Church IT Podcast Discussions Episode 29, June 5, 2008
Jason Powell
Good afternoon friends, neighbors, relatives, I don’t know that there are any relatives of mine listening or participating. I guess we are all relatives in Christ, get that warm and fuzzy spiritually right off the bat. This is Episode 29 of the Church IT Discussion podcast. My name is Jason Powell, I am the IT Director at Granger Community church. We meet live and online every first and third Thursday of the month at 2:00 p.m. here on www.churchitpodcast.com You can also check out past episodes, listen to them, we’ve even got them transcribed for your viewing pleasure and searching pleasure, if you can believe that, thanks to our wonderful transcriptionist, it’s a great thing. Thank you Margaret for doing that. So first off, I’m gonna probably need to change the time of the podcast as we are moving more and more toward multi-site, I’m getting involved in other meetings and a lot of them are happening on Thursday afternoon, one at 2:00 of course. So I would appreciate feedback on other times that might be good. I’m wondering if Wednesday afternoon would work for most people. So hopefully I’ll stick a poll or something on the blog www.jasonpowell.net at some point or over on www.citrt.org that’s where we are trying to funnel everybody to have a one-stop landing place. If you would, slap your contact info into the chat window, Margaret is in the channel listening live to what’s going on. I should put mine in now. I did change the picture on my blog because people said it was terrible, my wife even gave it huge thumbs down.
Also a reminder that The Chapel in Libertyville, Illinois is looking for an IT Director, so if you are interested or know somebody that could be, hit my blog and download the pdf for the job description, or you can also contact Jim Alexander and chat with him, he is a great guy, Chapel is doing some cool stuff, so if you’re interested, give him a contact. Some of you know Jeremy Good, he works at The Chapel, he is also somebody you could call to get an idea of the environment over there.
One thing, think about shifting dates/times for the podcast. Secondly, Trace do we have any updated info about the Charleston event that you want to share?
Trace Pupke
Yes, I’m starting to post some stuff today. I put the hotel information up, working on putting on some airline information. Flight costs have been going up because of the economy and gas prices, so I’m going to get some tips up there for you that’ll help keep your costs down. Once I get them up, if you’re coming, I’d recommend you do it sooner than later. Beyond that, just keep a watch on the website, I’m going to be adding quite a bit in the next few days. If you are interested in coming or are on the fence, just keep watching, hopefully it will help you out.
Jason
Do you anticipate a go-live date for registration?
Trace
Registration will probably start next week. We will have different prices for different registration times. There will be an early bird special and then penalties for late registration.
Jason
Mark Burleson says the Atheist nation is having a live talk shoe right now as well, that’s kinda funny. Take the channel by force. They are logged in? That’s interesting. Welcome.
Sp
Maybe they have the Atheist IT Roundtable.
Jason
That would be interesting. Honestly, most of the chat we do, it really doesn’t matter your spiritual bend, I don’t know if that’s a good thing or bad thing. There was some interesting discussion in the IRC Channel last night or the night before. There was one dude in particular going pretty deep with some theological stuff. It was an interesting thing.
So, we are still looking at October 8-10 for the Fall Roundtable, it will be an amazing time. You’ll definitely want to be there. Even if your church won’t pay for it, you should probably take out a small loan so that you get there.
Trace
No, don’t take out loans.
Jason
Ok, find a friend who will sponsor you. Wait a minute, that’s an interesting idea. I wonder [TimeStamp00:07:45 ] if any of the CHMS vendors or anybody would be interested sponsoring people? How would that work?
Sp
Free gas cards!
Sp
The more demos you get for them, the more gas money they give you?
Jason
I don’t know, certainly something to think about. I’m sure there are some smaller churches, depending on how many people you are trying to send, plane tickets alone.
Trace
Even if you can’t afford to come, you should find a way to come, it’s worth the investment.
Jason
I agree.
Mark [I think]
My problem is my wife has decided she is going also, but do we want to stay after the Roundtable and vacation or go out early and vacation before the Roundtable?
Tony
Or do you want to do both?
Jason
It could turn into a two-week event very easily.
