Now that you understand what SaaS is and how SaaS can benefit your IT career, I’m here to introduce you to IaaS.  This is pronounce as “I-AS”

While SaaS, software as a service can help you provide speedy solution on a lot of the traditional IT tasks such as data backup solution, phone services, and email services.  IaaS stands for Infrastructure as a Service.  What this means is that your entire Infrastructure, anything and everything from Firewall, your servers, the network that all the data traverse to and from and down to your applications can all be provided by one of these IaaS provider.  I’m sure many of you have heard of Amazon EC2 or AWS.  These are IaaS services provided by Amazon.  Basically, any company can sign up for their IaaS service, and in a very short time, setup their own servers along with all the necessary network components such as firewall, network and data connectivity all setup and ready to go.  And the beauty of it all is that you only pay for what you use.  And services can start as low as $40 a month.

You might think that these IaaS providers are more for the big guys with big Cloud applications.  Well, actually that’s not true at all.  Think about it.  For $40 a month for a server that has a 99.95 SLA (standard SLA, many IaaS provides even better SLA such as 99.999 or even 100 SLA but be sure to read their fine prints), that is a very inexpensive.  If you were to go out and buy any decent server with 2 socket quad core and some reasonable amount of space, it could easily cost you $4000 a server.  So for $40 a month, effectively you can host a server in the cloud for the same price for 100 months, that’s approximately 8 years.  And during those 8 years, not only do you have a server, but a server that you does not require maintenance.  Yup, that’s right, these IaaS providers will take care of all maintenance in the background for you from servers to network equipment so that you environment is always up.

Take a moment and think about if IaaS can help you with your existing Infrastructure.  Why put a server in your office location?  Whenever you have a piece of equipment sitting in the office, you’ll have to worry about power, safety and bandwidth.  What if you lose power in the office?  Then all your employees are down, might as well send everybody home for the day.  What if your ISP messed up your data circuit, now you have no email.  Worst yet, what if somebody come into your building and stole your server?  Now you are in big trouble.  Forget about data recovery, you don’t even have a server to recover to!  Don’t think this kind of stuff doesn’t happen.  I’ve seen it happened.  With IaaS, you can deploy your critical infrastructure in the Cloud.  All you need is some careful planning, your domain controller, mail server, filer can all be in the Cloud.  All you need is to setup a Site-to-Site connection back to your office(s).  You are up and running.  If your office building power goes out, send eveybody home, but not to do nothing, everyone should be able to work from home.  IaaS is great, if your company has many remote offices.  Connecting remote offices to Cloud Infrastructure is a piece of cake.  Or cookie I should say, each site’s network can simply be a cookie cutter setup and all have access to the same infrastructure as your head quarter.  Of course, how you want to control access is entire different topic, but distributing access would be drastically simplified.

Now of course, these IaaS providers are targeting big players with big cloud applications as well.  For example, NefFlix, is a good example of a big guy with a big cloud application in the cloud.  NetFlix uses Amazon for their online subscription based media distribution product.  NetFlix is a big enough company.  If they think that it is a good idea and more cost effective to host their own servers and infrastructure, I’m sure they would do it.  But if NetFlix, such a big company would choose to use a IaaS provider, instead of building their own private cloud, these IaaS providers are certainly adding value to the process.

By now, you might be a bit worried.  If SaaS can help with all the traditional IT services such as email, phone, and backups, and now there is Iaas to help with the infrastructure where no one need to take care and maintain all the servers, and network equipment, then what else is left for IT to do?  Aren’t we just working ourselves out of a job?

Well, my friends don’t you worry.  Be open minded, don’t worry about these low level tasks and start worry about the higher level tasks.  There really isn’t much pride in being the expert in knowing how to swap out a couple of bad hard drives or setting up some basic firewall and network rules.  These are yesterday’s problem.  Now, we have to step up a level and think about how to bring resources and services to our end users and clients quicker than ever before.  These IaaS providers give you the Infrastructure, but someone still have to manage the Infrastructure, how this infrastructure is supposed to function and all the applications running within it.  To state it simply, it is like somebody give you a super powerful computer, but how you run it and what applications to run on it is complete up to you.  And the content and results of what you run on this super computer is likely what will make or break your computer, not so much the computer itself.  But it is nice to have a computer that you know you’ll never have to maintain or worry about going down.  So what I am saying is, don’t worry about the infrastructure, don’t worry about the basic server and network.  But worry very much about your products, your services, your core worth and how you are going to delivery them and delivery them quickly.  Quicker and more secure than anyone else on the market.  That’s going to be why you are worth what you are worth.

