ExchangeDefender v3.1 sneak peak

Posted: 4:34 pm
August 2, 2007
ExchangeDefender
Comments Off on ExchangeDefender v3.1 sneak peak

Ironically enough, this blog gets more traffic than our corporate web site so I’m very happy to share with you another great accomplishment: ExchangeDefender v3.1. Why happy? Because I feel this release pretty much crushes all of our competition in the SMB market when it comes to business continuity concerns. I’ve had the pleasure of being the DR headquarters for every hurricane, mud slide, terrorist attack, act of Bell South incompetence and then some – and the first thing that people want to get to when their stuff falls apart is email. Really, once we get our ducks in a row we think about our business, our customers, and how to contact them. Email, even so beyond web, is the most critical piece of communications infrastructure you’ve got.

So for years I went around and asked people what would help, what we could do, what would fit the budget. And well, a few years later, dirt cheap bandwidth, inexpensive servers and some ingenuity… ExchangeDefender now delivers live archive functionality that lets you read, respond, send and manage past 7 days of your email at any point. Server went down? Hit the live archive box at ExchangeDefender via web/ssl. Mailbox corrupt and Outlook or OWA won’t start for that user Chad? Hit the live archive box at ExchangeDefender via web/ssl. Entire office trailer fell off the cliff? You’ve guessed it, hit the live archive box at ExchangeDefender via web/ssl.

Whats nice about the implementation is how gentle it is. While the original message is still in stream (or in queue if the server is down) a copy of it is spooled to our live archive box. It works constantly, in background, in the cloud, and requires no action on the users part at all. If they can figure out Hotmail, they can figure out this. The second nice thing about this is that the archive is live – meaning it will keep on receiving messages even if your server is down. That means you can use the archive mail server to send/receive/respond to mail for days without anyone knowing what happened. Third thing is auditing – auth trail, timestamps, etc – full control over whats going on. No plain text password or username access… EVER. Email is in the ExchangeDefender cloud so its secure, encrypted..

Oh, I forgot a small detail. It’s friggin FREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!

Download guide: ExchangeDefender.pdf (543 KB)

Idiots guide to vendor relationships: What does a vendor want?

Posted: 11:12 pm
August 1, 2007
IT Business
Comments Off on Idiots guide to vendor relationships: What does a vendor want?

In the dire contrast to the VAR list which looks like a Christmas wishlist written by a 2 year old, the vendor desire list is far shorter and specific though the delivery varies.

Vendors want..

To get to the customers money, either by empowering or compensating but preferably eliminating, the VAR.

It’s a very simple want. Whereas the VAR has to sing the remix of Queen’s “I want it all” and “Oh how I want to break free” at the same time, the only two things the vendor is concerned about is getting the customers check and having it clear. Some vendors are less evil than the others, some are more opportunistic than the others (“maybe if we networked our VARs and outsourced our support to India we won’t have to deal with support aside from occasional bitching about how much Punjab Frontline Support, Ltd sucks”)

The evil is indirectly proportional to the vendors desire to get the VAR involved plus the desire the vendor has in the customer using their product in the first place. Web hosting is a very simple way to illustrate this. GoDaddy hates VARs. They go through everything they can to get the direct sale, collect the money a year up front and never deal with either the customer or the VAR to begin with. Other turnkey web operations are the same, places like Vista Print, Google Applications, virtually any place where the only way to buy is to deal with the vendors site. On the flip side is the question of whether the vendor actually wants the reseller to use their app or not: For example, Google does not want you to be able to buy their Analytics product called Urchin. They want you to sign up for their Analytics package thats hosted, they don’t want you running that app on your side and cutting Google AdWords combo out so they make it very difficult to obtain through carefully chosen VARs that never answer their phone. Likewise, ExchangeDefender doesn’t publish pricing information nor a buy it now button because we don’t want to deal with the customer directly, we only want to work with a VAR thats intelligent enough to send an email or pick up the phone. Vendors always try to qualify their VARs.