Mark
She is already on the Internet planning what she wants to see.
Trace
The hotels we booked some rooms with said they would honor that cost even beyond the conference or before the conference if you are looking to stay longer.
Sp
How far are you from Savannah and all that?
Trace
Savannah’s about an hour and a half. We are about an hour and a half in every direction from Savannah, Columbia and Myrtle Beach. I’m putting those as three other options of places to fly into because sometimes those can be a little cheaper than flying into Charleston. That’s if you’re looking to rent a car and do a little driving.
Tony
Remember if you’re renting a car and thinking of doing a lot of driving, come to Atlanta, and it’s a long drive from Atlanta, but you can come to a bunch of places in the Atlanta area while you are here before you go down to Charleston. I don’t know what those places are going to be, we’re still working on that, but that’s a fine detail.
Jason
When I did my tour of Perimeter, has it been two years already, it was well worth it.
Good. So Fall Roundtable, be there, no excuses.
Tony
Backing up to your atheist discussion, I’ll still put my atheist up against anybody else’s atheist as the best atheist. I think Jason met my atheist and you know what I mean.
Jason
Yeah, Danny is awesome.
Tony
Besides being our paid-for atheist who helps us, he volunteers on weekends, he is now our video switcher.
Sp
Is he a real atheist too?
Tony
Yes, he is a real atheist.
Sp
Wow!
Jason
That’s another cool benefit of out-sourcing. However you want to word that, but that’s a cool thing.
Let’s see, we’ve got a few things that we can chat about. Justin, do you want to give any info on your recent Sonic Wall, you went to the road show, had some “fun” with getting Sonic Wall installed at your place. Do you want to share anything you’ve learned?
Justin
I’ve learned that I’m not sure I should have switched vendors completely and went the Sonic Wall route, may should’ve stayed with Watchguard, I don’t know, that’s debatable. But I did get a fantastic deal from Marino on all this gear, so for those who don’t know, I’m deploying a huge VPN here, the company I work at, we’ve got 24 remote offices and we are going to be installing a Sonic Wall TV 150 at each remote office and have a new NSA 3,500 here at corporate and we are creating a nice, large expensive VPN to secure things and make administration on those remote systems a little easier on me. I initially had some issues trying to configure multiple subnets on the single wan interface, but I was able to finally get that resolved. Things are going much better now. The hardware based VPN absolutely rocks. It beats the snot out of any software client that I’ve ever dealt with. I’ve got one at my house right now so full access to my network at the office from any computer or other device attached to the network, so I’m loving the VPN part now that everything seems to have stabilized.
Jason
Cool. What about the road show? Were there some Sonic Wall products that were Wow?
Justin
Yeah, there were. If you go to www.sonicwall.com and look up events, I would highly recommend you see if they are going to have a road show event near you. It only takes about half a day. Started at 8:30 and was done by around 12:30 and they will run through demos of the new eclass and NSA line of firewalls as well as cover the email security appliance, and they’ll do a demo of cdp, continuous data protection, a product that I fell [TimeStamp00:14:11 ] in love with, I knew about it but didn’t really know about it. The current series of those I think has some serious capacity issues, like the biggest one you can get is only 600 gigs raw, about 1.2 terabytes with their compression on certain file types, but that’s still not a lot of storage when you’re talking about a multi-terabyte san that you would like to protect or huge file shares. If you are at all interested in Sonic Wall gear, or even if you’re not, just going to the demo from the engineer is pretty impressing. A good look into their product.
Jason
Jason Lee and Jeremy Kilgore over at Northwoods, I don’t know that they don’t have a particular piece of Sonic Wall gear, I think they have every Sonic Wall product at their location, so they are also a good reference for things Sonic Wall.
Justin
They also have a new SSL VPN product from where they have acquired Aventail, which looks extremely sweet. One of the other demos that impressed me the most, I think it is in their older SSL VPN appliances but the virtual assist, which is kind of like a log me in rescue type thing, it’ll install a client on the remote pc and give you full access to that desktop and will completely remove itself from the system once you terminate the session. So if you’ve got people out in the field and they have access to software VPN or whatever, you can get access to their desktop. Or even if they don’t have VPN client, they hook up over the SSL VPN and enter the code and you can take over their desktop. Very cool.
