EMC Consulting Blogs

Using Data in Lotus Notes Fields for Refiners in SharePoint 2013

rhrempel — Wed, 08 May 2013 12:04:32 GMT

I have an earlier blog entry using SharePoint 2013 to crawl and index Lotus Notes documents. However, the value of doing so is much greater if I actually demonstrate some of the capabilities of SharePoint 2013. One capability that I find advantageous is the use of refiners in search results.

I increased the available memory to my SharePoint 2013 virtual memory from 8GB to 12GB. I know that SharePoint search likes using a lot of memory.

I return to Central Administration and click on Manage service applications.

I click on my Search Service Application service application. I then click on Search Schema.

The Search Service Application: Managed Properties screen appears. I click on Categories.

The Search Service Application: Categories screen appears. I click on Notes.

I want to use the Category field for filtering the search results. The Category appears near the top of the Lotus Notes form and a review of the data makes it appear to be well-used. The steps that follow will show how I implement using the Category field.

The Search Service Application: Crawled Properties - Notes screen appears. I enter Category in the Crawled properties field and click on the green arrow box . The list of property names is filtered to include only those that contain the term Category.

I click on Category and then click on Edit/Map Property.

The Search Service Application: Edit Crawled Property: Category screen appears. I can add mappings to the managed property on this screen.

I click on Add a Mapping. The Managed property selection screen appears. I scroll down the Select a managed property and select RefinableString00(text).

I click OK at the bottom of the screen (scrolling down a bit). RefinableString00(text) appears in the mapping list.

I click OK to close the Search Service Application: Edit Crawled Property: Category screen. I am returned to the Search Service Application: Crawled Properties - Notes screen. I enter Category in the Crawled properties field and click on the green arrow box . The list of property names is filtered to include only those that contain the term Category. I can see that RefinableString00 is listed in the Mapped To Property column for Category.

I click on RefinableString000. The Search Service Application: Edit Managed Property – RefinableString00 screen appears.

I scroll down to the Refinable section and validate that Yes – active is selected in the drop-down list.

I scroll down to the Mappings to crawled properties section and select Category in the list. It is already at the top of the list. If not, I would click on Move Up to move Category to the top of the list. By moving Category to the top, I am making sure that it is the first to be picked up and mapped to the RefinableString00 . I click OK to accept the changes and close the screen.

I click on Content Sources on the left side.

The Search Service Application: Manage Content Sources screen appears. I click on Lotus Notes Application and then click on Start Full Crawl. I will have to wait for the full crawl to complete because I selected Yes – active for refiners.

I open my Search Center site at http://server2012sp/sites/SearchCenter.

On the Search Results page, click the Settings menu, and then click Edit Page.

In the Refinement Web Part, click the Refinement Web Part Menu arrow, and then click Edit Web Part.

In the Refinement Web Part tool pane, in the Refiners section, click Choose Refiners...

The Refinement configuration for ‘Refinement’ screen appears. I select RefinableString00 in the Available Refiners list.

I click on Add> to add RefinableString00 to the Selected refiners list.

I update the configuration settings as seen below. I add Category as the Display name.

I click on Preview refiners… at the bottom of the screen. The Refinement Web Part preview screen appears. I see the Category refiner that I added on the left side near the bottom.

I click OK to close Refinement Web Part preview screen. I click OK to close Refinement configuration for ‘Refinement’ screen.

I click OK at the bottom of the Refinement Web Part tool pane.

I click on the PUBLISH tab.

I click on Publish and Publish again to publish the changes to the web part to the web page.

I click Continue to close the Publish screen. You may not see this screen.

The Category value now appears as a refiner. I run a different search to show additional Category values for refinement.

This was a pretty simple configuration once I completed it. I’m still working on a similar effort with metadata and faceted navigation.

Weekly Digest of what EMC's bloggers have been writing about 15/04/13, via @mattbuckley

steven.goddard — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 09:28:00 GMT

1. Reflections – EMC Executives Report From The Road

How Data Analytics Saved $300M In Health Care Costs

2 days ago

By Delia Vetter, Senior Director, Benefits and Programs

How can employers mitigate the escalating costs of health care while providing a benefits program that meets the needs of their employees? By becoming data rich and making data analytics meaningful to their workforce. Over the past decade at EMC we have created a center of knowledge through the use of aggregate healthcare data analytics. This holistic approach provides us with business intelligence, insights into the overall health of the population, as well as the ability to measure ongoing results.

700 Apply For Big Data Summer School in Brazil

6 days ago

By Rodrigo Gazzaneo, Specialists PreSales Manager, Latin America

As the “B” in BRIC emerging economies, Brazil is at the intersection of massive economic gains and growing pains related to ongoing infrastructure limitations. Energy and transportation are some examples, but the hardest resource to find is also the most valuable: qualified professionals. In IT, there is already high demand for skilled professionals. And given the speed of changes in the industry, the demand will grow even faster for individuals who have Cloud and Big Data knowledge and skills in their portfolio. With this scenario in mind, EMC Brazil put together its first “EMC Summer School on Big Data” at Rio de Janeiro Federal University (UFRJ) this past February.

2. Chuck's Blog – An EMC insider's perspective on information, technology and customer challenges.

The New "How Can We Help?"

1 day ago

Historically, I've done a *lot* of direct customer and partner interaction. I've always found that you can't fully appreciate what's really going on in the IT marketplace unless you spend a lot of time with the people that matter. Reading analyst reports (no matter how good) can only get you so far. All this frequent interaction gives me the opportunity to spot subtle yet persistent shifts in the gestalt of enterprise IT. Good news: I've started to regularly encounter an entirely new class of post-transformational IT leadership team.

My Thoughts On HP's Moonshot

2 days ago

This morning, HP took a bold step forward with formally unveiling their "Project Moonshot" -- a new class of servers targeted at (apparently) hyperscale web server farms. While I'm certainly a big fan of disruptive innovation (even from EMC competitors), I've come away with mixed emotions. HP has certainly picked an interesting target to aim at. And they have enough resources and influence in the larger ecosystem to drive a specific agenda. But I think it's going to take an awfully long time before the jury is in as to whether they've been successful or not.

NYSE Technologies and The Community Cloud

4 days ago

Almost two years ago, I wrote about how NYSE Technologies was launching a "community cloud" targeted at the financial trading community. At the time, it was a brave experiment, with powerful ideas behind the offering. I was duly fascinated. Now, two years later, they're now reaping the benefits of being the first mover in their industry: many customers, expanded services, increased investment -- success is clearly at hand. Could the dynamics behind their success lead to similar community clouds for other industry sectors? I think so...

Escaping The Channel Partner Vise

4 days ago

One of the more interesting things I've done recently was speak with the executive leadership of one of EMC's valued channel partners. They were going through a strategic planning cycle, and wanted an outside perspective. I thought that wonderful on several levels. First, they were investing serious leadership effort in a meaningful and non-trivial strategic planning process. It seems that far too few of our channel partners do this, and -- given all the structural changes occurring in our industry - it's probably a good time to do so. Second, they invited me (on behalf of EMC) to lead a business discussion - not on technology, but on the broader industry, the changing face of IT, new business models and -hopefully - what it might mean for them.

3. Storagezilla

Giveaway: $150 EMC World discounts.

7 days ago

When I have stuff to give away you’ll get it, in this case I’ve a $150 off your EMC World Registration to give away to the first three commenters. Include a valid email address so I can contact you directly. If you’ve used an early bird or discount code already don’t bother as it’ll knock out the previous code, but if you’ve already registered without any early bird or discount codes it can be used after the fact to gain the discount.

4. Information Playground – Global High-Tech Innovation

Collaboration with the Push of a Button

1 day ago

Last week I described the Improve Idea button that we have added to our 2013 Innovation Roadmap activity at EMC. I'd like to describe in a bit more detail what happens when this button is pushed. The goal is to connect EMC employees with the relevant people and resources that can improve their idea before they submit it. In a previous post I described an analytic experiment that allowed us to visualize the evolution of employee idea submission themes over a period of three years.

Innovation Roadmap 2013: Push the Improve Button

5 days ago

Earlier this week the Chief Technology Officer of EMC, John Roese, launched his own version of what used to be called the Innovation Showcase: The 2013 Innovation Roadmap. The Innovation Showcase was launched in 2007, and for six consecutive years the ideation growth across EMC's global employee base has been consistent. In 2007 employees submitted just over 400 ideas; in 2012 they submitted a grand total of 2200 ideas. Each idea was targeted at a specific challenge that EMC is facing as a company.

Cairo Innovation Clouds

7 days ago

In March I visited two universities in Egypt that have deployed "mini-clouds" for the purpose of education and innovation: German University Cairo (GUC) and Ain Shams University.

This visit coincided with a blog post I wrote several years ago (2011) called Cairo Cloud Formations. In that post, I discussed how the Egyptian innovation ecosystem was "primed and ready" to learn about cloud computing, design cloud architectures, build their own systems, and innovate within those systems. Our strategy after this visit was to (a) focus heavily on cloud education, (b) generate cloud-specific research proposals with select universities, and (c) build a "mini-cloud" on-premise at the Cairo Center of Excellence with EMC employees. Two years later, there has been significant progress made on all three fronts.

5. The Backup Window – 360° view of backup and recovery

Cloud Driving the Economy

6 days ago

From tech startups (like mine) to Fortune 200 tech companies (like mine) alike, cloud has been a global engine of growth as well as an enabler of rapid innovation. And even through the recent recession, cloud adoption has continued to skyrocket leading to an entire economy being built around it (PaaS, SaaS, ITaaS, BaaS, XaaS…) Did you know that cloud will generate 14 million jobs worldwide by 2013? Or that IT innovation through cloud computing leads to $1.2 billion per year in new revenue?

6. EMC IT Proven – Leading our IT Transformation

Once A CIO, Always A CIO

4 days ago

While bittersweet, career changes are exhilarating. After nearly five years as EMC’s CIO, I’ve handed the reins over to our newest executive Vic Bhagat and EMC’s award-winning IT team, who proudly and painstakingly built our industry-leading cloud and Big Data foundation. I may have given up the title and business cards, but I believe that once you are a CIO, you are always a CIO. As I roll up my sleeves to support the Pivotal Initiative led by Paul Maritz; foster the company’s international growth opportunities; and lend a hand with a variety of EMC’s customer activities, I will be relying on many battle-tested lessons from my tenure as CIO.

2013 RSA Conference Shows Risk Management A Growing Priority

7 days ago

The 2013 RSA Conference provides a terrific venue for industry leaders to share and communicate, but one topic, I couldn’t help but notice a dramatic rise in interest: Risk Management. Over the past three RSA Conferences, I have seen our Risk Management seminar increase from a peer-to-peer session of 25 people two years ago to more than 800 people at this year’s session — and with good reason. The idea of risk management resonates deeply within the industry, including the need and practice of risk management and the desire to bond security, data analytics and the business.

7. InFocus – EMC Global Services Blog

EMC’s Proven Infrastructure Presents New Opportunities for SMBs and VARs

2 days ago

A number of organizations are benefitting from virtualization, including small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). However, many SMBs face challenges with virtualization and implementation of their private cloud. They don’t have the luxury of a big IT team or substantial budget to start with. But they still have the same IT challenges as other enterprises – agility, innovation, doing more with less, the need for high availability and DR. Is there a quicker and better way for deployment of private cloud infrastructure for SMBs? EMC’s VSPEX Proven Infrastructure, a converged infrastructure solution, can help accelerate SMB’s IT Transformation journey.

Drivers for Managing Data Integration – from Data Conversion to Big Data

5 days ago

Data management in an organization is focused on getting data to its data consumers (whether human or application). The goal of data quality and data governance is trusted data. The goal of data integration is available data – getting data to the data consumers in the format that is right for them. Last week my new book on Data Integration was published and is now available: “Managing Data in Motion: Data Integration Best Practice Techniques and Technologies”. Of course the first part of a book on data management techniques has to answer the question of why an organization should invest time and effort and money.

8. Managed View – From Silos to Services

How The Data Center Is Becoming Software-Defined

4 days ago

In mid 2012 VMware CTO Steve Herrod and others began to articulate the concept of the software-defined data center. This concept was just as often received as a marketing position from vendors as an observation about the evolution of the data center. At the time, I blogged about the basic concepts of the software-defined data center and followed-up the initial post with an additional blog posts about storage challenges in the software-defined data center. Other posts addressed related topics such as how cloud adoption contributes to the evolution of APIs. Now, since many months have passed, which can be measured in dog years in high-tech, I would like to revisit the concept of software-defined as it pertains to storage as well as compute and networking, and its status in 2013.

9. Virtual Geek – an insider's perspective, technical tips n' tricks in the era of the VMware Revolution

An important ETA for VMAX customers using vSphere

1 day ago

EMC Technical Advisory (or “ETA”) are notices to customers of important fixes or updates. Some are more important than others. If you go to http://support.emc.com, you can get all the ETAs for your platforms. Shortly, this portal is getting a ton of updates, so customers can see a ton of info for all their EMC solutions in a nice place, with some useful analytics. EMC customers, partners – you can learn more about this at EMC World. Every once in a while, I see an ETA I think could use extra eyeballs – this is one.

What is the real thing stopping Cloud in the Enterprise? - RANT.

2 days ago

I firmly stand by “EMC SE Manifesto Principle #5”: We are positive force. Meaning “We think of the customer, our ‘tribe’, ONE EMC, the community at large, the world - and never go negative on the bad guy.” Rants tend to be negative, and tend to break with this principle, but I have to get something off my chest. If you’re an IT dude or dudette – this may make you angry. I kind of hope so.

Openstack Grizzly is out, with extra awesomesauce and bonus VMware and EMC goodies!

4 days ago

On April 4th, Openstack 2013.1 was released – better known as “Grizzly”, and is the 7th Openstack release. The best place to get a quick glance (haha – glance is the image service in Openstack) at what I’m talking about is here. Openstack is maturing as a very interesting stack to integrate and automate all the elements that go into creating a cloud computing model. Obviously, in a material sense, it competes with parts of VMware – most specifically vCloud Director and other elements of the vCloud management stack (vCloud Automation Center). Parts of Openstack also competes in a sense with EMC (Swift vs. Atmos)...

Matt Buckley | PR & Communications Director, EMEA | t. +44 (0) 20 8758 5603 | m. +44 (0)7500 799565 | http://twitter.com/mattbuckley

Using CSS Sprites to Improve Web Page Loading

rhrempel — Fri, 12 Apr 2013 01:44:00 GMT

This is a little bit off topic from what I have blogged about recently. But I recently had an opportunity to work with CSS sprites.

I was developing a new web page for an intranet web application. The web designer recommended that the key blocks of content be wrapped in boxes with distinct border colors and rounded corners. The image below shows the key parts of that recommendation. The boxes had to be able to resize dynamically based on the amount of content and the size of the web browser. Below is an image of one of the squares with rounded corners.

The original web page contained separate images for each border and corner image. That resulted in 43 images for the page as it appears above:

20 corner images
20 border images
1 image for the exclamation mark
2 images for the arrows

The download time for the web page was very high during performance load testing. So I made changes to use CSS sprites. First, I replaced the 20 border images with border calls that appeared in the CSS as below.

{background-color:#FFFFFF; border:2px solid #FF9900;}

Then I merged all of the images together into one image using the CSS Sprite Generator site at http://csssprites.com/index.html. Below is a sample image of four corner images merged into one image file.

As a result, I went from 43 http requests to only one. That was a huge improvement; but now I had to figure out how to use one image file as the source for all of the remaining images. I added the CSS rounded corners for each of the blocks. This was the tricky part because the images still had to be able to position themselves dynamically.

.roundedBox {position:relative; padding:17px; margin:10px 0;}
.corner {position:absolute; width:20px; height:20px; no-repeat;}

I then defined which image to use in which corner for each of the “squares”. Below is the CSS for one of the squares. Note that background-position is used to define the starting point of the image that I want to use in each corner.

