Ginneblog

Captain Kirk - a cloud pioneer

By default, when you upload a document or any other large file to SharePoint, it gets stored as a Binary Large OBject   (BLOB) in the content database in SQL Server.  As revisions are made, each version of that file also gets stored (not just the differences).  The amount of BLOB data grows significantly faster than associated metadata, causing SharePoint to consume large amounts of expensive SQL Storage space.   Burzin talked about externalizing BLOB storage, as well as options for storing infrequently used BLOBs in the Cloud.  These approaches can help ease the backup and storage cost problems content-heavy SharePoint sites encounter. 

Burzin’s SharePoint Storage Best Practices talk also covered Configuration, Maintenance, and Performance Tuning.  He explained some of the unusual stresses SharePoint puts on SQL Server, and offered suggestions on how to avoid degraded performance.  If you’re planning a significant SharePoint implementation, you’ll want to take a close look at his specific recommendations regarding recommended I/O Capacities, Database configuration and sizing, processors and memory. 

Given the headaches SharePoint BLOBs cause in many organizations, it makes sense that StorSimple has a complete solution to externalize them. Their storage-on-demand appliance provides tiered storage for SharePoint with the option to secure and store infrequently updated BLOBs to the cloud to achieve substantial cost savings.  According to Ursheet Parikh, StorSimple’s Founder and CEO, Burzin’s extensive SQL Server and SharePoint experience make him a key member of the StorSimple team. 

I’ll write about StorSimple’s product in an upcoming post, and will follow that with a case study once DesignMind has had a chance to implement StoreSimple’s Cloud Storage Solution for one of our clients.  For data storage, Space is the Final Frontier.

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Perhaps you’ve heard this astonishing figure.  At Amazon.com, every 100 ms of latency costs the company 1% in sales. Sumeet Bansal, Principal Solutions Architect at Fusion-io, referenced the Amazon study as he separated myth from reality about Solid State Storage and its role in the modern Database enterprise system.  

Fusion-io is a producer of enterprise-class SSDs.  Their silicon-based storage architecture known as ioMemory applies flash memory to large-scale enterprise storage products like Storage Area Networks.

Sumeet’s presentation to the Silicon Valley SQL Server User Group on Tuesday included a variety of reasons why SQL Server  DBAs, as well as other technologists, should be excited about SSD’s.  He stressed that SSD’s are ready for the enterprise today.  His description of the things to look out for when purchasing SSD’s was quite useful – kind of like the Consumer Reports of SSD’s.

This list of differentiators is probably part of why Steve Wozniak joined Fusion-io as Chief Scientist – “the Woz” wouldn’t put his energies into anything but the most promising technologies.  And neither would Sumeet, who came over to Fusion-io from Wine.com, where he was VP of IT at the San Francisco company.

David Leston walked away happy, and probably stayed up very late installing his blazingly fast 320 GB Fusion-io Solid State Drive (SSD).  He won the coveted door prize, which was generously donated by Fusion-io. 

I hadn’t met David before tonight, but he was on the same wavelength as our speaker.  Sumeet’s discussion of SSD’s pointed out that you don’t purchase SSD’s based on cost per GB, but rather by the value of the performance gains and reliability. 

It was particularly interesting to hear comments from the audience about how Microsoft and other vendors will start optimizing performance based on SSD-equipped systems, in addition to conventional drives.  Right now there’s an assumption of significant latency when going to the drive.  As the operating systems see great reductions in latency, additional optimizations will add to the performance gains of this breakthrough technology.

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Christa Stelzmuller, Chief Data Architect at MySpace.com, spoke Wednesday night to the San Francisco SQL Server User Group about the MySpace Service Broker.  Last summer, Christa spoke to the Silicon Valley SQL Server User Group about the MySpace Data Architecture.  MySpace is an amazing example of what can be done with SQL Server.

Christa started her presentation with a description of Service Broker, and the challenges they faced creating it.  She then covered basic features, advanced features, and the major use cases.  She concluded with a roadmap of their continuing development plans, and some fun examples of how their developers have sometimes used Service Broker to solve their problems in somewhat misguided ways.

Keep an eye out on CodePlex, where her team will be posting their work.  We’ll get a chance to speak more with Christa in early November at the PASS Community Summit in Seattle.

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Wouldn’t it be great to sit down next to your client and sketch out ideas?  Now there’s an online, user-friendly tool called Balsamiq Mockups that allows you to do that remotely.

Balsamiq Mockups helps you and your team or clients iterate on wireframes as early in the process as possible, when it’s cheapest to do so.  Not surprisingly, it was developed by a former Macromedia/Adobe software engineer.  