Jason
That would almost be something, we couldn’t do the whole half day, but thinking about the Fall Roundtable and vendors, having somebody that really knows the product line like that doing a small demo.
Justin
I know a guy, but I’m not going to recommend that. I’ve got a couple of contacts here in the Charlotte area so if Trace doesn’t have anyone down there, we might could talk to these folks and arrange something.
Jason
Right. I know there are a bunch of us that either have Sonic Wall or are looking at it. Sonic Wall is mentioned in the IRC Chat at least every day, sometimes in a poor reference, sometimes good. Speaking of vendors, what other vendors might people be interested in seeing at, if we did some sort of vendor bizarre or vendor presentations, what other vendors would be of use having them present?
Sp
Can we have all the Church Management Systems please?
Jason
Don’t make me slap you virtually.
Sp
Should we have a Sisco guy there if we have Sonic Wall?
Jason
The problem with Sisco, how many of us can truly afford their solutions? I think there is a lot of value in maybe some HP guys. Who are the mid? I usually think HP, Extreme and Sisco. Three Com. Then again, how many people actually care to listen to a 20-minute or 30-minute presentation from HP? Is that something that people would want to do?
Sp
Depends on if it’s a sales presentation or a demonstration.
Jason
Right, we don’t want PowerPoints, we want to see the product.
Tony
And I think the key is what you’re saying, keep it to 20 minutes or so, not these hour long things that are boring, but really show us stuff that we care to see.
Jason
Exactly.
Sp
And offer a couple of different things, maybe along side each other so that if someone is not interested in switches, they could go learn about church management or something.
Jason
The other I thought of the other day, because somebody else has already mentioned it, was maybe give, if we have everybody all together and each vendor gets 15-20 minutes to wet everybody’s appetite, maybe that’s a half a day, then the second half of the day is, now there’s at table for Sonic Wall, a table for the HP guys, kinda like what we did with the Church of the Resurrection topic bizarre thing. So, now I’ve heard about all these products from these different vendors, now for this half of the day I can go sit down at a table and talk about the individual projects that I’m interested in. something to think about. So at least I’m getting an overview of stuff. I’m thinking of the Houston Roundtable, before I heard about DataCore, I would’ve never bothered to go sit down at a DateCore table, but I listened to their presentation and every time I think about storage, in the back of my mind I’m still thinking about those guys and their solution. So I like the idea of having them present a very small window of time about [TimeStamp00:21:23 ] their products, whatever, really short, then the opportunity to go drill down deeper with them later. That’s just me.
Sp
What about Google Aps?
Jason
That would be sweet!
Sp
If you know anybody important at Google, might be able to get somebody in.
Jason
There’s a big Google place near Seacoast isn’t there? Is that open yet?
Trace
A data center, I need to go check it out, but it’s not like one of their other offices. It’s just staffed by guys maintaining hard drives and systems and stuff, but I’m going to see if we can get a tour of it.
Jason
That would be sweet too. I’d be interested to see somebody that really knows Google Aps going through and demonstrating the whole buffet, and I don’t want a Postini sales pitch. I signed up for two different Google Aps webinars that on the front end sounded like they were going to talk about the Google Aps products but then it was just Postini sales stuff. I love Postini, but I already have it. Google Aps, that’s a good topic.
Tony
Is anybody besides me interested in De-dup stuff? De- duplication vendor, ExoGrid, Data Domain, or something like that or software equivalent?
Sp
For files or for data and databases?
Tony
All of the above. Something that you back up to that looks at saying, You’ve already backed this up, you don’t need to back it up again, I’ve already got it for you or I’ve got pieces of it for you, so it lets you do a back-up, it’s better than compression because it is saying you’ve already got similar chunks of data, don’t store them again, just reference it again.
Jason
I’ve certainly gotta hook up with Data Domain.
Tony
I’ve got a good person at ExoGrid if we want to go there. I’ve already had a call with them, as a matter of fact.
