Frank Owen – TechVirtuoso

Google+ Available to Google Apps users!

October 27th, 2011 at 6:27 PM 9 Comments Frank Owen

I am a big fan of Google Apps. I use it for personal use and with most people’s Exchange mailbox size limits it is a good alternate (for some) to Outlook with PST files. There has been many people waiting patiently (I was one of them) for this option since Google + has been released. Google+ can now be accessed by members using Google Apps! Google has laid out tips for the roll out, considerations for the real business users and of course wait everyone is waiting for, how to enable Google + for Apps users.

Not sure why you are still here reading. Now that you have access, get to plusing!

Have HTC and AT&T gone nuts?

September 6th, 2011 at 9:35 AM 2 Comments Frank Owen

I do not understand the thinking behind this. It makes absolutely no sense to me. $849.00 for a Android Dual Core tablet? $149.00 subsidy from AT&T? What were they thinking?! I realize that these decisions were made long before the HP TouchPad firesale started, but don’t you think someone should have said “wait a second, we should look at this again” and postpone the launch?

The HTC Jetstream is no low end tablet, but it is nothing unique. 1.5GHz dual-core Qualcomm Snapdragon processor, an 8-megapixel camera with dual-LED flash, 10.1-inch display, and a 1.3-megapixel front-facing camera. In today’s world, the majority of tablets (including this one) is a add-on device. Why are they charging the price of a low to mid-range laptop? At this price point I can almost buy a Lenovo Thinkpad and a lower end Android Tablet.

The other piece that is puzzling to me is why is AT&T only offering a $149.00 discount for a 2 year contract? Who would sign up for that deal? With Sprint’s recently announced ETF Change is this a new pattern? Low subsidies and high ETF’s? Lets hope not.

Hopefully this is just a case of “too late to change” and doesn’t show a trend to things to come from HTC. If it does, I don’t see the once great smart device manufacturer continuing on with their legacy.

Can you have too much security?

August 29th, 2011 at 8:35 AM 3 Comments Frank Owen

I started a new position this year and have many challenges to overcome. There are a lot of things that have been neglected and many changes to be made. One of the changes I was looking at implementing is enabling Windows Firewall locally. I started on a few new servers that I was rolling out and the regional IT staff that support some of our internal systems started to disable these firewalls. When I brought this up they thought I was nuts. Just wait until I start restricting services by IP.

Fast Forward to today and the “Morto” internet worm is spreading via RDP. We don’t have any RDP hosts local that are open to the dangerous world we know as the internet but I can’t vouch for the other dozen sites that are connected at the other end of our MPLS. Now, most of our PC’s don’t have RDP enabled, but PC’s used by management and more importantly the majority of our servers may be susceptible if one PC out of thousands are infected.

I realize more security means more administrative overhead and makes admin jobs harder, but what happens when something like this hits and all of these machines are infected? how much work is that going to take to remedy?

So, what are your thoughts? How far do you go to keep your infrastructure safe?

A few days with a dead tablet

August 28th, 2011 at 9:12 AM 4 Comments Frank Owen

Like many others the announcement that HP would discontinue all current WebOS devices surprised me. I knew it wasn’t selling as well as HP expected (especially with the Rumors about Best Buy wanting to return a huge chunk of their stock) but I didn’t think they would give up this easily.

I went on the hunt to get one after the $99/$149 fire sale started. Since I was traveling that Saturday I didn’t get my hands on one until this past Wednesday. I am not a complete newb to WebOS. My wife used the original Pre on Sprint for a year and after she upgraded to the Evo I swapped it to my account as my primary device a couple of times. I really like WebOS but the Pre’s hardware killed the experience for me. I was exited to see how WebOS had evolved since version 1 as well as the experience on a piece of quality hardware.

Overall the WebOS interface hasn’t changed much, but it seemed much more polished over version 1.45. The hardware seemed solid but I was surprised to experience a little lag when doing some basic tasks. I would think the Dual Core Snapdragon system wouldn’t have small performance issues like this. Even with the performance shortcomings I didn’t use my laptop for three days after bringing the tablet home which surprised me.

The HP Touchpad had potential to be a great device, but with the previous price point I can understand why it wasn’t selling as well as it’s competitors. VPN Functionality and LAN Printing are great features but without apps like Remote Desktop, no support to access network files (CIFS Support is available in a Homebrew kernal, but no file manager supports it yet) and the crazy limitation to only be able to print to HP Printers it almost renders these features useless. There were also a number of applications in the HP Market that I was surprised not to see. No Google Voice (there was an app to send SMS messages through your Google Voice account), no LogMeIn and no Dropbox just to name a few.

Overall I am happy with my purchase. Would I have paid $499+ for the device? Absolutely not but I don’t think I would pay that much for an iPad even with it’s ever mounting list of applications. Will my Touchpad force me to leave my trusty Thinkpad on the charger? I am not sure, but after using the Touchpad I do know some tablet (not sure which at this point) will.

Tech Field Day 7 is on!

August 11th, 2011 at 5:00 AM 4 Comments Frank Owen

Tech Field Day 7 starts this morning and I am excited to get to our first presenter, Solarwinds (they have Tacos!). After we eat our Tacos and hear about Solarwinds we will move onto Symantec and then to Dell. You can follow the action on twitter or watch it live, right after the break!

