Can you imagine being the chief information officer who must explain to the company’s board of directors how his or her department lost their company’s data? Awkward doesn’t quite describe the meeting’s atmosphere. By comparison, the Roman practice of throwing Christians to the lions would seem compassionate and tasteful.

If you’re considering reviewing your disaster and recovery strategy, I’d recommend checking out a couple of sessions at BrainShare October 10^th through the 14^th. Two that caught my eye are “Disaster Recovery and the Cloud,” and “Disaster Recovery Made Easy for a Few Dollars a Day.”

Until next time, keep your head down and your datacenter up.

–Richard

You’ve probably heard the old engineering adage: “cost, quality, time—pick two.” Well, cloud computing lets you pick all three. It can lower costs, improve the services you deliver, and free up your staff to do stuff that’s a lot more innovative than patching OSes and updating servers.

Just ask the folks at Vodacom Business Services or Verizon Business Consulting. Seriously, ask them! You’ll get your chance at BrainShare. That’s where presenters from Vodacom, South Africa’s leading telecommunications provider, will talk about how they built out a successful cloud offering using NetIQ Cloud Manager as the underlying technology. Cloud Manager lets you manage workloads seamlessly and securely across a virtual infrastructure, private cloud and external cloud. The folks from Vodacom Business Services will talk about how they integrated NetIQ Cloud Manager into their cloud offering and learned some valuable lessons along the way. Speaking of fences, you might want to ask them how they handle multitenancy and the role NetIQ Identity and Security solutions play in this—for them and their customer BasisOne.

BrainShare is also where technologists from Verizon Business Consulting will explain why they’re so hot on the cloud. They recently built a hosted Access Manager solution to provide secure access services to customers in a software as a service (SaaS) environment. NetIQ Access Manager allows businesses and organizations to manage their users’ access to Web-based content, portals, enterprise applications and systems through secure authentication. Its simplified, centralized approach to access management is ideal for maintaining infrastructure-wide security and compliance. In the BrainShare session, engineers from Verizon Business Consulting and NetIQ will cover some of the more common solution development issues their teams encountered. Specifically, they will discuss the multiple custom login pages, user stores, authentication configurations and AG clusters that were required. They will also discuss delegated administration and keeping different customers’ data separate.

If you’re looking for some great insights into why moving into the cloud makes sense, get off the fence and come to BrainShare. That’s where you’ll learn from industry leaders who have already made the leap.

BRAINSHARE SESSIONS:

Delivering the Cloud: How Vodacom Business Services Uses NetIQ Cloud Manager

October 12, 2011 / 10:30 AM / Room 250 D

How Verizon Is Delivering Cloud Services Using Access Manager

October 14, 2011 / 9:00 AM / Room 151 B

I’ll see you there.

–Richard

Well I’m here to tell you, the world is not quite as interconnected as some people would like to believe. Not yet anyway. A recent trip to Germany really opened my eyes when it comes to getting online and getting things done.

Now Germany’s no slouch when it comes to Internet access. However, I wasn’t about to spend my entire trip camped out in my hotel room or the McDonald’s down the street for Wi-Fi access. I had people to see and things to do.

Unfortunately, 3G roaming access was incredibly expensive. To give you a sense of the costs, at one time I purchased 50 MB of bandwidth for the equivalent of about $50. I logged into my Hotmail account and launched GroupWise. I’d been offline for most of a day, so both programs had to update a few things and download messages, etc. That’s all I did. Within 5 minutes, I’d already blown through 20 MB. Needless to say, I turned off my data roaming for the remainder of the trip. When I wasn’t within radio-shot of a Wi-Fi network, I was incommunicado—and comparatively unproductive because so many of the resources I need to access to are in the cloud.

Sure, the cloud is a hot topic. And the dream of pervasive connectivity is still alive. But if you can’t get to the cloud—or simply can’t afford to—I have to ask: What’s the point?

Companies considering moving everything under the sun to the cloud, give my story some thought. There are many great reasons for adopting the cloud computing model. Just remember, however, a lack of affordable connectivity still persists in parts of this modern world of ours.

Understandably, everyone wants Internet access to be like breathing air, which is still free as of this writing. My situation was more like drowning. There was no air to be had—at least, not at a price that I could live with.

‘Til next time.

–Richard

While my opening may be a bit tongue-in-cheek, it does illustrate how pervasive automation is in our daily lives. However, when it comes to managing private clouds, we could still use a bit more.

Implementing a private cloud provides the utmost in IT infrastructure flexibility. But without the right automation tools, managing a cloud environment can be a real headache—and eat up enormous personnel resources trying to keep everything running smoothly.