Permabit is another one that’s kind of in that same area. There are a bunch of others but those are the names worth looking at. Data Domain is the well-known one. Everybody else is – we do everything they do but cost less. It isn’t true but it’s a good story.
Jason
It’s how you approach the De-duplication. I was doing some checking on Microsoft’s DPM, data protection manager and it’s not got De-duplication in it, in the 07 products. I haven’t looked at DPM since the 05 release, it’s looking pretty tasty, and of course the non-profit charity pricing is awesome.
Tony
Based on the stuff, the comments I got on my blog post the other day on back-up exe, I’m ready to throw everything away and just use DPM. I’m not there yet but that was real promising.
Jason
The only thing I don’t like about DPM is that it will not do individual email restores from Exchange. It will go down to folder level but you can’t get down to individual item level.
Tony
That’s why you need an email archiving product that is totally separate, and who cares then. Something like the Barracuda, a combination would be really good.
Jason
Or Postini, but it won’t do [somebody coughing, couldn’t hear], now you’ve got the calendar piece. Like Postini will do email no problem, but what if somebody needs to restore a particular calendar item?
Tony
Or an internal email problem thing?
Jason
Well Postini will do your internal email too?
Tony
Really?
Jason
Yeah, it uses Exchange journaling.
Tony
It seems like that would catch everything else too.
Jason
I don’t know, does the calendar invite stuff? Obviously there’s email there, but could you actually restore a calendar item? Or the task item?
Tony
Based on what the other vendors seem to do, how they tie into the Exchange API, I would say if Postini is using the whole thing, that they should be able to do that. Now they may have chosen not to, but it seems like Google wants all your data, so it seems like they would want that.
Jason
I’ll have to check that out.
Tony
Think about the archiving stuff. Switch from the De-dup into archive, would we want to have a vendor like Barracuda talk about their message archiver as opposed to their anti-spam, or get Archive One of one of the those other vendors in there. I could get somebody for either of those if that’s got enough interest.
Jason
We almost need to have a poll, a way to capture all this, a survey of some sort.
Trace
I was planning to put a survey of a lot of these already and also ask for additional as another post in the next couple days.
Jason
Ok. What about Apple?
Sp
Can’t hurt to ask any of them.
Jason
And I’d like that to not be actually Apple coming in to talk about it, because I’ve heard that. I’d like to see a vendor, an out-sourcing solution provider some and talk about it. Somebody that actually does the work. I know that Chris Green over at Solarant, [?] they’ve got a Mac lab that they are cranking up right now to figure out the whole magic triangle stuff.
Trace
I’ve got a feeling by October he will be an expert.
Jason
Exactly.
Tony
Another alternative, I could get Richard Dolan to come for a day. He is a former Apple employee, he still has Apple logos on everything he touches but he does our pc work, he knows both sides of it.
Jason
Does he know the Active Directory integration, Open Directory pieces of it?
Tony
Somewhat, and we got the guys over at Northpoint who are doing that and they know it better than they wanted to know it. So there might be better people but as a fall-back, Richard would be a great one.
Jason
I’m pretty sure that Solarant wants to be a part of this next one. Just because a lot of us already know Chris, because of his IRC stuff that’s going on. I liked your blog post Tony a while back, although a few people took it a little bit not as you intended it. Just the idea that there are vendors out there that we are looking at more closely than other vendors just because of their ties into the Church IT community.
Tony
Yeah, I’m going to find somebody who knows how to communicate well and have them re-write that. I’ll let you know when I find that person.
Sp
I understood it.
Trace
I got it perfectly clear.
Jason
I knew exactly what you were talking about. Maybe get your Communications guy,
Tony
Scott Logan, yeah, I’m going to get him to do a bunch of stuff for me, he just doesn’t know it yet. He actually has Margaret doing stuff for him, so if the podcast is late, it is Scott’s fault.
Jason
That’s funny. How’s your CHMS roll-out going?
