Securing Your Virtual Growth

Can Windows and Mac OS co-exist peacefully?

The desktop/laptop market is most certainly dominated by Microsoft Windows as it has been for many years now. This is especially true amongst business users as the overwhelming majority of business applications run on Microsoft Windows. However, the market share for Apple’s Mac OS is on the rise, and has been for the last 5-10 years. In the last year alone, Apple’s market share has grown nearly 30% and currently stands at 10.9% (Source: Ars Technica) And while Microsoft rules in the business world, Apple has always enjoyed a strong following amongst educational institutions.

Apple provides a robust suite of utilities in their iLife programs that many students use to create DVD’s, presentations, photo projects, web sites, etc. When students graduate and begin their careers, many will need to understand Microsoft Windows based applications as well in order to be competitive in the job market. So many schools are beginning to use mixed environments of both Macintosh and Windows based PC’s in their curriculum. This gives the student a good mix of both systems and better prepares them to be ready for whatever computing platform they may find themselves using when they start their career.

While this mix of computing is wonderful for students, it can wreak havoc on the technology administrators who have to maintain the computing systems. In many cases you find institutions that have separate usernames and passwords for both platforms and have varying capabilities in terms of desktop and user management. This type of scenario is a system administrator’s worst nightmare as they lose the ability to properly maintain the computing environment. So what is the answer? For many, Active Directory and Open Directory Integration.

Active Directory (AD) and Open Directory (OD) are two separate directory services based on the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol. Both are responsible for storing user account information, computer account information, information regarding shared files and folders on servers, management settings for desktops, etc. AD is the directory service utilized by Microsoft Windows based servers while OD is utilized by Apple Mac OS Servers. In the past they were used separately which meant having your Windows computers and users tied into AD while your Mac OS computers and users were tied into OD. And since the two systems are incapable of synchronizing user account information, this meant two accounts for all users that utilize both systems. That has all changed in the last few years as work has been done to allow the two systems to integrate with one another making the job of the system administrator much easier.

So how does it all work? Generally speaking you would have at least one Microsoft Windows Active Directory server and one Mac OS X Open Directory Server. The Mac OS X server would be bound to the Windows AD server, and all Mac OS X clients are then bound to both directory services. Once setup and configured properly, this allows for seamless usage of the systems in your environment by the end users. A student can go to their Intro to Business class and login to a Microsoft Windows computer to run applications like Microsoft Office, QuickBooks, etc. and then go to Intro to Web Design the next hour and login to an Apple Mac OS X computer using the same account to run applications like Adobe InDesign, iLife, etc, making their life much easier!

What about the system administrator though? How does this benefit them? Well for starters they have half the accounts to manage! All user accounts are stored in Active Directory so no account management is necessary in Open Directory. This also makes setting up file shares and home drives much easier. Since the same accounts can be used on both Windows and Mac OS X computers, file shares and permissions only have to be setup once. The user can then access his or her files regardless of what operating system they are using. This also allows for the most thorough desktop management capabilities possible. The system administrator can utilize Group Policies to manage various aspects of the Microsoft Windows computers such as access to system settings, ability to install applications, etc. Likewise, they can utilize Managed Preferences in Open Directory to control the same types of settings on the Apple Mac OS computers. The end result is an environment in which both of the major computing platforms can be utilized seamlessly with minimal impact on the users or the system administrators.

Setting up this type of environment definitely requires planning and a thorough understanding of both Active Directory and Open Directory, but if the system administrator is willing to put in a little bit of time gaining an understanding of how to integrate these two technologies, Windows and Mac OS can most certainly co-exist peacefully in your environment.

Justin is a Lead Solutions Analyst at Infrastructure Technology Solutions, and blogs (from his Mac) at www.iowatechtalk.com

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Justin, August 10th 2010 | Tags: active directory, Apple, integration, mac, open directory, windows
Posted in Business Solutions, Education

Citrix XenServer 5.6

We use Citrix XenServer in our Datacenter for hosting virtual instances. We have been using Citrix since version 5.0 and really feel it enhances the products and services we are able to offer our customers. I recently participated in a few XenServer webinars highlighting these new features:

Increased Scalability
Dynamic Memory Control
Heterogeneous Pools
Memory Snapshots
Role Based Administration
Workload Balancing with Power Management

Many of these features sparked my interest. The Dynamic Memory Control allows you to set memory ranges for the virtual machines so you can have more memory allocated then what the machine physically contains. The memory on each of the virtual machines will adjust on the fly without rebooting.