.topLeft {top:0; left:0; background-position:-0px -294px;}
.topRight {top:0; right:0; background-position:-0px -315px;}
.bottomLeft {bottom:0; left:0; background-position:-0px -252px;}
.bottomRight {bottom:0; right:0; background-position:-0px -273px;}

Next, I defined the square using the CSS. Note the reference to the sprites.gif image. The CSS for each square refers to the same image file. I also define the border size and border color in the first line of the CSS.

#roundedsquare {background-color:#FFFFFF; border:2px solid #FF9900;}
#roundedsquare .corner {background-image:url(./images/sprites.gif);}
#roundedsquare .topLeft {top:-2px; left:-2px;}
#roundedsquare .topRight {top:-2px; right:-2px;}
#roundedsquare .bottomLeft {bottom:-2px; left:-2px;}
#roundedsquare .bottomRight {bottom:-2px; right:-2px;white-space:nowrap;}

I add the div tags to the web page. I essentially wrap the html around with the div tags. The class statements reference the CSS styles that I created.

<div class="roundedBox" id="roundedsquare">
        <--- add html here --->

        <div id="cornertd" style='display:block'>
               <div class="corner topLeft"></div>
               <div class="corner topRight"></div>
               <div class="corner bottomLeft"></div>
               <div class="corner bottomRight"></div>
        </div>
</div>

The result is that the html is surrounded by a square with rounded corners. The images used for the rounded corners line up with the borders. The images and borders also use the same color and background.

I found it to be very simple after applying CSS sprites the first time. I did have to sometimes adjust the positioning of the images within the sprite image. That is, I learned to give them more space so as not to overlap when set on the web page.

Weekly Digest of what EMC's bloggers have been writing about 04/04/13, via @mattbuckley

steven.goddard — Thu, 04 Apr 2013 07:55:00 GMT

1. Reflections – EMC Executives Report From The Road

Once a CIO, Always a CIO

2 days ago

By Sanjay Mirchandani, Executive Vice President and Former CIO

Making Data Work through Collaboration

6 days ago

By Scott Yara, Senior Vice President, Products, EMC Greenplum

We are living in an extraordinary time. The convergence of technology vectors in recent years, including the advancement in microprocessors, storage, networking, virtualization, and the cloud, has presented one disruptive shift after the other, empowering remarkable people and organizations to push the limits experientially, conceptually, and socially. When I spoke at the first O’Reilly Strata Conference in 2011, the big question was, “How does this burgeoning industry accelerate its momentum and continue to push its limits?” In the past two years, we’ve seen data-derived insight drive business value and impact many sectors, with McKinsey projecting that the industry will grow to $16 billion by 2015. And its impact goes far beyond the enterprise.

2. Chuck's Blog – An EMC insider's perspective on information, technology and customer challenges.

Going To EMC World? Interested In Software-Defined Storage?

1 day ago

EMC World is right over the horizon (May 6-9 in Las Vegas) and we’re all busy making preparations. If you're debating whether or not to attend, I'd strongly recommend it -- every year the event is more amazing: more content, more big ideas, more great people to interact with - and (yes!) more fun stuff! One of the bigger themes at EMC World this year will be software-defined storage: what is it, why does it matter, and what EMC is doing about it. But the EMC storage team isn’t the only part of the broader EMC federation focused on this topic: related efforts are well underway at VMware as well. The fun part is that I’m now working with the VMware team: focusing on software-defined storage, software-defined availability and related topics.

Offering Your Users Hadoop-As-A-Service

1 day ago

It's great to see so many businesses start to experiment with Hadoop and its unique toolset. But I'm sure all this exciting experimentation is creating more than one headache for the IT team. Today, VMware announced some very useful extensions to Project Serengeti, essentially allowing the creation of virtual Hadoop clusters with very different characteristics to be easily delivered as-a-service on top of existing VMware infrastructure. While I'm sure there are Hadoop purists who might object to anything other than a dedicated, bare metal hand-crafted implementations, I think the VMware team has come up with a great capability that encourages increased experimentation of Hadoop's capabilities across the business without breaking the bank.

When Enterprise IT Met Macroeconomics

7 days ago

I came across a fascinating read that juxtaposes two of my favorite subjects: enterprise IT and macroeconomics. In "How The Internet Is Making Us Poor", Christopher Mims reprises an excellent case around how progressively more use of enterprise IT is fundamentally restructuring our economy, and - more importantly - our labor force. Vast categories of familiar middle-class jobs ('cognitive workers') are now at risk around the globe, thanks to software eating the world. It's happened before (e.g. agriculture, manufacturing) but perhaps never at this pace and scale. While I'm not advocating a Luddite stance, perhaps we all should be somewhat more cognizant of the macro changes we are collectively enabling, one modest IT project at a time.

3. Speaking of Security, the RSA Blog and Podcast – featuring a group of experts in identity management, encryption, privacy, policy, and enterprise security standards.

One Last Word: Next Generation Security Operations

1 day ago

Over the last few weeks I have outlined several elements of Security Operations that are bubbling to the surface in my blog series “Next Generation Security Operations”. The series really focused on the reactive side of security management and a key theme was the connection between nuts and bolts security with broader processes. A key point I wanted to communicate was not only the need for companies to remain vigilant and evaluate the detective side of security management but also look outside of the technical infrastructure for inputs to improve the reaction time within Security Operations. As most of my readers are GRC Practitioners, this connection stimulated some interesting conversations I had with customers from the GRC side of the house and I hope made some of the same connections from the security side.

Security @ EMCworld 2013: The Transformation in Security Analytics

2 days ago

We’re well into the preparations for EMC world 2013, to be held May 6-9 in Las Vegas. There’s been a significant RSA presence at EMCworld ever since RSA was acquired by EMC back in 2006 – including the presentation I gave on storage encryption and key management back at EMCworld 2007 in Orlando! This year we’ll have even more RSA presence than ever, exploring the “Lead your Transformation” theme from the perspective of security and trust. One of the major themes at RSA Conference this year was the transformation in security analytics: the way that Big Data capabilities enable dramatic improvements in detection and response to threats. We’ll be exploring that transformation in many of our presentations, in our birds-of-a-feather session on “Building your Trusted Cloud” and at the EMC booth.

2013: The Critical Need for Robust IT Security

5 days ago

Being in the IT world, the years fly by at such a rate it all seems like a blur. Many of us in this field are tied to multiple large-scale projects that need to be completed before year-end. Well here we find ourselves in 2013 and the question is how serious are you and your company about IT security? Is your company aware of how complicated and serious the threats are today? Does your company have the proper stance to defend and alert against breaches across the multiple attack vectors? Most companies are behind both in practice and planning and there is a lot at stake.

Help Me Help Myself and Others with RSA Authentication Manager 8.0

7 days ago

So I’ve called the Help Desk before. I’ve been that person on the other end who becomes a statistic, a cost point in the never-ending battle to keep costs low, to stay more efficient. The reasons I’ve had to call the Help Desk are myriad, but more often than not it’s because I’ve locked myself out of something. It’s a pain point for all of us. If you ask organizations what common user issue their Help Desk staff is plagued with the most, it is password resets. In a recent research study we worked with the SANS Institute on, 42% of organizations stated that password reset requests were the number one reason users called most often – so at least I’m not alone.

4. The Backup Window – 360° view of backup and recovery

Storage DNA (and Beer) – Brilliant!

5 day ago

I read an article a few weeks ago in The Economist about test-tube data. It begins in a similar way to most stories we hear in the data and storage industry. Data growth is massive, becoming more and more unwieldy and expensive. IT budgets (and budgets in general) aren’t keeping pace with that growth. We in the industry have read (and lived) that story again and again and know it dearly. But this is another story. A story about beer drinking, back-of-the-napkin machinations, and innovation. And a story about drinking and deriving. What happens when you put a couple of research wonks and real-world problems in a pub together? Magic.

Backup as a Service: The On-Ramp to Cloud Services

6 days ago

In a recently published white paper by IDC, Program Vice President, Laura DuBois outlines and reviews the challenges IT departments are having with meeting the data backup SLA’s required by the business. Laura discusses how cloud services can fundamentally change the cost model around backup and how enterprises are leveraging these new backup-as-a-service (BaaS) offerings as a means of outsourcing nonstrategic tasks. For enterprise IT shops considering offloading backup, IDC provides great reading and advice in choosing the right service provider (see EMC’s Velocity Service Provider) and the most appropriate service offering based on your business needs.

5. EMC IT Proven – Leading our IT Transformation

Moving To A Consumption-Based Model Is Essential To Deliver On The ITaaS Promise

2 days ago

You might wonder what moving our labor to a consumption-based model has to do with IT as a Service (ITaaS). The fact is a significant amount of our IT spend is made up of labor and these costs are then passed on to our business units in the form of invoices. Sourcing and contract strategies are essential to establishing our ability to effectively roll those costs into services and then back to the business units in the ITaaS business model. Let me start by describing EMC IT’s effort to restructure its sourcing strategy. We wanted to move beyond “name-based” or “capacity-based” supply side sourcing, and move towards “unit based” supply side sourcing.

6. Thought Feast – The technology blog to feed your brain with industry trends and topics

HSM or Archiving? From the Backup Guy

5 days ago

HSM or Archiving? From the Backup Guy Looking back in my working life I have spent well over 20 years in the backup arena. From installing, upgrading, monitoring, and finally selling and marketing all types and sizes of backup solutions. Until recently, only once in this 20+ year history have I touched on archiving and it was not even archiving by name, as then it was an HSM or Hierarchical Storage Management project that I was involved in. So HSM and Archiving are they the same? What are some of the issues we (EMC) are trying to fix? Some 15 years ago I used a HSM product to try and help a data storage issue I had.

7. InFocus – EMC Global Services Blog

It’s not just Big Data … It’s Gigantic Data! Are you ready?

2 days ago

This Blog takes a deep dive into the big data issues facing service providers and provides a quick preview of EMC’s new, unique solution to solve big data in the Communications Industry. Alongside two of my colleagues, EMC facilitated a Service Provider workshop on this topic at the March 2013 Next Generation Telecom Conference in Panama City, Panama. We polled the audience and found uniform agreement on these trends. These issues are driving a major change in how network data should be managed and analyzed. EMC’s approach? Read on …

TB-FTE Ratios Explained, or, Why Storage Management Isn’t Like Starbucks (Part 2)

2 days ago

In Part 1 of this post I dismissed the TB:FTE metric based on the fact that it does not measure what you think it is measuring. That, coupled with an analysis of some reasons for asking the question “what’s the typical TB:FTE ratio?” pretty much retires the question. In short, there is only one reason to use TB:FTE as a yardstick for storage management (or any other infrastructure) staffing: to track your own workload over time. It’s a terrible justification for hiring and firing.

Business Transformation: How Can You Get There?

6 days ago

Over the past few years, organizations have experienced increasing challenges in the business environment. These range from uncertainty in the global economy, uncertainty in the credit markets, uncertainty in how new regulations will affect business, and challenges that are brought on by globalization, new technologies, and new trends such as mobility and social media. According to Gartner, the top ten strategic technology trends for 2013 are emerging amidst a nexus of converging forces – social, mobile, cloud and information. Although these forces are innovative and disruptive on their own, together they are revolutionizing business and society, disrupting old business models and giving new leaders an opportunity to emerge.

Big Data, Vatican Style

7 days ago

This is a pretty cool story. The linked video on the page paints the picture nicely. The Vatican has 82,000 manuscripts of roughly 500 pages each with their high resolution scans requiring up to 150 megabytes of storage per page image. The librarian, Luciano Ammenti, explains that this will require 45 petabytes of storage. Let’s think about that massive problem for a minute…82,000 manuscripts * 500 pages per manuscript * 150 MB per page = ~6.45 petabytes. So, not 45 petabytes but 6? Well that’s why Luciano is a librarian and not a data center guy. Wait, what? Luciano IS the Vatican Library Data Center Coordinator?

8. Cloud Matters – Ideas, observations and stories about the journey to cloud computing

Gun Violence is Over

2 days ago

Unfortunately, any idea of really ending gun violence in the US is no more believable on April Fools day than on any other day. It’s no joke. Not that the vast majority of Americans wouldn’t like to see that. It’s just what they want. No matter how many voters want to see progress, progress – even a little bit – is unlikely. More like impossible. Still, we can aspire to do what is best for the rights and safety of all – gun owners and school children and the thousands of innocents that suffer from America’s obsession with firearms. This may be a time where some new capabilities, new technologies, can be brought to bear on these issues so simple (stop the violence) and complex (fix mental health, and background checks and fundamental societal values / American culture). A December article in the Atlantic proposed that Big Data in the form of a national gun-registry database could potentially have helped to prevent Newtown.

9. Jeetu's Blog

Enterprise Software: 5 Ways SaaS Changes Everything & 3 Ways It Doesn’t

7 days ago

As enterprise software moves into the world of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and consumer technology innovations invade the workplace, how companies evaluate enterprise software vendor changes dramatically in many way. Yet, in some ways, it remains the same. First, five things that SaaS changes forever:

Matt Buckley | PR & Communications Director, EMEA | t. +44 (0) 20 8758 5603 | m. +44 (0)7500 799565 | http://twitter.com/mattbuckley

Weekly Digest of what EMC's bloggers have been writing about 27/03/13, via @mattbuckley

steven.goddard — Wed, 27 Mar 2013 16:43:00 GMT

1. Reflections – EMC Executives Report From The Road

Now that flash is everywhere…Where do we go from here?

1 day ago

By Zahid Hussain, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Flash Products Division

Flash has become ubiquitous. It is being deployed on PCIe cards in servers, in all-flash arrays that plug into storage networks, and in hybrid arrays in the form of solid-state drives (SSDs). But where is the best place to deploy flash? Well, that requires the most famous of engineering answers: “It depends.” Application requirements have always driven infrastructure decisions, and flash is no exception. If your application demands the lowest possible latency and highest possible throughput, then flash on a PCIe card in the server, where it is close to your microprocessors could be the answer.

Why We're Focused on Cloud, Big Data and Trusted IT

5 days ago

Joe Tucci, Chairman and CEO

EMC is squarely focused on three of the most important drivers in information technology for enterprise customers today: 1) the adoption of cloud computing to improve agility and reduce IT costs, 2) leveraging vast quantities of data to make smart decisions and uncover new business opportunities, and 3) protecting and securing information to ensure that IT is trusted.

EMEA’s Race to Change

7 days ago

By Adrian McDonald, President EMEA, EMC

Organisations are putting aside the retrenchment of the recession years and once again looking to IT to underpin the transformation and growth ambitions of their businesses. This is the clear takeaway from research conducted at EMC’s EMEA Forums in late 2012. More than 6,500 business and IT management professionals from 22 countries were surveyed to determine how businesses are changing in today’s economic climate. There are a few key parts to this survey that are telling of where the industry is headed.

2. Chuck's Blog – An EMC insider's perspective on information, technology and customer challenges.

From Storage Products To Storage Workloads

1 day ago

We, as technology vendors, are collectively obsessed with products and technologies - not only our own, but those of our competition. Our fixations on debating the merits of Product A vs. Product B, C and D inevitably draw other groups in: partners and customers. Any random walk of the interwebs will show countless opinions, comparisons, debates, shouting matches, etc. along these lines. All of this may not be particularly productive, but I guess it's entertaining to all the participants -sort of the way people tend to debate sports. But getting stuff done in IT is a serious endeavor for most people; the outcomes matter so much more than how your favorite team is doing. Here at EMC, we've started to make some changes to improve the situation.

3. Information Playground – Global High-Tech Innovation

Doing Three Things at Once

5 days ago

In the past several years data center admins have continually deployed virtualization software onto their servers. My own company's IT department (EMC IT) actually tracked the percentage of virtualized versus non-virtualized servers. They assigned thresholds to these percentages, that when crossed, create a three-phase guide to implementing IT-as-a-Service. I wrote two articles on this approach, which can be found here. Rarely will a data center achieve 100% server virtualization. Some workloads are simply too hard to virtualize. Other workloads have security considerations (e.g. compliance, or availability) that are easier to satisfy in a more static, non-virtualized environment.