So, now that you know what VARs want (if you’re a vendor) and what Vendors want (if you’re a VAR) how do you balance this equation to your benefit?

Why you should look at Response Point

Posted: 10:59 pm
August 1, 2007
Exchange, Microsoft
3 Comments

So Response Point has had its most significant marketing to date done by Karl Palachuk who couldn’t stop talking about it since he saw it. I was also quite impressed by what I saw at WWPC and I did sign up for the demo unit right there from my PocketPC while watching them present their slide decks. And while I am with Vijay on the feature set of Asterisk and our deployments mainly consisting of LCS and heading to Office Communications Server (since most our VoIP sales are to enterprise and our clients either tend to be dead broke or have budget overflow crisis towards the end of the quarter) I have to say I’m intrigued by what I saw.

However, even if you’re not a VoIP guy, even if this is not your neighborhood, even if you’re sold on Trixbox and Asterisk.. you should check this out, if for no other reason than that the people behind this product have a sense of humor and reality about things:

Vijay – You know, I couldn’t understand the big deal about the iPhone either, having used a touch screen 3G phone with far better email and PIM capabilities for quite some time. So fwiw, I empathize with you. But sometimes innovation comes less from what a product does, than how it does it.

Couldn’t have put it better myself  So check out Response Point and send them your wishlist they want to know how to get this in our hands.

Idiots guide to vendor relationships: What does a VAR want?

Posted: 9:40 am
August 1, 2007
IT Business
2 Comments

This will be a brief series of posts describing the relationships that vendors and vars have and how they can effectively use their positions to screw one another. I happen to sit on both of these chairs so I’m offering you my insight, take it for what its worth.

 VARs want..

.. free license
.. free demo unit, for at least a month or a quarter
.. no sales commitments or volume
.. no credit checks
.. no shared marketing costs (vendor covers 50% expenditure)
.. free literature
.. free product training
.. free or heavily discounted certification that takes no effort to obtain but keeps the people they don’t like out
.. geographic exclusivity
.. the next release, today
.. direct access to developers
.. sales persons cell phone #, or at least a callback within 5 minutes of the voicemail
.. sales assistance (“Client is asking questions, can you please call them and close?”)
.. free vendor conference or at least an annual paid trip to the headquarters
.. paid tour of the headquarters, time is money
.. at least a 10 year roadmap
.. static price, year over year
.. new features every year
.. vendors complete and immediate halt to any direct contact with the market, segment, geography or any point of contact other than that of the VAR
.. direct referral to the VAR when vendors advertising campaign drives the end customer to the vendors web site
.. personal phone call from the vendor when anything of relevance changes at the vendors side
.. vendors commitment to keep its employees on staff for at least 2 years without an ounce of promotion or advancement
.. complete rebranding of vendors product, but with the enterprise-grade support and facilities (“Can we put our logo on your building too?”)

I’ve seen others but they tend to be unreasonable (email from vendors domain); Some of you may laugh at some of these, I assure you that they are both no joke and that I’ve been personally asked at least 3/4 of them, the others I’ve seen people request of Microsoft. Tune in tomorrow to find out what the vendor wants..

Really, it’s not my birthday..

Posted: 10:27 pm
July 31, 2007
Vladville
4 Comments

This goes into the personal category but most people think it’s my birthday today. Gotta give it up to the social networks for making every bit of personal life exposed to the public so I’ll let you in on a little secret.

Back, in the long long ago, I used to help write control panels and portals. Believe me, I know the level of security that goes into those – it’s somewhere along these lines “Ok, so it wouldn’t compile, so I nuked the lines and procedures that were causing it to fail and it works!” – not good.

