I know…

March 22nd, 2010 by Michael No comments »

…I have been extremely slack updating this blog.  But I am getting back on the bandwagon.  Did you know I have recently changed jobs to take on the exciting, but challenging, role of Unified Communications for HP South Pacific?

So that’s where I have been hiding, getting ramped up for OCS Wave 14 and how HP adds value from a Technology Services and HP Software & Hardware integration stand point.  2010 is going to be a smashing year for everyone involved in Unified Comms, and if you can’t tell I am really EXCITED about it!

Don’t worry, the blog will still stay agnostic, and I won’t just be rabbiting on about HP, I still am a MAC fanboy after all.  I am going to say this though, no iPad for me.  I have an iPhone, why would I want somthing that I need ANOTHER 3G plan for, and it doesn’t even fit in my pocket.  I will let the Tablet/Slate game play out before I dip my toe in the water.  Although I am toying with the idea of getting a HP 2740p http://bit.ly/cWuTZD for work and ucoms demonstrations.  I’d love to use my MacBook at work, but it just doesn’t quite sit right with customers.

Anyway, while I develop more content, be sure to follow me on twitter @mjokeefe13.

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Running Your Small Business from the Cloud

November 1st, 2009 by Michael No comments »

I have recently subscribed to Ross Dawson’s blog ‘Trends in the Living Networks‘ and I have become a big fan of his commentary on Social Networks & Media, and the how this sort of technology not only affects business, but also how technology can be used to provide innovation to obtain an audience and create value.

If you run a small business or are just looking to develop an online presence so that you can build brand and product awareness, I really recommend checking out his post here, where he discusses the sorts of technologies you should be looking to to undertake this.

As a user of a number of these apps, I see real value at looking at these online services.  Out of the Mashable recommended technologies, I currently use the Google Apps for Domains platform (my opendcx.com mail is hosted here), Linkedin, Facebook & Youtube frequently.

Out of the suggestions that Ross adds, I also use Evernote, to synchronise my thoughts and ideas between my PC in my contract role, my iPhone and Macs at home.  This is a simple and brilliant application that is based on Cloud based application storage, with a client front end.  I can capture photos, written text, and snap websites and links.  It even has an Microsoft Outlook plugin which allows me send an email to Evernote for archive or for editing.

As I am branching out and developing the ‘killer business plan’ to work for myself, the technologies on the top of my to use list are:-

  • Salesforce – SaaS provider of CRM software
  • Basecamp – Online Project Management tool

Both these products have API partners where you can link these online services and start to create real innovation by linking data and providing workflow between the applications.  Examples of this are Run My Process that runs on the Google AppEngine.  I think that this is a really exciting time to find services that are different to the standard offerings from all the vendors that small businesses currently use.  Tradition only lasts five minutes in IT and I think that will translate into business software in the not to distant future.

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NSW Government to consolidate Data Centres

October 28th, 2009 by Michael No comments »

The Australian IT is reporting here that the NSW state government has decided to consolidate their data centre footprint from 130 locations to two large purpose built data centres, in support of the state government’s IT systems.   I find this interesting in the fact that they are consolidating real estate, but there seems to be a lack of an announcement on how they will actually reduce the equipment or systems being installed into these two new facilities.  Using a public/private partnership, the NSW state governement have asked for companies to reply to Expression of Interest to develop these data centres, and provide long term access to the constructed space.

Fundamental to reducing the required floor space, power and air-conditioning requirements of a data centre, is capacity planning and understanding system usage.  In a previous lifetime, I worked on a commentary for the Australian Federal Government review of Data Centre usage, and how they should look to consolidate systems and develop smarter infrastructure services, before thinking about developing the bricks and mortar of a data centre.  There is obviously some merit, both financially and environmentally in consolidating data centres, but they must take it further to achieve long term benefits, to reduce the power consumption and remove the cost of operating the whole of government IT systems.  Shared infrastructure services (in this I mean, sharing the building blocks) and improvements in service management must occur.

The Victorian State government has a similar view of providing these services, through a shared services organisation called CenITex, and it will be interesting to see how this organisation succeeds through the next 3-5 years.

I think it’s great that technical innovators have had an opportunity to get into the halls of Parliament and explain their case for data centre consolidation.  I also see merit in using regional centres to supply the site and resources for delivery of these data centres.  It makes sense to locate them outside the CBD and use free-cooling.

Let’s hope they don’t make the same mistakes of the past, and make sure regional suppliers can provide enough power

and I also hope that it’s not just spin before the impending NSW election…

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Windows 7 Ultimate Upgrade – it’s not going to happen until I buy a new PC

October 23rd, 2009 by Michael No comments »

So I had a look today at the cost of upgrading my Microsoft Vista Ultimate PC at home to Windows 7 Ulitimate.  I am a majority Apple Mac user (iMac and MacBook), but I have a nice Quad core box for running Virtual Machines and doing odd multimedia tasks on.  

