So you're just breaking into the infrastructure world and now you're discovering the true meaning of a SLA. Your new client is telling you that we need "Four Nine's Reliability". Well great, but what does that mean exactly?

First get over to this website and determine just how long your website can afford to be down. In this case you're allowed 5 ~minutes a month before you're in trouble.

So great you tell yourself. You can do this, with 2 WFE's and 2 application servers in the backend with a SQL Cluster node, the odds of a failure knocking everything out are about a zillion to one right? (Note not actual numbers).

Whoa...hold on there newb, you are not wise in the ways of SLA. Remember a few points.

• Virtual Machines, they've made it spectacularly easy for hardware to fail mulitple machines at once. Make damn sure your virtualized machines have some sort of backup capability in and of themselves. VMWare typically excels at this, and is my favorite tool for virtualizing environments, period...be wise in the way of the VMWare Server...
• While the odds of a dual server failure are slim, ask yourself what are the odds of a total site failure? Think Earthquake's, Tornado's, Floods, etc. evaluate the environment your datacenter is in and start thinking about how fast you can recover from a site failure. I'll give you another hint, VMWare rocks here as well...but there are still some manual steps occasionally involved that may take you longer than 5 minutes...formulate your plans.

So don't just say 4 nine's reliability, MEAN it. Critical data is at stake here...

I really should try to write up my blog more than once a quarter, but I hardly ever think of anything good to cover, people want to help? Suggest stuff to write about and I might just go for it!

Anyways today's subject, Code rewriting. If you're a fan of Joel Spolsky's work, he has railed against ground up rebuilding your product, but then reneged and said it can be a good idea under some circumstances. I tend to agree with this, but let me share with you a story of code rewrite gone wrong (note, names have been changed to protect the innocent).

Right out of college I worked for a company called Data Storm. This company made a database product called E4. Which while a niche product had a few industries it was succesful in, mostly because it was really fast by most benchmarks, according to their statements, Oracle and SQL Server had nothing on them. Which may have been the truth from what I've seen. However this product ran in a dos command prompt and was getting a bit dated in features, look and feel. The time was coming to replace this product for the 21st century.

So Data Storm gets together and decides to build a new product, we'll call it LionReason. This product was supposed to be the relational database killer, to put Oracle and SQL Server into their graves. Midway through the development of this product is when I joined Data Storm and got to see some of these events unfold.

My job function at Data Storm was to do customer support for a few new extensions to allow Data Storm's E4 product to talk with Microsoft .NET products. However I had always been disappointed by the amount of support given to these extensions. These extensions at least allowed the old to talk to the new in some fashion. However only 3-4 engineers and 2 support personnel were allocated to this project at best. In fact this was a common theme at Data Storm, with maybe 5-6 engineers total working on Data Storms E4 products in general. The rest of the company's Research and Development were going to this Lion Reason product.

In doing this the company was making a dangerous "Hail Mary" play. In that:

• They were betting, perhaps too hard that Lion Reason was going to succeed, it wasn't.
• They were betting that legacy customers would hang on to their old systems until Lion Reason was ready, they didn't. In fact the common use for these .NET extensions were to enable a gateway to migrate to products like SQL Server. Ouch...

Needless to say at last look the company Data Storm is hovering at near bankruptcy now, with little hope of recovery unless some brilliant management takes the helm, which currently seems doubtful. However I still keep in touch with a few of my former co-workers at the company and have made some good friends there. Also this company launched me further into .NET and helped shape me into the consultant I am today. So I have much to thank Data Storm for...

Moral of the story, it's fine to rewrite code from scratch, but remember the products that got you where you are...

Some of you may have just noticed, my blog is now missing the Amazon associates crap. Finally got around to removing that after they stopped paying Colorado residents. Not that I was making much anyways, kinda sad they couldn't come to an agreement though.