So I got into a habbit of lying on every single form I fill out online. Sadly, I’m a really bad liar and could never remember when I told people I was born – so I decided to zero it out. I told every form that asked that I was born on August 1, 1978 (gonna be 29). The month and the year are correct so its easy to remember, as is the 1st of the month so.. went along with it. I did the same with other things like phone number (-1111), social security (-1111) and really everything in the NT4 serial number style – just hold 1 down till the form pops.

More about Microsoft PAL’s

Posted: 3:22 pm
July 31, 2007
ExchangeDefender, Vladville
2 Comments

Now if the unofficial live announcement from WWPC and the VladCast #9 didn’t answer your questions here is the official (as in, “you can take that to the bank and tell them Ligman sent you”) hint on just who the PALs are, where they are along with the contact info.

The Microsoft PAL initiative recognizes and thanks outstanding Microsoft Small Business Specialist partners for their community participation and willingness to help other Microsoft partners who serve entrepreneurial and midsized customers. The PAL designation is given to exceptional Microsoft’s Small Business Specialists who lead and foster the involvement of other Microsoft partners in their respective communities around implementing best business practices and supporting customers. The PAL designation recognizes the most active Small Business Specialists from around the world who provide invaluable online and offline expertise that enriches the Microsoft partner community focused on delivering Microsoft’s small and midsized business products.

Click here to read more from mssmallbiz.com…

On behalf of the ExchangeDefender team I’d like to thank Eric for helping spam those folks to death by publishing their email address. Only four on the list are current customers/partners and every bit of junk mail helps bring people on. Thanks dude!  

Restraining myself from Yahoo Groups

Posted: 11:42 am
July 31, 2007
Friends, IT Culture
12 Comments

If you’ve followed this blog for a while you know I’ve had my ups and downs with the Yahoo Groups system of “woe is me but I won’t do anything about it” discussions. For some that seemed to head nowhere (leads) I had the sense to remove myself. For others, I questioned publicly how long they were going to keep on taking the disrespectful tone and proceed into obscurity. I made a promise to a friend that I will remain and be a positive influence on the conversation – I nuked a few people that I had just about zero respect for and at the time I felt the fault was with the moderators of the group. Looking back, eight months later, not only was this not their fault to begin with but they have really stepped up their efforts to curb the discussions that headed nowhere. And at every turn they got questioned, disrespected, had personal items hurled at them..

Here is my fundamental problem with Yahoo Groups and IT discussions in the SMB IT consultant/reseller segment overall. It seems like there is always a crowd of people that comes to the table with one and only one objective: to bitch and moan. One of the idiots recently explained this in a very eloquent way: “The only way to get them to do anything is to create a huge public PR nightmare because the only way they will act is if there is a huge smear on their face”; If you’ve ever been to a TS2 event in Florida you know what I mean. Just because someone asks you for opinion or feedback does not mean you have put in a quarter for a few minutes with a punching bag. Some just do not seem to get that.

Sadly, folks, this isn’t therapy – this is a community for sharing technical and business knowledge; maybe at hard times a bit of comic relief. Unfortunately, this is a personal problem for me because Yahoo Groups have over time become a matter of personal addiction – and I just can’t seem to let it go when an idiot is given a megaphone directed at over 2,000 people. So I respond and I try to help folks understand the slightly bigger picture but eight months later it just seems to have gone to no avail. I guess I’ll focus more energy onto encouraging people to blog where they actually have to think before they start typing (though this blog is perhaps the worst example of that)

Blockweb

So… I’ve programmed in Parental Restrictions today not to allow me to look at my Gmail account (where all my community mail goes to) between 6 AM and midnight. If I am so compelled I guess I could look at them on my laptop but we’ll see. There are other OWN people in the groups now, maybe some of them bite the community bug but I kind of feel I have put in my time and failed and well.. time to move on.

Amazon Web Services: This Is Why Chicks Dig Vlad

Posted: 12:58 am
July 31, 2007
Vladville, Web 2.0
7 Comments

Warning to the opposite sex: Reading this blog post may (0.000% chance) affect your sexual desire for me. You’ve been warned.

