Technically Speaking

Community is something that for a while, at least to me, seemed a bit lost.  Sure there are facebook pages and twibes and twitter lists full of people ready to discuss something or get involved in some cause, but where is the real community?

I participate in both facebook and twitter, although not as much as I could I suppose, and those communities are great for reaching out to others or planning events… for those of you who are on twitter, I am a regular at the #bbhill tweetups held on alternating Fridays.

Wherever you find them, communities are essential.  Knowing where to go to find help with any number of issues, in this case more technical than not, but any issues really at all can be quite a relief.  Being busy with projects and family and keeping up with the Kardashians (so to speak) has left me little time to consider community.  For quite a while I spent a good deal of my time at Experts-Exchange, a site built to provide points for answers to questions.  The site has evolved a great deal since I first signed on (January of 2003 with a paid account).  In the years I have been a member, I paid for my account, earned my account, and now have been awarded my account access.  Just looking at the transgression from paying 10$/month to where I am today shows something about community involvement.

I like to help people with technical issues.  Sure I may not know do not know all the answers to all the questions, but there are a good amount of people in that community who know where to look for certain things.  It has been quite a fulfilling experience and I am looking forward to getting back into the swing of things.  I had stepped away for a while as some of the procedures on the site for new features were a bit confusing, but when I get into it for its core, the community, and jump into help others… it is a great place to be.

There are other communities I am involved in (and hope to increase involvement in) over at TechNet and TechRepublic, both built on getting help for those members who ask questions, but the community that really sort of sucked me in was Experts-Exchange.  I will hopefully grow in all three of these communities as well as those on twitter and facebook as effort to help those around you grow (either physically or at the other end of the data connection) will allow you to grow.

My participation in these types of activities has also helped, to some degree at least, to keep my skills sharp.  Sure helping others is a good boost for me and might cause me to remember that I once fixed problem x for someone, but it isn’t going to get me through the certification learning I need to do.  There is still room for other types of growth and learning, but community participation can boost your happiness in what you are working on or act as a type of skills test.  Not to mention, the feeling that I get from helping someone, even if it is just to explain a bit about hoe licensing works (I understand it, but am not sure I am an expert there… I think there could be a masters degree offered in licensing) is very rewarding.

Who knows, you might just help someone so much that they seek you out for other projects or even a new career. 

Being the sole IT person for an organization, I have often wondered where the value in technical conferences lies.  Is it in the interaction with other IT professionals or the opportunity to meet those who work in similar (and dissimilar) environments or perhaps it falls in the training and support gained from attending.

I have been to a few tech conferences in the years since I took this position and no year was more filled with them than 2009.  I started slow, attending Microsoft Convergence for a few years to get the latest on the Dynamics line of products (some of which we use) and to see what new BI might help my organization be better.

Convergence was great, I met a great many people who helped me understand more about the application I was supporting and determine that a change in Microsoft Partners was a good move for us.  Since the partner change, life has been much easier, at least in the "Who ya gonna call?” sense.

In 2009 I attended a customer interaction session at Microsoft for the System Center Online Desktop Manager product (still in beta) and because of some pure geek miracle the MVP Summit, which puts awarded MVPs on the Redmond campus for a week early in the year to learn about what’s here, what’s coming, and how/why Microsoft does x and y with those products the way they do.

Summit was awesome and there were tons of great people to meet and new opportunities I could never have imagined.  Being an MVP has taught me this fundamental principal:  use your technical skills to help those around you and be willing to share the information you have.  Good things come to helpful and willing people.

Following the MVP Summit last year I attended Microsoft Tech Ed North America for the first time.  I had previously wanted to attend Tech Ed, but the cost was prohibitive for me and my work schedule made it difficult as well.  Participating in several panels at the event was a great experience, although I was a bit nervous when getting started.

In the future, perhaps not in 2010, I will be returning to Tech Ed, the benefits and learning opportunities are amazing.

Technical conferences are a rather big expense, especially for individuals, but the possibilities for learning and networking with others are very high.  I think the bottom line is to look at the things you are interested in or use in your job and determine which conferences will advance your knowledge of the topic to better your job skills and work to attend these shows.  With the skills you acquire at the conference may well be worth the price of admission.

So this week the G Drive became available from Google, allowing users of Google Docs to store up to 1Gb worth of data in the Google cloud.  The files can be any variety of files and are not limited to the Google Docs suite of applications.  This is a good thing because it allows users or even organizations to store files in the cloud realatively easily.

Microsoft allows up to 25Gb of storage in its Sky Drive cloud application which to me seems the better deal.  Sure there are reasons to use both, depending on how the service is used and what applications it will be used with.  If you are a Docs user, the Google solution makes sense as long as you can keep within the 1Gb limit.

So where does this stack up for organizations?

I have accounts with both Google and Microsoft and have looked at both services briefly, each one coming in quite handy on days when for whatever reason, I forget my flash drive(s) at home.  But I am a bit curious as to the concept of organizational cloud storage and how this might start to change the game for companies.

Sure many companies still use on premise storage, either on a SAN or NAS with disk or tape backup to keep things recoverable, but would it make sense for an organization to push backups and even file storage into the cloud?  In coming years I think the answer will be a very loud yes.  Google and Microsoft can get server and disk space very cheaply per Gigabyte because they buy so much disk space all at once.  My organization can get the disk space to meet its needs in an on premise solution fairly cheap because we aren’t talking tons of storage, but for a larger organization, the need for storage space is likely to become much greater than today.  Allowing someone else to purchase, maintain, and handle the disks in your storage solutions might make the most sense.  This requires companies to have less IT staff and less server room overhead.

Pushing the stores to the cloud could cut into the overall energy utilization of a company quite quickly given the reduction in back office servers and tape drives that must be run to ensure business continuance.

What about today?

I am not sure the cloud is ready to take over entirely for on premise storage and backup but it is growing a bit more everyday.  In the future I have a feeling that storage other than an external hard disk for ITunes or other entertainment and a few files will be done in the cloud.  Maybe the disks in workstations will be large enough to foot the bill and a synchronization of the data to the organizations slice of the cloud will ensure backup all the way to the desktop.  Sure the bandwidth to the Internet would need to increase, but with fiber coming along and broadband being a mainstay already, this seems like the natural progression of things to me.

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Lately the goofed up tape backups happening at my office have been quite the challenge.  Working with drive support and testing various theories about the order of the backup jobs and the likelihood that once the library puts the tape away there is some crazy leprechaun messing with my setup… which by the way turned out to be false. 

It turns out to simply be a matter of hardware support.  The card I got to operate the library and drive was not on the list recommended, tested, certified, blessed, etc. by the manufacturer.  Rather than try to get it working and hoping for the best, I replaced the card and rebooted the server.

The next attempt at backups (and two since) have gone off without a hitch, even with multiple mounts of the tape. 

Following the recommendations of the manufacturer is a good idea.  While I knew this, I had a perfectly good card here and thought it surely should work.  Should and will… definitely not the same.

Thanks to the folks at Quantum support and to a few readers of my blog who emailed me with suggestions.  The effort put forth by others to lend a hand has been outstanding.

Here’s to many successful and undisturbed backups to come.