That’s why I wanted to share with you a cool NetIQ technology that I came across. NetIQ Aegis allows IT operations and security professionals to take the mundane, repetitive tasks that consume so much of their time—and automate them.

The hardest thing about Aegis is explaining what it does—because frankly, it will do just about anything you want (in terms of IT automation). The Aegis toolkit works across hardware and software combinations and features an intuitive graphical interface for creating automated processes. You just drag and drop activity icons onto the designer and connect them with workflow logic (if-then statements, for-next loops and so on).

The Aegis IT automation platform has been designed to orchestrate IT tasks using the tools you already have in your environment. All you need is a trigger to start a process running. Triggers can be manual, scheduled or event-driven. Here’s an example of each:

• Manual—You want to know if your retail stores are PCI compliant. You manually launch an Aegis process that incorporates NetIQ Secure Configuration Manager. The process automates auditing your application servers and network, and informs you of any configurations that violate applicable PCI policies. In this case, a system isn’t patched to the latest level. Your Aegis process sets an exemption for 30 days, and continually follows up with system administrator to get the system patched.
• Scheduled—One of your custom apps for order processing suffers from memory leak. Your developers don’t have the time to fix it, so you set up an Aegis process to reboot your servers on a weekly basis to clean up the memory. The process takes the first server out of load balancing, powers it down, powers it up, restarts services in the correct order, rejoins the server to load balancing and then repeats with the next server—all during the most advantageous time-slot, of course.
• Event-driven—The disk on one of your servers is almost full. As a result, one of your mission-critical applications can no longer write to the database. Your business is effectively coming to a standstill. You have NetIQ AppManager installed and it realizes what’s happening and triggers an Aegis process that you’ve created to automatically respond to known errors like this. The Aegis process automatically deletes unneeded temporary and log files, and provisions additional disk space on your SAN. Problem averted.

As you can see, using the Aegis toolkit, you can automate most anything in your IT environment, reducing labor costs and ensuring that the task is done correctly the first time.

I have a friend who purchased solar-powered automatic lawn mower. Now that’s some household automation really I could use.

–Richard

Where else can you get direct access to so many IT experts? Have a question about securing workloads? Ask the folks who make intelligent workload management work. BrainShare offers more than 20 hands-on labs which are staffed by product development experts, software engineers, and systems architects.

One of today’s hottest topics is automating application monitoring, reporting and management. You may have read my recent blogs about NetIQ® AppManager®. In Apps Behaving Badly? How Would You Even Know?, I touched on how AppManager complements Novell Operations Center, NetIQ’s business service management solution. I also discussed how AppManager can help you plan, manage and deploy your VoIP services.

AppManager is extremely versatile—it can help you resolve most anything that involves application monitoring and reporting. You might have an AppManager use case in mind, but you’re not quite certain how to go about implementing it. If so, there’s a can’t-miss BrainShare session called Ask the NetIQ AppManager Experts. This open forum will be hosted by a team of NetIQ AppManager product managers, architects and services experts. If they can’t answer your questions, the answer simply doesn’t exist.

Speaking of experts, NetIQ senior management will be at BrainShare, and they’re eager to hear what’s on your mind. In fact, Jay Gardner, president and general manager of the NetIQ Business Unit, will be at the conference. He’ll share NetIQ’s short-term and long-term roadmap with attendees. Equally important, Jay will be there to listen. That’s one of the great things about BrainShare: our customers leave with new ideas and knowledge, and everyone who works for the Attachmate companies comes away with a better understanding of the challenges customers face, including ideas about how we can best address them.

Feel free to pull me aside at BrainShare. If I can’t answer your questions, I’ll track down someone who can. I’m already registered. Are you?

–Richard

Amazon’s EC2 service outages have been well publicized over the past six months. And lightning struck again—literally, this time—in Dublin, Ireland on August 7^th, sparking a blaze that took down EU-WEST-1, Amazon’s only datacenter in Europe. Adding insult to inferno is the fact that, even as Amazon’s only European datacenter suddenly became darker than a Cormac McCarthy novel, many of Amazon’s European customers are left with very few options. That’s because data compliance mandates force them to keep their data in the region.

Later in the week, Amazon suffered yet another serious failure that left customers Foursquare, Reddit and Netflix without service (the second major outage for Amazon’s US-EAST datacenter this year so far).

During this latest outage outrage, some customers complained of “little or poor feedback from Amazon” regarding the cause or anticipated recovery timeframe. Hmm, it might be worth reviewing Two Lawyers Walked into a Presentation, my May 26^th blog that addressed negotiating service contracts with cloud providers.