Tony
Very good in the last couple of days. Finally, thankfully, just yesterday afternoon, we did our first round of training for our own IT department and worked through a few issues, but finally this thing is coming together and it’s kinda fun, so more will be coming on that in the next week. The irony of that of course is that I scheduled my trip next week during a down time in the project plan and next week is when we’ll train all our staff, so I won’t be here for the staff training. Maybe that’s a good thing.
Jason
That’s probably a good thing.
Tony
Margaret says she will do stuff for me too, I think she means she will make my stuff make sense. She doesn’t know what she’s asking, but sure, ok! [I didn’t say I could work magic, but it is scary that I can make sense out of most of your stuff]
Jason
I’d like a ghost-writer, somebody that actually just, I give them the idea for the blog post, they just go ahead and do it for me.
Tony
I’ve got about a hundred things on my list that someday I’m going to blog about as soon as I [TimeStamp00:33:02 ] can figure out when to do it and what to say. I’ve got the topics, that’s all.
Jason
I wonder who John Maxwell uses? I think he has a whole team of ghost-writers.
Tony
Yes he does.
I know somebody in Maxwell’s organization, I’ll have to track that down.
Jason
Maybe we could get John Maxwell to come and talk about IT.
Tony
That’s not too far-fetched.
Jason
As long as he cries, I’d feel good.
Let’s see, I did have some questions or wanted to throw out the discussion about thin clients. I know several of you are running thins, a lot of you I think though are just running them strict off terminal servers, but at least I can name four churches that since I blogged, have also indicated that they are also looking at the imbedded xp route for doing check-in type activities. I’m just looking for feedback on that. I know over at Church of Resurrection, they are using HP imbedded winterms [?] for check-in. The Fellowship Church guys are using Wise winterms for their check-in. Tony you guys got a bunch of thins but you’re not using the imbedded stuff are you?
Tony
We are not. We are using HP now and like that better than anything we’ve ever had in the past.
Jason
What particularly about it?
Tony
It works out of the box, it is cheap, it’s got better graphics than some of the traditional ones, that has been one of the failures for us on some of the older winterms, we used to use Neoware and we had some Wise and they are just slow graphics. The HP is much much faster. Not sure why, and it’s cheaper, so easy to get, cheaper, works better, pick all three.
Jason
Have you tried any of them with wireless, just out of curiosity?
Tony
I have not. I understand what you’re going for and I don’t want to go there.
Jason
I just need it to do Channel A, all it’s gotta do.
Jim Michael is asking if you can connect USB scanners and such to thins, absolutely.
Tony
Well, semi-absolutely, on your xp embedded, you probably can. On a lot of cheaper ones, you probably can’t. What’s really irritating is we’ve had a lot of things with like 6 USB ports on them, but then you talk to the vendor about what you can plug in there and they said keyboard and mouse. Plug a jump drive in and it doesn’t recognize it.
Sp
Fourteen USB ports and all you can use them for is keyboard and mouse.
Jason
Which is why I like the xp embedded thing, this is basically full-blown xp sp 2 and away you go. And the other idea, when we were at the last roundtable, I was talking with Ian, and at least with the HP one with the Alteris [?] management software, you could even create schedules to push out different images to your xp embedded devices, which is something I’m looking at too because our kiosks run dual-duty on weekends, therefore event check-in, typically child check-in, and we want them pretty locked down so that people aren’t trying to surf the web on them. But then during workshop days here, we set them out as Internet kiosks devices and now I want the web browser obviously to be open and other things to actually function, so the ability to schedule, here’s a flash image that I’ve got for check-in and here’s an image I’ve got for Internet kiosks, and at midnight the day before the workshops here, I push out the correct image devices. At the end of the workshop day, it schedules to push out the check-in image. Like that’s flippin sweet.
Taylor Smith said they are using xp embedded stuff. Anybody else?
What else is on your mind?
Tony
One of my old favorite subjects, if I can jump in, intranets. What’s anybody doing? Has anybody done Sharepoint and been happy with it?
Sp
We’ve done Sharepoint here at Watermark and we’re pretty happy with it.
Tony
Forgive me for laughing but how come every time somebody talks about Sharepoint happiness, there’s a qualifier in front of it?