Balsamiq Mockups hits the bulls-eye for firms like DesignMind.  We can use this inexpensive tool to rapidly create mock-ups of both desktop and web applications.  It’s got a lot of power, and is easy to learn.  One of the really great ideas in this tool is that the prototypes look hand-drawn.  This informal appearance makes stakeholders more comfortable about giving the developers early feedback, which is so incredibly valuable.

I learned about Balsamiq Mockups last week when Don Robins spoke to the San Francisco .NET User Group.  (Don, a principal at Outformations, gave a great overview of SQL Server Compact Edition.)   

Software Application Developers have long struggled with ways to help their clients visualize what an application will look like, early in the project.  These days developers communicate their user interface designs in many ways, all the way from whiteboard sketches, Visio diagrams, Excel, and at the high end, complex software visualization systems such as iRise.

If you aren’t doing prototyping, or if you’re using the paper, Visio, or Excel approach, you can elevate your development process easily with this product.  Thanks to Don for spending some of his presentation demonstrating the Balsamiq tool.

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Fusion-io is bringing a whole new meaning to SSD – Super Speedy Database.

Last week I had lunch with Sumeet Bansal, Fusion-io’s Principal Solutions Architect. Fusion-io is a producer of enterprise-class SSDs (Solid State Drives, as opposed to HDDs – Hard Disk Drives). Fusion-io applies flash memory to large-scale enterprise storage products like Storage Area Networks. I first met Sumeet when he was VP of IT at Wine.com.

Part of our discussion was about their products, and how they differ from the competition.  SSDs can be very fast.  They can also be pretty rugged, as they have no moving parts.  They are more expensive per GB than conventional hard drives – at least for now.  SSDs eventually wear out – each spot on the NAND Flash Chip can be exercised a finite number of times before it stops working.

Key points regarding Fusion-io’s  ioDrive:

Performance of NAND Flash Chips is extremely fast. Read latency is an order of magnitude faster than conventional HDDs.  But the Fusion-io ioDrive removes the IO bottleneck and makes the cpu utilization more efficient.  Fusion-io decided to adopt a PCIe architecture rather than dealing with the multiple layers of protocols necessary to implement a SATA interface.  I reviewed performance results at HotHardWare, and it’s clear that they are getting a big performance advantage.

They have the wear under control.  Their controller spreads the “wear” across the entire drive, giving them excellent life (1.2 million hours MTBF!)

The rest of our discussion was around how the ioDrive could be used most effectively on different platforms we work with a lot at DesignMind. There is work to be done regarding Best Practices for implementing SSD technology for SQL Server, SharePoint, Exchange, and other key Microsoft Server tools.  We look forward to working with Fusion-io to help them develop Best Practices, Performance Benchmarks, and Case Studies.

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A prospective DesignMind client in San Francisco is making modest use of SharePoint 2003, and is considering a move to MOSS 2007.  The reasoning is good. They can do an incremental rollout, and gain immediate value from SharePoint’s ability to index documents, including PDFs.

In preparation for the meeting, I had to refresh my memory in two very important areas.  First, I needed a Comparison of the features of SharePoint 2003 with those of MOSS 2007. 

The second major question to answer was which features are included in each version of SharePoint?  

Here’s another useful site Comparing WSS and MOSS. 

The last gem I uncovered was an excellent PowerPoint file covering the Functionality in MOSS 2007 and Office 2007.  This is a great resource for those thinking about leveraging the integration Microsoft has delivered in these two major toolsets.  It will help us make the right recommendations to our clients when it comes to purchasing Standard vs. Enterprise Client Access Licenses. 

No doubt there’s a ton of information to sift through on MOSS.  Next I’ll look forward to reviewing the comparisons between MOSS 2007 and SharePoint 2010.  I must say I’m pleased that Microsoft is making our lives easier by by shifting back to the name SharePoint rather than MOSS…read my June 3rd Ginneblog post for more on the rollout of SharePoint 2010.

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In my recent post on how MySpace is using SQL Server, I mentioned that the original MySpace.com was built with ColdFusion.  Even though MySpace moved to Microsoft .NET, there’s a very active ColdFusion community, fostered by Adobe.

As luck would have it, I had a chance to spend some time this week with ColdFusion guru Raymond Camden.  He’s co-author of the ColdFusion MX Developer’s Handbook, Mastering ColdFusion MX, and the Adobe ColdFusion 8 Web Application Construction Kit.  Along the way Ray has contributed to roughly a dozen other ColdFusion-related books.  He also runs several technical websites, and blogs at ColdFusionJedi.

Ray was here in the San Francisco Bay Area working with Adobe as they prepare for Adobe MAX 2009.  Ray will be a featured speaker at the conference, which will be held from October 4-7 in Los Angeles.