I’ve mentioned Amazon, but don’t think Amazon is the only IaaS provider out there.  I’m by no mean endorsing anyone IaaS provider.  There are many many IaaS providers out there.  Again I’m not endorsing anyone, but just to give you an idea, here are a few: Amazon, SoftLayer, RackSpace, Terremark, Hosting.com…etc.  If you do consider moving forward with a IaaS provider, you want to make sure you understand the fee structure.  They only charge you for what you use, but they will charge for everything that you use.  They will certainly charge your for the use of their servers, every CPU upgrade or memory upgrade there will be additional fee.  Bandwidth will likely be charge as well and they are frequently calculated by as separate upload and download fees.  Anyhow, there are alot of different things that they can and will charge you.  It is best that you make sure you understand before you sign the contract.

Lastly, please understand I’m not saying that IaaS is the best invention since sliced bread and that it would work for every single company.  Every company’s product is unique and requirement for infrastructure will be different based on many different factors.  There are plenty of good reasons to still do private cloud, there is really no one size fit all solution.  If after you do some serious homework and calculation, you find that it would be financially or administratively beneficial to do your own private cloud, then that’s what you should do.  Or if public cloud is the way to do, then you should embrace it.  and by the way, there are plenty of companies out there who are doing hybrid cloud, partly private cloud and partly public cloud.  You should always go with whatever that makes the most sense to you and your company.  I’m simply here to encourage you to explore the new world of IT and not be afraid to try them out.

Say for example, you are a talented IT person working at this really exciting startup company with about 200+ employees.  Everyone is fairly technical and have enjoyed using a Linux Sendmail server for all their email needs.  But the company is really starting to get big enough where it would benefit from some 21st century email technology such as group calendar, email syncing to their mobile devices and better organized email distribution lists.  You say, great, no problem, let me build a Microsoft Exchange server for the company.  It will satisfy all the email related requirements.  It will do group calendar, sync email to everyone’s phone and organize company events and more.  And you can build it with multi-site redundancy so the whole thing will never go down, it will cost less then $40k with hardware and software all included, and from planning to deployment in under 2 months time.  Wow, that’s pretty great.  The fact that you have the knowledge and know how to build something like that is great.  But what if I tell you I can have the whole thing done in just one day.  Actually to be more precise, I can probably have the whole thing done by lunch time and cost less.  You might be scratching your head and then say “no freaking way, there is no way one person can do all that in one morning”.  Well, technically you are right, I can’t do it, but who says I have to.

This is where SaaS comes in.  SaaS stands for Software as a Service.  To those who are not familiar with it, you really should get familiar with it.  Software as a Service targets exactly the scenario I mention above.  Problems such as corporate email, phone services, and even corporate file shares are yesterday’s problems.  There are plenty of SaaS companies out there who have mastered these technologies so you and I can focus our time on bigger problems.   To finish up on the example used earlier, there are plenty of Hosted Exchange Provider out there.  These are the company who will manage your corporate email with as little as $4 per mailbox per month.  For a company with 200 employees, the cost is merely $800 a month.  I know you might cry foul at this point and say “this is only a monthly cost, it will add up and what about security?”  Great questions, with approximate $800 a month, a yearly cost would be $9,600 which is still easily 4 times below the $40k estimate which means that this SaaS solution will be well below cost for 4 years compare to your in house solution.   Moreover, don’t forget to calculate your salary.  You are a talented IT person who’s salary is well above minimum wage. Let’s just say for ease of calculation, you make $100k per year.  Now your Exchange solution has a yearly operational cost of $100k plus the original $40k one time setup fee.  Wait, that’s not really a one time $40k setup fee is it?!  There is license renewal fee for the Exchange servers, otherwise you’ll be stuck with current version and can never upgrade.  Oh, and what about the server hardware, there is support cost for that too right.  We simply can’t let our Exchange server hardware go without warranty.  Shoot, what about hiring a backup for you.  You will get sick or go on vacation some day, now that company has to hiring another person just to make sure in your absence somebody can take care of the Exchange server.  Speaking of backup, we have to backup the data on Exchange too right.  Now we have to invest in the backup strategy just to make sure our in house Exchange server is well cared for.  With all these little details in mind, that $4 per mailbox per month should start to sound really good to you now.

