LANcom Technology Blog

File recovery (e.g. where we recover a deleted or overwritten Excel file) and system recovery (e.g. restoring a server that was destroyed in a flood) have been linked together for many years in the 770 type organisation. For a long time restoring one Excel file from tape was the same process, done in a different scale, as restoring the whole server. In both cases we went to the last backup tape and restored from this.

With the current Microsoft products – MS Windows 2003 Server and MS Exchange 2003 - we can configure soft deletion of items through the Windows Volume Shadow Service (VSS) and Exchange’s Store Retention Policy respectively. We can configure the server so that when a file gets deleted or an email gets deleted it in fact goes into a holding area for a week or two before it gets physically deleted. This holding area is not visible unless you go to a particular menu option in Windows or Exchange. But once there, it is easy for the user to restore. This holding time can be set to be longer than the tape cycle so is a more effective backup than tape for this kind of restoration.

This is the most common way today that we restore a deleted file on the server or a single email in Exchange. Whether recovering a single file or complete systems the two most important time parameters are the Recovery Time and Recovery Point.

The Recovery Time is the time it takes to get the data back for use or restore the system to a minimum level of operation.

For an Excel file recovered with Windows Volume Shadow Services the recovery time is minutes. With a complete restoration of a server from tape it could take days if poorly planned.

The Recovery Time for a server from tape depends on how well the restoration is planned. For example, if your plan is to purchase the same server hardware, it could take weeks for this to arrive!

The Recovery Point is the time the backup you are using was created. Ideally this should be minimised. If you are using a 30 day old backup tape your recovery time is 30 days and you will lose your last 30 days of work.

For the recovery of an Excel file the Recovery Point is conveniently the same as when the file was deleted when Windows Shadow Services is used for the recovery. This is because VSS created a copy of the deleted Excel file when it was mistakenly deleted or written over and puts it in the hidden holding area.

For a server system restoration from tape the recovery point is the age of the last backup. If you are backing up every night then the worst possible Recovery Point is 24 hours if the system fails/is stolen etc just before the backup starts.

Before VSS and Exchange Store Retention all restorations, big and small, came from tape and therefore the de facto expected Recovery Point has been 24 hours. This has had a profound impact on the way we plan for total system failure. A Recovery Point of 24 hours has been detrimental to both the Recovery Time of a complete server failure and the cost of provisioning.

Server failures happen from time to time but it is a very rare occasion that we have to completely rebuild a server from tape. That is, the disk subsystem of the failed server is unavailable. Having looked back at the last 6 years, we estimate that for any given company, this kind of failure occurs on average greater than every 20 years. Sure we have server failures.

Most of the failures have been hardware. In hardware failures other than the hard disks exercising the properly specified warranty has been the fastest way to recover the server. All the servers we provide have redundant disks that start up in the situation of a failed primary drive and this has sufficed in all but one case. There was only one occasion where all disks failed, which was a flood.

Where failure is a Windows software failure and not hardware then the disk subsystem and data on it is available. The fastest way to recover is the rebuild the server on the hard disk drives carrying the data. In 2006, if you use HP hardware with an appropriate warranty this is a very rare event.

So when you are planning for a once in 20 year event if the recovery point is pushing the recovery time out and piling on the cost then this should be looked at. Data and system security is very analogous to insurance. In this case the Recovery Point is like the insurance excess that will allow the premium to get lower as it gets higher.

This I will discuss in the next post on the matter.

This is a post created in Word 2007 and uploaded directly to this blog that contains a picture.

It was very easy to do once it was set up.

(The image was edited entirely in Word 2007 as well)

We are upgrading to Office 2007 at the LANcom offices this week.

There are many new features that I will blog about as I find them.

On first impression a lot of work has been done to make it easier to use some of the advanced features that already existed in Word.

Formatting tools like Themes seem smarter so there is no cleaning up to do if you change theme or styles.

One cool feature that is important to me is the new blog posting function.

After some (admittedly quite technical) setup I can now post directly to our Wordpress blog server.

Expect more frequent posts, less spelling mistakes and more pictures.

This post has come directly out of MS Word 2007.

Instead of printing I pressed the Publish button and it was done.

IBM research shows that NZ broadband users get attacked 100 times a day and more.

You can read the story here: http://www.nzherald.co.nz/section/story.cfm?c_id=5&objectid=10413035

This is why we provide all 770 IT Management plan customers with an industrial strength OpenBSD firewall.

Our Virusfree service stopped 9 million Spam messages
in the last four weeks. This was over 90% of all email received.

This is a huge increase.

We were stopping around 300,000 messages a month at the beginning of the year.

Without our screening service our customers would have received 9 million messages in the last month!

If you are at your browser and need a quick calculation done just put it into the Google search field and click search. Rather than a page of search results, Google will return the answer.

