Archive for July 2012

Consumer Electronic Sales Bode Well for Cloud

July 28th, 2012
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By Laurie Head
AIS Network Vice President

If consumer electronic sales – and particularly those of mobile connected devices (which leverage the elastic resources of various clouds) – are any indication, cloud computing is poised for more growth well into this decade, and surely, beyond.

Tablet sales

Tablets are expected to reach $29.1 billion in shipment revenues this year.

For the first time ever, U.S. consumer electronics sales are expected to top the $200 billion mark this year.  That’s according to a new forecast released by the Arlington-based Consumer Electronics Association (CEA).  CEA anticipates that the industry will grow 5.9% this year – 2% higher than previously expected – to more than $206 billion.  Sales growth is projected to continue into 2013, when industry revenues will likely reach nearly $216 billion.

Sales of mobile connected devices, led by tablets, have pushed overall industry revenues to record highs:   Tablets are expected to reach $29.1 billion in shipment revenues this year, $10.8 billion more than forecasted in January, representing 83 percent sales growth year-over-year.  Unit sales are expected to reach 68.5 million.

“The CE industry is offering what consumers want during these uncertain economic times: innovation and value,” said CEA President and CEO Gary Shapiro. “Consumers’ desire for connected devices is pushing projected revenues higher than originally anticipated, but the long-term health of our industry relies on a strong and growing U.S. economy.”

Smartphone sales will also see continued growth this year and will remain the primary revenue driver for the industry.  Shipment revenues for smartphones are expected to reach $33.7 billion in 2012, with more than 108 million units shipping to dealers, up 24 percent from 2011.

Laptop sales continue to increase as consumers demand mobility in computing solutions.  Led by the introduction of ultrabooks, overall laptop sales to dealers are expected to reach $14.9 billion, with 21.3 million laptops shipping to dealers.

“Tablets are the fastest-growing product category in the history of the CE industry, and sales will continue to increase as more products hit the market, offering consumers more choices in size, price, operating systems and app ecosystems,” said Steve Koenig, CEA’s director of industry analysis. “With U.S. household penetration of smartphones surpassing the 50 percent threshold, we’re seeing slowing sales of dedicated devices, as consumers seek singular devices that can perform multiple functions. We expect this trend to continue into 2013.”

CEA publishes the U.S. Consumer Electronics Sales and Forecasts (July 2012) twice a year, in January and July.  It was designed and formulated by CEA to be the most comprehensive source of sales data, forecasts, consumer research and historical trends for the consumer electronics industry.  The complete report is available free to CEA member companies. At the CEA store, non-members may purchase the study for $2,000.

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Private Cloud Success Trends Upward

July 17th, 2012
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By Laurie Head
AIS Network Vice President

How successful are private clouds, anyway?

That’s the question asked by a recent research report from Information Week.  The survey reveals that most companies with private clouds in place are pleased with the results and are experiencing heightened efficiency and lower costs.

I find this report particularly interesting, since we’re building more and more private clouds — and particularly SharePoint private clouds — every day.  While it’s not entirely clear to me how many of the companies surveyed are hosting their private cloud with a hosting provider or building their private cloud on premise, I think that the takeaways are broadly applicable.

Network Computing editor Mike Fratto, who wrote the 66-page report, said in his abstract:

The big takeaway? Those with private clouds experience more efficient use of hardware and superior scalability and reliability, and they make better use of IT’s time.  These are all measurable benefits that can make your IT department shine in the eyes of users and the CFO.  Those with private clouds also report success in lowering capital and operational costs and total cost of ownership.

There are some keys to success, though:  Have a well-thought-out migration plan. Make sure new software can leverage the scaling and reliability features of your private cloud, and be prepared to train employees on the new systems. They’ll love you for it, and you’ll get better results.

A majority of the 414 IT professionals surveyed said they aren’t running private clouds yet.  However, 21 percent of respondents said they have private clouds in place, and 30 percent more said they’re beginning private cloud projects.  Of the respondents with private clouds, 72 percent described their implementations as “very successful” or “a complete success.” Another quarter said they were “somewhat successful,” while only 1 percent chose “somewhat unsuccessful.”  Most reported having successfully lowered capex and opex.

The report digs deeper into cloud expectations, cloud costs, cloud maintenance, challenges, obstacles, vendor choices, best practices, keys to success and more.  You can download the report here.

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Cleaning Out the SharePoint Site Recycle Bin

July 16th, 2012
Posted by: admin

By Terry Engelstad
MCP, MCSE, CCNA, MCDBA, MCTS, MCITP
AIS Network Operations Manager

Recently, a SharePoint hosting customer asked us to perform routine maintenance on his SharePoint site.  As part of that, he asked us to clean out the Recycle Bin and have the automatic deletion mechanism disabled for the Recycle Bin.  He said that his company hadn’t cleaned its SharePoint Recycle Bin in over one year.

There are some things you might find interesting about the Recycle Bin, which is the first line of defense in recovering data. As you probably know, SharePoint uses a two-tier Recycle Bin. The first tier is at the User level where an item deleted from a List or Library will drop into the User Recycle Bin. This way, the Users can recover deleted items themselves. Then after a period of time, items will be moved from the User Recycle Bin to a Site Collection Recycle Bin. The duration for which an item sits in the User Recycle Bin is determined by a parameter in SharePoint Central and is specific to an entire Web Application.  The duration for which items will sit in the Site Collection Recycle Bin is determined by the amount of space available to hold these items and is also configurable via a parameter in SharePoint Central.

Currently, our customer’s User Recycle Bin is configured to never delete items.  There are quite a few items in various User Recycle Bins. There are two ways to clean them out.  First, somebody can go to each of the User Recycle Bins and remove items manually.  Or, second, the retention configuration parameter could be changed to a very low value, and after a period of time, the items will flush out on their own.