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Austin isn’t ready for this!

August 10th, 2011 at 12:49 AM 5 Comments Frank Owen

Photo by Steven Foskett at TFD4

When you have 13 geeks (plus a Foskett, not sure what to classify him as) transcending on a city at the same time there will be shenanigans. This is exactly what is going to happen tomorrow!

I will be joining a great group of tech bloggers at Tech Field Day 7. It will be two days of amazing information and discussions revolving around data center technologies. Sponsoring the event will be SolarWinds (@SolarWinds_Inc), Symantec (@Symantec), Veeam (@Veeam) and Dell (@Dell_Storage). My fellow TFD 7 deleates are below!

Scott Cochran	ScottCochran.org vCTC	@ScottCochran
Theron Conrey	Conrey.org VMunderground	@TheronConrey
Scott Lowe	TechRepublic VirtualizationAdmin	@OtherScottLowe
Roger Lund	vRoger vBrainstorm	@RogerLund
Frank Owen	TechVirtuoso	@FOwen
Bob Plankers	The Lone Sysadmin	@Plankers
W. Curtis Preston	Backup Central Truth in IT	@WCPreston
Fabio Rapposelli	Juku P2V It!	@FabioRapposelli
Brandon Riley	virtual insanity	@BrandonJRiley
Reed Robins	Truth in IT Backup Central	@TheReedRobins
Derek Schauland	Technically Speaking	@WebJunkie
Matt Simmons	Standalone Sysadmin	@standaloneSA
Matt Vogt	Virtualization, Storage, Community	@MattVogt

Keep an eye out on Twitter and my fellow blogger/tweeters above for information throughout this great event. We will also have a live feed posted on the forum tomorrow for anyone who wants to join in.

Disclaimer: Travel and accommodations are being provided by the sponsors of Tech Field Day 7 (which are listed above). My posts, and my opinions will always be my own. I am not required to post any material to participate in this event.

Edit: I can’t believe I left Dell out! Thanks gminks for pointing it out!

Official OneNote app comes to the iPhone

January 20th, 2011 at 10:06 PM 6 Comments Frank Owen

Microsoft has finally brought an official Office application (at least one of them) to the iPhone platform. The OneNote app allows users on an Apple mobile device to modify and create OneNote files from their iOS device and sync them through SkyDrive. Is this a sign of new applications to come out of Redmond to try and help combat users leaving Bill Gates’ cash cow called Office? If so, I believe it is a smart move. Choice and flexibility may help the fight against competitors from juggernauts Sun and Google. Currently Microsoft is giving the way the app but leaves the door open for a future profit stream by stating the application is “free for a limited time.”

Android users are currently left in the dark forced to use third party apps like MobileNoter to get their OneNote on.

Storage Tiering vs Caching

November 12th, 2010 at 9:06 AM 28 Comments Frank Owen

During the first day of Tech Field Day #4 in San Jose we heard from two storage vendors who had two different thoughts on how storage should be configured. We started out the day with NetApp who went over everything from their new OnTap 8.0.1 software, to the joint venture with Cisco and VMware called FlexPod as well as a presentation from Greg Kleimanon, Director of Marketing, on how NetApp uses caching in their arrays.

NetApp believes their Intelligent caching using Flash Cache is the best way to handle some of the hurdles that customers are facing today. Kleimanon stated that Tiering is expensive and complicated to manage. He did comment that there are companies (Like F5, another vendor from a previous Tech Field Day) that have created algorithms to dynamically manage tiering but he echoed that these algorithms are not proven.

The last presentation of the day was from Avere Co-founder/CEO Ronald Bianchini, Jr. He was very passionate about his product and it showed through the presentation. Avere uses your current “slow” storage for archive and uses a hybrid of RAM and SAS/SSD drives for faster reads/writes. This solves the problem of speed in space by using a non traditional process of putting their box with the fast stuff (RAM & SAS/SSD) in front of your traditional SATA slow array. It uses a algorithm to decide which items should be written/read from the RAM, the SAS/SSD drives or the SATA drives depending on the most efficient way to handle the data.

So what are your thoughts? Caching or Tiering?

After seeing both presentations I think Tiering as implemented by Avere is the right way to implement the solution. The way Avere breaks down the data and gives it the most efficient access path to the storage just makes sense. Look for big things coming from Avere, especially in their FXT Series.

Update: Here are the videos of the two presentations. Watch and share your thoughts!

NetApp Presentation 1, 2, 3

Avere Presentation

Disclaimer: Tech Field Day is organized by the great folks at Gestalt IT and paid for by the presenters of the event. Even though my travel, meals and hotel accommodations were paid for my opinions are my own and it will not affect my posts.

Tech Field Day starts on Wednesday!

November 9th, 2010 at 12:32 AM 4 Comments Frank Owen

It is going to be a crazy couple of days as myself and 10 other bloggers converge on San Jose for the 4th Tech Field Day presented by Gestalt IT. Over the two days We will be hearing from 7 sponsors, from storage providers to chipset giants and enterprise monitoring leaders.

This will be the first event that will be streamed live from Gestalt IT, the events organizer. I am expecting two action packed days full of tweeting, blogging and good discussion. If you have any questions you want asked to the sponsors post your questions in the comments or message me on Twitter.

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