Our time was spent preparing for, and delivering, a presentation on migrating from Oracle Forms to ColdFusion – something we hope to be doing for an upcoming project.  We are also teaming up with Peter Koletzke, co-author of Oracle Developer Advanced Forms & Reports and Oracle JDeveloper 10g for Forms & PL/SQL Developers.  I’m very excited to have Ray and Peter, leading experts in their respective fields, working with the DesignMind team.

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MySpace.com uses SQL Server in a big way. On Tuesday night MySpace Chief Data Architect Christa Stelzmuller spoke to the Silicon Valley SQL Server User Group in Mountain View. We had a record turnout. This was a rare opportunity to learn how a high profile company is using SQL Server to manage very large data.  And I mean large – think 130 million active users a month!

It’s pretty well known that MySpace.com started out as a two-tier system. They used ColdFusion on the front-end, and SQL Server at the back-end.  Traffic grew radically, and the technical team scrambled to adapt. Over the years, the technology has matured, but we’re talking about big data, heavy traffic, and continued rapid growth. 

Christa Stelzmuller and me at Microsoft

Now ColdFusion is gone, replaced by C# and ASP.NET. They added a middle tier, and are running mainly on SQL Server 2005, Standard Edition, with a few instances of Enterprise where required.  They have about 4 petabytes of disk space, spread across 17,000+ disks.  You can read more about the specifics in this MySpace Microsoft Case Study.

That volume of data pushes the database hard – and in some cases, beyond what SQL Server can handle out of the box.  Load during replication was so high that they had to write their own replication mechanism.  Likewise for many other processes. The load also impacts the development, testing, release, and backup routines. According to Christa, they literally invented their own processes and tools, as they are in uncharted territory.

Despite continued growth, MySpace is making real technical progress. For instance, when Christa joined the team from Yahoo 2.5 years ago, they were experiencing more than 2 million data integrity errors per day. Now that’s down to about 100,000 per day. My hat goes off to the MySpace engineering team!

The audience was so engaged that an extended Q&A that broke out in the middle of the presentation. Christa fielded dozens of questions, ranging from hardware configurations to backup strategies, and then finished off her presentation. You can check out Christa’s slides here.

Christa will speak to the San Francisco SQL Server User Group on October 14, 2009 when her topic will be Service Dispatcher: The MySpace Implementation of Service Broker, and I expect we’ll see another record turnout.

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Earlier this month Microsoft released the first beta of a new free tool – the IIS Search Engine Optimization Toolkit – that makes it easy to perform SEO analysis on your site and identify and fix issues within it.

Scott Guthrie’s excellent blog tells all about it.  Thanks to E.R. Gilmore at Travis Medical Software for pointing it out to me.   The new SEO Toolkit looks incredibly useful, and at DesignMind we’re starting to test it out on several client websites.  I’ll report back on its effectiveness.  I’ll also try to arrange a demo of this toolkit at an upcoming meeting of the San Francisco .NET User Group.

Scott Guthrie runs the development teams at Microsoft responsible for ASP.NET, Silverlight, WPF, IIS, and various Visual Studio Tools.

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Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger touts the MicroFueler

What a week!  Today I had the chance to go to Sacramento to attend the unveiling of the E-Fuel MicroFueler on the steps of the California Capitol Building.  Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and Linda Adams, Secretary of the California EPA, were on hand to make the introductions to a crowd of several hundred.  Entrepreneur and E-Fuel founder Thomas Quinn told us how he became interested in home ethanol production, and why he thinks the Organic Fuel Revolution will change the world.

In the morning I’m heading to E-Fuel’s manufacturing facility in Paso Robles, CA.  There’s a two day workshop for the folks forming E-Fuel’s dealer network.  Representatives from all over the world will be on hand to learn how to maintain the MicroFuelers they’ll be selling.

DesignMind has been working with the E-Fuel team to develop the E-Fuel Global Network.  This network allows the company, it’s dealers, and MicroFueler owners to monitor the health, performance, and real-time status, of every MicroFueler on the planet.  Each unit is equipped with internet connectivity (wired, Wi-Fi, cellular, and satellite), a GPS, and all the telemetry needed to monitor the vital signs as well as the amount and quality of ethanol each unit produces.

At the workshop, we’ll be demonstrating the E-Fuel Global Network for the dealers who will be selling and supporting the product.  This is the culmination of a lot of work by several very talented teams.  We’ll get feedback and more good ideas, and continue to make the network even better.

For the engineers in the crowd, the E-Fuel Global Network is built using Microsoft’s .NET 3.5 Framework, and SQL Server 2008.

Here’s a video of the event with Governor Schwarzenegger, as well as a full transcript of the remarks.

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