The cheapest I could find was from EYO at just under $AU340.


Microsoft, all I can say is that Windows 7 isn’t worth that much to me to upgrade my PC at home.  My Apple Snow Leopard upgrade cost me $39.95 delivered to my door.  I know that Apple have the whole lifecycle to make money from (Hardware, Software & Online Services), hence why they can discount their OS.  But, their OS works (apart from a few small glitches ‘we delete files automagically for you when you logon to Guest account’), and they aren’t superseeding, honestly, one of the worst technical PR disaster’s ever…Windows Vista.  

Actually, Vista with SP2 runs pretty well now, so Windows 7 is de-valued just that bit more as a home upgrade.



Microsoft need to look at the consumer pricing of Windows 7 very closely. I know I won’t be a consumer of the product until it becomes a bargain, or I get it for next to nicks with my next OEM licensing hardware compliant product.



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Infrastructure Service Innovation

October 13th, 2009 by Michael 1 comment »
How do you provide innovation to your business or customers?  Is installing the latest technologies what you deem to be innovation?  Is providing cost savings innovation?  Do you improve service levels by doing this?
In my humble opinion, it’s a combination of these and more.
Infrastructure practices, be it in a consulting capacity or within an internal IT organisation, provide the foundation for the successful operation of a business that relies on technology to supply goods or services to their clients.  They lay the foundation to provide a stable and secure environment that can then be used to provide applications and business workflow to users.  I have referred to this for a long time as the ‘Lego block’ model of IT.  Whether it be building a green fields infrastructure, or transforming an enterprise IT environment, each component must be built and then added by connecting the blocks and providing integration and integrity to the overall design.
This can be carried through from the data centre, network, storage, server, operating system, authentication, and finally to the application layer.  In fact, the applications layer can use this same mentality to componentised services, particularly with web services.
Why is it that most IT departments don’t work like this by default?  In most organisations, IT departments are stuck in vendor mode.  They select a preferred vendor for a technology, and they stick with it.  But the key word in the previous sentence is ‘TECHNOLOGY’.  I am not averse to using a single vendor to provide a solution; in fact there are some great synergies in doing that.  But my concern is that IT shops (in particular, infrastructure) will purchase the technology because of the features, bells and whistles, and not because of the ability to develop a service around the technology.
Let’s take virtualisation as an example.  Forgetting the mainframe days of the 80′s where CPU time was purchased by the minute, the hypervisor (thin layer of software that allows abstraction to host multiple systems on a single server) was first placed onto a desktop system and allowed the uber geeks out there to run two copies of Windows 2000 and get their paper MSCE (I know, very tongue in cheek).
Fast forward to 2009, and not only does server virtualisation software allow you host hundreds to many thousands of ‘virtual guests’ across minimal server hardware, it has the framework and management capabilities that we used to use 3-5 separate products to achieve the same result. The virtualisation vendors have developed, or acquired, the management tools and integrated them into the mainstream product offering to allow IT organisations to provide a service just by buying their software.  If we take this back to the building block mentality, the virtualisation vendors is the single block.  VMware, Citrix, Microsoft or Redhat, it’s a holistic service you are purchasing.
So what do I think constitutes the building blocks of a great infrastructure environment?  I’ll start from top to bottom, but read up to understand the layers:-
Infrastructure Services
  • Application Platforms (web services/databases/multi-tier) – Controversial I know, but applications teams shouldn’t own the platforms that they develop on.  When it comes to providing a service level, applications can be the most difficult to monitor and measure.  App Platforms might make up multiple services, but all the same, the developers should be requesting access to components such as a database, a web service and an authentication service and providing the workflow and access methods only and allowing the service bus or user to populate the data.  Bring this into the infrastructure team and put process and supportability wrappers around the platforms.
  • Authentication Services – If you can’t provide a secure service, you won’t be able to provide a stable service.  Have one core identity source, and use this as the source of truth.  Traditionally this would fall under the operating system building block, but yank it out into its own service.  Know how much this cost to run. Automate it and allow self service management.  Measure the service management practices and costs.  It helps to justify head count later when HR wants to know what it costs to provision and manage users.
  • System Management – Find a system management platform that can monitor your data centre and preceeding upward building blocks holistically.  Make sure it integrates with the platforms, networks and storage layers natively.  If it doesn’t, enquire into the third party integration tools.  If you have a small environment, don’t go out and buy the Mercedes Benz model.  Think Open Source and get a consultant to install it.  Some of the Open Source products are MORE than capable.
  • Operating Systems – Windows, Unix/Linux or Mac?  Does it really matter with enterprise software?  Unless you have a distinct requirement to have a mixed operating system environment, stick with the core knowledge of your support teams, and keep it simple.  Remember, that as a service, you want a locked down, secure known environment that you can build a rock solid service level with, and make changes easily.
  • Virtualisation/Platform – As I have already discussed, you are buying not just virtualisation, you are buying a management framework.  Choose the platform that you can identify with, and scale out as required.  Make sure you can measure and monitor it and even if you don’t intend on using chargeback to the business, understand the costs of all the options so that you can see that you are providing a good value service to the business.
  • Servers/Storage – I must say I see this as the largest commodity within IT infrastructure.  There are hundreds of solutions out there, and most provide the same functionality at different costs (I’m not excited by the latest developments in storage).  Think carefully before signing the multi-million dollar lease deal and beware of vendor lock-in.  You need to provide an open storage system to the layers above to provide a true storage service.  Power comes in 2 flavours, AC & DC, and you can covert both ways, why would you want to have three or four flavours of storage that you can’t move between?
  • Network – These are the plumbing pipes that allow your organisation to provide a stable IT environment.  I include storage networks in here.  Redundancy and bandwidth is key.  Capacity planning is essential when planning your network.  In the data centre, the port in the rack is the service.  The internet feed, the DMZ, the port on the users desk is the service.  Know what the monthly cost of providing this is.
  • Data Centre – You take the utilities and integrate them into delivery of providing power to your cooling solution (Free Cooling I hope), racks, batteries, etc…The data centre itself is made up of service offerings.  Each deliverable is measured, monitored so that you know the true cost of providing the service to your business.
  • Utilities – These are the services supplied to you by the Electricity, Gas, Telecommunications, and Water companies.  Each of these is provided with a cost and a service level.  Hopefully you have redundancy for each of these services and it’s built into your SLA?  Are these now sourced from a green power provider?
…of course all of these building blocks should be developed in tune with a service management and security framework.  As these service offerings mature and you move on from provisioning and supply then, only then, do you look at service improvements and incremental updates to the service offerings.  Integration points between each of these blocks are key to providing a mature service to your business.
If you can find the right architects to guide the business on how to better utilise what technology you have already invested in, the more cost effective and efficient your infrastructure organisation will be.
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Tech.Ed 2009: Wrap-up

