TechnologyProfessionalOrg

Storage Virtualization

2009-06-09T00:50:00.000-07:00

Introduction

Storage virtualization is the assembling of physical storage from multiple devices so that it is looked at as a single storage entity, which very much simplifies its organization and management. Implicit in storage virtualization is the idea of integrating a large amount of a corporation’s data to the new program. It imparts a great opportunity to accomplish some of the things that have been on your company’s list of responsibilities to undertake.

There are three methods to storage and these are:

Network Attached Storage

Network Attached Storage (NAS) enables files to be communal over an Ethernet network. A change from when files were stored within a server, SUN Microsystems built the Network File System (NFS) protocol that permits users to access a file on a distant computer as if it were their own. Later, Microsoft developed the Common Internet File System (CIFS) protocol that allows NAS to be utilized with Windows-based machines.

Storage Area Network

While older storage technology demanded disks to be attached directly to servers over short-range cables, Storage Area Network (SAN) allowed the connection of multiple servers to multiple shared disks from a special network. Sharing the disks improved competence and became more realistic to execute high availability features and a common backup solution. SAN technology requires high reliability, low dormancy, high-bandwidth networks, which frequently run proprietary protocols over fiber optic connections.

Internet-Based Storage

This is also known as “cloud” storage, Internet-based storage, an promising substitute, uses the pervasiveness of the Internet to offer users online storage, sometimes even free of charge. Several vendors also submit more than ordinary storage by including file management and collaboration tools. While the potential for Internet-based storage is incredible, companies have to address key issues and concerns like security more comprehensively. With key companies like Google publicizing a venture into online storage, Internet-based storage is likely to go through prompt expansion.

Storage remains the trend in the data center. Over the last number of years, the rate of increase of storage resources has been amazing, driven by applications that have a greater desire for more, larger files and a variety of performance requirements. Storage sellers have been launching storage virtualization technologies to check out and help user organizations acquire greater control on how they organize, move, manage and finally handle resource utilization of these storage assets.

These technologies finally offer three views that manage to well-defined and genuine benefits:

A user view that lets individuals and developers to distinguish the specific storage resources under their control.
A resource management view that provides an instrument for mapping resources to potentials at a delivery level.
An operational view that efficiently conducts the ongoing arrangements of one-time resources necessary to deliver committed services at the storage level.

The benefits of storage virtualization can be important, noticeably reducing the cost of configuring storage and moving data, simplifying the handling of resource utilization decisions and even addressing accounting inquiries concerning how much an application, user or group make use of storage at various implementation levels.

However, even as these technologies verify progressively more beneficial and powerful, user organizations must be very particular to be aware that the front side (services) virtualization work is not negligible. Servers, files and other types of resources should be inconspicuously named and recognized so that a strong virtualization set of resources can be described and managed in an continuing way.

Over the next few years, users ought to start operating virtualization technologies in application domains where the cost of design, movement and processing of storage are tremendously high. All the while approaching their traders to acquire new and additional significant methods to simplify and ultimately combine technologies for handling the front side virtualization metadata and resources.

Marketing is Design

2009-06-06T13:35:00.000-07:00

Marketing is Design! That’s how Rob Welling describes it. This comes from a man who gained more than $1000 from tweaking a website and hit the jackpot by choosing the right words to advertise. Welling learned these three-fold moral lessons in internet marketing:

Know your customer.
Make your customer feel at ease with what he/she is buying.
Always be testing.

The first two numbers above are self-explanatory and all businessmen know this by heart. The third one is a bit tricky though and this is how Welling explains it.

“And by far the biggest lesson I learned is that you have to test everything. You use your experience and rules of thumb to come up with ideas to try, and then you have to try them and test to see if they work.”

Welling believes that marketing is different from coding in a way where coding is a highly constrained environment and the options in marketing are infinite and the ways to success are unique to each dilemma.

But what did Rob Welling really did?