4. Speaking of Security, the RSA Blog and Podcast – featuring a group of experts in identity management, encryption, privacy, policy, and enterprise security standards.

Next Generation Security Operations: The Wrap-up

2 days ago

Over the last few blog entries, I outlined some of the dimensions that security operations need to think about during 2013 and beyond. In some respects, this is the tip of the iceberg – there is only so much you can cover in a blog. However, I think there are some important items to put on the radar. First, Business Context is becoming a big priority for security. No longer can companies chase vulnerabilities and events around the infrastructure. Secondly, we need to continue to recognize that security incident handling must evolve in parallel with the threat landscape. Finally, there are many related processes that should be evaluated regularly to minimize attack vectors.

Workplace Security: Are You the Weakest Link?

5 days ago

As an employee at some company somewhere, you are probably putting your organization at risk every day – and you don’t even know it. Do you re-use the same password to log in to multiple accounts? Are you visiting social networking sites and planning your upcoming summer vacation while at work? Have you ever logged in to check your work email from unsecured wireless hotspots? These are just some of the activities employees around the world do every day that seem relatively harmless, but could be putting their company at risk. But how?

5. The Backup Window – 360° view of backup and recovery

Did Dinosaurs Like the Taste of Tape Cartridges?

1 day ago

Whenever I see physical tape cartridges still being used for backups, I can’t help but think about cavemen and dinosaurs. So how does a progressive human fix the age-old problem of doing backups with physical tape? Go simple, go fast, go tapeless! Deduplication technology is the enabler to get your backups out of the stone-age.

How to Ensure Data Protection As You Move to the Cloud

7 days ago

According to Mark Prahl, a high-tech business professional who has been talking or writing about products and gadgets for business or personal consumption for some time, data protection needs are more acute for as-a-service cloud models and require new approaches. What can you do to ensure data protection as you move to the cloud? Prahl explains what it means to augment a successful data protection solution and extend it with a new distributed architecture and analysis engine to cloud deployments, without losing any usability benefits (i.e. without making it complex) in his post “EMC Data Protection Advisor For As-A-Service Cloud” on our sister site Managed View.

6. InFocus – EMC Global Services Blog

Learnings from the Field

Today

I recently moderated a CIO Summit in Philadelphia on the topic of “Big Data: Moving from Monitoring to Optimization.” Participating in the discussion were about 30 CIOs from very large to more moderate-sized organizations. The discussion was lively and the participants were very open in sharing their concerns and issues, as well as their hopes and desires with respect to how big data could impact their businesses.

Do You Need a Chief Data Officer?

1 day ago

In his book “Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning,” management and analytics expert Tom Davenport says “Executive sponsorship is so vital to analytical competition…,” and talks about the need for data-driven CEOs such as Gary Loveman Harrah’s casino) and the role of the Chief Analytics Officer (CAO) or Chief Data Officer (CDO). I believe the CDO or CAO are useful and needed roles for an organization. I’m not fully convinced that every company needs one, but I am convinced that companies need senior executive support to ensure that analytics (or probably any big initiative for that matter) is widely adopted and made integral to their business.

In Customer Service, Not All Answers Are In the Numbers

2 days ago

I am reading Nate Silver’s book, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail – But Some Don’t. The book is resonating with me relative to the challenge of choosing the best operational measures and data that will help us effectively analyze, predict outcomes, and make improvements in customer services. We thrive on measuring and “goaling” everything in customer services – response time, resolution time, customer satisfaction, productivity, and so much more. Why not – there are so many from which to choose. Implementing the right balance is important, as too few or too many measurements can be problematic.

7. Virtual Geek – an insider's perspective, technical tips n' tricks in the era of the VMware Revolution

Thank you! and a quick set of things

1 day ago

For all that voted on the “2013 Top VMware & Virtualization Blogs” – I’m very proud to be in the top 10 in the number 5 spot! There are a ton of really, really great blogs out there, and these are one of the best ways to get info out, share, and contribute to the community. I’d strongly encourage people to check them out. I want to give a special shout out to Cormac Hogan, whose blog is here. While Duncan Epping is the king of the hill (and authors a killer blog – yellow-bricks), Cormac really came out swinging over the last year, and while it might be my storage bias, I don’t think that captures the awesomeness of his blog. Cormac is posting with quality, frequency, and detail.

EMC World Top 10 + SE Conference Details, Contests, and HOWTO get in

6 days ago

EMC World 2013 has been in planning for months already… and will be HUGE. I’ll do another post on EMC World in a bit – but in the meantime, if you’re in the business of information (and who isn’t?) – it’s the conference of the year (including the CIO Summit and the Data Scientist Summit). EMC World 2013 will feature our biggest announcement of the year. It. Will. Be. Epic! Here’s my top 10 reasons to go.

8. Jeetu's Blog

New Syncplicity Enterprise Edition – Adult Supervision for the BYOD Party

7 days ago

The BYOD movement continues to gain momentum. As such, consumer devices are invading the enterprise. This freedom is liberating for workers but potentially disastrous for IT. To combat the risks introduced by BYOD, IT has no choice but to arm themselves with enterprise-grade security and control to mitigate potential data leakage. Today, EMC is excited to announce Syncplicity Enterprise Edition (EE), an enterprise-scale, cloud-based file sharing solution that blends two ends of the spectrum — consumer usability with true enterprise security and control. Modern workers are well-connected, multitasking, “uber producers,” and IT needs to stay ahead of the pace. That’s what Syncplicity EE is all about – simplifying end user deployment and administration at enterprise scale, and empowering IT with complete control over security, policy and storage.

9. EMC Consulting Blogs

Installing and Configuring the Lotus Notes Connector for SharePoint 2013 Server: Part 2 of 2

2 days ago

I am ready to start the Lotus Notes connector on the SharePoint 2013 Server. I continue to follow along the steps as detailed here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj591606.aspx. However, I depart from the steps and do things a bit differently based on where I ran into problems and fixed them. I document everything in detail.

Installing and Configuring the Lotus Notes Connector for SharePoint 2013 Server: Part 1 of 2

2 days ago

I am involved with Lotus Notes application migrations to SharePoint from time to time. I am looking for a solution that can keep some legacy Lotus Notes applications in place; but provide search capabilities to the legacy data to SharePoint 2013 users. This could be a very practical and cost-effective business solution to customers. I want to crawl a Notes database with SharePoint 2013 Search. As part of that effort, I need to install the Lotus Notes client and connector on the SharePoint 2013 Server. But there are a number of steps that I need to execute first.

Matt Buckley | PR & Communications Director, EMEA | t. +44 (0) 20 8758 5603 | m. +44 (0)7500 799565 | http://twitter.com/mattbuckley

Installing and Configuring the Lotus Notes Connector for SharePoint 2013 Server: Part 2 of 2

rhrempel — Mon, 25 Mar 2013 01:02:00 GMT

I am ready to start the Lotus Notes connector on the SharePoint 2013 Server. In this second of two blog entries, I execute the steps to:

Start the Lotus Notes Connector service
Register Lotus Notes with the service
Setup and start the crawler
Setup, start, and configure the metadata service
Create a Search Center site
Refine the Lotus Notes search results

I continue to follow along the steps as detailed here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj591606.aspx. However, I depart from the steps and do things a bit differently based on where I ran into problems and fixed them. I document everything in detail.

RHR (2013-05-05): I had to make a few corrections in this blog posting. I corrected the order below. Registering Lotus Notes with the Server has to be completed before starting the Lotus Notes Connector Service.

Register Lotus Notes with the Server

I open Explorer and click through the folders until I get to: C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office Servers\15.0\Bin\1033

I double-click on the NotesSetup file. The Index Setup Wizard screen appears. I click Next to continue.

The Register Lotus Notes screen appears. I enter the data as seen below. I enter the password for the Notes ID that I used to run the Lotus Notes client software. I do not check the Ignore Lotus Notes security while building an index checkbox. I click Next to continue.

Location of notes.ini file	C:\Lotus\Notes\notes.ini
Location of Lotus Notes install directory	C:\Lotus\Notes

The Specify Lotus Notes Owner Field screen appears. I enter the details as seen below. I click Next to continue.

Lotus Notes server name	192.168.1.88
Lotus Notes database file name	Mapping.nsf
View name	Mappings
Lotus Notes field name column title	UserID
Windows user name column title	DomainAccount

The Completing the Lotus Notes Index Setup Wizard screen appears. I click Finish to continue.

The Microsoft SharePoint Server Configuration screen appears. The configuration succeeded!

Start the Lotus Notes Connector Service

Open Central Administration and click on Manage services on server

Click Start on the Lotus Notes Connector service

The Lotus Notes connector settings screen appears. I select Create new application pool and enter Contoso Lotus Notes Crawl App Pool. I keep the security account and click Provision.

The Working on it message appears briefly

The Services on Server screen appears and the Lotus Notes Connector service has started.

Setup and Start the Crawler

I return to Central Administration and click on Manage service applications.

Click on the search service application. I named mine Search Service Application.

The Search Service Application: Search Administration screen opens.

Click on Content Sources

The Search Service Application: Manage Content Sources screen appears. I started some work on crawling HTML files. Maybe I cover that in a future blog entry.

The Search Service Application: Add Content Source screen appears. I enter Lotus Notes Application as the Name. I select Lotus Notes as the type of content to be crawled.

I set the Start Addresses to point to the Notes database that I opened earlier. I could add other Notes databases here, too. I also set the Crawl Settings, Crawl Schedules, and Content Source Priority. I click OK to accept the settings and continue.

The new content source appears in the Manage Content Sources screen.

Setup, Start, and Configure the Metadata Service

I created a Metadata service while doing some other work. The steps to create one are listed below.

I return to Central Administration and click on Manage service applications.

Click on New in the top left corner of the screen and Managed Metadata Service.

The Create New Managed Metadata Service screen appears. I enter a Name and Database Server.

I scroll down the screen. I select Use existing application pool and keep the remaining settings as is. I click OK to accept the edits and continue.

The Managed Metadata services now appears in the list.

I return to Central Administration and click on Manage services on server.

Click on Start on the Managed Metadata Web Service.

The service starts shortly afterwards. I return to Central Administration and click on Manage service applications.

I click on Managed Metadata in the list of service applications.

I had a problem one time with an error message appearing.

The Managed Metadata Service or Connection is currently not available. The Application Pool or Managed Metadata Web Service may not have been started. Please Contact your Administrator.

I checked that the Contoso App Pool application pool was started in IIS.

I waited about 20 minutes and the message stopped appearing. I considered doing an IIS Reset; but it was not necessary. The Site Settings: Term Store Management Tool screen appeared.

The service starts shortly afterwards. I return to Central Administration and click on Manage service applications.

I click on my Search Service Application service application.

I then click on Content Sources on the left.

The Search Service Application: Manage Content Sources screen appears. I click on Lotus Notes Application and then on Start Full Crawl.

I click OK on the message screen.

The final status update appears as below after the crawling completes.

Create a Search Center Site in SharePoint Server 2013

I created a new Search Center site by executing the steps outlined here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh582314.aspx

Refining the Lotus Notes Search Results

I open my Search Center site at http://server2012sp/sites/SearchCenter. I enter the word sharepoint in the search window and click on the search icon. The search results appear as below. I blanked out the last part of the last names of the authors. Also, you can see that the Notes document UNID is displayed as the document title.

I found a blog entry (http://blogs.msdn.com/b/opal/archive/2010/02/16/crawl-lotus-domino-with-lotus-notes-connector-in-sharepoint-server-2010.aspx) that described how to replace the document UNID with the document Subject field. The steps to execute were for SharePoint 2010; but I’m going to show the steps for SharePoint 2013. I suspect that they are virtually the same anyway.

I return to Central Administration and click on Manage service applications.

I click on my Search Service Application service application. I then click on Search Schema.

The Search Service Application: Managed Properties screen appears. I click on Categories.

The Search Service Application: Categories screen appears. I click on Notes.

I want to use the Subject field for the document title. The Subject field appears to be the best match for the title based on the design of the form. The Subject appears at the top of the Lotus Notes form and a review of the data makes it seem to be the best match. The steps that follow will show how I implement using the Subject field.

The Search Service Application: Crawled Properties - Notes screen appears. I enter Subject in the Crawled properties field and click on the green arrow box . The list of property names is filtered to include only those that contain the term Subject.

I click on OriginalSubject and then click on Edit/Map Property.

The Search Service Application: Edit Crawled Property: Subject screen appears. I can add mappings to the managed property on this screen.

I click on Add a Mapping. The Managed property selection screen appears. I scroll down the Select a managed property and select Title(text).

I click OK at the bottom of the screen (scrolling down a bit). Title(text) appears in the mapping list.

I click OK to close the Search Service Application: Edit Crawled Property: Subject screen. I am returned to the Search Service Application: Crawled Properties - Notes screen appears. I enter Subject in the Crawled properties field and click on the green arrow box . The list of property names is filtered to include only those that contain the term Subject. I can see that Title is listed in the Mapped To Property column for Subject.

I click on Title. The Search Service Application: Edit Managed Property – Title screen appears.

I scroll down to the Mappings to crawled properties section and select Subject in the list.

I click on Move Up to move Subject to the top of the list. By moving Subject to the top, I am making sure that it is the first to be picked up and mapped to the Title. Otherwise, the document UNID will be displayed. I click OK to accept the changes and close the screen.

I click on Content Sources on the left side.

The Search Service Application: Manage Content Sources screen appears. I click on Lotus Notes Forum and then click on Start Full Crawl.

I click on OK on the confirmation prompt.

The crawling starts.

The crawling completed after almost 14 minutes.

I open my Search Center site at http://server2012sp/sites/SearchCenter. I enter the word sharepoint in the search window and click on the search icon. One of the search results appear as below. You can see that the Notes document Subject is displayed as the document title.

I have to add a Server Name Mapping for my Domino server. My Domino server uses port 8080 instead of port 80. I click on Server Name Mappings in the Search Service Application screen.

The Search Service Application: Server Name Mappings screen appears. I click on New Mapping.

The Search Service Application: Add Server Name Mappings screen appears. I add the name mapping as it appears below. I click OK to continue.

The mapping is displayed on the screen.

I run another full crawl on the Lotus Notes Application content source. I refresh the Search Results screen and the correct port number appears in the URL.

I click on the search result and the web page opens as expected.

I have an idea about building a search drive solution using the data stored in Lotus Notes databases. I saw some interesting solutions by a few SharePoint MVPs.

For now, this concludes my blog entry on installing and configuring the Lotus Notes Connector for SharePoint 2013. I hope that you found it helpful. You can read my other blog entries on how I installed and configured my SharePoint 2013 server environment.

Part 1: http://consultingblogs.emc.com/randyrempel/archive/2013/03/24/installing-and-configuring-the-lotus-notes-connector-for-sharepoint-2013-server-part-1-of-2.aspx

Part 2: http://consultingblogs.emc.com/randyrempel/archive/2013/03/24/installing-and-configuring-the-lotus-notes-connector-for-sharepoint-2013-server-part-2-of-2.aspx

Installing and Configuring the Lotus Notes Connector for SharePoint 2013 Server: Part 1 of 2

rhrempel — Mon, 25 Mar 2013 00:59:00 GMT

I want to crawl a Notes database with SharePoint 2013 Search. As part of that effort, I need to install the Lotus Notes client and connector on the SharePoint 2013 Server. But there are a number of steps that I need to execute first. I follow along the steps as detailed here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj591606.aspx. However, I depart from the steps and do things a bit differently based on where I ran into problems and fixed them. I document everything in detail.

In this first of two blogs, I execute the steps to:

install and configure the Lotus Notes client software
grant access privileges to the Notes \ data folder
install the Notes C++ API
create the Mappings database
add a user account mapping to the Mappings database

I am logged onto my SharePoint 2013 Server with the SP_Install user account. The SP_Install user account is a member of the Administrators group on this server.