September 10th, 2009 by Michael No comments »
So it’s been a few day’s since the end of Microsoft Tech.Ed and I can say that I attended some fantastic sessions, and on the flipside, went to 2 sessions in particular that were marketing based, and didn’t offer me anymore insight that I can’t gleam from the PDF overview documents on the microsoft.com portal.
Vittorio Bertocci, Senior Architect Evangelist presented the session for ‘ARC204 Claims-Based Identity: An Overview’, and I have to say it would have been close to the most enjoyable session of the three days.  Using Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS 2.0), WIF, CardSpace 2.0 , Vittorio, in his unique and humorous Italian presentation style and Tablet PC to draw his explanations of the technology and how it can be used in real world scenarios.  Those of you that know me, I prefer to use a whiteboard to communicate my ideas when I am developing solutions, particularly when I have a hare-brained idea for an infrastructure deployment, so it really re-enforced how this technology can be used.
As a Pre-Sales Solution Architect specialising in Microsoft technologies, I am constantly involved in company mergers and acquisitions, assisting clients to develop and deliver solutions that allow them to share corporate data, develop security models to allow application integration and what is always atop of their merger project plan, make disparate Microsoft Exchange environments work together.
Vittorio’s session opened my eyes to the possibility of allowing companies to bring customised application’s onboard quickly during mergers and with business partners, by using core AD security and federated security relationships.  Yes, this technology has been around for a long time, but finally expensive middleware identity management platforms are not required to provision this capability.  Key to this technology is the ability to develop applications that use ASP.NET or CardSpace, and leverage the existing corporate authentication mechanisms.  This is not to say that third party authentication cannot be used.  ADFS supports the WS-Federation, WS-Trust and the SAML 2.0 protocols so that authentication vendors such as Sun, Oracle and IBM can potentially interoperate.
I am currently working with a client with this technology in the forefront of my mind to help them close the gap to reduce project overhead and give them a strategic advantage on application delivery in the future.  I hope that they sign-off so that I can assist them to implement this exciting new feature of Windows Server 2008 R2.
UPDATE:  ADFS 2.0 has passed SAML 2.0 interoperability testing
The second session I wanted to highlight that I really enjoyed was the ‘UNC311 Telephony in OCS R2′.  Purely and simply, this was a ‘minimal marketing’ demonstration session that showed why OCS R2 is gaining a lot more respect in terms of enterprise telephony features, and why Microsoft are ultimately trying to develop a replacement for the company PBX.
The presenters had this session right on the money.  Kudos to John Smith and Brendan Carius from Microsoft.  It’s great to see that the local guys can present as well as the imports!
My one complaint; the session I attended about OCS the day before.   When Microsoft get partners to present, it might be an idea that they don’t just talk about how good they are, and actually give us some technical insight into real world deployments…I work for a Gold Certified Microsoft partner, and I don’t plan on using the competition to do OCS rollouts. If I had of known it was going to be a services offering session, I would have skipped and found something useful to attend!
Overall Tech.Ed 2009 gave me some insight into latest and greatest Microsoft have released in the last 6-12 months.  Did I find it value for money? I paid out of my own pocket…unfortunately not, but it was an enjoyable week where there were some definite highlights.  Was the free notebook a nice addition to the conference?  Certainly, it’s set the bar for all future conferences as far as I am concerned.  Facilities, surroundings and hospitality were fantastic.  I may not attend next year, but if I do, I hope Microsoft raise the technical bar, and leave the marketing to the exhibition floor.
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Microsoft Tech.Ed Australia 2009 (Gold Coast)