Rob tweaked his website selling beach towels by updating his graphic design, added other products aside from the towels, adjusted shipping costs, and many other changes in order for the viewers become actual buyers of his products. He did those in 6 months, and each time he made the change, he noticed that there is actually no difference in his sales, not until he added only three small words which are:

“Low Price Guarantee”

Rob made the change on a whim and forgot about it until his sales skyrocketed from $210/month to $2200/month immediately.

The moral here is to be the cheapest supplier in any market and you will multiply your sales by tenfold. But the primary lesson is to make your customers feel at ease with what they are purchasing.

People buy beach towels (or any other items) from a website because they want to save time. They want to make the purchase as quickly as possible but they also want to know that they are making a right decision about their purchase, which is what “Low Price Guarantee” offers.

The moral of the experience is to always test your sales pitch. Marketing is always a trial and error thing, if one tactic doesn’t work, then it is time to move on and formulate something new.

FREE GENUINE SOFTWARE FROM MICROSOFT

2009-06-05T00:47:00.000-07:00

To all budding entrepreneurs out there listen to this! There’s a legitimate way of getting absolutely free Microsoft software without having to hunt the web for tricky downloads. Yes, you have read it right! Absolutely free!

Microsoft is offering a legitimate program outlined to reduce the capital expenses associated with the Visual Studio IDE and Microsoft server operating systems.

Applying for this program is very easy. You have three options to choose from and these are the following:

Review the information on the Bizspark site and apply by clicking “Join BizSpark Now”: http://www.microsoft.com/bizspark/Default.aspx
Jump straight to the application page: http://www.microsoft.com/bizspark/Startup/Signup.aspx
Send email to contact@brian-blanchard.com and you will be assisted with the qualification and enrollment process.

There are no straight fees for BizSpark access, enrollment or registration services, just a $100 Program Fee upon program exit.

However, Microsoft has a few qualifications your company must meet at time of enrollment. You have to meet the qualifications as this program is designed to enable entrepreneurs and startups to get new visions and ideas off the ground and generate income. You have to be mindful and meet these qualifications:

You must be using the product to develop a software-based product or service that will develop a core piece of your current or intended business.
Your company must be privately held.
Your company must be relatively new. It must at least be less than three years old.
Annual income revenue does not exceed $1 million USD.

So hurry struggling entrepreneurs and go grab this chance of a lifetime!

Software Reuse and Code Conjurer

2009-05-31T09:02:00.000-07:00

Software reuse is about structuring software from components wherein the bigger and more comprehensive the components, the better. At best, software products could be constructed entirely from such reused components.

Recently, the technology industry has taken many approaches to reuse including object-oriented development and software as a service (SaaS). In their online journal, Janjic, Hummel and Atkinson discussed a tool designed to upgrade fine grained component reuse by matching test specifications versus a code repository to find reuse candidates. The authors explained several ways that Code Conjurer can promote reuse with almost no impact to the way developers normally work.

The Code Conjurer

Basically, Code Conjurer offers to search for software reusable components based on a category and descriptiom of an interface or API (i.e. set of operations). It is a plug-in for the Eclipse development framework summarized to address the challenge of software reuse by transparently attaining test cases against existing code to find code that could pass the specified test.

Once he has classified a part of the interface supported by the desired component, Code Conjurer is able to find appropriate reusable components that already instigate this interface using the Merobase search engine.

It is a fundamental notion that developers no longer need to think about software reuse—the system finds opportunities for reuse as the developers work. It functions in the background and leverages search technology that is not reliant on a specific format or metadata, so the design and upholding of a code storage are does not demand supplementary work. Most documentation that is not automatically produced quickly becomes archaic, so this advantage is vital. To put it bluntly, Code Conjurer minimizes work and minimizes modifications for the developer.

How to Profit from the Coming Economic Collapse?

2009-05-25T10:36:00.000-07:00

Before giving my two cents about the book, let me give you a small background of the writer first. Peter David Schiff is an American economic commentator, author and licensed stock broker. He is known for his insights on the United States economy and for having foretold the economic crisis of 2008. His credibility as a financial analyst is remarkable for he graduated from the University of California at Berkley with a degree in finance and accounting. He was one of the few people who accurately foretold the scope and scale of the credit catastrophe, and then sent a year and a half trying to get his message out but to no avail, until it’s too late. The book I am going to review was his rise to media distinction which was published in 2007.