The difference between these two techniques is that the first one requires human intervention to find all the Recycle Bins and to make decisions about which items should be deleted or not. The second option is global and will affect all items in all Recycle Bins.

Naturally, if our client wants us to clean out the User Recycle Bins individually, they would also need to define the rules for deletion of those items (i.e., delete everything older than 30 days, for example).

On the other hand, if the customer wants us to change the configuration parameters, we’d be happy to do so.  That’s easy.

More questions about your hosted SharePoint?  Leave your comments below.

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What Is Big Data and Why Is It Becoming Bigger Data?

July 12th, 2012
Posted by: admin

 

By Julia Uglietta
Associate, Marketing and Sales

Big data is a consequence of the new world of technology that we have created, where everything is monitored and measured at an increasingly fast rate.  All of the resulting data then exceeds the processing and storage capacity of traditional database systems.  The term “big data” is used to describe sets of data so great and intricate that they need assistance from data management tools in order for people to be able to use the data effectively.

Big Data

Cloud-based big data is rapidly becoming the wave of the future.

Big data can be found in many industries that touch everyone’s life in some way or another such as healthcare, human relations, science and finance.  But most of all, the federal government wrestles with big data routinely.  Medicare claims, financial records, video and “sensor” records represent just some of the big data that the federal government deals with every day.

Big data to the federal government, though, may be different than big data to an organization with fewer than 100 employees. What is considered big data, as opposed to just data, depends upon the organization managing it. Some might be able to handle hundreds of terabytes or even multiple petabytes, while some might only be able to manage hundreds of gigabytes.  It all depends on what an organization is prepared to handle.

Big Data Is Becoming Bigger Data

Faster than we can count, big data is becoming bigger data.

According to the Forbes article “Best Practices for Managing Big Data,” the average organization will grow their data by 50 percent in the coming year and overall corporate data will grow by 94 percent.  IDC pegs the value of big data at $16.9 billion by 2015.

The myriad devices in use today are contributing heavily to the growth of big data. Between mobile phones, laptops, sensors, RFID tags and smart meters, the new technology devices we use today are bringing in more data than ever before.  Not surprisingly, the majority of big data is duplicated or synthesized data. So, just as large masses of data are being recorded daily, copied and stored data is also growing exponentially – and by the second.

Managing data is no longer an option for most organizations.  Rather, it has become a requirement.  However, without the proper data management tools, analyzing the data to gather business insights is an enormous challenge.

Big Data and the Cloud

That’s where the cloud comes in.  Cloud computing, along with the tool of virtualization, is rapidly becoming the best way to manage big data. By virtualizing data, you are reducing the data footprint and centralizing the management of the data set – ultimately making big data smaller.  Virtualization is key when it comes to opening up more affordable data management options and reducing the costs associated with data storage.

The cloud, with its clusters of servers, readily offers scalability and flexibility for processing all that big data. The increase in processing capacity for cloud-based big data saves both time and money.  When big data applications are based in the cloud, a broader range of users within an organization can run mammoth big data infrastructures more quickly and efficiently.  Moreover, in the cloud, organizations can run their big data operations at a fraction of the cost of doing it in-house.

Big data is simply becoming unavoidable.  However, with this growing challenge, comes many new opportunities.  Cloud-based data management tools and techniques are being developed and automated every day to meet the unique needs of millions of customers around the world.

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Slow SharePoint Server? If your SharePoint Loads Slowly, This May Be Why.

July 9th, 2012
Posted by: admin

 

By Terry Engelstad
MCP, MCSE, CCNA, MCDBA, MCTS, MCITP
AIS Network Operations Manager

Is your SharePoint Server running slow?

Recently, a client emailed to say that he was noticing large slowdowns in connecting to their SharePoint server at AISN.  It seems to be happening nightly and intermittently throughout the day, he said.  Specifically, his issues were:

  1. SharePoint content loads slowly
  2. Uploading/ downloading from SharePoint is impossible (speeds come to a crawl at less than 5KBps)
  3. Remoting in to the SharePoint server is very slow

He asked what could be causing a slow SharePoint Server and SharePoint SQL Server.  Here’s the problem in his case.

The servers, in general, are starving for memory.  The hypervisor on which they reside (XYZ1) has only 74 MB of free memory.  Microsoft recommends not dropping below 2 GB of free memory on a hypervisor.

See the image below for XYZ1 (real names changed to protect client).

Slow SharePoint

As I explained to our client, the server “SharePoint” has 0 free memory and is warning that it needs more.  It looks like the vast majority of the memory on SharePoint is being consumed by w3wp.exe – IIS Application Pools. This would certainly contribute to slow web page rendering.  And with 0 free memory, anybody who remotes into it will take more memory away from the Application Pools, thereby making it slower.

In our client’s case, the server “SharePointSQL” is grossly overtaxed.  I count 68 databases defined and live.  This is way, way too much for a SQL Server with only 8 GB of memory.  The Microsoft recommendation is 8 GB of memory for a lightly used SharePoint Foundation Farm and 16 GB for a lightly used SharePoint Server Farm.

This level of memory, combined with the number of databases, will create very small page caching (perhaps not even caching at all).  This will seriously degrade the speed of uploading documents.

As you may or may not know, SharePoint stores all documents as Binary Large Objects (BLOBs).  In order to properly convert, for example, a Word document to a BLOB, it must cache the entire uploaded document somewhere before it can go through the conversion to a BLOB. So again, small or non-existent cache, means real slow upload and download times, among other slownesses.

In this case, adding more memory is the solution to a slow SharePoint Server.   However, a SharePoint private cloud would be an ideal approach – one that allows for the flexibility and scalability this client needs to accommodate growth smoothly.

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