September 8th, 2009 by Michael No comments »
Well I am into the third session at Tech.Ed, and so far it’s been pretty decent.  I must say that apart from a few ‘geeky moments’ from the presenters *PowerShell* shreeks in the Keynote, and a very lame crowd photo graph, its been informative.  I am really keen to play with the Windows 7 touch interface.  Retail and distribution uses are endless and I think there could be some fantastic solutions to be developed around this. 
The second session of the day demonstrated the new features of Windows Server 2008 R2.  DirectAccess and BranchCache are are game changers for why you would want to continue to rollout Microsoft desktop and server technologies.  The level of innovation from Microsoft always amazes me.  There will be some people that say that Windows 7 is no different to Vista or XP, but if dig into the management and enterprise features, I think that Microsoft have done a great job moving forward.  One of the coolest things is the ability to push a VHD file on a disk, and be able to boot the OS from this file using the baremetal.  I need to explore this, and get some more information to explain it.
I am now sitting in the Exchange Architecture session, and I must say I am a little underwhelmed by Exchange 2010.  Sure, they have done a good job improving High Availability features, but I can’t see a reason to rush and get customers I work with to adopt the RC (which is upgradable to the RTM on release) today.  It’s simplified in one respect, particularly around the Hub Transport and CAS roles, but from a storage point of view, I think they have actually made it more difficult to plan from a storage capacity point of view, and also forgive me if I am wrong here, but I can’t see why a customer would want to support MORE Windows Server instances.  It seems to me that the Exchange platform footprint is expanding at the same speed as my waistline.
More to come through the week…
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Microsoft Tech.Ed 2009 – Gold Coast 2009

September 7th, 2009 by Michael No comments »
I am going to be blogging from the sessions at Microsoft Tech.Ed 2009 from the Tuesday night until the Friday.  I’ll try and give you an insight into what the sessions are like and what you’re missing out on.  This year is a sellout (talk about a recession…not).  I am hoping it will be great.
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My first post…

September 7th, 2009 by Michael No comments »
Hi all, after a long break from blogging, I thought I would give it a go again.  Well this is my first post after migrating most of my hosting services to Google Apps and back to blogger.com. I have been running on Webair’s hosting for a while using WordPress, but I have found that security seems to be lacking across the platform and to be honest, I just can’t be bothered trying to keep up with WordPress updates.

I thought I would use this blog to throw around some crazy ideas, maybe innovate a little bit, and give everyone a chance who ask’s me, ‘what do you do for a living?’, to get some insight into what drives me to work in IT.  Amongst friends and family, I am known as a Geek.  I don’t consider myself a geek, just knowledgable about technology.  I don’t play WoW, or wear t-shirts printed in binary code or code programs for that matter.

So what’s going to be the topics I’ll cover on this blog.  It won’t be your run of the mill Infrastructure diatribe, ‘wow look at the new Vendor box that runs a a great SPEC number and uses half the power’.  I will discuss the IT market in general, the development of services in relation to the industry and how innovation, particularly around cloud and hosted services will affect everyone in IT.  I truly believe that if you cannot innovate and change an enterprise IT market in the next 2 years, you will be left behind. Core to this, is how data centres are used, abstraction of infrastructure hardware from software, and treating virtualisation as a commodity.

If you’re already a bit lost, bare with me, it won’t be so heavy all the time!
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