Peter Schiff did not only predict the decline in the value of the dollar but he also predicted the bankruptcy of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, Citibank and the housing bubble bust. He is definitely not a magician but he takes what a reasonably learned person can see: the 'fake' economic growth the US has gone through for the past 15 years was/is unsustainable.

He begins Crash Proof by giving details of how Asian economies are prepared to disrupt the U.S. economy by emphasizing on Western spending and consumerism versus Asian saving and producing. He expressed that the United States is based on service without anything to produce or sell, while Asia is based on manufacture where they produce goods that we buy on IOUs thus creating a trade deficit. However, Schiff neglects the fact that the United States is also a modern manufacturer where they buy, sell, and export goods over the Internet in the mode of media, ideas, and software.

This book also provides you a blue print to guard and grow your wealth by moving your assets out of the dollar and into other foreign currencies. It advises people to employ funds that earn known rates such as savings accounts, time deposits, CDs, bonds, and the like. He reiterates that housing, stock market and real estate do not indicate real savings as they require a buyer in order for them to be profitable. He also recommends that people should expand as a way to minimize risk. He suggests investing in natural resources, energy companies, and foreign markets so that if the U.S. market were to crumple, investments in foreign markets would at least cover the losses, especially with the favorable exchange rates.

However, while Schiff's analysis of the credit crisis was precise, his financial advice is of passable merit. Schiff's best advice is to evade US stocks. Schiff was influencing people to do this in 2007, and anyone who followed this advice would have been secured by the economic chaos.

The piece of recommendation that is most tricky is Schiff's advice as to invest your cash out US stocks by buying international stocks. If you had abided this advice, you would have squandered more than if you had stayed in US stocks, or just kept the cash because international exchanges have been hit worse than the US. Even if most of Schiff's predictions have come disappointingly true, one has not: Schiff forecasted a shattering collapse of the dollar as the world's reserve currency. The opposite has happened as the dollar has strengthened in value as there were extreme investors who have seen everything fall in value.

Crash Proof is a good read for it gives you insights about the economy’s rise and fall. It is not necessary that you to believe and follow Schiff’s advice. However, I recommend this book because this is a good read. If you read just one book in a year, make it this one, and then do something for a change.

Review in Focus: How Buffett Does It?

2009-05-24T05:46:00.000-07:00

Basic Information About the Author

Warren Edward Buffett is an American investor, businessman, and philanthropist and is currently ranked by Forbes as the second richest person in the world. He is often called the “Sage of Omaha” and is famous for his devotion to the value investing philosophy and for his personal stinginess despite his immeasurable wealth.

The Book

In How Buffett Does It, James Pardoe imparts the 24 strategies of Buffett’s investing strategies where there is a one common theme and that is to become a value investor when procuring stocks. Normally, people would buy low and then sell high. We all look for cut-rate stocks hoping that someday they will become expensive. Buffett’s advice is to focus on the price and concentrate even more on the value. The quantity is not as good as the quality.

James Pardoe enumerated Buffett’s four main criteria in buying stocks and these are:

Business he can understand
Companies with favorable long-term prospects
Business operated by honest and competent people
Business priced very attractively

These are what Buffett calls as his “circle of competence,” and he affirms that diverging from them will impair you in the long run. His guidelines in investing are reasonable. First, one should buy a business that he fully understands because the cash flows are easier to foretell. Second, buy stocks that have persisting competitive advantages and products that control their markets. Although many are looking for the company that will be a pioneer in its trade, Buffett recommends you to look for the absence of change.