Jason
It’s a beast!
Sp
That’s a self-answering question.
I think the real question is how much are you wanting to get out of it? If you are talking about very simple stuff, I think it is a piece of cake, but if you are really wanting work-flow, a true intranet, then it is a lot more complex. What we are using it for is very simple, so we haven’t really branched out to doing true, what I’d love to do is processing HR, processing lots of work-flow and really moving documents through process, that’s what we want ideally but that’s a lot more work.
Jason
And to get that, you really need to go to the full-blown [TimeStamp00:40:22 ] moss version vs the free wss.
Tony
Let me throw out an alternative, maybe this is a Fall Roundtable thing, we’ve been talking with the guys who do our public website and we just had this breakfast yesterday about what we are trying to do on our intranet and what we wish we could do and how we are frustrated with Sharepoint and we are frustrated with everything else, and they said they think they could do that for us, very inexpensively. I just had Scott Logan in my office a few minutes ago, and you have to know Scott Logan so most of you won’t catch this, he said, “the guys just told me about something and I had to use my swear word for the day, it was so great!” He just explained it to me just seconds before the podcast, I though this is neat. Would we have an interest of a company like that doing a presentation at the Fall Roundtable?
Jason
Absolutely.
Tony
And it’s also, in my mind, affordable, now I don’t know what anybody thinks is affordable, but basically they are giving us a portal on our public website that lets our staff access a bunch of internal stuff, but now it is one interface. So when you go to the Perimeter website, you go to the My Perimeter and it says Oh you are a staff member, here’s more stuff for you. A Google-type thing where you can put your own little Applets and arrange it the way you want to, and these guys can do this kind of stuff.
Jason
Who is your web?
Tony
The company is eye-speak. www.eye-speak.com
Jason
I’ve looked a little bit at community server, tele-something.
Sp
Tony, what kind of internal resources are you tying it back to?
Tony
Lots of different things and that’s the key. Obviously, we’ve got our new CRM database that we are connecting back to so we can expose appropriately, and that’s the key word, the membership data, but we are also tying it back to things like our events calendar so that we can see that stuff. We are hooking it into some other assorted internal databases like our staff phone directories. I’m sure there are more but those come to mind in a hurry. If we had onsite payroll, we would tap back into our payroll system, not show people’s salary but to show who is employed and not. We will very likely, we could even do it today with our current phone system, we use call data recording and this is one of our most popular things, somebody says who did I call last week, or I missed a call, who was it? So we want to extract that call data recording information out and make it available to people. With Asterisk hopefully that will be even easier.
Jason
I’m hoping GCC will go to Asterisk at some point in the near future.
Sp
So what part of that could you guys accomplish with a really good solid SSL VPN solution?
Tony
Zero
Sp
Really, none of it is web-based?
Tony
Today it is only available internally. You have to be on our lan to get to any of it.
Sp
Right, but we are doing some stuff with SSL VPN where everything is tunneled through the VPN through over SSL, so we are able to get to all of our internal resources, databases, everything else across that connection.
Tony
Which is a great solution, we haven’t done that. Just the opposite of, it you want to get to our data, you have to be on own lan, but then we’ve done things like Citrix and Provision Network to get you onto the lan but we haven’t done that simpler step, that simpler for the staff step, of letting them get to it externally. So that’s part of where we want to go next.
Jason
What SSL are you guys using?
Sp
We are using a Juniper solution, it is an SA 2000 hardware appliance but basically it lets you do customizable screens and you can give people web links and even terminal sessions back directly to their desktops through it.
Jason
We looked at Juniper and couldn’t get any good non-profit pricing from those guys.
Sp
They hang on to it pretty tight.
Jason
Intranets. We are still slowly plodding along with the basic stuff you do in Sharepoint, nothing fun or crazy.
Tony
Does anybody do any kind of dashboard stuff?
Jeremy Good
We are doing some pretty big dashboard stuff right now. We had a custom-coded solution that someone in our church helped with who is a pearl but we are switching over to using Sharepoint and Performance Point.