Anyways I've been now in Newark setting up a big SharePoint server farm now, and have had to answer the tough question "Just how big should the farm be?" from here we start talking about availability, performance, etc...let me make this short and sweet, start with the basics:

• 1 SQL Server
• 1 Index Server
• 2 Web Front Ends load balanced with Search Services behind them
• 1 "Everything Else" Server

• Cluster the SQL Server, remember this is your data, high availability very good
• Split out apps even further, SharePoint is good at self-balancing all but the index server, if you notice a particular app "pegging" in performance monitor time to buy a new server to split out the loads.
• SQL Server is typically very heaily hit, some of the first things you'll do is break out more storage engines on separate hard drives, offloading the bigger sites to these hard dries to further distribute the load, ultimately you may be doing so with a new SQL Server

Just break out your performance monitor tools when the users start to complain and be a good sleuth...analyze what is "pegged" (Disk? Memory? Network?) and start working accordingly. Infrastructure guys in particular are good at this, use them well in your organization to get the vital clues you need...

God is anyone still out there?

Well if you are, it has been busy, right now in Newark NJ on a SharePoint migration assignment. It's going ok but remember people, have hardware available and together first before calling consultant up :-) makes things go a lot smoother.

I'll probably write a more detailed case study on this one when it's done, and maybe some of my other experiences lately in the SharePoint consulting world, stay tuned!

Originally I decided to go with ADT for home security at our place. There is a nasty spike in violent crime in our neighborhood and I figured an alarm might be a good idea for a first line of defense. So I give them a call and after some talking we come to an agreement. However I decided that $35/month and a 3 year contract is just too much on the backend for an alarm system and call back a few days later to cancel.

So today I get a call back from an "ADT Hit Man" who decides to offer me an extra year of free monitoring to sweeten the deal. After I told him that the main "pain point" was this 3 year agreement they're making me sign, they dismiss it with "well it's standard in the industry." Funny my alarm guys that I ultimately went with only asked for a one year agreement. Ultimately ADT does nothing to address my problem with going with them and a customer is gone.

I would have like to think that ADT might have been able to salvage the deal had they maybe offered to reduce or waive the contract in exchange for some more up front costs. Instead they tried to keep me longer even if a part of the deal was free. Not what I would consider smart selling. Also they tried to convince me my other alarm guys offered lousy monitoring for $8/month. Be VERY careful how you bash the competition in sales, makes you look unprofessional as well.

Oh well ADT, if you had played this right we might have had a deal.

So you're trying to leave for the day, but as you shut down, windows starts with "Installing update 1 of 36" *sigh* has it been that long? You now have a few choices

• Be late to wherever you're going
• Force a shutdown and risk corruption

I really do wish Microsoft would think about putting in a "cancel at the next install" option so you can cancel midway. This can just suck...

I know, been nearly a month since I last put up anything in my blog, anyone still there?

Well if so, sorry, see how much free time you have for blogging when you're buying a new house and starting at a new client in your job. Yup, I'm only now getting my sanity back.

Recent annoyance I didn't need though, about 1.5 months ago my Wife's laptop broke, no explainable reason, looked like hardware granted the power button wouldn't even work, always died on startup. So I get an RMA and send my laptop back to Toshiba.

I takes them about a month to get a new part for the laptop which was mildly annoying but if the part isn't available the part isn't available. In the meantime we reconcile to having only 2 computers in the house instead of 3. However when the laptop comes back, they've reformatted the drive, this was really annoying seeing as there was hardly a reason and I re-installed the OS 2 weeks before. Toshiba, was that really necessary? I would have appreciated a phone call asking if it was ok to hose my computer first. Fortunately I had a backup though, even though it was taken a week before it broke. So I re-installed over Toshiba's install and restored.

By the way, for a good backup system I'd heartily recommend IDrive as they've now been tested for a restore and passed with flying colors, for $50/year per user it's great stuff.

So I log in today to Yahoo and check my news and comics feed, only to discover my comics feed is gone, replaced by a new app saying "click here to setup your comics", so I click in to find that half my comics are gone, and the app makes the remaining ones impossible to read, WTF?

I start thinking about setting up RSS feeds for my favorite comics but for the most part the RSS feeds are crap, making you click on a link to view your comic (amidst a pile of ads). How dumb!

Oh well, one step backwards for the world of comics I suppose. I'm now forced to reading my newspaper for my comic fix.

First I did it not too long ago, signed up for one of those FREE RINGTONE services on accident, and wound up coughing up $9/month until I texted them a STOP.

Now it's my wife's turn, to the tune of $14/month.

I was thinking though, these services are strictly single opt-in online, if you wanted to be really mean to someone, you could sign them up online to every single one you can find for about $1,000/month. Anyone want to be my worst enemy now?