Chris’ Blog

Ok, now that I’ve got your attention I’ll add a small discalimer - the dust hasn’t quite settled yet and no one knows at this point exactly what will happen, but from what I can tell this is one of those places where a decision was made not because it was the best one but because it was seen as being the most popular for those making the decision.

At a time when the economy is truly suffering and people everywhere are looking for leaders to do the right things, many see things such as ballooning costs in government programs as being full of fat and needing to be purged.  Thus was the case with the VH-71 Presidential Helicopter.  From what I understand this was a bid by Lockheed Martin for a 2 phase project.  The original cost was $6 Billion for 28 helicopters.  Now that is probably the seed of the overall problem.  I will admit that there is a spending problem in Washington and that seems like a huge amount of money for a helicopter.  As a tech person myself though, I must also admit that we as civilians also don’t know what technology they were trying to put into those helicopters to justify such a huge cost.  The biggest news we have heard is that the project cost has ballooned to $13 Billion.  Truth be told most of the “soaring cost overruns” and “government procurement process ‘run amok’” were probably scope creep in phase 2 where the military was trying to push the already bleeding edge technology even further which would also lead to delays and extensions of the deadlines (which was also cited as a reason for the cancelation.)

After spending $3 Billion already on phase 1 (and having 4 prototypes built - 3 of which are the final product scheduled for delivery in 2010) they decided to cut funding to the program completely and put additional money toward repairing the already failing helicopters.  It seems that the money (and jobs?) would have been put to better use finishing phase 1 and having new (albeit not so technologically advanced) helicopters so they don’t fall out of the sky.  Why punish the citizens and local economies because the military and government have a spending problem.  Lets curtail costs where we can and reign in spending but lets not throw jobs and money away and pretend that we are doing the right thing for the economy.  But hey, its all a political game right?

The President was quoted as having said “The helicopter I have now seems perfectly adequate to me,” but isn’t that kinda like someone in a building when the fire alarms are going off saying “I don’t see any smoke… must not be a real fire…” - What does he know about a helicopter?!

Further Disclaimer: I have some bias toward wanting the right decision for this program to be made as I am from the Binghamton, NY area where these possible job losses would cause a devastating problem to the local economy.

I had this “virtual drive” script I wrote setup a while back for my windows machine to make certain things easier.  For instance I setup my apache htdocs directory so that it was the “W” drive so I could just open my computer and W and I would be there with my websites - it just made things more easily accessible.

The solution was used again for a different purpose when one day I had a friend who had installed windows and something went wrong.  A drive other than his main windows partition was set as “C” and his windows partition was created as “F”.  What made this a problem was that when he would install some programs (flash for example) it would attempt to install certain things to the registry on the “C” drive which it couldn’t find and there seemed to be no way to correct this.  So I showed him my little trick.  I didn’t think much of it until the other day he asked me for the script again because when he just installed his new computer the USB drive was “C” and he messed it up again.  He said he searched for a fix on Google and couldn’t find one.  You can’t just rename the partition because you are using it.  I imagine there is some kind of a fix if you put in a live cd and you can change it but we didn’t really look into it.  I just gave him the script and off he went.

So its a very simple batch script and you can modify it to do either of the things that I just mentioned.  Just save the following as virtualDrive.bat (or whateverYouWant.bat)

This first one shows my setting up the W drive:

@ECHO OFF
ECHO.

subst W: /d
subst W: D:\htdocs
CLS
EXIT

This one shows the fix if your windows partition is not set to C and it is causing you a problem:

@ECHO OFF
ECHO.

subst C: /d
subst C: F:

CLS
EXIT

The first “subst” line deletes the “C” drive in case your script has already ran previously (this stops an error from popping up if it already exists) - The second creates the “C” drive pointing to the “F” drive.

The last hint is that if you want to have it created every time you start your computer, just put a link to the virtualDrive.bat file in your startup folder in the start menu.

Ok, so the other day I found out that my iPod touch is limited to 9 pages of apps. Now I know some of you are thinking “how did you fill 9 pages?!” but I also know others are saying “I know 9 is not enough!” Well I understand why, especially because I don’t know if apple initially planned on having so many apps and therefore didn’t plan for this problem. Anyway what happened today was that I was trying to move some icons around and I accidentally pushed one off the edge of the last page! If you’ve had this happen, have no fear, just turn it off and then back on again. The icon will now appear in the first open spot starting at the left most page. So all you have to do is go back and find it!