Installing the Lotus Notes Client Software

I am installing the 32-bit version of Lotus Notes R8.5 on my SharePoint 2013 server. I will only install the client and not the Designer or Administrator software. I would typically recommend against ever installing such software on a server. But I don’t have access to a third party connector (e.g. BA-Insight). I have installed Lotus Notes client software more than a hundred of times already. I will touch on the key points.

I double-click on the installation file.

I click Yes on the User Account Control window.

I change the file path in the InstallShield Wizard and click Next

The files are extracted and the installation process begins. The Install Wizard screen appears. I click Next to continue.

I accept the terms in the License Agreement screen and click Next to continue.

I enter generic text in the Customer Information screen and click Next to continue.

I keep the selections in the Installation Path Selection screen and click Next to continue. I actually tried it with the default file paths first and everything worked until I got to the last step of the Lotus Notes Index Setup Wizard. I could not complete the step. But simplifying the default file paths made it work.

Program Files	C:\Lotus\Notes\
Data Files	C:\Lotus\Notes\Data\

I modify the settings in the Custom Setup screen as seen below. I do not select the Domino Designer or the Sametime Client to be installed since I already have it installed on another virtual machine. I really do not want them installed on a server anyway. I click Next to continue.

I deselect all of the options on the Ready to Install the Program and click Install to continue.

The Install Wizard continues to install until the Install Wizard Completed screen appears. I click Finish.

Grant Permissions on the Data Folder

I open Explorer to the Notes data folder.

Right-click on the data folder and click on Properties.

Click on the Security tab on the Properties window.

Click on the Edit button.

The Permissions for Data screen appears. Click on Add…

The Select Users screen appears. Change the location to the local server and enter WSS_WPG into the object names field and click Check Names.

The group name should resolve correctly. Click OK to accept and continue.

The WSS_WPG group should appear in the security list. Click the Allow checkbox on Full control under permissions. Click OK to accept the changes and continue.

The WSS_WPG group appears in the Security list in the Data Properties screen. Full Control permissions are granted. Click Close to close the screen.

Install Lotus C++ API

I downloaded the Lotus C++ API from here: https://www14.software.ibm.com/webapp/iwm/web/reg/download.do?source=ESD-SUPPORT&S_PKG=CR3DNNA&S_TACT=104CBW71&lang=en_US&cp=UTF-8

I chose the Release 3.0 for Windows file.

I executed the c55svna.exe file on the SharePoint 2013 server where the Lotus Notes client will be installed. I clicked on Run in the Open File – Security Warning screen.

The Lotus C++ API screen appeared. I clicked Finish to continue.

I clicked Yes on the Create directory screen.

I clicked OK on the Extraction completed screen.

Copy the lcppn30.dll file from the C:\notescpp\lib\mswin32 folder to the C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office Servers\15.0\Bin folder.

RHR (2012-05-05): I fixed a typo below. I referenced the wrong Lotus Notes folder to copy to.

Copy the lcppn30.dll file from the C:\notescpp\lib\mswin32 folder to the C:\Lotus\Notes folder.

Update the Path Environmental Variable

I am not convinced that I need to update the Path Environmental Variable; but it has solved problems for me in the past when I use the Lotus C++ API from IBM.

I open Explorer and right-click on Computer. I click on the Properties option on the menu.

The System Properties screen appears. I click on the Advanced tab.

RHR (2012-05-05): The Control Panel \ System and Security \ System screen may appear. If it does, click on Advanced system settings next.

Click on Environment Variables and scroll down in the System Variables and select Path.

Click on Edit and the Edit System Variable screen appears. Append the following text to the end of the Variable value field. Then click OK to accept the change and continue.

;C:\Lotus\Notes;C:\notescpp\lib\mswin32

Click OK on the Environment Variables screen.

Click OK on the System Properties screen.

Configure the Lotus Notes Client Application

I confirm that my Domino server is running on another virtual machine. The server name is Litwaredemo/litwareinc and the IP address is 192.168.1.88. The Lotus Notes ID that I plan to use is a member of the applicable administrators groups on the Domino server.

I click the Windows Start button on my keyboard and then click on the Lotus Notes 8.5 icon on the workspace.

The Client Configuration screen appears and I click Next to continue.

The Client Configuration screen appears and I enter the details as seen below. I click Next to continue.

The Client Configuration screen opens. Click Next to continue.

The Domino Server Network Information screen appears. I enter the settings as seen below and click Next to continue.

The Notes ID File screen appears. I browse to where my Notes ID is stored and click Next to continue.

I click Yes in the IBM Lotus Notes screen that appears. I do want my Notes ID file copied to the data directory.

I enter the password in the Lotus Notes password screen and click Log In to continue.

Note: Never create this Notes ID without a password! Anyone with access to the SharePoint server could then gain full access to the databases on the Domino server.

The Lotus Notes client successfully connects to the Domino server.

The Client Configuration screen appears. I leave the settings as is and click Next to continue.

Another prompt appears. I check the checkbox in the bottom of the prompt and click No to continue.

The Lotus Notes 8.5 Getting Started workspace appears.

I keep the Lotus Notes client running in preparation for the next steps.

Verify Access to the Lotus Domino Database that You Want to Crawl

I click on File \ Open \ Lotus Notes Application on the menu bar.

The Open Application screen appears. I select my Domino Server (LITWAREDEMO/litwareinc) in the drop down list and click through the folder structure until I see the database that I am looking for. I select it and click Open.

I wait for the Lotus Notes database to open. A Create Cross Certificate prompt appears and I click Yes to accept it.

The About Database document document appears in the workspace. I click the small x on the tab to close it.

The database opens in the workspace. It is opened to the default view named Threaded.

I also see a message in the view. The message indicates that the view is still being updated.

Eventually, the view completes updating and displays data.

I can test access to more Notes databases if I want to. I close the Lotus Notes client software after I completed testing. I click on the X in top right hand corner.

I click Yes to exit from Notes when prompted.

Create the Lotus Notes Mappings Database

I created the Mappings database on another virtual machine where I have the Lotus Notes Designer client installed. I opened the Lotus Notes Designer client and created a Notes database and named it “Mappings”. I then created a new form named “Mapping”. I added two fields and some labels as seen below.

I did change the Window Title of the form to “Mapping”.

I created a view named “Mappings”. The View Selection formula is: SELECT Form="Mapping". I add a column for each field. I sort the first column in ascending order. The view design appears as below:

I removed the default view that came with the design. Only the Mappings view appears in the view design list now.

Add User Accounts to the Mappings Database

I open the Mappings database in the Lotus Notes client and click on Create \ Mapping.

A blank Notes document appears as below:

I enter the names as below to create a new mapping.

Lotus Notes User ID:	LitwareInc\System Administrator
Windows User:	contoso\Admin

I click on the save icon and then close the document by clicking on File \ Close.

The new document appears in the Mappings view.

I close the Notes client on my virtual machine. I copy the Mappings database file from my Notes \ data folder to a shared folder. I then copy the file from the shared folder to the lotus \ Domino \ data folder on the Domino server. Not to the Notes client on the SharePoint server!

Restart the Server

I have the Search components installed on my SharePoint 2013 server. I have to restart the server before proceeding with the next steps.

This concludes part 1 of 2 of my blog entries on installing and configuring the Lotus Notes Connector for SharePoint 2013. I hope that you found it helpful. Part 2 will provide the steps to complete everything to the point where you can get search results from your Notes databases. You can read my other blog entries on how I installed and configured my SharePoint 2013 server environment.

Part 1: http://consultingblogs.emc.com/randyrempel/archive/2013/03/24/installing-and-configuring-the-lotus-notes-connector-for-sharepoint-2013-server-part-1-of-2.aspx

Part 2: http://consultingblogs.emc.com/randyrempel/archive/2013/03/24/installing-and-configuring-the-lotus-notes-connector-for-sharepoint-2013-server-part-2-of-2.aspx

Weekly Digest of what EMC's bloggers have been writing about 20/03/13, via @mattbuckley

steven.goddard — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 16:10:00 GMT

1. Reflections – EMC Executives Report From The Road

Big Data: The Future of Massachusetts

2 days ago

By Bill Teuber, Vice Chairman

A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to address a group of legislators, public officials, and industry leaders to launch Massachusetts’ inaugural Tech Hub Caucus, led by Senator Karen Spilka. The event kicked off a dialogue between leaders in the state’s tech sector and members of the Massachusetts legislature. Technology is the fastest growing industry in Massachusetts, responsible for more than 468,000 jobs, $122 billion in direct and indirect economic output, and $5.6 billion in state and local taxes. Innovations driven by the tech sector support the critical pillars of our state’s economy: healthcare, education, financial services and increasingly, state and local government. Yet, Massachusetts cannot take the growth of the tech sector for granted.

Achieving IT Financial Transparency: Simple Is Better

6 days ago

By Paulo Prazeres, Senior Director of IT Finance

Sometimes simple is just better, even when complex financial and IT strategies are at stake. So it wasn’t totally surprising that EMC IT’s simple approach to creating financial transparency for its transformation to IT-as-a-Service (ITaaS) struck a positive note with financial leaders at two recent conferences where I gave presentations last month. The first was a Finance Management Board meeting of The Research Board Inc. in late January, where I got to discuss EMC’s financial transparency program with some 15 IT finance leaders from other Fortune 500 companies. The following week, I gave a presentation on “The End of Flat-Tax Funded IT” to CFOs and other financial leaders from a cross-section of industries at the Corporate Performance Management Conference.

2. Chuck's Blog – An EMC insider's perspective on information, technology and customer challenges.

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Installing and Configuring SharePoint 2013: Part 4 of 4

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I setup another VMWare virtual machine for the SharePoint 2013 server. I plan to configure it as:

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I did an install of SharePoint 2013 on a single virtual machine last summer (2012). It works; but it has some shortcomings. A single virtual machine is not an ideal representation of a real SharePoint 2013 server environment. A three server environment provides a more realistic environment. I saw how I could create the three server environment on a more powerful laptop in a presentation at the SharePoint Technical Conference in San Francisco in March, 2013.

Matt Buckley | PR & Communications Director, EMEA | t. +44 (0) 20 8758 5603 | m. +44 (0)7500 799565 | http://twitter.com/mattbuckley

Installing and Configuring SharePoint 2013: Part 4 of 4

rhrempel — Sun, 17 Mar 2013 23:18:00 GMT

This blog entry provides the details on installing and configuring SharePoint 2013 on a Windows 2012 server. I include some PowerShell scripts for setting up a few services and a content database. I also show how to configure and run the crawler service for the first time.

As a reminder, I am separating the details into four blog posts:

Installing and Configuring a Three-Server SharePoint 2013 Environment: Part 1 of 4
Installing and Configuring the Windows Domain Controller: Part 2 of 4
Installing and Configuring SQL Server 2012: Part 3 of 4
Installing and Configuring SharePoint 2013: Part 4 of 4

RHR (2012/04/25): I made several corrections to this entry after I ran into multiple problems during a second attempt at installation and configuration.

I setup another VMWare virtual machine for the SharePoint 2013 server. I plan to configure it as below.

SharePoint 2013 Server

Windows Server 2012
SharePoint Server 2013
Memory: 8GB RAM <--- I am tempted to increase this to at least 12GB when running search!
CPU: 4
Drive: 1x80GB
IP Address: 192.168.67.13
Domain: contoso.com
Name: server2012sp
Target Drive: 2

Make sure that you select VMnet8 (NAT) for the Custom: Specific virtual network in Network connection in the Virtual Machine Settings.

Make sure that you select “2012 Standard” and not “2012 Datacenter”.

Also, change the server name (server2012sp), domain (Contoso), and IP address (192.168.67.13) after installing the operating system.

Note: I had a problem once with the server connecting to the domain controller. So I added the following entries to the hosts file in the C:\Windows\System32\Drivers\etc directory.

I first had to give the Admin user account Full control access to the hosts file.

192.168.67.11 server2012dc
192.168.67.12 server2012sql

I install the Windows 2012 operating system just as with the other two servers. I add the sp_install and sp_farm user accounts to the Administrators group on this server.

I click on Tools \ Computer Management.

The Computer Management windows opens. I click on Local Users and Groups.

I double-click on Groups and the list of group accounts is displayed.

I double-click on the Administrators entry and the Administrators Properties screen opens.

I click on Add… and the Select Users, Computers, Service Accounts, or Groups screen displays. I enter the sp_install user account name and click Check Names.

The Windows Security screen appears. I enter the Administrator credentials and click OK to continue.

The Select Users … screen returns. I click OK to continue.

The Administrators Properties screen is updated. I click OK to close the screen.

IMPORTANT! Repeat the process for the contoso\sp_farm user account!

I close the Computer Management screen.

I want to logon as the sp_install user. I click on Local Server.

I click on Tasks and select Shut Down Local Server.

I select Switch User on the What do you want the computer to do? drop down list and click OK to continue.

The server restarts. I click Other user.

I enter the credentials for sp_install and click the arrow.

I am now logged in with the sp_install user account and have Administrator rights. I also have the appropriate rights on the SQL Server with this account.

Install Prerequisites

I click on VM \ Settings on the VMWare toolbar.

The Virtual Machine Settings screen appears.

I click on Add… and the Add Hardware Wizard screen appears. I click on CD\DVD Drive and click Next.

I select Use ISO image and click Next.

I browse to the ISO image (en_sharepoint_server_2013_x64_dvd_1121447.iso) that I have for SharePoint Server 2013. I click Finish to continue.

I click OK to close the Virtual Machine Settings screen. A message appears in the top right corner of the screen.

I tap on the message and another message appears.

I click on Open folder to view files. The Explorer window opens.

I scroll down and find prerequisiteinstaller and double-click on it. I click Yes on the User Account Control screen.

The Microsoft SharePoint 2013 Products Preparation Tool screen appears. I click Next to continue.

The License Terms for software products screen appears. I click on the I accept terms … and click Next.

The installation begins.

A restart message appears in the screen when the process completes. I click Finish to continue.

Note: I did have a major problem at this stage once. I had no connection to the DNS server from this server. I disabled the network adapter, added a new network adapter in VM Tools, and configured it. I then deleted the old network adapter in VM Tools. The new network adapter had the same configuration as the old one. It connected to the DNS server and displayed an Internet connection.

Windows Server restarts.

Windows is configuring features.

I login to the server

A User Account Control screen is displayed. I click Yes to continue.

The Microsoft SharePoint 2013 Products Preparation Tool screen is displayed.

I wait for the prerequisites to be installed. Another restart message is displayed. I note that all tasks are completed successfully. I click Finish to continue.

Another restart and login. A User Account Control screen is displayed. I click Yes to continue.

The Microsoft SharePoint 2013 Products Preparation Tool screen is displayed.

The process runs quickly and is soon replaced by the Installation Complete screen. I click Finish to continue.

I see that I have two additional roles displayed in the Dashboard: App Server and IIS.

Install SharePoint 2013

I click on the explorer icon on the task bar, expand Computer \ DVD Drive (E:) and find the setup file.

I double-click on the setup file to start the installation process. A SharePoint 2013 screen is displayed.

It is soon replaced with a larger screen that includes a menu.

I click on Install SharePoint Server and a User Account Control screen is displayed. I click Yes to continue.

The Enter your Product Key screen is displayed. I enter the product key and click Continue.

The Read the Microsoft Software License Terms screen is displayed. I click on I accept the terms of this agreement and click Continue to continue.

The Server Type screen appears. I keep Complete selected and click Install Now.

The Installation Progress screen appears.

Installation nears completion.

Installation completes. The Run Configuration Wizard screen appears. I uncheck the Run the SharePoint Products Configuration Wizard and click Close.

I click Exit on the SharePoint 2013 screen to close it.

Creating Content Databases without GUIDs in the Name

Click on the Windows button on your keyboard.

Right-click on the SharePoint 2013 Management Shell on the Start workspace

Click on Run as administrator.