Buffett also advised to not base your decisions with what everyone is saying or doing. Do not go with the flow and make your own mark instead. When Buffett began managing money from a handful of investors, he refused to tell his partners where he was investing their money and so he was dubbed as an oddball and people predicted that he’d fail. However, when he closed his partnership after 14 years, the investment was worth more than $100 million. Instead of going with the flow, he searched for underrated investments and managed to beat the market average every single year. For Buffett, the average is just what everyone else is doing. To be extraordinary, you have to assess yourself by what he calls as the Inner Scorecard, and that is to evaluate yourself by your own standards and not the world’s.

The book also exposes all those myths such as buying a few stocks as emergency supply, selling when the market is falling, getting insider tips, reading stock trends, frequent buying and selling to get the most out of it, etc. These are purely myths as far as Warren Buffett is concerned.

How Buffet Does It is definitely a good book but whether the recommendation given is to be heeded or not is totally up to you. This book, I believe, will be practical for anyone daunted by investing, engulfed by data or susceptible to pressure from brokers. However, one good reason to pay attention to it is that the man who followed these steps made billions of dollars out of the stock market.

Internationalization for Dummies

2009-05-20T23:12:00.000-07:00

A lot have been said about internationalization but a lot of people still do not know what these are. I am not an IT expert so I am with those who want to understand what this matter is so I am going to explain it to you without using much technological jargons.

Internationalization is the manner of designing software so that it can be adapted (localized) to different languages and regions effortlessly, cost-effectively, and in particular without engineering changes to the software. Internationalization and localization is interconnected. Meaning, before a program gets localized, it has to be internationalized first.

Localization is a process of familiarize a program for use in a specific locale. From a geographic viewpoint, a locale is a place or political region that shares the same language and customs. From a software viewpoint, it is an identification used to select information correlated with the language or place. This includes the translation of text such as user interface labels, error messages, and online help. It also contains the culture-specific formatting of data items such as monetary values, times, dates, and numbers.

How it Works

Imagine yourself in a foreign country where you do not know the language being spoken there. You went to that country because you are tasked to sell something and you have a quota to make. You are a non-speaker of the language but you brought with you a translator. You will definitely go home selling the quota given to you but you can earn more than that if you yourself learned how to speak their language. Internationalization works like that.

The benefit from localization is access to more markets. Most software companies want to sell their software in every country in the world. Since users prefer to use software in their native tongue, it builds good marketing strategy to develop software that can administer in those languages. However, it is not exactly an international market strategy. International market strategy deals with the planning and vision as to how to market goods/services across national boundaries. This includes dealing with trade restraints, pricing issues (including transport costs and tariffs), etc.

Internationalization deals with the specific details involved in marketing the goods/services in the foreign market. Will this help in boosting the sales? I believe so. Adopting internationalization will definitely benefit the sales but it does not necessarily mean that the ratio of cost and benefit are equal. One has to weigh in the cost vs. benefit ratio before deciding on fully adopting it.

The Importance of Project Managers

2009-05-13T10:28:00.000-07:00

We are now living in a project age along with the information age that still surrounds us. The technological advances that we have right now give us the opportunity to multi-task and, more often than not, sometimes we tend to just care about finishing something without giving much attention to the little details. And that’s where the project management professional comes in.

A project manager is knowledgeable on how and why a certain project succeeds and they can create circumstances in order for it to do so. They have a list of priorities to achieve and the flair to execute them until the project becomes flourishing. Sure, everyone can make a list, but not all can think of ways to escape a loophole when it comes. And that is why I think that the world needs project managers.

Moreover, project managers are often neglected and taken for granted. Why? It is because people don’t consider them as real professionals like the nurses, teachers, engineers, doctors or accountants. Why again? It is because they do not have the privilege of taking the board exam certification like the other professions. The career situation they are facing is tough. Imagine yourself almost killing your brains by studying your lessons and then when you finish the course, people will still laugh at you and treat you like you were just a high school graduate. I bet that would hurt your ego too!

Project managers are leaders. They build their credentials with the hope on committing their life-long learning to the highest standards of performance. It is about time that credit is given when credit is due.

Technology Professional Organization

2009-04-28T06:33:00.000-07:00

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