Have you ever said something to a girl and just had her eyes roll straight back in her head? Let’s face it, with an engineering degree, MCSE, MVP and few other credentials my sexappeal from the opposite sex is very far in the red to say the least…. but one of my motos is “the only way you can make sure you’re not a complete failure is to keep on trying to take things to a new low with each passing day” so here goes what I believe will be the post that absolutely eliminates even the last of my female audience. Libido, watch out!

Earlier this year I was very excited at the invitation to attend the MVP summit. Contrary to the popular belief, there was very little koolade there and the types of conversations that went on would blow any geeks mind. It is what I imagine the life in the Silicon Valley was like during the .com boom and now the Web 2.0 on the rise, 24/7 discussions about technology and curiosity about technology I otherwise would dismiss outright. So one night at the bar we’re talking about AWS (this is obviously outside of my Exchange MVP hive).

I explained to the guy what we do, and he explained to me what they do with this new kids web test app that they are developing. Just like any other regional application they have their peak times during which both the network, the CPU and everything related to it spike through the roof. Traditionally, this is where you’d go into designing high capacity clusters, load balancing hardware and switches, basically bend over and bite the infrastructure pillow cause the datacenter quote you’re about to get is going to hurt some place really personal – your wallet. So we keep on talking, really all angles of it and he tells me about the Amazon Web Services and how that whole thing works (for the sake of the story just assume that the technical limitations didn’t work out for his app); Here is the concept:

“Amazon has this concept of Elastic Clusters, where you basically lease time and space on their clusters. There are two deliverables – the virtual machine and storage/network. You pay for the number of hours a virtual machine runs plus any storage and network you consume. You can configure as many virtual machines as you want and you can also spin up as many virtual machines as you want.

So the concept is pretty simple. I have a 4 hour block during which my demand skyrockets. During the other 20 hours of the day the activity is minimal at best. I can scale up the service on demand by firing up as many virtual machines as I need during peak times and only paying for that 4 hour block, at 10 cents per hour per virtual machine! Network is about $0.18 per gigabyte and storage is around that price as well.” – Some Unmemorable .NET MVP

Yes ladies, thats the sexy stuff right there (are they gone yet?) that makes the virtualization and resource availability a totally scalable variable cost that can grow and shrink on demand. Starting a new web app – your costs are minimal. Your application popularity explodes, WSJ reviews it – you add resources on demand and just pay for the usage. Your application gets a fatal bug, competitor moves in, etc – you scale back down without a huge infrastructure to pay off. Brilliant!

So how does one actually do this?

Ok, math first. 10 cents an hour for a vm running 24/7 is roughly $80 a month. What’s in the box? Each VM is supposedly an X86 equivalent of 1.7 GHz processor, 1.7 GB ram, 160GB local disk and 250Mb/sec local network. There is a video out there but let me walk you through standing up your CentOS image with Windows:

First, sign up for AWS and EC2. Download and install Java runtime environment.

Create a new directory, C:\EC2 and download the X509 certificates and personal certificates from AWS site to this directory. Download the Amazon EC2 API and extract bin and lib directories to the C:\EC2 directory. Now, create the following batch file:

echo off
set EC2_HOME=C:\EC2
set PATH=%PATH%;EC2_HOME%\bin
set EC2_PRIVATE_KEY=C:\EC2\PrivateKey.pem
set EC2_CERT=C:\EC2\509Certificate.pem
set JAVA_HOME=C:\Program Files\Java\jre1.6.0
“%JAVA_HOME\bin\java” -version