Tony
I don’t know how many of you follow Kevin McCord’s blog, he’s been posting left and right queries that if you are running a Shelby data are great. I look at those things and say great, I want everyone of those things available to all of our staff if they want. It’s the sort of stuff where I see his things, and I think, I never thought of that but now that I’ve seen it, I want it.
Jason
When I look at John Edmonston’s blog, all the cool stuff they are doing with Arena and tying it back to Asterisk and, here’s this dashboard of sweet stuff.
Sp
We just did our Arena integration with Outlook this week, which has been great, so when you receive an email inbound, it does a look up, so if it’s got an email address, obviously it comes into my Inbox, does a reverse look-up against Arena, this is all stuff that John developed and basically I get a little pull-up on my screen of all their phone information and I get a single click which will launch a new tab in the browser, basically opens up a new web tab with that person’s information. Plus it will do quick-to-call with Asterisk which is way cool. We’re going to Asterisk but we’re not there yet, but that’s part of the whole virtualization deal and we don’t know if we are going to virtualize that or not.
Jason
Good.
Is there any interest in virtualization vendors? I think most people are aware of virtualization, although there were a lot of people at my little presentation thing I did at Ministry Tech, a few people that has never done anything with virtualization, which surprised me a little bit. Do we need somebody like VM Ware coming in, or do we all pretty much know what it can do, ya know, show me a vendor that is doing something I’m not aware of.
Tony
Or go back to like your discussion of Data Core and bring back in the Fairway Consulting guy and let him cover both. Somebody of that nature.
Sp
For those doing multi-site, you could look at bringing in Riverbed and let them talk, for compression between wan links.
Sp
They’ve got some great stuff.
Jason
I wonder how many churches? At least in my opinion, that’s stuff that I would anticipate our Tech Arts guy.
Sp
Well it is for data, you can use it for DR as well. I’ve seen it and you have a san, I saw Equal Logic, VM Ware and Riverbed do a demo together of how you do DR using all three.
Jason
Alright, Trace you’ve got your work cut out for you, for your survey. I think the hard part will be narrowing it down to a few vendors.
Sp
I thought we were going to be there for two weeks! Do we really have to narrow anything down?
Jason
We could do two vendors a day for two weeks. Great! Build in a day to go play at the coast. What else?
Sp
What about Server 08 and Hyper-V? I didn’t know if that might be part of the presentation.
Jason
I’m interested in Hyper-V. The only [TimeStamp00:50:59 ] reason we mentioned Fairway is because of their interest in what we are doing, they came to the Houston event, but the fact that it is $24 on top of the server license, and they already ridiculous pricing we can get for server licensing from Microsoft. Although I love VN Ware, I love the free products. There is some cool stuff coming down from Microsoft, they don’t have the V motion stuff at all.
Sp
I think one of the cool things that I’ve heard about Hyper-V is the integration with the virtual server manager piece of the puzzle, how well that is actually going to integrate with VM Ware also, so you can manage Hyper-V and VM Ware all from one interface. Extremely cool.
Jason
Now I think though that it is only ESX VMs. I believe somebody asked when we had our demo thing of 08 here in town and it seemed like it was just ESX stuff. I could be wrong. Typically if you are a big business you aer not running the free products. More and more churches are going to the VI 3 products.
Kilgore, are you guys over onto ESX yet?
Watermark, you guys are looking toward ESX. Tony is ESX. Who else?
Mark. Ok. What stinks about this web client is I can’t see who is talking, I’m trying to guess based on your voice [Jason, now you know how I feel! Not an easy task!]
Trace is.
Jason
You guys are ESX? Oh, that’s right. I feel like the lame duck in the group, I haven’t made the jump yet.
Mark
Well when they came out with that new foundations pricing for our smaller, we only had 3 servers that we virtualized so it fit into our program perfect. With the foundationed HA with the high availability, if one of your boxes goes down, it doesn’t instantly roll over, but VM Ware will see that the server is on the one box that failed and it will re-boot them on the other available VM, so you have some down time while they re-boot, but it also gives you some redundancy, so it is not instantaneous but for me, it is a perfect alternative. I put my primary servers on those VMs to keep the print servers, Shelby and those things on it, so if I lose one box, I’ve got a minute or two of down time and they are back up on the other machine.
