Socal IT Pro Newsletter November 1, 2004

SoCalITProAssociation Newsletter Volume 2 Number 11
Southern California Information Technology Professional Association November 1, 2004

Welcome Members, Visitors and Friends!
It's November! The year is almost over, and Thanksgiving, Christmas, Kwansa and Chanukkah are just around the corner. I wonder what I'll be getting? Worse, yet, how much am I gonna have to spend? There are a number of new and interesting techno-toys out there.

Inside this Issue:
Nogginfest 2004
Meeting Announcement: Intransa and Waterford Technologies
Previous Meeting: Raptor Networks and triCerat
Opinions and Commentary Department:
Reader Feedback
Final Notes…
Email the Editor

And Now, The News...

Nogginfest 2004

In place of a December meeting, we usually have Nogginfest, our annual open house to entice our friendly vendors to hawk their wares, and encourage our members to meet and greet each other as well as patronize our vendor booths. There would be plenty of givaways, as well as a raffle. We still hope this event will come off as well as it usually does, although we're not yet certain, because we may not have a sufficient number vendors for this year. So watch your email for announcements from notify@ocntug.org! I was kind of hoping for an evening of carefree noshing and networking, myself...

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Meeting Announcement: Thursday, November 11, 2004

There will be two topics, as follows:
#1 - Intransa
http://www.intransa.com
Article by Brad Fischl

Title: iSCSI IP SAN, Simply Smarter Storage by Intransa, Inc.
Storage is an integral part of an organization's computing and communications infrastructure. Intransa brings the intelligence of networking to storage; creating a smarter, higher value approach to any company. Intransa has developed an IP SAN that is built around a federation of modular components to deliver exceptional value, low total cost of ownership, high scalability, excellent performance and built-in redundancy & reliability. These requirements define IntraStor™ architecture, the foundation for delivering block-level, distributed storage over IP-networks.

In this session you will learn about iSCSI IP SAN, the components needed to build one such as HBA/NIC choices, cabling, switches, storage, as well as see a live demo of an Intransa IP5000 2TB storage system. If you can build a RAID volume on a server using internal disks, you possess the skills to administrate an IP SAN.

#2 – Waterford Technologies
http://www.waterfordtechnologies.com
Email Management and Security
Article by Lorcan Kennedy, CTO, Waterford Technologies

You are familiar with email “security” issues like Spam, Viruses and Phishing. Those are nuisances that get a lot of attention and companies spend a lot of money on them because they are apparent, affect everyone, and have a high frequency. However, by themselves they will not necessarily put your company out of business.

What you may not be as familiar with are corporate security risks that have far greater damage potential but are not as visible, only affect a few people at first, and occur infrequently. Through your email system has traveled content created by your own employees that contains inappropriate materials, sexual harassment proof, trade secrets and how your company is represented to outsiders.

Some of these email bombs can put you out of compliance with industry regulations, resulting in million dollar fines or even prosecution. Other email bombs will be your downfall when a disgruntled employee sues your company for wrongful termination. However, some of these emails may save your company reputation in a lawsuit as well.

The point is you never know what is in the email records that can hurt you or help you. By analyzing your company’s email trends and usage, you can find out what is happening, who rises to the top of the volume, attachment and aging charts, but more importantly, how make better business decisions based on this understanding.

Only by becoming aware of how your employees use email, can you take action to improve email usage by optimizing retention, compliance and email security policies, or by giving managers better information to manage their staffs.

The email archive becomes a searchable database and provides dozens of reports to help you understand the big picture.

Please join us in this discussion of how email administrators and IT professionals are dealing with the latest email challenges and what you can do to mitigate risk and improve productivity & security for your organization.

During this session, the following areas will be discussed:

Incident Investigations – what you can proactively do today to avoid the next one
Tips and tricks to reduce your storage and bandwidth usage immediately
How the right Email Policies can be a competitive advantage
Delegating Email Monitoring and Reporting to Department Managers
Ensuring you are in compliance to avoid fines and prosecution
Avoid major pitfalls when migrating from Exchange 5.5 or 2000 to Exchange 2003
Quickly measure your company’s Non-Business email, which may account for up to 40% of your email resources
Email Archiving strategies – reporting and retention

You can be ahead of the curve by hearing about the latest email management, reporting and archiving solutions. A live Demo of Waterford Technologies’ MailMeter product line will be shown, and a drawing will be held for a free copy of MailMeter.

(And I thought Waterford was the beautiful lead-glass crystalware from Ireland.)

MCT Corner: To Be Announced

Door prizes and software.

As always please RSVP on the http://www.SoCalITPro.org website. The link is on the lower left hand side of the home page.

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At the Previous Meeting...

Last month we had two fascinating presentations. The first, presented by Edwin Hoffman, Chief Development Officer of Raptor Networks Technology, Inc. discussed Disaster Avoidance.

Just a sec, Ed...did you say Disaster Avoidance? We know how to recover from disasters, fire, flood, earthquake, and so on, and we do plan for these types of problems, but how can you plan to avoid them? Control the weather? Stop quakes before they happen? After all, we know that:

All computer hardware must fail; it is only a matter of when.
All computer software has bugs; it is only a matter of finding them.
All humans will make errors; it is only a matter of how big and how often.

