One thing I’m not an expert on is data center security. A story was relayed to me by one of my Sales Engineers that really got me thinking about the topic though.

A while ago we were installing BalancePoint in a new customer site. The customer has a fairly large data center with hundreds of servers. As he began with the installation he requested username / password credentials in order to collect data from a particular set of servers. The customer was eager to get us going so instead of waiting to go through a process to get us Akorri credentials he said we could use the same credentials they use for another product. He asked a coworker if knew the username / password combination. Unfortunately he didn’t remember but offered to go get it. Now my Sales Engineer was expecting him to log into some database or other application to retrieve the need information but instead he got up and walked over to a corner of the room where there was a safe. Yes, a real safe. He opened up the safe, riffled through a number of envelopes, retrieved one and brought it back. Opening the envelope he removed a slip of paper that had the handwritten username/password combination. He entered the information into BalancePoint and then returned the envelope to the safe.

As this story was being told to me I was chuckling. I was thinking to myself how low-tech nobody would want to manage credentials that way. On my drive home from work that day I began to think about the story again. I do most of my best thinking on my 12 mile commutes to and from work! I was still thinking wow, such a low-tech solution but I was beginning to also think maybe it’s not such a bad solution. Just because it’s low-tech doesn’t mean it’s a bad solution. As a matter of fact it’s probably more secure than the high-tech alternatives. Credentials stored on shared media, no matter what type of encryption is used, can still be hacked and accessed. With the physical security of the safe the access control is very well understood. Also, backups of the data aren’t really needed. It’s much harder for slips of paper to get destroyed in a fire proof safe than it is for bits to get destroyed or corrupted on a computer system. I was beginning to convince myself that the credential security scheme they employed may not be so ridiculous afterall. It’s ok to be low-tech. Right?

As I stated at the beginning, data center security issues isn’t something I’m an expert on. I’d be interested in hearing from the experts their thoughts on the topic. I might just go out this weekend and buy a safe for storing my own username / passwords in!

Wow, I cant believe its been a month since my last posting. What a month its been. Startups are intense places and Akorri is no exception. Since our company & product launch on January 15^th Ive been on a whirlwind tour of customer and partner visits and conferences.

On March 2nd I was asked to speak at the New York CMG. For those of you not familiar with Computer Measurement Group (CMG), its a group of professionals who are interested in performance measurement and analysis of computer systems. CMG is a great resource if you are interested in computer systems performance and Id highly recommend joining.

The NY CMG chapter meeting on was focused on virtualization. Virtualization is a hot topic these days and its impact on system performance is a difficult one to understand. My talk focused on a few key points.

The first point I made was that virtualization is not new. Networks have been virtualized for years. You could also consider things like server based volume managers as a virtualization layer. And lets face it, most storage vendors have had some type of virtual LUN for years. Its server based virtualization like VMWare and Xen that are causing all the hype these days.

The second point I made was that what virtualization does for an IT organization is that it turns physical resources into services. VMWare for example turns computes into a service. If an application needs more computes then we turn a dial in the server virtualization layer and get more. If a storage volume needs more space or different protection characteristics we can turn a dial in the storage virtualization layer to achieve this goal. This is a very powerful realization. But as you can imagine, it also has a huge impact on effective system management and overall system performance.

My third point was that in order to achieve effective management of a virtualized IT infrastructure, a new management paradigm needs to be embraced. Virtualization can provide for highly dynamic systems, systems that can change relatively easy with changes in business requirements or workload. But in order to realize the benefits of this dynamic system, a high degree of collaboration between various organizations within the enterprise needs to exist. The business owner, application administrator, server administrator, network administrator and storage administrator all need to be in sync as to defining the requirements and how those requirements will impact their areas of focus.

In a future post Ill talk in more detail regarding how I believe that the available collaboration tools known as Web 2.0 can be used in achieving effective IT management in our virtualized world.