Note: I read about the Run as administrator requirement here: http://tomresing.com/blog/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=57

Click on Yes in the User Account Control window.

The SharePoint Management Shell window opens in the workspace.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Note: I did run into an error on this step once. The Powershell script could not connect to the SQL server.

I tried pinging the server2012sql SQL server from a command prompt without success. So I added the following entries to the hosts file in the C:\Windows\System32\Drivers\etc directory..

192.168.67.11 server2012dc
192.168.67.12 server2012sql

I had to give Full Control permission to the sp_install user account to the hosts file before I was able to edit and save changes.

Pinging will not work because of the firewall; but at least the IP address was available. So I tried running the script again. This time it worked!

I also changed the hosts file at the beginning of this blog entry for a different reason.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Copy and paste the following text into the SharePoint Management Shell window. Check that the spaces appear correctly!

I sometimes paste it into Notepad on the VM first.

New-SPConfigurationDatabase –DatabaseName SharePoint_Config -DatabaseServer server2012sql –AdministrationContentDatabaseName SharePoint_Admin_Content

Press the Enter key on the keyboard. The Shell screen refreshed and requests credentials.

A Credentials screen appears. I enter the sp_farm credentials. I click OK to continue.

I’m still being asked to supply a passphrase for FarmCredentials. I enter the credentials passphrase and hit Enter on the keyboard.

I wait for something to happen … but I am impatient. I go to the server2012sql server and run the Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio.

I expand the Object Explorer to see the Databases. I see that the databases are created!

I return to the server2012sp server and see that the prompt has returned in the Shell window.

The process has completed successfully! I close the Shell window.

Run Configuration Wizard

I click on the Windows key on the keyboard and then click on the SharePoint 2013 Products Configuration Wizard icon on the Start screen.

The User Account Control window appears. I click Yes to continue.

The SharePoint Products Configuration Wizard screen appears. I click Next to continue.

A prompt appears warning me about services being started or reset. I click Yes to continue.

The Modify server farm Settings screen appears. I review and accept the settings. I click Next to continue.

The Configure SharePoint Central Administration Web Application screen opens. I review and accept the settings. I record the port number 11747. I click Next to continue.

The Completing the SharePoint Products Configuration Wizard screen opens. I review and accept the settings. I click Next to continue.

The SharePoint product is configuring …

The Configuration Successful screen is displayed. I click Finish to close the screen.

Welcome Wizard

The Central Administration page begins to load. A Windows Security prompt appears. I login with the sp_install credentials. I leave Remember my credentials unchecked and click OK.

The web page continues to load. The Help Make SharePoint Better screen appears. I click No and OK to continue.

The Welcome page is displayed. I click Cancel. I can always restart the Welcome Wizard from the Central Administration screen later.

The Central Administration webpage is displayed.

Creating Service Apps with PowerShell Scripts

I am going to run some PowerShell scripts to create the State Service Application and the Usage and Health Data Collection application. These came from a presentation that Todd Klindt made at the SharePoint Technical Conference in San Francisco.

Click on the Windows button on your keyboard.

Right-click on the SharePoint 2013 Management Shell on the Start workspace

Click on Run as administrator.

Click on Yes in the User Account Control window.

The SharePoint Management Shell window opens in the workspace.

Copy and paste the following text into the SharePoint 2013 Management Shell window. Make sure to remove any empty lines.

New-SPStateServiceApplication -Name "State Service Application"

Get-SPStateServiceApplication| New-SPStateServiceApplicationProxy -defaultproxygroup

Get-SPStateServiceApplication| New-SPStateServiceDatabase -Name "State_Service_DB"

Get-spdatabase| where-object {$_.type -eq"Microsoft.Office.Server.Administration.StateDatabase"} | initialize-spstateservicedatabase

New-SPUsageApplication -Name "Usage and Health Data Collection"

$proxy = Get-SPServiceApplicationProxy| where {$_.TypeName-eq"Usage and Health Data Collection Proxy"}

$proxy.Provision()

You may have to click Enter on the keyboard to get the last command to run, too. It runs successfully as seen below.

You can validate that the applications are created by opening the Central Administration web page and clicking on Manage service applications in the Application Management section. You should see the new service applications listed by name.

The accounts that I use for the Search service (SP_Search), the Search Admin Web Service application pool (SP_Crawl), and the Search Query and Site Settings Web Service application pool (SP_Search) must be registered as managed accounts in SharePoint Server 2013 so that they are available when I create the Search service application. I used the procedure defined at this site (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg502597.aspx) to register each of these accounts as a managed account.

I see the Managed Accounts screen displayed as below when completed.

Next, I will create the Search Service Application and topology.

RHR (2012/04/25): I tried running a PowerShell script to do so that I downloaded the PowerShell script from http://melcher.it/2012/07/sharepoint-2013-create-a-search-service-application-and-topology-with-powershell/.

I modified the applicable parameters. It worked once for me; but I have since received errors every time that I run it.

I read a blog posting here that suggested installing Windows Updates. So I did so. But it still failed to run. So I decided to install using Central Administration.

I click on New \ Search Service Application in Manage Service Applications.

The Create New Search Service Application screen appears. I update the Service Application name and validate that the contoso\sp_crawl user account is selected.

I scroll down and select Create new application pool and enter the Application pool name as seen below.

I select Configurable for the security account and select contoso\sp_crawl. I then click on use existing application pool and select the Search App Pool.

I select Configurable for the security account for the application pool and select contoso\sp_crawl.

I click OK to continue. The Create New Search Service Application screen appears.

Upon completion, a message appears stating “created successfully.

I validate a few items to ensure the actions completed successfully.

I open the Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio application on server2012sql and expand the Object Explorer to see the Databases.

I see four Search databases created. Sadly, they do not have the nice, clean names like I would be able to create if the PowerShell scripts worked.

I open Central Administration on the server2012sp server and click on Application Management. I then click on Manage Service Applications. I can see the Search Administration Web Service for Search SA and the Search SA service applications.

I open Central Administration on the server2012sp server and click on General Application Settings. I then click on Farm Search Administration.

I can see that the Search Service App service application is created.

I click on Search Service App to review the Administrative status. I see that it is not able to connect.

I scroll down and review the Search Application Topology and the list of databases. These match what I saw listed on the SQL Server.

I click on Central Administration \ Manage services on server.

I scroll down to see that all of the Search services are started.

Next I want configure crawling. I click on Content Sources on the left navigation.

The Search SA: Manage Content Sources screen appears.

I click on Local SharePoint sites and click on Edit in the drop down list.

The Edit Content Source screen appears. I enter http://server2012sp in the Type start addresses below field.

I click Create Schedule under Incremental Crawl.

I configure the schedule in the Manage Schedules screen as seen below. I click OK to continue.

I click Create Schedule under Full Crawl. I configure the schedule in the Manage Schedules screen as seen below. I click OK to continue.

The Crawl Schedules appear as seen below. I click OK to close the Edit Content Source screen.

I click on Local SharePoint sites and Start Full Crawl on the drop down list.

A Message from webpage appears. I click OK to accept and continue.

The crawling starts.

I refresh the screen by clicking on Refresh and see that the crawling process is still crawling. I can also see when the next full crawl is scheduled to run. I also have options to stop or pause all crawls.

I refresh the screen by clicking on Refresh and see that the crawling process is completing.

I refresh the screen by clicking on Refresh and see that the crawling process is idle.

I click on Crawl Log on the left side navigation and I can see the last crawl log entry. Note that there is a 1 under Successes. I conclude that my first full crawl was completed successfully.

Creating New Web Application with PowerShell Script

I am going to run a PowerShell script to create a new web application. The script came from the following site: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/rcormier/archive/2012/09/01/how-to-create-sharepoint-web-applications-with-powershell.aspx.

The accounts (contoso\sp_webapp, contoso\sp_superreader, and contoso\sp_superuser) that I use for the web application must be registered as managed accounts in SharePoint Server 2013 so that they are available when I create the application. I used the procedure defined at this site (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg502597.aspx) to register each of these accounts as a managed account.

I see the Managed Accounts screen displayed as below when completed.

Run the SharePoint 2013 Management Shell as administrator.

Copy and paste the following text into a Notepad file on the server2012sp server. I modified the Script Variables for my SharePoint configuration.

   1:  $ver = $host | select version if ($ver.Version.Major -gt 1) {$Host.Runspace.ThreadOptions = "ReuseThread"}

   2:  Add-PsSnapin Microsoft.SharePoint.PowerShell -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue

   3:  Import-Module WebAdministration -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue

   4:  ##

   5:  #This Script Creates SharePoint Web Applications

   6:  ##

   7:  ##

   8:  #Load Script Variables

   9:  ##

  10:  Write-Progress -Activity "Creating Web Application" -Status "Creating Script Variables"

  11:  #This is the Web Application URL

  12:  $WebApplicationURL = "http://server2012sp"

  13:  #This is the Display Name for the SharePoint Web Application

  14:  $WebApplicationName = "Contoso Web Application"

  15:  #This is the Content Database for the Web Application

  16:  $ContentDatabase = "Contoso_ContentDB"

  17:  #This is the Display Name for the Application Pool

  18:  $ApplicationPoolDisplayName = "Contoso App Pool"

  19:  #This is identity of the Application Pool which will be used (Domain\User)

  20:  $ApplicationPoolIdentity = "contoso\sp_webapp"

  21:  #This is the password of the Application Pool account which will be used

  22:  $ApplicationPoolPassword = "pass@word1"

  23:  #This is the Account which will be used for the Portal Super Reader Account

  24:  $PortalSuperReader = "contoso\sp_superreader"

  25:  #This is the Account which will be used for the Portal Super User Account

  26:  $PortalSuperUser = "contoso\sp_superuser"

  27:  ##

  28:  #Begin Script

  29:  ##

  30:  $AppPoolStatus = $False

  31:  Write-Progress -Activity "Creating Web Application" -Status "Checking if Web Application Already Exists"

  32:  if(get-spwebapplication $WebApplicationURL -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue)

  33:  {

  34:  #If a web application with the specifid URL already exists, exit

  35:  Write-Progress -Activity "Aborting Web Application Creation" -Status "Web Application with URL $WebApplication Already Exists"

  36:  Write-Host "Aborting: Web Application $WebApplicationURL Already Exists" -ForegroundColor Red

  37:  sleep 5

  38:  }

  39:  else

  40:  {

  41:  Write-Progress -Activity "Creating Web Application" -Status "Checking if Application Pool Already Exists"

  42:  #Check to see if the specified application pool alrady exists. If it exists, use the existing app pool

  43:  if($AppPool = Get-SPServiceApplicationPool $ApplicationPoolDisplayName -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue)

  44:  {

  45:  Write-Progress -Activity "Creating Web Application" -Status "Re-Using Existing SharePoint Application Pool"

  46:  Set-Variable -Name AppPoolStatus -Value "IsSharePoint" -scope "script"

  47:  }

  48:  else

  49:  {

  50:  if((Test-Path IIS:\AppPools\$ApplicationPoolDisplayName).tostring() -eq "True")

  51:  {

  52:  Write-Progress -Activity "Creating Web Application" -Status "Application Pool with name $ApplicationPoolDisplayName exists and is not used by SharePoint"

  53:  Set-Variable -Name AppPoolStatus -Value "IsNotSharePoint" -scope "script"

  54:  }

  55:  }

  56:  if($AppPoolStatus -eq "IsNotSharePoint")

  57:  {

  58:  Write-Host "Aborting: Application Pool $ApplicationPoolDisplayName already exists on the server and is not a SharePoint Application Pool" -ForegroundColor Red

  59:  Write-Progress -Activity "Creating Web Application" -Status "Aborting: SharePoint Cannot use the specified Application Pool"

  60:  }

  61:  elseif($AppPoolStatus -eq "IsSharePoint")

  62:  {

  63:  #Check to see if the URL starts with HTTP or HTTPS. This can be used to determine the appropriate host header to assign

  64:  if($WebApplicationURL.StartsWith("http://"))

  65:  {

  66:  $HostHeader = $WebApplicationURL.Substring(7)

  67:  $HTTPPort = "80"

  68:  }

  69:  elseif($WebApplicationURL.StartsWith("https://"))

  70:  {

  71:  $HostHeader = $WebApplicationURL.Substring(8)

  72:  $HTTPPort = "443"

  73:  }

  74:  Write-Progress -Activity "Creating Web Application" -Status "Application Pool $ApplicationPoolDisplayName Already Exists, Using Existing Application Pool"

  75:  #Grab the existing application pool, assign it to the AppPool variable

  76:  Set-Variable -Name AppPool -Value (Get-SPServiceApplicationPool $ApplicationPoolDisplayName) -scope "script"

  77:  Write-Progress -Activity "Creating Web Application" -Status "Creating Web Application $WebapplicationURL"

  78:  #Create a new web application using the existing parameters, assign it to the WebApp variable such that object cache user accounts can be configured

  79:  $WebApp = New-SPWebApplication -ApplicationPool $ApplicationPoolDisplayName -Name $WebApplicationName -url $WebApplicationURL -port $HTTPPort -DatabaseName $ContentDatabase -HostHeader $hostHeader

  80:  Write-Progress -Activity "Creating Web Application" -Status "Configuring Object Cache Accounts"

  81:  #Assign Object Cache Accounts

  82:  $WebApp.Properties["portalsuperuseraccount"] = $PortalSuperUser

  83:  $WebApp.Properties["portalsuperreaderaccount"] = $PortalSuperReader

  84:  Write-Progress -Activity "Creating Web Application" -Status "Creating Object Cache User Policies for Web Application"

  85:  #Create a New Policy for the Super User

  86:  $SuperUserPolicy = $WebApp.Policies.Add($PortalSuperUser, "Portal Super User Account")

  87:  #Assign Full Control To the Super User

  88:  $SuperUserPolicy.PolicyRoleBindings.Add($WebApp.PolicyRoles.GetSpecialRole([Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPPolicyRoleType]::FullControl))

  89:  #Create a New Policy for the Super Reader

  90:  $SuperReaderPolicy = $WebApp.Policies.Add($PortalSuperReader, "Portal Super Reader Account")

  91:  #Assign Full Read to the Super Reader

  92:  $SuperReaderPolicy.PolicyRoleBindings.Add($WebApp.PolicyRoles.GetSpecialRole([Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPPolicyRoleType]::FullRead))

  93:  Write-Progress -Activity "Creating Web Application" -Status "Updating Web Application Properties"

  94:  #Commit changes to the web application

  95:  $WebApp.update()

  96:  }

  97:  else

  98:  {

  99:  Write-Progress -Activity "Creating Web Application" -Status "Creating Application Pool"

 100:  #Since we have to create a new application pool, check to see if the account specified is already a managed account

 101:  if(get-spmanagedaccount $ApplicationPoolIdentity)

 102:  {

 103:  #If the specified account is already a managed account, use that account when creating a new application pool

 104:  Set-Variable -Name AppPoolManagedAccount -Value (Get-SPManagedAccount $ApplicationPoolIdentity | select username) -scope "Script"

 105:  Set-Variable -Name AppPool -Value (New-SPServiceApplicationPool -Name $ApplicationPoolDisplayName -Account $ApplicationPoolIdentity) -scope "Script"

 106:  }

 107:  else

 108:  {

 109:  #If the specified account is not already a managd account create a managed account using the credentials provided

 110:  $AppPoolCredentials = New-Object System.Management.Automation.PSCredential $ApplicationPoolIdentity, (ConvertTo-SecureString $ApplicationPoolPassword -AsPlainText -Force)

 111:  Set-Variable -Name AppPoolManagedAccount -Value (New-SPManagedAccount -Credential $AppPoolCredentials) -scope "Script"

 112:  #Create an application pool using the new managed account

 113:  Set-Variable -Name AppPool -Value (New-SPServiceApplicationPool -Name $ApplicationPoolDisplayName -Account (get-spmanagedaccount $ApplicationPoolIdentity)) -scope "Script"