The Workload and Balancing with Power Management is a great feature as we try to make our data centers “Green”. The power management features enable you to configure the XenServer cluster to consolidate all of your servers on as few host machines as possible. Once all of the virtual machines are migrated or shutdown for the night, the machine will shutdown the physical box on a scheduled basis. When the down machine needs to be booted up and have virtual machines migrated back over, the Power Management feature powers it back on. The host servers have either iLO or DRAC, which are the remote management technologies from HP and Dell.

One of the most impressive features was the Increased Scalability. Each host can have up to 64 logical processors, 256 GB of RAM as well as 16 NICs. A host machine with specs like that would be able to run many virtual machines.

The Heterogeneous Pools allow you to run different types of hardware in your cluster. For example, if you have a cluster of 3 servers running on last year’s Intel Xeon 5400 processors and want to add more to your cluster but can’t purchase the same hardware, you can use the Heterogeneous Pools to mix and match. With this new feature you could mix in some Intel Xeon 5500 processors, or even mix Intel and AMD systems – though the live migrate feature will not work.

These are a few of the features I am excited to implement – for further information, check out Citrix’s HCL. If you are interested in testing Citrix XenServer, there is a free version available for download. Look to future blogs for more about Citrix’s products.

Ben is a Solutions Analyst at Infrastructure Technology Solutions, and blogs from http://blog.benbosquared.com/

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Ben, August 4th 2010 | Tags: 5.6, Citrix, Virtualization, xenserver
Posted in Virtualization

OpenStack opens opportunities, reservations

Open source technologies may have previously conjured images of geeks poring over code to modify and compile, and companies too poor to afford the real thing, but open source offerings are now driving new developments and spawning technological revolutions. Cloud computing is following suit and opening its code, technology, platforms and forums to the masses.

OpenStack is the moniker given to the project that involves such names as Rackspace, NASA, Citrix and Dell, and it hopes to unite the cloud computing arena behind one community-driven platform. The project specifically deals with Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and cloud storage. Rackspace is donating its code to the OpenStack project and NASA’s Nebula coordinates and powers arguably one of the most robust cloud services out there. It is being released under the Apache 2.0 license.

Current public cloud computing providers boast specific and unique platforms to manage data and applications. While this adds exclusive features, it also creates a culture of vendor lock-in, proprietary formats and customer hesitance. Their open source counterparts give developers and end users an opportunity to deploy an infrastructure based on a community-driven software stack. While the platform is still young, massive adoption across cloud vendors and private cloud users would mean great success; and draw more enterprise clients to the cloud for services. Prospective clients would also be able to evaluate cloud service platforms based on the value of their services and not their core technology.

Interoperability between platforms would also be a key factor for enterprises seeking to utilize multiple public cloud providers for redundancy in the same way that many of us depend on multiple telecommunication carriers.

It’s clear that businesses and government entities are leery of current public cloud services, but many are still taking advantage of cost-savings and accessibility with private clouds. The OpenStack initiative could potentially draw more public and private cloud clients; businesses are building private clouds first for their more sensitive data and could easily bridge their existing infrastructure to public cloud services as data needs increase and security fears are calmed. Users of Amazon’s cloud product, EC2, can currently use open-source Eucalyptus to build a private cloud and easily integrate with EC2 for public cloud needs. Making OpenStack open source and interoperable will develop the same private/public cloud relations for many other cloud vendors.

Many question how vibrant the OpenStack community will be, and how the open source initiative will affect competition in price and services. It appears that OpenStack will draw users from the technology community, but it’s unclear how much public cloud providers will push OpenStack when users come their way, and how large the user group will extend beyond already cloud-savvy users.

I’m excited to see where OpenStack goes and how it drives the technologies and market, and expect that this is just the first of many movements regarding cloud management.

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Joel Althoff, August 3rd 2010 | Tags: Cloud Computing, open source, openstack, Rackspace
Posted in Cloud Computing

The Annoyance of Encrypted Searches

A month ago, Google rolled out its encrypted search option, which allows users exploring through https://www.google.com to seemingly search in stealth mode.

For public library and internet cafe users, bored private sector employees, and non-American Googlers, this news was heralded with great excitement and a flurry of key presses; nobody can see what we are Googling anymore! (To be fair, I must also mention that Firefox also rolled out an extension last week called HTTPS Everywhere that encrypts data between users and sites whenever possible, but I haven’t had a chance to read more on the release.)

For many other users and network administrators, encrypted searches are a minor annoyance.

For example, our K-12 Education clients that rely on federal E-rate funding for bandwidth and internet related hardware must comply with the Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA). Adherence to CIPA policies requires that schools design and implement a policy that monitors the online activity of minors. Allowing students to use encrypted searches, whether through Google or elsewhere, violates CIPA and a school’s qualifications for E-rate funding. Google is aware of the issue, and recently changed the url of their encrypted search to https://encrypted.google.com. Schools looking to block access to Google’s encrypted search engine should be able to do so within their URL filters or by blocking access to the above hostname.

