Day 1 Fun

Hi All,
Let me appologise for the non photographic contect of my blog. I know that many other ISS folk have cameras so will take exciting pictures, but I dont (well it's at home) so you will have to rely on my descriptions! Also, dont mail be about poor spelling / grammer I KNOW!!!!£%£"$"!

Q. Why does spanish TV have versions of Strictly Come Dancing / Who wants to be a millionaire / X Factor etc. etc. How are we getting away with exporting this rubbish?

Registered this morning at about 9am and had cakes and coffee in the conference venue. Then went to the Sagrada Familia. I've been before but it always astonishes me at the complexity and beauty of the place. Last time you were able to climb up the stairs, but now this seems to have been closed off for building work so you had to queue a long time for the lift. Anyway, it's an inspiring place. I particually like the origional face of the building. Somehow the carvings are more human. You can look for a long time and still descover new biblical scenes and points of interest. It's a fantastic place.
It also offered a trip on the metro system which I am a fan of. It somehow seems simpler to use than it's English cousin and a lot of the trains and infrastructure are more modern.

Anyway, better get onto some IT talk, or you'll all be thinking that I'm wasting ISS resources and swanning around doing nothing. So... after lunch it was time for the keynote.

The keynote speech was given by a guy called Bob Kelly who was a vice presendent, so I was very worried about bordom setting in. However I need not have worried. Before the session we were treated to some very fine african drumming and then a chance to join it. There were tuned pipes for everyone in the audience and we played them to great effect. See here for the bits of plastic used.. Anyway, after a general overview of where Microsoft were going, we got onto some good (and mostly successful) demos of the latest products.

Windows Server 2008
Some new bits of note here were:

• Quarantine of VPN / Wired / Wireless machines - does this not cut across the work of the ISS management agent, which I still fail to understand the need for.
• PHP native supported (Fast CGI)
• IIS 7, more secure, better... etc. etc. (we will see if this is the case as we go on)
• Shared configuration. Settings stored central. 1 config for all web farm
• Terminal Services Remote aPps (this is a bit like SGD allowing you to deploy apps across wide range of devices almost seemlesly (I say almost, the demo was a bit clunky)
• Virtualisation, this seemed to be a good growth area, with things like:
  Support for LINUX (fast), 64Gb memory per VM
  Support of snapshots without reboot of VM (e.g Service packs etc.)
  Systems Centre / Ops manager with logical / physical management
  Drill down to VMs and services / Databases etc. running actions such as SQL database mgr etc.
  Physical / Virtual management in Ops manager
  Migration from one physical host to another (and geographical using stretched clustering)
  Application deployment / thin & rich and virtual machines.
  Softgrid with multi version etc.
  Isolated virtualisation environments
  Streams application and user preferences….
  Systems Centre - Config manager
  Support for driver catalogue and thus only deploy in the image that which you need.
  Integration with Dell and others for firmware / etc.
  Enforce configuration rules / policies

Sorry that this is a bit of a random list, but I copied it from my notes! I'm getting used to using one-note now, which makes things useful.

SQL Server 2008

Again some new looking bits and pieces in here including:

• Policy with integration with Systems Centre across 1 or multiple servers
• Performance monitors linked to workloads using Resource govener. e.g critical apps can keep performance.
• Intellisence within the tools (long overdue!!!£"$)
• New reporting tools (office like) report designer looks like Office 07 (ribbon) - better visualisation

Windows Home Server (is this just an excuse to make money?)

This was an interesting one. I'm still not convinved that this produce is actually needed... How many people actually want a cut down server for use at home... I guess the main server products are becoming more complicated and large, but I'm still not sure you can't do it all with Vista.. Hmmmm. Anyway, it offers a number of bits:

• Partnerships with systems people to deliver hot swap drives / eSATA etc.
• File organisation / sharing
• Simple setup
• Link on every desktop to server folders.
• Taskbar entry on each client to monitor network health.
• Daily backups of client PC, nightly including Wake on LAN for patching backup etc. (Diffs etc.) Single instance store for backup intelligently backs up same data at bit level. (Explorer style recovery or full system restore.
• Media sharing (Xbox etc.) can see home server and play content.
• 3rd party apps (home automation / security etc.)
• Remote access to outside world (using domain name! and public cert me.homeserver.com)

All in all it was all quite exciting, and if you're still reading then you may be crying, whats the implication for ISS?

Well.... thats an interesting question. It strikes me that a lot of this requires a lot of integration and also a lot of control of infrastructure. I think one of the things that is missing is a systems roadmap. We still take everything down for patching during business hours. What about application vitrulisation, softGrid does look sexy? There is a lot of stuff in the party.

I guess that the IT Strategy will address this, so I guess I kinda feel that exciting times are ahead.. .hopefully... although some people may need to be drowned in the sea of change.