Massively scalable database - open source too
Based on Google's well known BigTable project, the new entrant into the scalable database space is Hypertable. Hypertable is currently in beta release 0.9.x beta and is designed to manage the storage and processing of information on a large cluster of commodity servers, providing resilience to machine and component failures. According to their website, Hypertable is out to set the open source standard for highly available, petabyte scale, database systems. The goal is nothing less than that Hypertable become one of the world’s most massively parallel high performance database platforms.
Hypertable uses Apache Hadoop HDFS distributed file system, which Hypertable refers to as a third party file system. The Hypertable website contains a great high level architectural overview of how Hypertable is constructed, as well as more detailed documentation on the dependencies and structure of a Hypertable database implementation. Currently the Hypertable project has a few formidable deficiencies to overcome, the most critical being that the master and hyperspace servers are single instance with no cluster takeover capability. These two issues, among others, are currently being addressed by the development team. Given the fact that Hypertable is based on a Google project, this is one to keep your eye on if you are in the market for a massively scalable database. I would also venture to say that you should also consider it for ANY database deployment that needs resilience, even if it's implemented in a single rack versus geographically distributed. Looks like Oracle's Real Application Cluster database architecture may soon have some open source, scalable competition.
Saturday, September 6, 2008
Tuesday, September 2, 2008
Email as a service
Email should be your next utility.
Anyone that reads my blog posts knows that I'm somewhat biased to software as a service offerings, especially ones that make daily tasks easier. Here is my latest rant: Why is it that small and medium sized businesses continue to run their own email servers? Heck, for that matter why does a business that's not a Fortune 500 company run their own email server? I'm somewhat taken aback by the constant self flagellation many systems admins expose themselves to by keeping email as an in-house service.
I noticed this trend a while back and have continued to ask the "dumb" questions like like why are you still managing your own spam filter, why do you care where your email lives as long as you have access to it, and the list goes on. If this is hitting home with some of you, please read on. Here's my key point: Email is now a utility function. You should treat it like a utility service just like water, electricity or natural gas. Your users don't really care that you spent all last weekend up in the datacenter patching the Exchange server, they just want their email to flow into their mail client uninterrupted and free from viruses, spam and phishing.
Face it, users EXPECT email to work 24x7x365 and you will never get a call thanking you for the email server working, you'll only get rolled under the bus when it doesn't. There's no upside potential to running your own email server anymore. Ok, so all that said, what's a brother to do? Easy, outsource it. There are dozens upon dozens of companies out there that specialize in running whatever variant of mail server you have. Everything from Groupwise to Domino to Exchange to sendmail to Zimbra, you're covered. In fact, you really shouldn't even care what the heck the backend is as long as it supports whatever functions you need in your mail client.
I've heard the excuses of "we're still running Netscape mail" or some crap like that. No better time than the present to roll out a better CLIENT solution to your users. Best to do it now before that old mail server crashes and you can't get it back up in the 10 minutes it takes for the company president to miss an important email and fire your butt. Really, I know we IT people tend to embrace the "if it ain't broke don't fix it" saw, but please people, this is one tool you need to hand over to someone else. Even those of you with regulatory and security issues in the banking, financial services and health care industries, there are partners out there who can give you hosted services that are GLBA, HIPAA, SOX, etc. compliant; trust me, I've got customers who have already done it!!
Here's just one example for you: Google charges $50 per user per year for email hosting, and that includes 25GB of data storage per user, and the ability to deploy Postini email message discovery, compliance and archival for selected users (with some restrictions). Now, if you're a shop with 100 users that's $5000 per year. It would take five to seven years to equal what you're going to have to fork over now for that upgrade to MS Exchange 2007, the spam and anti-virus updates and for that price you don't even have archival set up yet.