Earlier I said that nobody could see what you were Googling when you used the encrypted search, but that isn’t exactly true. Google still tracks and compiles that data, but webmasters and others that rely on analytics and search engine data to judge the effectiveness of their sites, products and marketing campaigns will no longer see what keywords led viewers to a specific webpage when using an encrypted search. For many of our web hosting clients, this is dismal news. Small- and medium- businesses typically depend on their website as the hub of their marketing presence. If consumers are led to a site through an encrypted search, businesses will see the same statistics as if the consumer had simply typed the address in the browser without using Google’s encrypted search.

Many businesses will also find that encrypted searches are not allowed in their company Internet access/privacy policy. We typically recommend that a privacy policy read something like this:

NO EXPECTATION OF PRIVACY- Employees are given computers and Internet access to assist them in the performance of their jobs. Employees should have no expectation of privacy in anything they create, store, send or receive using the company’s computer equipment. The computer network is the property of the Company and may be used only for Company purposes. WAIVER OF PRIVACY RIGHTS- User expressly waives any right of privacy in anything they create, store, send or receive using the company’s computer equipment or Internet access. User consents to allow company personnel access to and review of all materials created, stored, sent or received by User through any Company network or Internet connection. MONITORING OF COMPUTER AND INTERNET USAGE – The Company has the right to monitor and log any and all aspects of its Computer system including, but not limited to, monitoring Internet sites visited by Users, monitoring chat and newsgroups, monitoring file downloads, and all communications sent and received by users. Failure to monitor in specific situations is not a waiver of the Company’s right to monitor. BLOCKING SITES WITH INAPPROPRIATE CONTENT- The Company has the right to utilize software that makes it possible to identify and block access to Internet sites containing sexually explicit or other material deemed inappropriate in the workplace.

If Google’s encrypted search remains an optional tool, it will remain just a minor annoyance for IT staff. But, if Google favors the encrypted search for its sole search engine, schools, webmasters and businesses may be Googling for a new search engine.

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Joel Althoff, June 29th 2010 | Tags: cipa, encrypted, engine, firefox, google, schools, search, Security
Posted in Education, Security

Riptides

While attending the Ingram-Micro Spring Partner Connection Summit this May in sunny Hollywood, Florida, I watched lifeguards rescue swimmer after swimmer that lost track of their location in the ocean and were pulled out to sea in a dangerous riptide.

My wife and I couldn’t understand why swimmers weren’t splashing within the limits of the buoys – each time the lifeguards hauled someone in, they pointed out the buoys to the rescued swimmers AND to any swimmers within shouting distance on the beach.

A few days later, when we boarded a vessel for an off-shore snorkel adventure, we found just how easy it is to be whisked away by waves and scenery. While observing the schools of fish beneath us, I popped my head up to see how close we were to the dive flag the marked our boundaries. Mere inches!

We sometimes find ourselves in similar situations when working with small businesses; they may be unaware that they are caught in an undercurrent of poor technology practices, hardware purchases, dismal security and poor policies. Once businesses feel the pull and pressure of the current, they panic. Businesses fight the waves and current instead of swimming parallel to the shore into the clear waters of prosperity and growth.

While we are happy to lifeguard for clients and rescue them from a sea of break-fix spending, we find much more satisfaction in working with clients to place buoys in the area where they are comfortable swimming. Swimming within the buoys helps them stay clear of the dangerous break/fix riptides and enjoy the many benefits of leveraging technology to move their businesses forward.

A marketing session at the conference asked us to take a closer look at our passions to determine where to focus our marketing efforts.

Our passion is providing total support and peace of mind to our clients.

Iowa Data Centers and Infrastructure Technology Solutions – Trusted, IT solutions.

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Joel Althoff, June 16th 2010 | Tags: consulting, small business, SMB, technology
Posted in Solutions

Evaluating 1:1 Initiatives

I was talking with a school administrator recently that is retiring from his Superintendent’s position this June.

Earlier this year, his School Board had been discussing and planning a 1:1 laptop initiative. The Superintendent is tech-saavy; he can knowledgeably reboot servers and run commands from terminal, but also knows how to make technology work as a tool and learning companion in his school. He felt obligated to inform me that because he, the technological innovator of their school community, was leaving, there would be no 1:1 initiative next year for sure.

I thanked him for thinking of us, and said, “To be honest with you, I’m glad they are delaying the 1:1.”