Now $4 a mailbox certainly sounds like a deal, but what about security.  We can’t let outside vendor manage our sensitive information such as email? or can we.  Well, you will be relief to know many of these companies take security very very seriously.  Most of these companies comply with SSAE-16 (SAS-70 in the older days), and some of them have additional certification such as PCI, FISMA…etc.  All these certifications will save you a ton of time if the company you work for is a public company or plan on going public.  3rd party auditors generally accepts certifications from your service provider with little to no questions asked.  So whatever SaaS services you are using, so long as they are certified, you are good in those areas.  Please don’t mistaken me as saying all SaaS are safe and secure.  You will still need to do your homework and make sure whoever SaaS you choose is the right fit.  But if you do your due diligent, you’ll find that often time these SaaS providers take their security seriously, probably even more than you would.

Still not convenced?  Take a look at the some of the wildly successful stories such as SalesForce, Google App, and iCloud.  I’m not here to endorse any companies nor any products, but can you imagine how long it would take for any company to deploy an in house solution that can compare to what SalesForce is offering.  It would take a tremendous effort, financial resource and time to deploy a similar product in house and the biggest question is WHY?  This is not even your company core product.  SaaS providers have mastered their trade.  They have looked at every corner of their business and squeezed out every inefficiency so that they can complete with other SaaS providers that are in their space.  They have already invested tremendous effort, financial resources and time to delivery their refined products to you, so that you don’t have to reinvent the wheel.  Take advantage of these SaaS offerings.  Save the man hours, save the money to spend on projects that really matters to your company success.

Lastly, please understand that I’m not here to persuade you to buy any products or services from any SaaS providers nor am I saying that SaaS is a one size fit all solution.  A solution that works for one company could be a disaster for another.  Picking the right technology to solve a given problem requires diligent study.  However, I simply want to persuade you that the old days of IT where the IT team is spending most of their time managing core functions such as email, file shares and phone services are over.  There are ways that we can do IT faster and cheaper now.  Time is critical to every company who wants to stay current and competitive.  Imagine, if the company you work for is able to bring their products consistently to market two months ahead of competitors because of your efficiency in managing IT resources.  That would be great.  I’m sure a promotion would be on its way.  Now, imagine if you are in those companies that are always two months behind because you insisted to do these traditional core functions in house.  Worst, imagine you are working diligently, doing everything you know how and meticulously go over every detail in bringing up a state-of-the-art redundant Exchange cluster environment, only to have a college kid come in and have a brief conversation with your boss simply asking “why”

-David H.

So, to Apple’s credit, they have just released a beautiful tablet.  It certainly did not disappoint any previous iPad2 owners.  Well since it looks exactly the same as the previous version, I guess you can’t really be disappointed, right?  To be exact, the New iPad is actually slightly heavier and thicker.  It is .11 lbs heavier and .03 inches thicker, not by much at all.  If the old iPad2 and the New iPad were lined up side-by-side right next to each other, most people would not be able to tell them apart.  So from the form factor’s perspective, it is the same as the previous generation.  Hey, for those who are upgrading from iPad2, you can save a few dollars from buying a new cover.  The old one will work just fine.  But if you are hoping for a new exciting look, well, you won’t get it this time.

BUT, Apple is known to be innovative.  They come up with products that are always on the cutting edge.  So what’s new with the New iPad?  By the way, the name of this new iPad is simply “The New iPad”.  Many are calling it the iPad3, but its official name is really just The New iPad.  When I heard that, I thought it was a little odd.  I understand why they would want to get away from using just a number like iPad2 or iPad3, but I thought they might want to call it something like the iPad Sabertooth to match with their OS X naming convention, but they are simply calling it the New iPad.  That just leaves one to wonder what they are going to call the next iPad, The New New iPad?