 114:  }

 115:  #Check to see if the URL starts with HTTP or HTTPS. This can be used to determine the appropriate host header to assign

 116:  if($WebApplicationURL.StartsWith("http://"))

 117:  {

 118:  $HostHeader = $WebApplicationURL.Substring(7)

 119:  $HTTPPort = "80"

 120:  }

 121:  elseif($WebApplicationURL.StartsWith("https://"))

 122:  {

 123:  $HostHeader = $WebApplicationURL.Substring(8)

 124:  $HTTPPort = "443"

 125:  }

 126:  Write-Progress -Activity "Creating Web Application" -Status "Creating Web Application $WebapplicationURL"

 127:  #Create a new web application using the existing parameters, assign it to the WebApp variable such that object cache user accounts can be configured

 128:  $WebApp = New-SPWebApplication -ApplicationPool $AppPool.Name -ApplicationPoolAccount $AppPoolManagedAccount.Username -Name $WebApplicationName -url $WebApplicationURL -port $HTTPPort -DatabaseName $ContentDatabase -HostHeader $hostHeader

 129:  Write-Progress -Activity "Creating Web Application" -Status "Configuring Object Cache Accounts"

 130:  #Assign Object Cache Accounts

 131:  $WebApp.Properties["portalsuperuseraccount"] = $PortalSuperUser

 132:  $WebApp.Properties["portalsuperreaderaccount"] = $PortalSuperReader

 133:  Write-Progress -Activity "Creating Web Application" -Status "Creating Object Cache User Policies for Web Application"

 134:  #Create a New Policy for the Super User

 135:  $SuperUserPolicy = $WebApp.Policies.Add($PortalSuperUser, "Portal Super User Account")

 136:  #Assign Full Control To the Super User

 137:  $SuperUserPolicy.PolicyRoleBindings.Add($WebApp.PolicyRoles.GetSpecialRole([Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPPolicyRoleType]::FullControl))

 138:  #Create a New Policy for the Super Reader

 139:  $SuperReaderPolicy = $WebApp.Policies.Add($PortalSuperReader, "Portal Super Reader Account")

 140:  #ASsign Full Read to the Super Reader

 141:  $SuperReaderPolicy.PolicyRoleBindings.Add($WebApp.PolicyRoles.GetSpecialRole([Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPPolicyRoleType]::FullRead))

 142:  Write-Progress -Activity "Creating Web Application" -Status "Updating Web Application Properties"

 143:  #Commit changes to the web application

 144:  $WebApp.update()

 145:  }

 146:  }

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I save the file with the filename CreateWebApplication.ps1.

I right-clicked on the Windows PowerShell icon on the taskbar and clicked on Run ISE as Administrator.

The Administrator: Windows PowerShell ISE window opens. I click on File \ Open …

I click on the CreateWebApplication.ps1 file and click Open. The script opens in the workspace.

I click on the Run Script icon.

The script ran with a single warning displayed.

I validate that the web application was created by opening the Central Administration web page and clicking on Manage web applications in the Web Applications section. You should see the new web application listed by name.

I select the Contoso Web Application and click on User Policy. The Policy for Web Application screen is displayed. I review the displayed accounts and permissions. I click OK to close the screen.

I will validate that the database for the web application was created by opening the Central Administration web page and clicking on Manage content databases in the Databases section. You should see the new database listed by name.

I also check that the database is created in SQL Server Management Studio on my SQL Server.

Conclusion

There is more that I can do; but I am going to end here. I set out and accomplished what I wanted to do. All three servers are operational. I have a new SharePoint 2013 environment that is a much better match for what I would see in a production environment. I could always squeeze in another server if I need an App Server or independent Search Server. I will do my best to keep track of any issues that come up and blog about them.

I will make corrections in these blog entries as needed. I already made a few corrections that pertained to problems with some PowerShell scripts that I ran.

There are certainly several blogs that have details on SharePoint 2013 installations. I hope that the details that I included help anyone interested.

As a reminder, I am separating the details into four blog posts:

Installing and Configuring SQL Server 2012: Part 3 of 4

rhrempel — Sun, 17 Mar 2013 22:35:00 GMT

This bog entry provides the details on installing and configuring SQL Server 2012 Standard on a Windows 2012 server. I have installed SQL Server many times over the years. This time I separated the installation onto two virtual disk drives.

As a reminder, I am separating the details into four blog posts:

I setup another VMWare virtual machine for SQL Server 2012. I plan to configure it as below.

SQL Server

Windows Server 2012
SQL Server 2012 Standard SP1
Memory: 8GB RAM
CPU: 4
Drive: 1x80GB, 1x40GB
IP Address: 192.168.67.12
Domain: contoso.com
Name: server2012sql
Target Drive: 2 (OS and SQL Server install)
Target Drive: 1 (Database install)

Note the following in the Virtual Machine Settings. I set up one processor with four cores.

Add a Second Hard Disk

I set up a second Hard Disk by clicking on Add… at the bottom of the Virtual Machine Settings screen. The Add Hardware Wizard screen appears. I select Hard Disk and click Next.

I click Create a new virtual disk in the Select a Disk screen and click Next.

I leave the settings in the Select a Disk Type screen as is and click Next.

I change the Maximum disk size to 40.0 in the Specify Disk Capacity screen and click Next to continue.

I specify the location and filename for the virtual disk file in the Specify Disk File screen. I click Finish to continue.

I click OK to close the Virtual Machine Settings screen. I want to restart the server to apply the changes. I click on Local Server.

I click on Tasks and select Shut Down Local Server.

I select Restart on the What do you want the computer to do? drop down list. I change the option to Hardware: Installation (Planned), add a comment, and click OK to continue.

The server restarts. I logon with the local Admin account. I click on Tools \ Computer Management to finish adding the second disk.

The Computer Management screen appears. I click on Storage \ Disk Management.

I right-click on Disk 1 and select Online.

The status of the drive changes to “Not Initialized”.

I right-click again and select Initialize Disk.

The Initialize Disk screen appears. I leave the settings as is and click OK to continue.

The status of the drive changes to Online.

I right-click on the drive and select New Simple Volume.

The New Simple Volume Wizard screen appears. I click Next to continue.

I leave the settings in the Specify Volume Size screen as is and click Next to continue.

I leave the settings in the Assign Drive Letter or Path as is and click Next to continue.

I change the Volume Label in the Format Partition screen and click Next to continue.

I click Finish in the Completing the New Simple Volume Wizard screen.

The second hard disk appears in the list.

I close the Computer Management screen.

Change the Server Name and the IP Address

I want to change the server name and IP address. I click on Local Server.

I click on the displayed computer name and the System Properties appears.

I click on Change and the Computer Name / Domain Changes dialog box is displayed. I update the computer name as displayed below. I click OK to continue. I will update the domain later.

Computer name: server2012sql

I click OK when asked to restart the computer.

I click on Close to close the Systems Properties screen.

I click on Restart Now.

The computer immediately restarts. I confirm that the computer name has changed.

I click on the Ethernet setting to change the IP address.

The Network Connections screen is displayed.

I double-click on the Ethernet icon and the Ethernet Status window is displayed.

I click on Properties and the Ethernet Properties dialog box is displayed.

I click on Internet Protocol Version 4 and Properties. I select Use the following IP address and enter the IP address displayed below. Note that I added the Domain Controller server as the preferred DNS server address and I added the IP address of my home router as the alternate DNS server. I click OK to accept the changes and continue.

I click Close to close the Ethernet Properties dialog box.

I click Close to close the Ethernet Status dialog box.

I close the Network Connections window and I am returned to the Local Server dashboard. I can see that my change is applied.

I click on WORKGROUP in the Properties display.

The System Properties screen is displayed again.

I click on Change… and the Computer Name / Domain Changes screen is displayed. I select Domain and enter contoso.com. I click OK to continue.

The Windows Security screen appears. I enter the Administrator account on the domain controller and click OK to continue.

A Welcome screen appears. I click OK to close the screen.

I click OK to restart the computer.

The System Properties screen shows the updated Domain. I click Close to close the System Properties screen.

I can see that the Local Server properties is also updated.

I click Restart Now on the Restart screen to restart the server.

The server restarts immediately. I logon with the local Admin account. I check the Local Server Properties.

I want to add SQL_Admin as a Local Administrator on the SQL Server. I click on Tools \ Computer Management.

The Computer Management screen opens and I select Local Users and Groups. I expand and select Groups.

I double-click on Administrators and the Administrators Properties screen appears.

I click on Add... and add Contoso\SQL_Admin to the Enter the object names to select box.

I click Check Names and the Windows Security screen appears. I enter the credentials for Administrator and click OK.

The name is validated. I click OK to continue.

The SQL_Admin account appears as a member of the Administrators group.

I click OK to close the Administrators Properties screen. I close the Computer Management screen.

Windows Firewall

I need to configure Windows Firewall to open a port for SQL Server.

I click on Domain: On beside Windows Firewall in Server Manager \ Local Server.

The Windows Firewall screen opens.

I click on Advanced Settings

The Windows Firewall with Advanced Security screen opens.

I click on Inbound Rules

I click on New Rule … under Actions on the right menu

The New Inbound Rule Wizard screen appears.

I select Port and click Next.

I keep TCP selected and enter 1433 as the local port. I click Next to continue.

I keep Allow the connection selected and click Next to continue.

I keep all of the settings on the screen and click Next to continue.

I enter values for Name and Description and click Finish.

The Inbound Rule is saved. I will create additional Inbound Rules:

Port	Description
TCP 2383	Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Analysis Services with Default instance
TCP 2382	SQL Server Browser service
TCP xxxx	SQL Server 2011 Analysis Services (if used)
TCP 80	SQL Server 2012 Reporting Services (SSRS)
TCP 135	SQL Server 2012 Integration Services (SSIS)

I close the Windows Firewall with Advanced Security screen.

I close the Windows Firewall screen.

Install SQL Server 2012

I click on VM \ Settings on the VMWare toolbar.

The Virtual Machine Settings screen appears.

I click on Add… and the Add Hardware Wizard screen appears. I click on CD\DVD Drive and click Next.

I select Use ISO image and click Next.

I browse to the ISO image (en_sql_server_2012_standard_edition_with_sp1_x64_dvd_1228198.iso) that I have for SQL Server 2012 Standard. I click Finish to continue.

I click OK to close the Virtual Machine Settings screen. A message appears in the top right corner of the screen. I ignore it for now (because I want to switch user accounts).

I click CTRL-ALT-DEL in the VMWare toolbar. I click Switch user in the screen.

I click Other user.

I enter the credentials for SQL_Admin and click the arrow.

I click the Libraries folder on the task bar at the bottom of the screen.

The Drive Tools screen appears. I select the F: drive that I just mapped to the SQL Server ISO file.

I double-click the setup file. The User Account Control screen appears and I click Yes to continue.

The installation process begins.

The SQL Server Installation Center screen appears.

I click on Installation and New SQL Server stand-alone installation ….

The Setup Support Rules screen opens. It shows that all rules passed. I click OK to continue.

The Product Key screen is displayed, I enter a product key, and I click Next to continue.

The License Terms screen is displayed. I click on I accept the license terms and click Next to continue.

I see two recommended product updates on the Product Updates screen. I click Next to continue.

The installation process continues.

A message box appeared during the installation. I clicked OK to close it and continue.

Another message briefly appeared and then closed.

The Setup Support Rules screen lists warnings. There is one warning about Windows Firewall; but I already made the required changes. I click Next to continue.

The Setup Role screen appears. I leave the settings as is (because I want to customize and configure). I click Next to continue.

The Feature Selection screen appears. I select the following Microsoft SQL Server 2012 features for a fast SQL Server setup :

Database Engine Services
Client Tools Connectivity
Client Tools Backwards Compability
Management Tools – Basic

I change the directories to point to my second drive (E). I click Next to continue.

The Installation Rules screen appears. I click on Show Details to see the details. I click Next to continue.

Note: I did have a problem reported with installing Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 one time. I did not get the problem again when I added my home router as the second DNS server in the IP address configuration. So I think the solution is to have an Internet connection available to the Windows 2012 Server.

The Instance Configuration screen opens. I change the Instance root directory to point to the second drive (E). I click Next to continue.

The Disk Space Requirements screen displays the disk summary. I know that I have plenty of disk space (for now). I click Next to continue.

The Server Configuration screen opens. I change the settings by changing two of the account names and include the passwords. I display the Locations and Select User screens below.

I click Next in the Server Configuration screen to continue.

The Database Engine Configuration screen opens. I add Contoso\SQL_Admin as a SQL Server Administrator.

I select Mixed Mode and enter the password for the SQL Server system administrator. I click Next in the Database Engine Configuration screen to continue.

The Error Reporting screen opens. I click Next to continue.

The Installation Configuration Rules screen opens. I click Show Details to see the details. I click Next to continue.

The Ready to Install screen opens. I click Install to continue.

The Installation Progress screen opens and the installation process begins.

As a side note, my Lenovo ThinkPad looks like it is working for a change.

The Complete screen appears. The status of every feature is Succeeded. I click Close and the screen closes.

I close the SQL Server Installation Center screen.

I click on the Windows Start button on the keyboard. I can see new icons for SQL Server programs. I click on the [ESC] key on the keyboard.

Max Degree of Parallelism Setting

I need to change the setting for max degree of parallelism. I click on the SQL Server Management icon.

SQL Server Management Studio starts up. The Connect to Server screen is displayed. I click Connect.

The Object Explorer pane shows the SQL Server listed.

I right click on the SQL Server SERVER2012SQL and select Properties.

The Server Properties screen appears.

In the Select a page section, I click Advanced. I scroll to the bottom and change the Max Degree of Parallelism value from 0 to 1. I click OK to continue. I keep the Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio screen open for the next step.

SQL Permissions for sp_install

I need to set the following roles on the SQL Server for sp_install:

DB_Creator
Security_Admin
Public

In the Object Explorer, I expand Security and Logins.

I right-click on Logins and select New Login.

The Login – New screen appears. I enter the account (CONTOSO\sp_install) that I will use for the SharePoint installation into the Login name field.

I click on Server Roles and select dbcreator and securityadmin. I keep public selected. I click OK to continue. The screen closes.

SQL Permissions for sp_farm

I need to set the following roles on the SQL Server for sp_farm:

DB_Creator
Security_Admin
Public

In the Object Explorer, I expand Security and Logins.

I right-click on Logins and select New Login.

The Login – New screen appears. I enter the account (CONTOSO\sp_farm) that I will use for the SharePoint farm administrator into the Login name field.

I click on Server Roles and select dbcreator and securityadmin. I keep public selected. I click OK to continue. The screen closes.

I close the Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio screen.

This concludes the installation and configuration of SQL 2012 Server.

As a reminder, I am separating the details into four blog posts:

Installing and Configuring the Windows Domain Controller: Part 2 of 4

rhrempel — Sun, 17 Mar 2013 21:48:00 GMT

Installing a Windows Domain Controler is a relatively easy task. I also provide a list of service accounts to create for the new environment.

As a reminder, I am separating the details into four blog posts:

I downloaded Windows Server 2012 (64-bit) from MSDN. I plan to perform the following tasks

Install operating system
Add Active Directory Domain Services (ADDS)
Add DNS
Add domain groups and users

I create a custom Virtual Machine in VMWare Workstation. I click on Create a New Virtual Machine.

I click Next to continue.

The New Virtual Machine Wizard screen is displayed. I click Next to continue.

I select the Installer disc image file (iso) and select the Windows Server 2012 iso file. I click Next to continue.

I enter the Windows product key, select Server 2012 Standard, enter Admin in the Full Name field and a password: pass@word1. I click Next to continue.

I enter the Virtual machine name and Location. I click Next to continue.

I keep the Processor Configuration settings as is and click Next.

I change the memory setting to 1024 and click Next.

I select Use host-only networking and click Next.

I keep the Controller Type settings as is and click Next.

The Select a Disk screen appears. I want to Create a new virtual disk and click Next.

