Skeleton staff - what's in your DR closet?

Fifteen (over) years ago I was a sys-admin. And at the time I thought that I had been exposed to all of the technologies I would ever need. We had a Novell Netware 3.12 File Server and a Sun Solaris Unix server running Oracle for the accounts team.

All I had to do was make sure that Windows for Workgroups 3.11 would boot from the server share (remote win.ini from the H:\ drive) and that meant I was doing my job.

Bliss or boredom?!

We had shift plans for long weekends, my boss and I. This was pre-cell phone days, where one of the team would remain ready to dial-in over the phone lines if need be for diagnosis. Actually, I recall a minor few with cell phones. Notably, the guy walking down the mall with his portable phone attached to his face yelling "buy, buy" and then the look on his face when the phone he was screaming at rang - yes we all know you were pretending…

Fast forward to a more complicated time: here we are, easter weekend. So, who's looking after everything? We used to have on-call staff for the potential of an outage that would be far less disruptive compared to what we store digitally today.

Yet, I just left a serviced office and turned out the lights as I did knowing there was no shift-monitor in place. Well, actually, even that's an untruth. The motion sensing lights did their thing soon after I left and thats that.

So, what is todays version of skeleton staff? How have things progressed? Is it a term that has evolved like many others to mean something new or is it now redundant with 24x7 services being the norm?

To all those on call this weekend, I hope you are warm and happy. Are you the DC operators, the security guards, the  guys in the NOC (Network Operations Center)?

Calling all skeletons. Who are they of today?

Google patent to make The Truman Show a reality?

Good post by Bill Slawski of 'SEO by the Sea' yesterday covering Googles Patent application for Query-based User Groups - the dynamic creation of Google Circles based on what Google know's about you.

Bill summarises, "A query-based social circle approach could potentially connect a lot of people who might otherwise not communicate, and there seems to be a lot of potential in enabling people to connect through circles like this.".

Road testing the idea in the office this morning, I threw the question out to F5's Ellie Robson, Marketing Ops PM, who feels this is, "...far too stalkerish. I don't want strangers talking to me because of a false sense of familiarity derived from their 'smart' phone".

My inner geek tells me this is quite cool. Its using data sources already in existence, like location, personal preferences,  habits, and its turning them into something meaningful. On the other hand, its using my location, personal preferences and habits - to reach out to strangers. 

Are we venturing dangerously close to Drew Carey's character in 'The Truman Show' - where Truman thinks that he is an ordinary man with an ordinary life and has no idea about how he is exploited?

And where would this work? I struggle to see it here in the UK where talking to another passenger on the train is strictly taboo; make eye contact at your own risk. Or, is this a generational thing? I, for one, can't help feeling that take up of such an experience is something a new generation needs to be born into. A generation with less of a sense of privacy.

I like a bit of mystery, an element of surprise in my day. Of not knowing what could happen next.

Curiosity didn't kill the cat. Curiosity gave it a reason to go outside and explore!

An Intelligent Services Framework within the Network

The requirements for delivering employee and customer applications have never been more similar. Largely due to mobile working, the BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) movement and the webification of the data center, organizations are forced to deliver internal employee applications with similar delivery demands as required for external facing customer applications. With a broad range of devices to support and varying connectivity profiles, they must deliver access from anywhere and on any device securely, fast & always available, 24 hours a day.

And the landscape for enterprises hosting customer facing applications and services has also changed. Competition has raised consumer expectations demanding improvement over generic, one-size-fits-all architectures and programming methodologies.

Competition, internally between IT Departments and Software-as-a-Service providers, and externally, between competing organizations, is driving a review of not just what applications are being delivered but, more importantly, how. But longstanding has been the disconnect between data center networking and the way in which applications & services are consumed. Customers have always had the right to choose and will exert that right by taking their business elsewhere when expectations are not met. And this right to choose now also extends to employees. The term ‘consumer’ must now be redefined to include colleagues.

And in a time of high expectations, where consumer’s desire for ‘instant gratification’ reigns, organizations can ill afford to allow application errors, performance related issues and security shortfalls, however severe or temporary, to impact service delivery.

The Network must lose its rigidity and in place provide an Intelligent Services Framework delivering a service-to-consumer oriented view of application delivery. The Network must focus on the expectations of those consuming services.

There is no way to manage mobile device and application growth simultaneously without an Intelligent Services Framework, a broker between the users and applications providing:

• Application Awareness: Total insight into how the application is supposed to look on the wire.
• User Awareness: Ability to see which users are trying to access what application from which devices.
• Resource Awareness: Tying all pieces of the application delivery infrastructure together to provide real-time visibility into the entire Application Delivery Network

The Internet and its resources are free and open. And, like in nature, its applications and services fight for alpha-status in a battle of survival-of-the-fittest. An Intelligent Services Framework within the network wins that battle.

John Gage said it best when he coined the phrase, "The network is the computer".

Dynamic Service Management – F5’s goal for SDN

Last week Dell made interesting comments that Software Defined Networking wouldn’t have an impact on cost savings for another three to five years, as most SDN models are currently deployed on hybrid set-ups using legacy technology. The market knows that it will take a number of years for SDN to be fully realised, but it doesn’t hurt to hear a sobering message in the midst of so much excitement following VMworld in the US.

At F5 we find SDN exciting because it aligns with our long-term goals for Dynamic Services. We’ve been developing our approach for Dynamic Network Architecture for some time and SDN plays directly into that. Our customers are looking for more control, more agile implementation of their networks that will result in increased efficiencies and, of course, a reduction in cost.

The separation of the logical network topology from the physical is a process that will take considerable time and thought to manage successfully. Once the process is complete though it will need powerful tools to oversee and control the new architecture. That’s where F5 and BIG-IP come in, solutions that will give you that management ability.

Our solutions have to be compliant with SDN technologies. For example our BIG-IP products provide a strategic point of control for application layer decisions across the data, management and control plain. We’re focused on delivering in real-time security and performance across the network. We’ve addressed the dynamic conditions that exist within networks, servers and applications that mean services can be delivered successfully.

At a more fundamental level we’ve been seeking to develop products and services that understand data intelligence, the pro