Anyhow, I think most of you probably know by now that the two coolest cutting edge technologies in the New iPad are its new A5X chip, which is supposed to be way faster then the previous A5 and of course the new Retina Screen capable of doing a 2048 x 1536 display resolution.  Can you imagine watching a HD movie on your New iPad with stunning 2048  x 1536 resolution?  Well, actually no.  If I want to watch a really good HD movie, I would watch it on a big flat screen TV or even on my laptop because why would you want to watch a great movie on a small 10″ iPad screen?!  Plus the sound on an iPad is just not gonna be good enough.  I understand that the iPad is small and easy to travel with.  So it would work in the case that you are traveling, and you only have an iPad with you and you happen to want to watch a movie.  Wouldn’t it be great to watch it on a 2048 x 1536 Retina screen?  Well, yes, but no.  If you happen to be traveling and your hotel room doesn’t already have a big screen TV, which would be a bit odd, in that case, I guess watching a movie or two on the New iPad wouldn’t be a bad idea.  However can you imagine how long it would take to download a full length HD movie that could fully utilize the 2048 x 1536 resolution?  Ah…. it would take way too long.  And in reality, HD movies utilize just 1024 x 768 resolution.  So having a screen that can display resolution at 2048 x 1536 is great, but what’s the use?  I have had countless conversations with colleagues and friends about the applications they use on their iPads.  Most of us working folks really use the iPad for just a few things.  We use our iPad for emails, scheduling/calendaring, reading ebooks, and occasionally play some lightweight games.  But that’s it.  None of these applications require high-end graphics.  So to me, the biggest advantage of having this Retina screen with 2048 x 1536 resolution is the bragging right.

Well, what about the new A5X chip in the New iPad?  That makes every application run way faster than the previous iPad2 right?  Well, actually not really.  I know that might be a surprise to many out there.  The A5X chip is certainly a much faster chip than the previous A5.  But the problem is with the high resolution Retina screen.  Because the Retina screen has such a high resolution, the A5X chip ends up spending a lot of CPU resources rendering graphics for the display instead of making applications run faster.  So for a simple task of just reading an email, instead of sending out graphic information for just 1024 x 768 resolution, a lot more CPU resources are spent calculating graphic information for a 2048 x 1536 screen.  So in short, the New iPad will likely outperform the old iPad2, but due to its Retina Screen, it won’t be by much.  If you care to read some bench mark testing between the New iPad and the old iPad2, just do a quick search on Google.  There are a ton of “unbiased” reviews out there that will give you the hard numbers.  To me the performance gain on the New iPad over its predecessor iPad2 is disappointing.

In my opinion, the New iPad release has a lot of hype and not a lot of real feature improvements.  The Retina screen is great, but it doesn’t have any real usability or real world applications.  By the way, not sure if you know this, but the Retina screen is actually not made by Apple.  The Retina screen is made by Samsung.  So anyone with money can buy the screen and put it on their tablets.  You might wonder why other tablet makers don’t put this new Retina screen on their tablet, especially Samsung – since they make the screen, why don’t they put it on their Galaxy tablets?  Well, the Retina screen costs quite a bit more money to make.  Any tablet maker that chooses to implement a Retina screen will have to consider cutting back on other features in order to stay competitive in their pricing.  The New iPad has the new Retina screen, but is still limited to the 16GB, 32GB and 64GB models.  In its 3rd generation tablet, it still does not have a simple SD or microSD card slot.  An SD/MicroSD card slot is almost a standard feature on all Android tablets these days.  But with Apple, if you want to store more media files, you will have to pay up and buy their next model up.  With no new exciting look, no lighter, thinner form factor, no performance gain, no new peripherals/accessories, it is difficult to call it revolutionary, which is what Apple usually calls its new product releases; this one is “Resolutionary” mainly due to the Retina display.  Nonetheless, this is more like a minor improvement than a major upgrade, maybe that’s why Apple is simply calling it a New iPad cause it is not worthy to be called the iPad3.

While Apple enjoys their new found $600 a share status, other tablet makers are working hard to come up with real innovative products.  Asus for one has come up with a great tablet.  I’ve come to really enjoy their new Asus Transformer Prime tablet.

Microsoft Windows 2008 Server Core is unlike any of the previous server editions. This edition is super lightweight. You can run it with a 1GHz processor and just 512MB of RAM. Now, this is the minimum requirement, and you can always give it a little more, however it really doesn’t need a whole lot more. I’ve been running two core servers in my environment, and each have only 1GB of RAM, and a single 2.2GHz processor. Both of my core servers have been running happily.