While he was surprised at my remark, he agreed wholeheartedly.

I continued to explain that often when we see 1:1 initiatives fail, the school has done their homework on hardware, policies, installation, etc., but hasn’t really thought about how to integrate these tools into their classroom. Instead of multi-media tools, students have a personal (and pricey) word processing device, calculator and entertainment vessel.

Researchers draw the same conclusion: 1:1 initiatives are only good when they are in the hands of teachers that are already innovators in lesson planning and collaboration, and in a school community where administrators set strong models for technology integration. The administrator I was speaking to would have had great success with a 1:1 initiative next year, because his staff already knows how to get the best learning experience from the technology they currently have.

They place the technology in the hands of learners, create developmentally appropriate learning opportunities, and know how to drive value from technology assets. It’s too bad that a 1:1 initiative wasn’t realized two years ago, giving the Superintendent time to implement the program before reaching his retirement this year – we all could have learned from their success.

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Joel Althoff, June 5th 2010 | Tags: 1:1, initiatives, k-12, laptop
Posted in Education

Schooled in the Cloud

Cloud computing and collaborative environments topped the 2010 Horizon Report of technologies to watch and expect in the K-12 arena for the coming year, and both private companies and publicly funded entities are creating and merging products to meet that expectation.

Infrastructure Technology Solutions serves 20+ K-12 education clients throughout Eastern Iowa with security cameras, consulting, web design, web hosting, firewalls and content filtering, and data backup.

Many of these K-12 clients are also one of 54 schools/districts served by Grant Wood Area Education Association (GWAEA). There are ten AEAs throughout the State of Iowa, which are state funded and have no taxing authority. Instead, they are funded via a per-pupil ratio determined by the Legislature and other governing bodies, as well as grant money and sale of services.

GWAEA provides a myriad of solutions and services for our local schools; lending libraries, child support teams, parent and educator training opportunities, graphics and printing, and managed/hosted services.

From hosting payroll and budget applications, to email and websites, GWAEA serves as a model of how schools can use cloud computing to eliminate costs and increase efficiencies. While some of the hosted offerings at GWAEA might be better defined as software as a service (SaaS), it is certainly exciting to see our public schools and associated bodies evolving technology right along with -or ahead of – the private sector.

Schools are no stranger to hosted services, and it makes sense. When schools use hosted solutions (via GWAEA or elsewhere) for business and student management programs, schools can concentrate on integration of technology in the classroom and maintaining equipment used daily by staff and students for learning and growing. Schools can also take advantage of local training opportunities when a group of schools use the same budgeting tools or student management systems, and have a larger support network.

As schools begin to take advantage of more cloud computing services, they will have the ability to grow their network space during times of peak usage. Yearly events such as student registration, fiscal year planning, benefits enrollment and parent-teacher conference scheduling can burst into the cloud when needed, and shrink back to the original allocation after the usage has subsided.

With the advent of state-wide academic expectations known as Iowa Core Curriculum, Iowa and its AEAs have a tremendous opportunity to provide collaborative environments for students and educators as well. Companies like Pearson, Google, Microsoft and ePals are rolling out new products to excite and engage students across the curriculum.

Education is evolving, and our Iowa schools and AEAs are right on track.

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Leslie Althoff, April 28th 2010 | Tags: challenges, cloud, horizon report, k-12, school, trends
Posted in Cloud Computing, Education

Smart Web Strategies for Small Business

Before we built our data center and developed our consulting offerings, we built a lot of web sites for customers. With a guy to write code and a guy with a sharp eye for design, and we could roll out sites that showcased businesses’ products and services fairly quickly.

The customers we worked with didn’t necessarily have a background in html, and couldn’t easily edit their pages without some sort of specialized software. Rather than encouraging clients to purchase Dreamweaver or Contribute, we wrote a Content Management System (CMS) that provided a user-friendly interface for inputting and editing information on the site.

Now, we turn to Wordpress.

WordPress helps small and large business alike have a website that’s easy to maintain by providing a built-in content management system. While WordPress has several free themes to start you on your website adventures, a little knowledge of html and CSS will take you ever further. Custom coding and sites can easily be developed to take advantage of all WordPress has to offer as well.

In addition to the CMS, WordPress is an open-source platform, which means that developers are constantly adding new plugins, themes and tools for other users and developers. These plugins are snippets of code that run in your website to help you flash through photos in a gallery, connect clients to your social networking sites, provide a “contact us” form, or even count and track visitors to your new website.

A simple and secure WordPress login allows users to author, edit and publish pages on the website, depending on the amount of permissions given to them.