Here is a short video that was shared with me about what cloud is. I thought they did an excellent job explaining the basics. Enjoy!

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about clouds and all the things that can be done in them.  I was just having a conversation the other day about how pretty soon our computers will be “dumb terminals” and even our OS will be “in the cloud”.  Google is been rumored to be close to releasing its GDrive - A cloud storage drive for your computer.  An article at foxnews.com predicts that “Google’s Rumored GDrive May ‘Kill’ the PC”.  Now I don’t think things will go as far as they say they will but I do think that we will move to what I just dubbed Mainframe 2.0 where instead of “dumb” terminals however, I think we will do part of our processing on the local machine with the more processor intensive or large scale storage happening in the cloud. We will probably still have multi-core pcs with lots of ram, but processing videos or large tasks could be made much faster. Of course this won’t be a viable solution until we have ubiquitous high speed internet. But maybe some day we will log in to our computer from any computer because the OS is in the cloud…

Isn’t it funny how things kinda tend to go full circle?  It reminds me of this quote I found:

Historical footnote: Way back in the mists of time, people not only didn’t have cell phones, they didn’t even have telephones. (It’s true; you can look it up.) To communicate over any sort of distance, people relied on the telegraph. Due to the limitations of the technology and to the costs involved, people also had to resort to using cryptic messages like this: C U 2MAR O. Talk about primitive, huh? Today, of course, you can use your fancy, high-tech digital cell phone to send really cool text messages like this: C U 2MAR O. We’ve come a long way, baby.

At the Super Computer 2008 conference a couple of months ago, Microsoft created a short video interview of one of my coworkers talking about the Hybrid Cluster solution.  This solution still seems so amazing to me that Moab can dynamically setup the best use of the system including the OS needed to run certain applications.  This doesn’t have to be just Windows and Linux.  Maybe you have some images for Red Hat, while others are Ubuntu or SUSE.  Moab can dynamically re-provision any server to the OS necessary to make it work correctly.  Here is the video:

Last night I wanted to see my google analytics on my iPod Touch, however there is currently no flash plugin available for it so I don’t get the graphs. I think I just came up with a simple solution. You can have google email you a PDF version of the analytics every day, week, or month, or even just a one time thing. I’m not going to go way into all the details, but at the top center of the dashboard there is an email button. If you click it you can schedule your automatic emails. The downside is that you don’t have the ability to drill down into the stats, but you can always still do that without the graph on the website. This is just for a quick checkup anyway. Besides, this way you don’t find yourself in there checking your stats for hours because you get the email and its too much work to get into it and look at more specifics unless you really need to or want to.

In a recent Information week blog post, John Foley discussed briefly the problem of having data spread between different cloud providers.  As I read the post I started to think about where I think a good solution to the cloud will finally settle.  My opinion is that one of the solutions particularly for enterprises will be that the organization will maintain their own “private” cloud of resources and as needed they will be able to spill their resources over into one of the Cloud solutions available.  I got to thinking about where Moab could sit in this solution and I have been told that not only can it do this (migrate data between a private cloud and a public cloud) but it has been done in a demo where it was able to manage resources on multiple public clouds as well.  I’m not saying it is a solid solution at this time, and as John mentioned, “It’s too early to know how all this will play out, but IT folks should be paying attention and, if cloud computing is part of your company’s strategic direction, looking to get involved.“  I guess only time will tell to see what will work as a viable solution, but I think that a third-party layer will be a very used solution.

I work for Cluster Resources as their Business Infrastructure Developer. Basically in my job I find ways to make our business processes more efficient, removing touch points and creating value through IT. Really love my job and specifically, the company. The more I have come to understand our product, the more I want to tell people about how amazing it is. No one else’s product does as much as our’s does and it does some amazing things. As I have interacted with different people, I’ve come to realize that our product “Moab” is so complex that I can never explain it as fully as I would like. I decided that I basically needed a landing page that I could give out that I could consolidate my thoughts and some links to help people get introduced. Although I work for Cluster Resources, the information posted here is my own understanding of the product and does not represent any stance or opinion the company currently has. As I mentioned, I love talking about our product, but I am not a sales person. If you have questions or are interested in our product you can contact me through my contact page or by leaving a comment here (comments are posted for everyone to see) and I will put you in contact with someone who can answer your specific question. I may create some more advanced follow up posts to this if there is interest - if I do, I will edit this post and put the links at the end.

What is Moab?