Then again, aren't we safe just applying our disaster recovery techniques? Some managers think 95% uptime is acceptable, but that leaves 480 hour$ (20 day$!!!) of downtime in a year. How much money will the company lo$e in twenty day$ if it$ primary $y$tems are down? If critical data i$ lo$t? If recovery technique$ can only rebuild the databa$e to a certain point, and the mo$t recent tran$action file$ are damaged?

Mr. Vendor: You still owe us $25,000 for that last shipment.
Mr. Customer: Didn't you get our check a few days ago. I'm sure we paid it in full.
Mr. Vendor: Uh...our database and transaction logs got thrashed yesterday...but I'm sure we didn't receive your payment.
Mr. Customer: Yes, we heard about your IT department going up in smoke. We sympathize, and I can give you the check number, if that helps, but I know we paid it.
Mr. Vendor: Couln't you put a stop to that check and send us another?
Mr. Customer: I'm sorry, but our company policy is not to send duplicate checks until the bank can verify...

Well, Ed says Disaster Avoidance is actually simpler than you might think. Store your backup data, in realtime somewhere else, as across town, in another part of the state, in another state, or across the country. Huh? How're we gonna do that? Data can't be sent fast enough, can it?

Yes it can! With Raptor Networks Gigabit switches, at 10 or more Gb per second! These are probably the least expensive switches you'll find, that give high performance at Layer 2, and they cost about a tenth of what you'd pay for Cisco equipment which operates at Layer 3, which slows it down! With the savings, you could buy a plot of land in a small town and put up a fully equipped data center.

Operating at the Data Link Layer, Raptor switches operate at the full speed of the hardware, without need for the CPU to control the data flow. No CPU interaction, no slowdown. And Raptor's solutions use pairs of switches for redundancy that eliminate single points of failure. Think of an IT department that never suffers downtime. Think of how CFO's will react to the savings. Think Raptor Networks Technologies, http://www.raptor-networks.com.

The second presentation, given by Christa Anderson, canderson@tricerat.com of triCerat, author, MVP, and senior editor of Windows IT Pro Magazine, discussed how triCerat's software can make certain aspects of server management easier in "Building Day Zero Stability".

First, you must remember that Windows was originally designed as a single user interface, not a server OS. If you're going to use Terminal Services or MetaFrame, this creates problems in printer driver management, user profile management, applications that stress the CPU, as well as with users who run unauthorized software.

Buggy drivers can crash a server. Driver names must map to the server and the client. The typical "universal printer driver" seems to follow the old automobile model..."any color you want, so long as it's black." Administrators may not have control of the drivers in use on the client side. Administrators must juggle User profiles trying to balance user functionality against manageability and security. And when profiles write back to their servers at the end of a session, logoff times get really llooonnnnggggg!!!!!! And while group policies are useful, they work only with Active Directory, and don't control all of the possible settings exposed in a profile.

Until the release of Server 2003, Microsoft's usual approach was to leave all server functions open, and let the admin decide what needed to be locked down. So if you failed to lock out everything important, malicious executables could disrupt usage for everyone on a particular terminal server. Also, if you left all applications available on every desktop, task-based users might not only become confused, but could cause mischief.

Then you must consider resources on the terminal server. Many applications now in use put heavy usage on the processor, and not all of those are sufficiently well-written to share the processor with other apps. So capacity planning becomes an important factor.

So, what can triCerat do about all this mess? Eliminate the common shortcomings of terminal server functionality by enhancing performance and productivity, lowering support and hardware costs, and minimize the administrative burden. triCerat delivers Day Zero protection, solving problems before they occur, and ensuring and documenting Quality of Service.

triCerat's Solutions:

Simplify Printing™

No more printer drivers!
Full printing functionality and fidelity from any application using any printer
Shrink Help Desk and Support costs
Maximize Terminal Server uptime by eliminating printer driver server crashes
No limitations on dpi or types of printers
Set quotas on ICA/RDP bandwidth allowed for printing
Allow for different “default” printer in Terminal Server sessions

Simplify Lockdown™

Deploy customized Terminal Server desktops in minutes
- Customize application access to users and groups
- Full control of desktop environment, including Start button and shortcuts
- Simple and easy to use
Added security and peace of mind
- “Allowed List” of executables
- If you can’t see it, you can’t run it!

Simplify Resources™

Boost application and server performance
Increase number of users per server
Improves user experience and productivity
Proactively control erratic applications
Install and run – no configuration required
Capture detailed server/session stats
Perform capacity planning

Simplify Profiles™

Prevent and/or permit application registry changes
Boosts system reliability and performance
Speeds login time
Overcomes limitations of roaming profiles
Eliminates time-wasting workarounds and scripts

Could you ask for solutions better than these? Could you find them? Probably not. So contact triCerat today! http://www.tricerat.com

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And Now, The News...

Nogginfest 2004

Meeting Announcement: Thursday, November 11, 2004

At the Previous Meeting...

OpInIoN

Reader Feedback

Final Notes…