I keep SCSI selected and click Next.

I change the Maximum disk size to 32.0 and keep the Split virtual disk into multiple files setting. I click Next.

I update the Disk File setting and click Next.

I click Customize Hardware on the Ready to Create Virtual Machine and remove the Floppy and Printer devices.

I click on the Network Adapter and change the Network Connection setting to Custom and select VMnet8 (NAT) in the drop down list. I click Close to continue.

I click Finish in the Ready to Create Virtual Machine window.

I close the Removable Devices window by clicking OK.

Installation continues until the operating system is installed. The server reboots and the Server Manager \ Dashboard is displayed.

Change the Server Name and the IP Address

I want to change the server name and IP address. I click on Local Server.

I click on the displayed computer name and the System Properties screen appears.

I click on Change and the Computer Name / Domain Changes dialog box is displayed. I update the computer name as displayed below. I click OK to continue. I will update the domain later.

Computer name: server2012dc

I click OK when asked to restart the computer.

I click on Close to close the Systems Properties.

I click on Restart Now.

The computer immediately restarts. I confirm that the computer name has changed.

I click on the Ethernet setting to change the IP address.

The Network Connections screen is displayed.

I double-click on the Ethernet icon and the Ethernet Status window is displayed.

I click on Properties and the Ethernet Properties dialog box is displayed.

I click on Internet Protocol Version 4 and Properties. I select Use the following IP address and enter the IP address displayed below. I click OK to accept the changes and continue.

I click Close to close the Ethernet Properties dialog box.

I click Close to close the Ethernet Status dialog box.

I close the Network Connections window and I am returned to the Local Server dashboard.

I click on Tasks \ Refresh to update the dashboard.

I can see that my change is applied.

Active Directory Domain Services

I want to add AD DS now. I click on the Dashboard link on the left.

I click on “2 Add roles and features”

The Add Roles and Features Wizard opens. I just set the static IP address. I click Next to continue.

I keep the Role-based … selection and click Next

I make no changes to the next screen and click Next

I click on Active Directory Domain Services in the Add Roles and Features Wizard.

A new screen appears immediately. I click Add Features to continue.

I click Next on the Add Roles and Features Wizard to continue. The Select Features screen has Group Policy Management pre-selected. I click Next to continue.

The Active Directory Domain Services screen displays notes. I click Next to continue.

The Confirm installation sections screen appears.

I click on the Restart checkbox and a confirmation dialog box appears. I click Yes to continue.

I click Install on the Confirm Installation selections screen. The Feature installation shows the progress.

I click Close after seeing that installation succeeded.

An AD DS box appears on the Dashboard

Promote Server to Domain Controller

I want to promote the server to a domain controller next. I click on the flag with the warning triangle. A Post-deployment Configuration list appears.

I click on Promote this server to a domain controller. The Active Directory Domain Services Configuration Wizard appears.

I change the deployment operation to Add a new forest and enter contoso.com as the root domain name. I click Next to continue.

I enter a DSRM password in the next screen. I leave the rest of the settings as is and click Next to continue.

A warning is displayed on the DNS Options page.

A DNS Options warning box also appears. I click OK to continue.

I click Next on the DNS Options screen to continue. The Additional Options screen verifies the NetBIOS domain name. I click Next to continue.

I do not change the path settings in the Path screen. I click Next to continue.

I review the options on the Review Options screen. I click Next to continue.

The Review Options screen is displayed. I do not have plans of running the scripts with PowerShell. I click Next to continue.

The Prerequisites Check runs. Unfortunately, one or more prerequisites fails.

I need to set a strong password for the local Administrator account. I click on Tools \ Computer Management.

The Computer Management windows opens. I click on Local Users and Groups.

I double-click on Users and the list of user accounts is displayed.

I right-click on Administrator and select Set Password….

The Set Password for Administrator dialog box is displayed. I click Proceed to continue.

I enter the password in both password fields in the next screen. I click OK to continue.

I receive a confirmation that the password is set. I click OK to close the confirmation window.

I close the Computer Management window and return to the AD DS Configuration Wizard. I click Rerun prerequisites check.

The prerequisites check passed successfully this time.

I click Install to continue. The process starts …

Installation continues with status updates displayed.

The server automatically restarts.

The server restarts. I logon with the local Admin account. The Dashboard shows the new AD DS and DNS roles.

I can also see the new components available under the Tools menu.

Service Accounts

I will install the service accounts as listed on http://www.toddklindt.com/SP2013ServiceAccounts. I also plan to install some additional service accounts as listed on http://www.absolute-sharepoint.com/2013/01/sharepoint-2013-service-accounts-best.html. I really like the details provided in both blog entries. I changed the table format to follow what was in Todd’s blog.

The Account permissions and security settings in SharePoint 2013 document (link) provides a detailed list of all of the permissions and security settings automatically added to accounts during the various installation processes.

Service Accounts Needed for a Base Install of SharePoint 2013

Account name	Role	Domain rights	Local SharePoint Server rights needed	SQL rights needed
sp_install	Used to install SharePoint binaries.	Domain User	Local administrator on all SharePoint servers (but not on SQL Server)	public, dbcreator, and securityadmin SQL roles. Need to be SysAdmin on SQL when installing the Workflow Manager
sp_farm	Farm account. Used for Windows Timer Service, Central Admin and User Profile service	Domain User	Local administrator on all SharePoint servers (but not on SQL Server)	public, dbcreator, and securityadmin SQL roles. Need to be SysAdmin on SQL when installing the Workflow Manager
sp_webapp	App pool id for content web apps	Domain User	None	None
sp_serviceapps	Service app pool id	Domain User	None	None
sp_userprofile	Account used by the User Profile services to access Active Directory	Must have Replicating Change permissions to AD. Must be given in BOTH ADUC and ADSIEDIT. If domain is Windows 2003 or early, must also be a member of the "Pre-Windows 2000" built-in group.	None	None
sp_superuser	Cache account	Domain User	Web application Policy Full Control Web application super account setting	None
sp_superreader	Cache account	Domain User	Web application Policy Full read Web application super reader account setting	None
sp_MySitePool	Used for the My Sites Web Application	Domain User	This account must not be a member of the Farm Administrators group.	None

Accounts Required for SQL Server

The security benefit here is that the account running the Agent and Database Engine services is not a local administrator anymore.

Name	Role	Domain rights	Local SharePoint Server rights needed	SQL rights needed
SQL_Admin	SQL Admin on the SQL Server. Used to Install the SQL Server.	Domain User	None	Local Administrator on the SQL Server
SQL_Services	It is the service account for the following SQL Server services: MSSQLSERVER SQLSERVERAGENT.	Domain User	None	Will be given necessary permissions when SQL Server is installed by a local administrator on the SQL box

Accounts Required for Search

Instead of letting The sp_content account runs both the Windows Service and have FULL-READ rights on all the web applications, the SP_Search will now run the Windows Service and the SP_Crawl account has the FULL-READ rights for crawling.

Name	Role	Domain rights	Local SharePoint Server rights needed	SQL rights needed
SP_Crawl	The Default Content Access Account for the Search Service Application	Domain User	None	None
SP_Search	Service Account to run the SharePoint Search “Windows Service”	Domain User	None	None

Accounts Required for Optional Components

Account name	Role	Domain rights	Local SharePoint Server rights needed	SQL rights needed
sql_ssas	Account that we run the SQL Server Analysis Service services as	Domain User	None	db_datareader on databases
sp_excel	Excel services unattended account.	Domain User	None	None
sp_pps	PerformancePoint Unattended account	Domain User	None	None
sp_accsvc	Access Services. Used to create all Access databases in SQL and the service account running the service app pool for the Access Service Application	Domain User	None	db_owner, public, and securityadmin
sp_workflow	The RunAs account for the Workflow Manager service	Domain User	None	None

I create all accounts in the Active Directory Users and Computers screen in the same manner. I have “Users” pre-selected.

I right-click in the right pane and select New \ User. I enter the details as seen in the screen below.

I click on Next to continue.

I click on Finish to continue. The New Object screen closes. I can then double-click on the new user object and edit all of the properties. For example, I can add a description.

I click OK to close the window. The end result looks like below.

I close the Active Directory Users and Computers screen.

I click on the Windows Start button on the keyboard. I can see new icons for Active Directory and DNS programs. I click on the [ESC] key on the keyboard.

This ends my work on the domain controller. I will leave the virtual machine up and running.

As a reminder, I am separating the details into four blog posts:

Installing and Configuring a Three-Server SharePoint 2013 Environment: Part 1 of 4

rhrempel — Sun, 17 Mar 2013 21:32:00 GMT

I also felt that I should configure the firewalls, services, and service accounts with best practices in mind. I had not done so the last time.

I still wanted to use VM Workstation to run all of the virtual machines. I don’t see a lot of demos and blogs that show how to do this. So I wanted to document the details related to VMWare as much as possible.

I also try to record every step I complete with screenshots. This makes for a long blog entry. So I split the details up into multiple blog entries. On the other hand, I am not showing every problem that I encountered. Some are just simple typos or I tried something that did not work. I just fix these and move on. Basically, I am showing what worked and sometimes I note where I encountered a significant problem and my solution. I’m also posting all images in original size.

I am separating the details into four blog posts:

Hardware and Software

I am installing the environment on a Lenovo ThinkPad W530 laptop (Machine Type 2447 / Model CN4). The laptop has the following hardware specifications:

CPU	Intel® Core™ i7-3820QM (3.70 GHz, 8MB L3, 1333MHz FSB)
Memory	32GB RAM (2 x Crucial CT3291640 16GB kit (8GBx2), 204-pin SODIMM)
Drive 1	256GB SDD
Drive 2	512GB SDD (replaced internal CD/DVD)
Optical Drive	External CD/DVD (if needed)
SDHD Card	32GB Memory Card (if needed)
Graphics	NVIDIA Quadro K1000M / Intel HD Graphics 4000 - 2 GB
Display	15.6”

This laptop is by far the most powerful computer that I have ever used. It never seems to slow down for anything. I was running another virtual machine with Windows 7 most of the time while installing and configuring the three Windows 2012 servers.

I use a second monitor from AOC (model e1649fwu) that plugs into a USB port. It has a 15.6” display and I take it with when I travel. It’s like having twice the workspace! It made writing these details and taking screenshots much easier.

I have plenty of drive space on external drives if needed. I use Acronis True Image Home 2012 for daily backups.

I have the following software installed on the laptop:

Windows 7 Professional SP1 (64-bit)
Microsoft Office 2013
Microsoft Project 2013
Microsoft Visio 2013
Neat v5.1 SP4
SnagIt 9 Editor
VMWare Workstation 9.0.1
MagicISO Virtual CD/DVD Manager
EditPad Lite
AVG 2013 Anti-Virus Free

Resources

I used several resources to assist me with this installation. As already mentioned, I did a standalone installation of SharePoint 2013 on Windows Server 2008 last summer (2012). This effort will take more planning and preparation to get it right.

Title	URL
Installing and Configuring SharePoint 2013 without screwing it up (too badly)	http://www.slideshare.net/SPTechConSanFrancisco/how-to-install-sharepoint-2013-without-messing-it-up-by-todd-klindt-and-shane-young-stechcon
A simple install of SQL Server 2012 for SharePoint Server 2013 or 2010	http://msmvps.com/blogs/shane/archive/2012/09/17/a-simple-install-of-sql-server-2012-for-sharepoint-server-2013-or-2010.aspx
Step-by-Step Guide for Setting Up Windows Server 2012 Domain Controller	http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/12370.step-by-step-guide-for-setting-up-windows-server-2012-domain-controller.aspx
Installation SharePoint 2013 Step by Step	http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/14209.installation-sharepoint-2013-step-by-step.aspx
Service Account Suggestions for SharePoint 2013	http://www.toddklindt.com/SP2013ServiceAccounts
SharePoint 2013 Service Accounts Best Practices Explained	http://www.absolute-sharepoint.com/2013/01/sharepoint-2013-service-accounts-best.html
Account permissions and security settings in SharePoint 2013	http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc678863.aspx

My Configuration Plan

I need to keep more files on Drive 2 as it has more disk space available. This is a bit of a balancing act to spread the load. It would be nice if both of my drives were 512GB SDDs (or larger).

Domain Controller

Windows Server 2012
Memory: 1GB RAM
CPU: 1
Drive: 1x32GB
IP Address: 192.168.67.11
Domain: contoso.com
Name: server2012dc
Target Drive: 1

SQL Server

Windows Server 2012
SQL Server 2012 Standard SP1
Memory: 8GB RAM
CPU: 4
Drive: 1x80GB, 1x40GB
IP Address: 192.168.67.12
Domain: contoso.com
Name: server2012sql
Target Drive: 2 (OS and SQL Server install)
Target Drive: 1 (Database install)

SharePoint 2013 Server

Windows Server 2012
SharePoint Server 2013
Memory: 8GB RAM
CPU: 4
Drive: 1x80GB
IP Address: 192.168.67.13
Domain: contoso.com
Name: server2012sp
Target Drive: 2

Installing on VMWare Workstation

I am using the default VMnet8 network within VMWare.

I will keep the NAT settings as is. Note that the Gateway IP address is 192.168.67.2.

I will keep the Auto detect available DNS Servers setting.

I will keep the DHCP settings as is. I plan to use static IP addresses for the servers.

This blog entry is the shortest of the four entries.

Weekly Digest of what EMC's bloggers have been writing about 06/03/13, via @mattbuckley

steven.goddard — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 17:09:00 GMT

1. Reflections – EMC Executives Report From The Road

Transforming India into a Big Data Hub

3 days ago

By Rajesh Janey, President, EMC India & SAARC

Big Data is a goldmine of opportunity for every country but, it represents probably the biggest opportunity in the history of India. The answer lies in how the world views India as a brand. More often than not, is the country is seen as an IT Services hub or is commonly referred as the back-office of the world.

Beyond Robust: Resilient IT (Part 2)

5 days ago

By Par Botes, Chief Technical Officer, EMC Asia Pacific and Japan

In my first post on Resilient IT, I focused on why IT needs to inject random failures into its systems to make them stronger. Now, I would like to discuss how you should actually start doing it. Modern IT systems are constantly changing and these changes introduce a risk that isn’t always obvious or visible to the person implementing them. Many management frameworks try to cope with change by introducing maturity models however, maturity by itself is not enough. So what do you do?

2. Chuck's Blog – An EMC insider's perspective on information, technology and customer challenges.

Hardware In An Era Of Software-Defined Everything

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It's A Flash World: EMC's "Flash.next" Announcement

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The Three Transformations of ITaaS

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From Databases To Dataclouds

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EMC's VSPEX: A Winning Formula

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3. Storagezilla

XtremIO: XIOS 1.0 (Now shipping)

1 day ago

Since I don’t write anything ahead of time I’m always under the gun when it comes to product launches. You can look at pretty pictures and contemplate your navel elsewhere, this post will last as long as my morning cup of tea so here are just the facts.

4. Speaking of Security, the RSA Blog and Podcast – featuring a group of experts in identity management, encryption, privacy, policy, and enterprise security standards.

Transforming Identity Assurance Through Risk-Based Authentication

2 days ago

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Damned If You Do, Damned If You Don’t

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Last year, I received an e-mail from one of the social networking sites I frequent, in the wake of a bulk password theft, asking me to change my password. I went ahead and did so, but I’m sure that many others did not. And some that did change their passwords may not have done so immediately. If, as an organization, you are concerned that attackers may use the credentials they have stolen to access user accounts, then time is of the essence. So you’d want to reset all passwords now. Over the weekend, Evernote took the proactive approach. After discovering that attackers had managed to steal usernames, e-mail addresses and salted and hashed passwords, the company reset all 50 million of its users’ passwords. Evernote notified their users via a blog post and via e-mail.