Go to the command prompt, execute the batch file and if all went well you should see the JRE version info.  Time to get started, first find the image you want to roll out:

ec2–describe-images -x all

IMAGE   ami-febd5897    khaz_fc4_dev_fuse_alfresco/image.manifest.xml   602961847481    available   public
IMAGE   ami-a38b6eca    amis.winelibrary.com/rails_svn.manifest.xml     609234845463    available   public
IMAGE   ami-40e50029    ezNetllcBucket/ezimage1.manifest.xml    610305670733    available       public
IMAGE   ami-268f6a4f    rightscale-images/CentOS5V1.img.manifest.xml    635201719205    available   public
IMAGE   ami-2c8f6a45    rightscale-images/FC6V2.img.manifest.xml        635201719205    available   public
IMAGE   ami-9a9e7bf3    rightscale-images/CentOS5V1_6.img.manifest.xml  635201719205    available   public
IMAGE   ami-08806561    steveodom_ec2_images/Apr022007.manifest.xml     844412190991    available   public
IMAGE   ami-8db95ce4    icn-public-ec2/debian.3-1.img.manifest.xml      845261616107    available   public
IMAGE   ami-c69471af    icn-public-ec2/fedora7-i386.img.manifest.xml    845261616107    available   public
IMAGE   ami-de9c79b7    bals/ec2/drupal/image.manifest.xml      875251158881    available       public
IMAGE   ami-be8f6ad7    mybucket-rajesh2/my-image-1.fs.manifest.xml     876813118668    available   public
IMAGE   ami-099c7960    strategoit/ec2-images/fedora7-i386.img.manifest.xml     945771494425    available       public
IMAGE   ami-85997cec    mt4/image.manifest.xml  959411691118    available       public
IMAGE   ami-83886dea    ami-jb/image_bundles/loadtester/image.manifest.xml      971351813114    available       public
IMAGE   ami-a69471cf    workspace.globus.org/hello1.manifest.xml        971725951873    available   public
IMAGE   ami-34ba5f5d    neotactics-images/fc4-base-cryptofs.manifest.xml        978951556539    available       public
IMAGE   ami-0b967362    sitemason-pub/slackware-11.0.manifest.xml       986331161080    available   public
IMAGE   ami-20b65349    ec2-public-images/fedora-core4-base.manifest.xml        amazon  available   public
IMAGE   ami-22b6534b    ec2-public-images/fedora-core4-mysql.manifest.xml       amazon  available   public
IMAGE   ami-23b6534a    ec2-public-images/fedora-core4-apache.manifest.xml      amazon  available   public
IMAGE   ami-25b6534c    ec2-public-images/fedora-core4-apache-mysql.manifest.xml        amazon  available       public
IMAGE   ami-26b6534f    ec2-public-images/developer-image.manifest.xml  amazon  available       public
IMAGE   ami-2bb65342    ec2-public-images/getting-started.manifest.xml  amazon  available       public
IMAGE   ami-bd9d78d4    ec2-public-images/demo-paid-AMI.manifest.xml    amazon  available       public  A79EC0DB

These are the public images available for rollout. They are basically shell deployments of Linux distributions that you can model into your own VM with your requirements and demands. So, lets create a certificate for SSH (certificate authentication)

ec2–add-keypair vlad-keypair

This simply creates a certificate for me to login to the virtual machine. Now, let me pick a virtual machine to use and tell it to use my certificate:

ec2–run-instances ami-9a9e7bf3 -k vlad-keypair

All set. This is where the AWS prostitute clock starts ticking, $0.10 per hour folks. This can take a few minutes because right now that instance is firing up (ie, the virtual machine is starting) so time for me to open up some inbound ports. I’m opening up SSH, http/https, ftp and some magical port for vladnet stuff.

ec2–authorize default -p 21

ec2–authorize default -p 22

ec2–authorize default -p 80

ec2–authorize default -p 443

ec2–authorize default -p 3425

Now to check on my virtual machine….

ec2–describe-instances

RESERVATION     r-0b907162      343618739966    default
INSTANCE        i-ec6d8f85      ami-9a9e7bf3                    pending         0

Notice that the vm is still starting up (pending); according to Amazon this can take up to 10 minutes. But when it does launch I will be given my URL to access this site via SSH.