If you like running MS Exchange/Outlook or IBM Domino/Notes then go hosted. Pick any of the many companies that specialize in managing hosted Exchange or Domino environments and let it go. They'll do your anti-virus, spam filtering, offer archival options and manage all of the patching, upgrading, redundancy, clustering or whatever other options you choose. There's also the option of going to a managed services contract where the email servers may still physically sit in your datacenter, but someone else monitors, manages, patches, updates, cares for and feeds the little beasts. Don't forget that the day you outsource, you also give up having to manage the constant disk storage defrag hassles, the mail database re-org, inbox size issues, user deleted email by mistake issues (nah, you'll still get that call, but it'll be easier to get back) and many more. Really, it's THAT simple. Then you can spend more time implementing technology that can give your business a competitive edge instead of managing an oh-so-'90s technology that takes up way too much of your time. Am I missing something here? Give me your thoughts on this!!
Anyone that reads my blog posts knows that I'm somewhat biased to software as a service offerings, especially ones that make daily tasks easier. Here is my latest rant: Why is it that small and medium sized businesses continue to run their own email servers? Heck, for that matter why does a business that's not a Fortune 500 company run their own email server? I'm somewhat taken aback by the constant self flagellation many systems admins expose themselves to by keeping email as an in-house service.
I noticed this trend a while back and have continued to ask the "dumb" questions like like why are you still managing your own spam filter, why do you care where your email lives as long as you have access to it, and the list goes on. If this is hitting home with some of you, please read on. Here's my key point: Email is now a utility function. You should treat it like a utility service just like water, electricity or natural gas. Your users don't really care that you spent all last weekend up in the datacenter patching the Exchange server, they just want their email to flow into their mail client uninterrupted and free from viruses, spam and phishing.
Face it, users EXPECT email to work 24x7x365 and you will never get a call thanking you for the email server working, you'll only get rolled under the bus when it doesn't. There's no upside potential to running your own email server anymore. Ok, so all that said, what's a brother to do? Easy, outsource it. There are dozens upon dozens of companies out there that specialize in running whatever variant of mail server you have. Everything from Groupwise to Domino to Exchange to sendmail to Zimbra, you're covered. In fact, you really shouldn't even care what the heck the backend is as long as it supports whatever functions you need in your mail client.
I've heard the excuses of "we're still running Netscape mail" or some crap like that. No better time than the present to roll out a better CLIENT solution to your users. Best to do it now before that old mail server crashes and you can't get it back up in the 10 minutes it takes for the company president to miss an important email and fire your butt. Really, I know we IT people tend to embrace the "if it ain't broke don't fix it" saw, but please people, this is one tool you need to hand over to someone else. Even those of you with regulatory and security issues in the banking, financial services and health care industries, there are partners out there who can give you hosted services that are GLBA, HIPAA, SOX, etc. compliant; trust me, I've got customers who have already done it!!
Here's just one example for you: Google charges $50 per user per year for email hosting, and that includes 25GB of data storage per user, and the ability to deploy Postini email message discovery, compliance and archival for selected users (with some restrictions). Now, if you're a shop with 100 users that's $5000 per year. It would take five to seven years to equal what you're going to have to fork over now for that upgrade to MS Exchange 2007, the spam and anti-virus updates and for that price you don't even have archival set up yet.
If you like running MS Exchange/Outlook or IBM Domino/Notes then go hosted. Pick any of the many companies that specialize in managing hosted Exchange or Domino environments and let it go. They'll do your anti-virus, spam filtering, offer archival options and manage all of the patching, upgrading, redundancy, clustering or whatever other options you choose. There's also the option of going to a managed services contract where the email servers may still physically sit in your datacenter, but someone else monitors, manages, patches, updates, cares for and feeds the little beasts. Don't forget that the day you outsource, you also give up having to manage the constant disk storage defrag hassles, the mail database re-org, inbox size issues, user deleted email by mistake issues (nah, you'll still get that call, but it'll be easier to get back) and many more. Really, it's THAT simple. Then you can spend more time implementing technology that can give your business a competitive edge instead of managing an oh-so-'90s technology that takes up way too much of your time. Am I missing something here? Give me your thoughts on this!!
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