Being lightweight is not exactly what Microsoft is known for. To make this edition lightweight, many usual features have been removed. In this edition, there is no Start button, no All Programs, no Administrative Tools. All of these usual GUI have been removed. The only thing available by default is a command prompt window that allows you to enter text commands. But again, the lack of these features means faster, lighter operating systems, and even more importantly, a more secure operating system. With fewer features, there are less things to patch.

Well, all good things on this earth have some shortcomings, too. This edition, being the first of its kind, can only do the functions listed below, however the list is actually not too short. Many critical functions can be performed by the Core edition.

Active Directory Directory Service

Active Directory Lightweight Directory Service

DHCP Server

DNS Server

File Services

Hyper-V

Print Services

Streaming Media Services

Web Server (IIS)

Active Directory Certificate Services

To summarize, the Windows 2008 Server Core is lightweight, more secure than other Windows versions and able to perform most of Windows 2008 core applications. We’ll go into details later about some of the core applications, but today we will quickly look at its installation.

The installation of the core server is super simple. I’m including some basic instructions and screenshots below just to be thorough, but I think most of you will not be needing them. The only two steps you might need would be after the whole installation is done. You need to run two commands, one to set the IP address on the server, and one to allow remote desktop access so you don’t have to sit at the console all the time. Now these are normally done by using Windows basic GUI, but since the Core edition does not have any of these usual GUIs, even these basic settings have to be done in command lines.

So, if you want to move ahead and do the installation yourself here are the commands

Netsh interface ip set address “Local Area Connection” static 192.168.0.10 255.255.255.0 192.168.0.1

This command sets the IP address for your server. Beware that “Local Area Connection” generally refers to the first default network card. If you have multiple network cards, you would have options such as “Local Area Connection”, “Local Area Connection 2″, “Local Area Connection 3″….etc. So make sure you are specifying the right IP for the right network card. Oh, and you need those double quotes. Following the “Local Area Connection” is the IP address of the server, the subnet mask, and lastly the gateway address.

The second command that you probably want to run would be to activate Remote Desktop.

cscript c:\windows\system32\scregedit.wsf /ar 0

This command will enable the server to start accepting remote desktop connections. If you ever want to disable this feature in the future, simply run the same command again, but replace the 0 (zero, yes that’s a zero) at the end of the command with 1 (one). But in case I wasn’t clear before, the core edition does not come with the usual GUIs, and even when you remote in from a different system, all you will see is the same command shell window; you will not see additional GUIs.

For those who wants to see the whole installation from beginning to end, please read on.

You might think that “all our network is protected by our firewall and no RDP is open directly to the outside world, so we are fine”, well think again.  Smart hackers would likely not target your servers directly, but target your end-user systems.  A virus/trojan could affect your end-user community by some java code off of some webpages and once it is on your end-users’ systems it can then activate a second pay-load which scans for RDP vulnerability within your network.

To get more details on MS12-020, go to: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/security/bulletin/ms12-020

Another quick word of advice on applying patches.  Always understand what you are patching, especially if you are working in the production environment.  Many patches like this one will require a system restart in order for it to take effect.  However you just can’t restart production machines in the middle of the day.  It is best to test them in a staging environment, then schedule a maintenance window and apply the patches that you really need.

Years ago, I remember there was a critical patch that came out for Microsoft SQL server.  Everyone was in a panic trying to get that patch onto their SQL server as quickly as possible.  That vulnerability was scary enough where if un-patched, it would allow hackers to completely take over the MsSQL server remotely.  But if you read further into the details, this only applied to SQL servers that had a blank password for their SA account.  Who in the world would leave their SQL SA account with no password?!  No sys admin in their right mind would leave their SQL SA account with a blank password!  Well, unfortunately a ton of people did and that’s why that patch was such as big deal.  But for you, if you have done the right thing and never left the SA password without a password, you had nothing to worry about.  It was probably still a good patch to install since that patch would enforce a password on the SA account.  But while the world panicked, you could do it at your leisure.