INSTANCE        i-ec6d8f85      ami-9a9e7bf3    ec2-72-44-49-248.z-1.compute-1.amazonaws.com    domU-12-31-36-00-24-E4.z-1.compute-1.internal   running           0

And we’re up, my hostname as indicated above is: ec2-72-44-49-248.z-1.compute-1.amazonaws.com

The cool thing about ec2–run-instances is that I could have passed it a count parameter, firing up a number of these VMs, literally as many as I needed and could pay $0.10 per server per hour to run.

Finally, shut it down:

ec2–terminate-instances i-a0688ac9

RESERVATION     r-0b907162      343618739966    default
INSTANCE        i-ec6d8f85      ami-9a9e7bf3    ec2-72-44-49-248.z-1.compute-1.amazonaws.com    domU-12-31-36-00-24-E4.z-1.compute-1.internal   shutting-down           0

Ok, so I know you’re sitting there thinking. Ok, WTF, who cares. Well, here is a beauty of all this. Let’s imagine you had a web app that for one reason or another had 4 hours a day where the demand was just through the roof. You could either purchase 8 servers from Own Web Now and run your infrastructure on top of that or you could get the Elastic Clusters from Amazon. Here is some math for you.

Eight servers, running for four hours a day, for five days a week for four weeks a month comes out to a total monthly expenditure of $64.00

Thats sixty four dollars a month.

Now of course on top of that you have the bandwidth and storage fees but you’d have those costs everywhere else. This is huge in terms of software availability and the whole SaaS pricing because the cost of hardware and infrastructure invesment is pretty much 0. So is the infrastructure consulting and product evaluation, it makes it possible to have your entire infrastructure designed in an afternoon and be in business by the evening. And all the costs are directly proportional to your popularity which better be exponentially proportional to your revenues. How amazing is that?

So… Ladies? Hello? Anyone awake?

Fabio_01Mind you, compared to the dev work I do on ExhangeDefender and Shockey Monkey, this goes into the “exciting” category. And to think that Katie was concerned having me on the road all the time with all the hot IT women all over me… with me turning up my charm… talking about elastic clusters… scalable infrastructure… SaaS…

Note: No, I am not kidding. No, thats not really me but if you squint.. (well, really, if you close your eyes and run at a wall its pretty close) I am happily married, not taking any responsibility for the sexual attraction that may result from you reading this blog post.

“No baby, thats not a roll of quarters in my pocket. Yes I’m happy to see you but thats a roll of $100’s I’m pulling in since I moved my web app to elastic clusters. Yeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaaaaah.”’

Stalking Vlad Simplified

Posted: 11:48 am
July 30, 2007
Vladville
Comments Off on Stalking Vlad Simplified

My little AJAX / PHP / WordPress tutorial is growing (step 2 tomorrow). I’ve enabled RSS (xml feed) for the Facebook-style status update trick and will eventually show you how to build your own feeds with plain PHP. So, want to know whats on my mind without loading up Vladville? Add this to your aggregator:

http://www.vladville.com/wp-statusfeed.php

Why? Simply because I can…

Orlando ITPRO Meeting This Thursday

Posted: 11:39 am
July 30, 2007
Friends, IT Business, IT Culture
1 Comment

OrlandoitproOrlando ITPRO meeting is scheduled for this Thursday, August 2nd at 6:30 PM so come on over. It’s at the New Horizons (meeting not open to general public, must be a member of ITPRO due to confidentiality issues, lawyer speak, global warming, etc)

There are two quickie presentations up front just to get everyone started and the rest of the evening will be a roundtable discussion of everything thats going on. Thankfully it’s a slow summer with lots of folks on vacation – which makes this the best time of the year to start working hard on all the services you intend to be delivering year round. Now you can think about them, develop them, test them and all without being interrupted every 10 minutes. So… were putting our collective brain together to figure what more we can do to be successful in Orlando and Central Florida.