After converting our website to WordPress, we are excited to roll out our first client sites in the next few weeks. We know that our clients are excited to have a web presence that is eye-appealing, user-friendly, and cost-effective. And, we are excited to show you what a WordPress site can do for your business.

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Leslie Althoff, April 8th 2010 | Tags: cms, small business, Web Design, wordpress
Posted in Education, Web Design

Broadband Buzz

My wife loves to tell people how we happened upon the parcel of land that is now Infrastructure Technology Solutions (ITS); we simply followed the fiber.

No, we didn’t drive around Eastern Iowa aimlessly following neon orange fiber markers – we simply took note of which fiber ran where in the areas that could support a data center. Multiple fiber providers happened to intersect on one parcel of land and provided the redundancy we sought, and the land happened to be for sale.

During the purchasing process we also discovered that two power companies served the parcel, which sweetened the deal immensely.

ITS is fortunate in its find: broadband availability in Eastern Iowa can be spotty, especially in rural areas and smaller communities. Finding multiple providers to service one municipality is especially rare.

Leading up to the release of the National Broadband Plan, cities in Iowa began announcing plans to compete in Google’s “think big with a gig” contest that utilizes dark fiber Google began quietly purchasing in 2005. Ames, Des Moines and Iowa City have all released grassroots web campaigns to woo Google and make a case for the awesome things their city could do with faster and more affordable broadband.

If Google’s gig doesn’t choose your city, perhaps the US Government will. Below we have listed several of the main goals of the National Broadband Plan (from http://www.broadband.gov/) recently released by the FCC, and shared our thoughts and experiences where appropriate. We would love to hear yours, as well.

Goal No. 1: At least 100 million U.S. homes should have affordable access to actual download speeds of at least 100 megabits per second and actual upload speeds of at least 50 megabits per second.

Do you know what your current download and upload speeds are, and what that even means? We use the websites www.speedtest.net and www.speakeasy.net/speedtest to test bandwidth when we are testing equipment and setups.

Most LAN networks were, and many still are, 100 megabits/second. Picture moving around the internet at the speed that you could move around a snappy network at school or at the office – nice, right? Adding the component of Cloud Computing makes more robust bandwidth even more exciting – you could have a snappy, LAN-like connection with your data no matter where it is stored.

Even more importantly, downloading information at 100 megabits per seconds also means that you can stream your Netflix or download your iTunes movies fluently.

Goal No. 2: The United States should lead the world in mobile innovation, with the fastest and most extensive wireless networks of any nation.

Doing business at the speed of light…does that mean we can finally get iPhones in this area?

Goal No. 3: Every American should have affordable access to robust broadband service, and the means and skills to subscribe if they so choose.

Goal No. 4: Every community should have affordable access to at least 1 gigabit per second broadband service to anchor institutions such as schools, hospitals, and government buildings.

Schools can currently take advantage of e-Rate – a government program that provides up to a 90% discount for schools and libraries that qualify based on free/reduced-lunch numbers and rural/urban location.

However, schools applying for E-Rate discounts cannot use equipment funded by those monies to provided internet access to communities, whether acting as an ISP or opening the computer lab for after-hours users.

If E-Rate funding increased (something we haven’t seen in ten years), could schools with powerful broadband connectivity become an internet hub for their communities? If so, how would schools handle the filter settings they must comply with when accepting E-Rate funding. Would second-hand users of the school broadband be limited by the same filters?

Goal No. 5: To ensure the safety of American communities, every first responder should have access to a nationwide, wireless, interoperable broadband public safety network.

Goal No. 6: To ensure that America leads in the clean energy economy, every American should be able to use broadband to track and manage their real-time energy consumption.

It will be interesting to see how providers and government entities prepare to address nationwide broadband concerns, and how that impacts businesses, communities and consumers.

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Joel Althoff, March 20th 2010 | Tags: broadband, Cloud Computing, Iowa, plan
Posted in News

Goal No. 1: At least 100 million U.S. homes should have affordable access to actual download speeds of at least 100 megabits per second and actual upload speeds of at least 50 megabits per second.

Goal No. 2: The United States should lead the world in mobile innovation, with the fastest and most extensive wireless networks of any nation.

Goal No. 3: Every American should have affordable access to robust broadband service, and the means and skills to subscribe if they so choose.

Goal No. 4: Every community should have affordable access to at least 1 gigabit per second broadband service to anchor institutions such as schools, hospitals, and government buildings.

Goal No. 5: To ensure the safety of American communities, every first responder should have access to a nationwide, wireless, interoperable broadband public safety network.

Goal No. 6: To ensure that America leads in the clean energy economy, every American should be able to use broadband to track and manage their real-time energy consumption.

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