8 * 3 will return 24

The ‘whitebox’ supplier has two advantages – performance and cost – although the advantage of each has been diminishing in recent years. Local suppliers don’t carry any research and development overhead or the large support infrastructure of the international companies and this keeps their costs down. And by comparison they buy components (like processors) in tiny shipments allowing them to start shipping the fastest components as soon as they are available.

This last advantage is actually a disadvantage on a site of any size. There is far greater benefit in being able to open any computer at a site and be sure of the components inside than there is having a few faster computers at the expense of uncertainty.

The price gap has narrowed as well.

For HP longer production runs for each model help immensely with troubleshooting issues. For an HP server running Windows 2003 the large installed base from their production runs (many thousands) and extensive engineering staff (many thousands again) means that HP are aware of almost all the compatibility issues. Local vendors can only speculate at best. They can often have less than 100 units of your server in the field and have no engineering resource to collate in the field data from even these small numbers.

The hardware game is a high capital game with tight margins. For companies with thin balance sheets (i.e. New Zealand companies) it is difficult to survive and there has been a high attrition rate. Local companies maintain far less warranty stock both because of cost and the huge variation in componentry in their installed base.

For these reason local assemblers tend to do well with home users, small business and the education sector where cost demands diminish the risks. For all other business the choices are HP, IBM Dell, Acer, Toshiba and other billion dollar international megaliths.

There are two main sources of computer hardware in New Zealand – international manufacturers like HP, IBM, Acer, and Toshiba and local ‘white box’ suppliers like Ultra, Gamma, Advantage.

HP (formally Hewlett Packard) is typical of the international manufacturer.

• They are a US based company with manufacturing, sales and distribution resources across the world.
• HP has some 60 billion dollars in annual sales.
• HP makes servers, workstations, notebooks and PDAs (personal digital assistants). 
• Their production runs for each model runs between tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands.
• They maintain huge research and engineering capability.

IBM, HP and Dell dominate this segment. Companies like Acer and Toshiba are strong players as well.

‘White box’ manufacturers get their name because the equipment is normally shipped in unbranded boxes.

• They are typically local companies assembling their computers in New Zealand from imported parts.
• The biggest have turnovers in the tens of millions
• They assemble servers and workstations. They will re-badge notebooks and PDAs bought from other suppliers.
• Their production runs for each model runs between hundreds and a few thousand.
• They have no research capability and very limited engineering capability

A nice two page summary on that state of play with Spam today from the NY Times can be read here.

It is written in everyday language most users can understand without leaving out anything important.

I went on holiday to Europe in July this year with my partner. We went to a travel fair in our first week of planning for the trip and were quoted about $4800 for a round the world fare to and from Europe flying either One World or Star Alliance.

It was a big trip so we shopped around for airline tickets. What we quickly found was that the nominal price of an economy return ticket to Europe varied considerably – from $1800 through to over $5000. This was huge variation for what was nominally the same service – get one person to Europe and back. Sometimes two different fares used the same carrier and we would have been flying in the same plane and probably the same seats, but at a different price depending on the ticket.

Every time we dug deeper on a cheaper fare we found out that there were special conditions that were not acceptable.  The cheaper fare had limited to no flexibility, parts missing or incompatible limitations on mileage or stopovers. If we were prepared to do without safeguards (have fixed unchangeable/non refundable dates) and fly only to one mandated stop-over city (Singapore/Hong Kong/Dubai depending) and do without the extras (like free internal European travel) we could have qualified for the cheap fares. Most often after purchasing the extras (like internal Europe travel) separately and adding the left out costs (fuel surcharges and taxes) the total cost was marginally more or less than the original $4800 offer.

In the end we spent a lot of time learning what our travel agents had already known and took the $4800 fare originally offered.

The headlines of the advertisements of special travel deals kept on making me feel that I was paying too much. But whenever I investigated there was always a matching downside to the saving in feature, service or risk.

If you are in business and haven’t thought that you are paying too much for computer hardware, at least some time in the past few years, you would be unusual. Seemingly similar computers can vary in price by 20 – 25%. Sometimes the same computer model bought from two different sources and the price can vary by 15% and more.

What’s going on?

Plenty and when you explore the details there are always trade-offs between cost, features, service and risk. Some of these elements are not so obvious.

The devil is in the details – in computer hardware and travel. It is not surprising. Both are complex products that are presented in simplified format because to present all the details would overwhelm the customer.

So we understand the problem. What you want to know is the answer. “How can I buy hardware and know that I am getting the best value?”.

There needs to be education. I will be blogging more on this subject explaining how computer hardware gets to you and price differences and value appreciation.

There also could be better ways to do this. In the next few weeks we will be canvassing you in this blog and directly (if you are a customer) about better ways for you to see the value in your hardware purchases. We have a few ideas to share.