From our website: Moab Cluster Suite is a policy-based intelligence engine that integrates scheduling, managing, monitoring and reporting of cluster workloads. It guarantees service levels are met while maximizing job throughput. Moab integrates with existing middleware for consolidated administrative control and holistic cluster reporting. Its graphical management interfaces and flexible policy capabilities result in decreased costs and increased ROI.

Solutions Moab Provides:

HPC (High Performance Computing):

In the past clusters of computers were most often used in academic and government facilities to perform huge calculations and manipulation of data. Moab was originally setup to work in these environments sitting on top of the cluster managing the resource managers that are set up to accept and control jobs. Moab’s unique scheduling capabilities give it the ability to increase the use of hardware and allow for less manual intervention necessary by administrators to keep the system working smoothly.

As the information age has come upon us, huge amounts of data have become prevelant in all parts of society. Many companies have to utilize large IT budgets to manage the hardware and sofware necessary to manipulate the data that they receive and make it usable for the business. With this in mind, Moab has been modified through its development to work well in other situations. These include both Cloud Computing and Data Center environments.

Adaptive Computing for Clouds and Data Center:

At Cluster Resources we sell a solution tailored to fit these environments. This solution is our Adaptive Operating Environment—Powered by Moab. In this environment Moab can intelligently manage your resources to utilize as much or as little of your hardware as necessary at any given time. Moab looks in the queue of upcoming jobs and can dynamically power on or off hardware as necessary to accomodate those jobs. For instance if your data center provides web hosting and one of your customer’s websites gets to the front page of digg and their bandwidth increases, instead of having a denial of service, or needing to turn on new hardware, Moab would recognize this increase as it was happening and would power on nodes to handle the workload seemlessly providing the bandwidth and server power necessary to handle the workload. If all of the servers that you own are utilized, Moab can utilize servers “in the cloud” and push jobs as needed to hardware carved out specifically for your organization. Here is a link to a video we have created that gives a brief overview of this solution.

Green Computing:

Green is the new thing these days. In fact if your company hasn’t figure out some way to show you’ve gone green you are behind the times. If you have or if you haven’t, here is yet another way you can show you care about the evironment (if not the bottom line). The Green Computing solution uses moab to do things like power off unused hardware, locate high processor intensive jobs in cooler parts of the data center to allow the temperature to become more uniform throughout, consolodate jobs to as few servers as needed and even hold off performing non-essential jobs if possible until there is space on the available hardware so it doesn’t have to start up and shutdown servers more than necessary. Here is a link to a video on green computing.

Hybrid Computing:

Is your IT budget larger than it needs to be because you need to run both Linux and Windows servers? How often are all of your servers in use at the same time? With Hybrid Cluster - powered by Moab you can buy less servers and have them dynamically re-purposed based on the current need of your “cluster”. I personally think this is one of the coolest solutions we have. Think about it, if the main time you need to run windows servers is when your accounting jobs run at the end of the month, you can have the system DYNAMICALLY change the OS on the servers to meet the need of those jobs for that period of time. After the need is passed, the servers can either be turned off to save power, or switched back to the original operating system. How cool is that?! Here is a link to a video on the Hybrid Cluster solution.

Ok, I’ve written more than I thought I would, but I think this page now serves the purpose that I wanted it to. If you found this page from a link online, feel free to visit the Cluster Resources web page at http://www.clusterresources.com for more informaion. If ypuvwould rather as I mentioned you can ask me a question and if I can’t get the answer for you, I’ll get you to someone who can answer it.

One last note:

If you have actually read down this far you might be interested enough to know that we will be holding our 2nd annual Moab•Con Conference June 17 - 19. More information can be found on the information page.

I am always looking for new ways to do things. A few weeks back I wanted to subscribe to some newsletters at work. I noticed however that my inbox (which I try to keep empty) was being cluttered with newsletters I had not yet had a chance to read. Newsletters just don’t work in my inbox for me, I’d rather have an rss feed - but these companies don’t offer them - so I started looking for an email to rss feed application. I’m not going to be specific with what I found (you can google if you are interested) but there are some that use IMAP, some that are disposable emails, but nothing that really did it for me. Then I stumbled upon something someone had written and it was just what I needed. It still works great so I thought I’d share. What I did is I created a new blog for that topic or newsletter (some go to the same blog) on blogger. I then use a filter to forward my newsletters to the blogger auto post email which is setup to publish automatically. The emails become blog posts which has an rss feed which I can then subscribe to. I even set the filter to archive the messages and mark them read (and in some cases apply a label) - I still have the email if I want to go back and read it, but now I have it as am rss feed too!