I blogged about the first major service outage at Amazon’s US-East datacenter on April 28th, and offered suggestions to help protect companies that outsource workloads to the cloud. You might want to check out that blog (and review your cloud outsourcing strategy). My previous recommendations bear repeating:

1.         Don’t put all your eggs in same cloud-computing basket, or your eggs my end up getting fried.

2.         Manage your IT assets with the same rigor as you do in your datacenter regardless of where they are—even in the public cloud.

When it comes to managing and monitoring your private cloud, NetIQ offers very powerful tools. In fact, these tools also help you prepare for unforeseen outages, allowing you to perform contingency planning and define and automate best-practice responses to various failure scenarios—before a crisis occurs. If you haven’t already done so, I’d suggest checking out Novell Operations Center which provides a dashboard view of the interrelationships that ensure delivery of critical business services.

Well, I’ll leave you with one more weather factoid to consider: The most common type of lighting is known as intra-cloud lightning—lightning that occurs within a single cloud—or is that a single cloud provider?

–Richard

Well, looking back I’ve chosen a baker’s dozen of my favorite blogs to recap from the past year. Enjoy!

• Identity, It’s the Passport to Intelligent Workload Management. Put simply, identity is what puts the intelligence in intelligent workload management (IWM). It intelligently controls access to resources and applications—whether in the data center, on the road, or in the cloud.
• Who’s On First? Beyond the Who, What I Don’t Know of Identity Management. Sorry Rain Man. This one is the winner for September, although Managing Workloads without Herding Cats was a close second.
• Trade In Your Old Technologies for a New Appliance. Where’s the love for “green” technologies like SUSE appliances?
• Migrating to IWM Takes Time. Got Ten Minutes? When it comes to simplifying, automating and securing operations, Vodacom and their customer BasisOne get it. Check out this blog and learn why.
• Presenting WorkloadIQ Man: Tights Are Just Part of the Package. Faster than a speeding compliance officer. More powerful than an angry CFO. Able to switch hypervisors on the fly. It’s WorkloadIQ! Boy, did I take some flak over this one.
• WorkloadIQ Exclusive: My 10 Predictions for 2011. In this blog, I predicted the future—without the use of tea leaves, Tarot cards or the astrology app on my iPhone.
• Remember When IT Owned The IT Budget? Discover the three main challenges that surfaced from my cloud-computing focus group in Las Vegas .
• How Smart Is Too Smart for Intelligent Workload Management? It’s man versus machine. Whose side is IWM on?
• Too Much Information? Yep, and You’d Better Protect It. Sorry, the St. Paddy’s Day disclosure of what’s under the kilt of Novell SUSE Manager was simply too controversial for consideration.
• Performance Measurement Lost and Found. After you’ve learned about Novell Operations Center, you might want to check out a few of the April 1st predictions made by celebrities.
• Two Lawyers Walk Into A Presentation. You should definitely read this (unless you’re a cloud services provider).
• NetIQ, WorkloadIQ and Natural Selection. The Novell/NetIQ acquisition explained.
• Trust But Verify Applies to Cloud Hype, Too. We go down under to share valuable insight from my colleague Patrick Eijkenboom.

Wow, I can’t believe it’s already been a year. Stay tuned for the year ahead! I have insider’s knowledge of some of the remarkable things that will be going on at BrainShare this Fall. If you haven’t made plans to attend, what are you waiting for? Cheers for now.

–Richard

iPads always work because Apple controls both the hardware and software. Not so long ago, phone companies enjoyed the same level of control. You bought your handsets, your PBX interfaces and even your phone lines from the same vendor. You picked up the phone—and you had a dial tone. Even during a power outage, you had phone service.

Today, next-generation communications technologies like Voice over IP (VoIP) are cutting costs and adding flexibility. And while they can certainly give your business a competitive advantage, picking up the handset and getting a dial tone is no longer always a certainty. Say nothing of call quality. I was talking to an early VoIP adopter a while ago…or was that the Tin Man calling from a bathroom stall? Not completely sure.

In your typical VoIP implementation, you have multiple players involved. For example, you might purchase your physical handsets from one vendor, your software from another and your broadband connectivity from a regional phone company, cable operator or national carrier. You also have a growing number of devices and applications all contending for the same bandwidth, often at the same time. Making sure everything plays nice together is going to be up to you.

To deliver the reliability and quality that phone users expect, you need to continuously manage your VoIP services—just like any other application. And without the right tools, that can be a daunting task.