Jason
That’s pretty cool.
Sp
And that pricing is significantly less, half of what you will pay for V motion.
Sp
We got a quote from Dell, our quote for 4 sockets, ESX with the console and HA was about 6 grand, so basically being able to run two servers. Maybe you guys have gotten better pricing? I thought that was pretty decent.
Mark
I think it is $5,995 for that two socket HA option. You can go down to the foundation that doesn’t have the high availability but that high availability gives you consolidated back-up, high availability, so a lot of the cool things that makes that work is the difference in cost.
Jason
Cool stuff. If you’re going ESX, you need a good san behind it.
Sp
You think we could find a vendor to talk about sans? Probably as easy to find one of those as it is a Sonic Wall guy.
Jason
Cut to the quick.
Sp
I also noticed Dell starting to sell some of their servers with the Firmware VM Ware loaded so you just flip it on in the Firmware and it boots, you don’t even need a boot drive, it comes up, it is like 78 kilobytes to boot the small client to run VM Ware. The ESX 3I you just buy and it’s built into the Firmware, there’s no hard drive, it’s all fixed software so you don’t have to worry about any corruption. Pretty cool, not that I’m going to go that direction but I saw it as an offering on the Dell site.
Sp
The thing that I got from Dell on that is that when you do that, they’ve got to sell you basically premier support. They won’t license it any differently and the licensing prices seem to be higher to go that route.
Jason
It’s crazy to think you need no hard drive, you just need a chip. Sweet.
Sp
No spindles ready to break down
Jason
It’s about time. Every once in a while, I think how backwards it is that we are still relying on physical movement that is very susceptible to all sorts of things, to hold all of our mission critical data? Very interesting. Brought up a question I had the other day, I twittered but nobody replied back. So you’ve got your data in these big expensive data centers, but really, how big of an earthquake does it take to kill your drives? The building is still standing, maybe you’ve still got power to [TimeStamp00:59:09 ] the building, but if it shook hard enough?
Sp
You could email Mythbusters and have them try and figure it out.
Sp
OH! That would be sweet! IT Mythbusters!
Sp
Nice!
Sp
Maybe we should just do our own Mythbusters show!
Sp
If you freeze a corrupt hard drive, will it fix it?
Sp
We might have to plan that.
Jason
We just need to find somebody that would sponsor buying a bunch of Equal Logic sans.
Sp
Maybe we could get a vendor to donate some to see how well they stack up against others!
Sp
They’d want to see the results first.
Jason
But seriously, it is a legitimate question in my mind. I was thinking about the China earthquake, you’ve spent all this money to have your data in a big fancy data protection place, or a data center, and sure the building still stands and has power, but besides your back-up tapes, what kind of ugliness do you have on those hard drives? Maybe they can survive a lot more than I think, I’ve seen that they can take a hundred-g blow and it’s all good. But is that a hundred g’s when the thing is spinning at 10,000-15,000 rpms and it is being shook violently for, how long does an earthquake last? A minute, 30 seconds? Makes you wonder.
Well, anything else? We are into the hour time frame here.
If you are interested in Equal Logic, I keep running into people doing Equal Logic, and all I want to say is if you are trying to get some great pricing on Equal Logic, you need to check out VR 6 Systems [?] You don’t have to use them, there is some back-story to that, but I’m just trying to get pricing. You can obviously go through Dell but you will not get the pricing you deserve. I’ll leave it at that for now. That’s all I had, oh I wanted to talk about, we need more suggestions from you guys on what kind of things we want to do with the podcast. It seems like we are, I don’t want to say running out of steam, but we need to revitalize it, give us some more shots in the arm. If you’ve got ideas for topics that you’d love to hear discussed. In the past we’ve brought some vendors in to talk about a particular topic, if you’ve got interest in that or you know a vendor that’s got something you are interested in, it is probably something that all of us would be interested in. Please help with that.
Good! I will kill the record, the phone line stays open, the chat window stays open. We’re good.
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