Back to MS12-020 though, this is an important patch for most systems running Windows operating system and specifically using the RDP protocol.  If you don’t use RDP anywhere, then you are safe.  But you probably want to install it anyway, just in case if you turn this feature on in the future.  However as mentioned before, if you don’t use RDP in your environment, then you can do it at your leisure while the rest of the world panics.  This patch applies to all versions of WindowsXP, Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 2003 Server, and Windows 2008 Servers.  So basically this applies to all recent Windows Operating systems.  I would highly recommend applying this patch sooner rather than later.

-David H.

First, management generally don’t like employees who can’t work with others.  Yes, do understand that if he/she has exceptional technical skills, management would have to keep them for those highly technical tasks that only they can do.  But the question would be for how long?  Depending on how difficult it is to work with this person, sooner or later, management will always come up with idea to “cross train” the rest of the team to ensure that more than one person can perform these difficult tasks.  Now, I’m not saying that management will eventually fire this highly technical but difficult to work with person.  Well, unless he or she is really difficult to work with, then yes, they will ultimately fire them.   Most of the time management would likely keep them around, however, the credit would likely go to someone else, to a person who can learn to be technical and yet is easy to work with.  And if this person is pleasant to work with, guess who is gonna get the next promotion?

Second, great tasks are rarely accomplished alone.  Promotions and salary aside, for those who actually like their jobs working in the IT field and want to accomplish something great, well, you can’t do it alone.  If all the projects that you’ve done so far in your IT career were all done by yourself without any help from other people, perhaps you can dream bigger.  Have you ever heard of a datacenter being built by one man, or a cloud service offering all managed by one very talented IT sys admin?  Of course not.  To accomplish something great, you need a good team to get it done.

Last but not least, for someone who has no people skills, he/she is for sure gonna miss out. Miss out on what?  Well, a whole lot – anything from technical information to information on how well or poorly the company is doing.  If someone is not easy to work with, people around him are generally not going to volunteer information to “help” him out.  That’s just human nature.  If someone in the team has just learned some latest and greatest, really cool way to manage the data center infrastructure, they for sure are not going to voluntarily share this information with the person who has no people skills.  Unless the management were to mandate some kind of cross training, but even then, the information shared will likely be the bare minimum.  Besides technical information, people know a lot about the state of the company.  If you talk to just one person, you might not know a whole lot, but if you talk with many people in the company, you can often put together how well or poorly the company is doing.  For example, if you talk with a person in Sales, it is quite easy to find out how many deals the company has done this quarter.  Or if you chat with the guy in Manufacturing, you’ll know how many products your company has shipped. And if you chat enough and with the right people, you’ll find out a whole lot about the company and gain a few good friends.  With these conversations, you might also find out what are some of the pain points people have regarding IT.  If you are proactive about it, your end-user community will thank you and again give you a much better chance at your next promotion.

Allow me to give you a couple of examples to help  some of these concepts sink in.  And trust me, once I point them out, I’m sure you’ll find some of these same folks working at your companies as well.

Several years ago, there was a highly technical sys admin that I had the displeasure of working with.  This guy was not only difficult to work with, his attitude was just downright unacceptable.  He talked to everyone as if they were below him and no one could measure up to his technical expertise.  He thought he was smart to withhold critical technical information and refused to cross train anyone on the team in order to protect his own job security.  I would have never hired this guy, but unfortunately for me, he was part of the team that I had inherited.  Well, it took me and our management team a few months to analyze and work out the situation.  We understood that this individual was highly technical and quite valuable to the company, but ultimately due to his lack of respect for others and inability or unwillingness to work with others, we had to let him go.  We actually had to hire two senior sys admins to replace this one guy, and had to do a whole lot of reverse engineering to figure out the technical information that he had hid from us.  But we did it.  We fired the guy.  And you know how the rest of the team reacted?  The entire team welcomed it.  One guy even said to me, “it’s about time.”  I know this example is a bit extreme, but it is a true story.  What’s the moral of the story?  Well, there are several.  One, don’t count on your technical skills alone because there are always other technical folks out there who are just as good as you.  Two, treat others with respect.  Yes, work on your people skills and it will give you a better chance at your next promotion.

I hope you see how important people skills are to having a successful IT career.  There are different aspects to people skills as well.  How do you manage relationships with people who report to you, people who are your peers and the people you report to.  Come back next time and I’ll share more with you.

-David H.