When I began working with NetIQ, I was interested to learn about the VoIP management capabilities of NetIQ AppManager. A great addition to the WorkloadIQ solution set, AppManager 8 features over 65 modules that provide out-of-the-box monitoring and reporting for distributed Windows-, UNIX- and Linux-based systems, applications and servers—as well as VoIP services.

As it turns out, AppManager really shines when it comes to capacity planning for VoIP deployments. It also an exceptional tool for effectively managing, securing, diagnosing and analyzing the performance and availability of VoIP applications—regardless of who’s VoIP software you’re using. It’s no wonder communications hardware OEMs like Avaya use AppManager to ensure quality of service levels for their devices.

You know, most companies don’t appreciate the challenges of managing VoIP applications until they actually implement them and then start having problems. But using something like AppManager is a good way to add VoIP to the list of life’s certainties.

Until next time.

–Richard

One organization that wanted to stay in compliance with the Spanish data privacy law is Grupo Godó. Founded in 1881, this print and digital media communications group based in Cataluña is best known for its very popular newspaper La Vanguardia—one of the best-selling daily papers in Spain. I know what you’re thinking. No, Grupo Godó isn’t owned by Rupert Murdoch (they actually believe in privacy protection).

Because of Grupo Godó’s diverse range of commercial activities in the media sector, the company comprises many different divisions using a variety of IT systems, user directories and authentication processes. Large numbers of freelancers who need periodic access to internal systems complicate the mix even more.

Managers at Grupo Godó wanted to improve the management of its more than 1,300 users across the company’s heterogeneous IT environment in order to comply with Spanish data protection legislation. After an exhaustive search, Grupo Godó selected Novell Identity Manager—picking it over a comparable IBM Tivoli* solution.

Implementing Novell Identity Manager, a WorkloadIQ product, the company combined its disparate identity stores to create a central repository of all user identities across every IT system. Users now benefit from a single sign-on system and have just one password which identifies them on all current Grupo Godó IT systems and applications. IT staff now spend considerably less time on user management tasks. And the company has fulfilled its legal requirements.

Speaking of which, while IT administrators were previously responsible for distributing new passwords to users via email or face-to-face, Novell Identity Manager’s self-service password reset portal grants users the autonomy to self-manage their personal information—a key requirement of Spain’s newest data privacy law

If you want to learn more about how Grupo Godó improved security, reduced user administration time and complied with the Spanish data privacy law, visit www.novell.com/success/grupo_godo.html.

Until next year’s Running of the Fools… er, I mean Bulls, may your feet never fail ya.

–Richard

By all appearances, iCloud will be a perfect example of the cloud’s promise and potential. It will provide online storage and backup for music, photos, documents, apps, contacts, calendar and other personal data, with an automated synchronization layer that keeps a user’s content seamlessly available and up-to-date across up to ten different devices. The base service with 5 GB of storage and an email account will be free to anyone who buys a new iPhone, iPad or Mac.

For those of us who own several iOS devices, all our content, data and personal information will be seamlessly available, no matter which of those devices we have in hand at the moment. If we lose a device, our content, applications and settings can be quickly restored on our replacement. Any song or app we purchase on one device will be available on any other, all linked under our Apple IDs. Pretty cool stuff. The company expects 150 million users will sign up in the first month.

But how will this look to the enterprise IT departments that have finally been opening up to iDevices? Several features are sure to cause alarm. Document synchronization, for one, will be enabled by default. Any company document downloaded to or created on a device running iCloud may be automatically uploaded to Apple’s cloud and synchronized to an unknown number of other devices. Device backup will copy a wide range of user and application data to the cloud. All of this information will be automatically moved out of the enterprise environment and secured by only an Apple user ID. Hello data leakage. Good-bye compliance

Apple does say that document synchronization can be disabled, but there’s no word yet regarding how, or whether we can expect any centralized tools for managing iCloud access and user behavior.

Granted, user access to cloud storage platforms is already a problem, but the combination of iCloud’s automated features, the sheer number of expected users and the near ubiquity of iOS devices will dwarf anything we’ve experienced before. And it’s coming our way this fall.

If only iCloud promised the range of intelligence we’ve been advocating within the concept of WorkloadIQ. What if every file, document and data record that made its way into iCloud had identity and security information associated with it? What if enterprise policies could constrain access, transfer and replication, no matter where that information came to rest? What if applications and storage platforms could communicate and collaborate to recognize ownership and enforce rights?

Then I think we could say that every iCloud really did have a silver lining.

–Richard