Must Have Competencies for Mobile in 2013

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Innovation and the Unexpected

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Calling IT Professionals: Addressing the Security Skills Gap

6 days ago

Art Coviello at RSA often refers to the skills gap in the number of Cyber security professionals in his keynotes. A UK National Audit Office report out today quotes it could take “up to 20 years to address the skills gap”. The truth is the number of IT and cyber security professionals in the UK has not increased in line with the growth of the internet and the NAO warns that the UK faced a current and future cyber security skills gap, with “the current pipeline of graduates and practitioners” unable to meet demand.

An All Access Sweep – RSA Wins Big at SC Mag Awards

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The Collaboration Imperative

7 days ago

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How broken is security?

7 days ago

Last week Mandiant produced their report entitled ‘Mandiant APT1 report’ that was widely covered by global media and essentially exposed a ring in China allegedly responsible for APT attacks. To many, this in itself is startling news and there have been many stories pointing the finger at hackers in China. However, on reading the report an interesting statistic about how long APT1 were in organizations stands out. We know from the 2012 Verizon Data Breach Report that breaches lead to compromise much faster than companies can discover them. Security tools are slow, lack visibility and are too often perimeter and signature-based to detect the presence of cyber activity.

5. The Backup Window – 360° view of backup and recovery

Highlights from the VCE Launch

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Lumenate Talks Backup Transformation at VPEX 2013

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6. Thought Feast – The technology blog to feed your brain with industry trends and topics

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Prevent and Predict Cyber Attacks – Really!

6 days ago

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7. InFocus – EMC Global Services Blog

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3 Lessons from My Son in Navigating the Complex World of Finance and Technology

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Is High Availability Sexy?

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Big Data and Mobile Health

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As I discussed in my last blog post Big Data Enables Chronic Condition Management I am spending some time examining the ways in which Big Data captured and processed in an Electronic Medical Records (EMR) systems can transform how healthcare providers deliver care to their patients. In particular with HIMSS kicking off next week I wanted to examine how EMR systems can be used to deliver mobile health to clinicians and patients.

Automating IT Services Is Not As Hard As You Think

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8. Cloud Matters – Ideas, observations and stories about the journey to cloud computing

No Price on Value

5 days ago

Data is a good thing and essential for much of what we accomplish every day. But it isn't the only thing. We also need humans in the mix - for intuition, emotion, loyalty and more. David Brooks wrote a NY Times column last week that frames a view of data that provides an example of that need. It's a reminder worth noting. Brooks describes a conversation with a banker - not the heartless kind - who decided to ride out a crisis despite data pointing in the opposite direction. His decision was based upon trust and loyalty and values – the values based upon principles not dollars.

9. EMC Consulting Blogs

Why you may not need a new search engine...

5 days ago

Today I'm going to cover what I believe is one of the biggest misconceptions regarding search engines and why a new search engine will probably not solve the "findability" issues your organization is encountering. A common complaint I hear from potential customers is "We need a new search engine as 'x' doesn't work". My first question is "what configuration / changes have been made to the search engine in the past 18 months?". The answer is always "nothing". My second question is "what search engine do you presently have?", the normal answer is a search engine which was purchased in the past 3-5 years.

Matt Buckley | EMC EMEA Communications | t. +44 (0) 20 8758 5603 | m. +44 (0)7500 799565 | http://twitter.com/mattbuckley

Why you may not need a new search engine...

pete.petley — Fri, 01 Mar 2013 16:56:00 GMT

A common complaint I hear from potential customers is "We need a new search engine as 'x' doesn't work". My first question is "what configuration / changes have been made to the search engine in the past 18 months?". The answer is always "nothing". My second question is "what search engine do you presently have?", the normal answer is a search engine which was purchased in the past 3-5 years.

The client at the point has done their research into the latest and greatest search and normally decided on one of the top three according to Gartner, though of recent clients are more and more looking at the smaller independents vendors instead of the products now owned by MSFT (FAST), HP (Autonomy IDOL) Google (Search Appliance).

This is all based on an assumption that a product installation will solve findability, unfortunately based on my 6+ years of experience, this is a false assumption and next I'll tell you why.

Search engines are not as intelligent as they appear for example

Out of the box, search engines can search for simple variants of a word using algorithms. e.g. a search for “human resources” also searches for combinations of “human”, “humans” and “resource”, “resources” However the search engine by default doesn't know that the common abbreviation is “HR” and so documents that just contain “HR” are not returned, similarly if searches for "HR" the result set won't include documents which contain variants of "Human Resources"

The solution is a business vocabulary which creates the relationship between the terms. Most search engines support this feature but I rarely see it being used, and when it is utilized it's not updated regularly.

Another Example:

When searching across multiple content sources, one content source can have higher quality content (body of the text and or meta data than another. If the search engine is poorly configured, documents with the superior content quality will often appear higher in search results than they should, providing a poor user search experience

The Solution is a combination of tuning the search engines ranking and relevancy model, use of auto-classification and improved content templates for new content

These are just two examples of where an out of the box search engine misses out on factors which greatly affect the end search experience, there are many more.

At EMC we have a slide which covers some of the core aspects, which we've categorized under

Technology, Best Practices and Strategy, we see this as an iterative process by the way.

The core white circle is Technology, meaning the right search engine, taxonomy management tools, content connectors, auto classification.

Next is the Best Practices circle, covering regular activities for tuning the search engine and user experience.

Finally there is Strategy, which covers governance, ownership, in house expertise and an enterprise search roadmap.

Most organizations barely get 1 or 2 of these pieces per circle right and are trapped in a 3-5 year search engine purchasing cycle. Where alternatively they could with limited operational costs, get greatly more successful search and avoid more IT disruption by following a detailed plan based on this diagram.

Here is the root problem, most organizations are sold on the idea that search can be solves by a product purchase, so they budget Capital Expenditure, they fail to realize that they also need Operational Expenditure both inside IT to maintain the technical aspects of the search engine, such as ranking and relevancy tuning and also inside the business, for governance and business administration, such as site owner reviewing the search logs for their site and understanding that 0 result queries (a query which yields no results) indicates either an issue with synonyms or a need for a content creator develop an article for that query.

So what is the end solution for your business if you're reading this? Well you can use the model above as a basis and go it alone, or find a consultancy which really understands search to develop the plan for you and help you calculate the required roles and resources (We at EMC Consulting would love to help and you'd most likely end up with myself completing the engagement as strategy, planning and best practices are my specialty).

Weekly Digest of what EMC's bloggers have been writing about 06/02/13, via @mattbuckley

steven.goddard — Wed, 06 Feb 2013 16:26:00 GMT

1. Reflections – EMC Executives Report From The Road

Security Analytics: The New Model

1 day ago

By Art Coviello, Executive Vice President, EMC and Executive Chairman, RSA, The Security Division of EMC

I love technology. I like thinking about it. I like talking about it. And I love leading the technology company, RSA, that works so hard to be a force for good in our technology world. In addition, I am lucky to have a parent company, EMC that is a force multiplier, and leading the way to the cloud and Big Data. From time to time you have to pause and take stock of where we are, where we’ve been, where we’re going and why we do what we do. So where are we taking technology or, perhaps, where is technology taking us?

The Predictive Enterprise (Part 1)

6 days ago

By Annika Jimenez, Senior Director, Analytics Solutions at Greenplum

Big Data is the latest technology wave impacting C-Level executives across all areas of business, but amid the hype, there remains confusion about what it all means. Big Data emphasizes volume, diversification, low latencies, and ubiquity, whereas data science introduces new terms including, predictive modeling, machine learning, parallelized and in-database algorithms, Map Reduce, and model operationalization. Instead, I want to emphasize a more important point regarding this new vernacular: It infers an evolution beyond the traditional rigid output of aggregated data: business intelligence.

2. Storagezilla

Dell: Slash burn.

1 day ago

While Michael Dell might be crowing like a cockerel at taking his company private the question for Dell customers should to be this… Now carrying an extra $15 billion in debt, what’s Dell going to slash & burn first? With new creditors to be paid what’s Dell going to stop investing in? You can put all this talk Mike is floating about new acquisitions aside, anything Dell might have been able to afford they could have bought as a public company and the bottom line is that Dell will owe it’s gang of four bankers $15B tomorrow which it did not owe them yesterday.

Sync share. For anyone. For everyone.

6 days ago

Having spent some time speaking to customers, partners and distributors across Europe I wasn’t surprised by the… cautious... approach Europeans have to sync & share. It’s not enough to have a data center ‘in the region’, Europeans want that data center to be down the road. And if we can show up and take a tour, grab a coffee and have a biscuit we’ll do that too. That’s why the full ‘as a service’ sync & share offerings will do business with a certain customers but will find others to be impenetrable. In this case you’re not selling an idea, you’re trying to change a culture and while ideas come and go culture lasts for generations. So what do you do to fit into the culture?

3. Information Playground – Global High-Tech Innovation

When Right is Wrong

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In my recent post How to Get the Wrong Answer, I stated that analytic correctness (e.g. the "right answer") increases when large volumes of data are highly varied. Analytic correctness also has a corollary statement: the right answer is wrong if it takes too long too calculate. A good example of this corollary can be found in high-tech security.

4. Speaking of Security, the RSA Blog and Podcast – featuring a group of experts in identity management, encryption, privacy, policy, and enterprise security standards.

“What’s your question?” – Next Generation Analysis in the Compromise Landscape

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Threat analysts, as a general rule, are often concerned with the minutiae of the day-to-day threat landscape. Who was hacked this week? Do we have malware involved for this incident? Do we have indicators for the incident? What about exploits? Do we need patches? This is all key information related to properly defending a network, but often, taking a step back and looking at the environment holistically PRIOR to the incident helps to understand where the gaps may be.

The Iris System: Tidying Up Under the Rug

2 days ago

Virtualization helps conceal hardware complexity, one of its many benefits for programmers and administrators. But it’s also a rug under which security and reliability concerns can be all too easily swept. Here’s a simple example. Suppose that a file system replicates data across two storage devices to prevent data loss in the advent of a drive crash. If these storage devices are virtual, they can well reside on the same physical hard drive. One physical drive crash, then, will wipe out the file system. RSA Labs has a long-term research program that aims to restore to both service providers and tenants the security visibility concealed by virtualization and cloud migration.

The New OASIS PKCS 11 Technical Committee

2 days ago

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Prevent and Predict Attacks

2 days ago

When it comes to defending our networks we have to be right 100% of the time but a cybercriminal has to be right just once. We must shift this balance if we are ever going to be in a position to truly protect and defend our networks. In fact, defence is probably no longer appropriate because it is not enough we need to be in a position to stop the attacks and even predict attacks. Predict attacks you say? How?

The Hacks Get Hacked and Their Passwords Get Dumped

5 days ago

On January 30, the New York Times acknowledged that it had been a victim of a security breach. The Times claims this was the result of a long, targeted attack allegedly committed by attackers located in China to gain access to corporate email and data. Now it’s also coming out that the Wall Street Journal and Washington Post were also compromised in similar attacks for similar reasons.

Realizing all the Promises of Mobility

6 days ago

The SBIC has produced a new report that is mobile centric called “Realizing the Mobile Enterprise.” The council builds on data. In this case, it builds on a fascinating series of online polls that show a rapid litmus-like test of the mobile landscape and, in particular, the degree to which “the enterprise” (an interesting notion in itself, but more on that later) and security are both embracing and adjusting to all things mobile. Some interesting answers popped up…

The Big Data Security Analytics Era Is Here

7 days ago

My blog today reflects on newly published research from Jon Oltsik at ESG (from whom I borrowed the title of this blog), which covers the collision of advanced threats, security monitoring, SIEM, big data technologies and techniques, and organizational security maturity. In the paper Jon clearly brings forward his argument – with which I completely agree – that security threats have changed and thus the tools used and approaches for defense need to change significantly.

5. Big Data Transforms Business

RSA Leverages Big Data to Detect and Investigate Security Threats

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As cyber attacks become more advanced and damaging, organizations are looking to integrate Big Data tools and techniques into their security operations to optimize threat detection and investigation. Organizations can no longer rely on traditional security systems that monitor and analyze only a slice of information from a portion of their environment. Nor can organizations depend on traditional perimeter or signature based systems, as they have not been able to stop today’s more sophisticated attackers.

6. The Backup Window – 360° view of backup and recovery

This Is Your Brain on Tape Backup

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Is your old fashioned and unreliable tape based backup infrastructure giving you serious headaches? Are your backups extending further and further into production windows? Are you worried what the auditors are going to say if they find out about those backup tapes that got lost? There is a simple way to fix all of this. Replace your old-fashioned tape-based backups with backups to deduplicated disk storage. The results will amaze you and your brain will be thrilled with all the benefits you will get. Let your brain relax and focus on more important things.

7. EMC IT Proven – Leading our IT Transformation

EMC IT Takes a Holistic Approach to Optimizing Business Capabilities

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Planning our EMC IT strategy to meet the company’s future business capability requirements is a lot like planning for the future growth of a city. Road improvements, for example, need to link to traffic and development patterns and not conflict with sewer or water line installation. As EMC’s business has become more complex, EMC IT has been striving to work closely with business units in a similarly holistic approach to map out what capabilities they need and how IT can support them.

8. Thought Feast – The technology blog to feed your brain with industry trends and topics

IT Transformation – What We’ve Missed (Part 3)

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Government ICT 2013 – Part 1

5 days ago

The Government ICT Conference 2013 in the QEII Conference Centre kicked off the event season with traditional gusto and the key themes were focused on delivering change, supporting the Government’s reform agenda and enabling the delivery of more efficient public services. All worthy themes but the core challenge still seems to be how can the public sector tackle some of the more intransigent issues that Chris Chant identified in his ‘unacceptable IT is pervasive’ blog post in early 2011.

IT Transformation – What We’ve Missed (Part 2)

7 days ago

Picking up from last week, Lady Backup asserts that there is a key enabler in IT transformation that we haven’t paid enough attention to: archiving. Archiving has a key value to play in lower your IT costs, improving your user experience and managing risk for your organization. Let’s look at the 3 key benefits of archiving in more detail: Benefit 1: Archiving increases operational efficiency. Benefit 2: Archiving improves end user productivity. Benefit 3: Archiving consistently manages retention policies.

9. InFocus – EMC Global Services Blog

Dear EMC Customers: Please Don’t Thank us for Asking

1 day ago

In his free ebook, The 6 Laws Of Customer Experience: The Fundamental Truths That Define How Organizations Treat Customers, Bruce Temkin describes six laws of customer experience. Law #1, Every Action Creates a Personal Reaction, highlights the importance of personally understanding your customers. He describes several implications of this law, but I wanted to specifically touch on a couple of them in this post. I also recommend taking a look at the details of all six laws.

The Not-So-Dreaded Annual Review: A Checklist for Data Success

2 days ago

At the beginning of every year, I like to take inventory of everything we are doing with our workforce-generated data. Below is a checklist and underlying questions I think everyone who relies on data-driven decision-making should review on an annual basis. Hopefully you stuck to your data resolutions last year and are already in good shape! I’m looking at my world on the IT services side (specifically customer service and professional services) but I feel much of this applies to almost any area.

Transforming IT to a Service Broker

2 days ago

Transformation is a high priority for many IT organizations these days, but it’s important to remember the ultimate purpose for transformation is to deliver value to the business. This means that IT needs to focus on what the business needs, not just on what will make IT more efficient and cost-effective. What the business needs is often measured in terms of increased revenue by faster time to market with new products and services.

Moving Technology with the Times

6 days ago

Time flies ….. Did we just ring in the New Year? The whole month of January flew by in a blink of the eye. In today’s high-speed everything, hyper-accelerated world, time is ever more compressed, especially with all things technology. We are seeing the continuing momentum behind social, mobile and analytics, which are in play at every major industry sector. And all the while, financial service firms are trying to figure out how to catch up, to keep up, and to take the lead.

Capacity Planning for your Virtual Data Center and Cloud – Part 2

7 days ago

In this 2^nd part of my blog on capacity planning, we shall look at the steps to implementing Capacity Management for your Virtual Data Center and Cloud. Many IT organizations have used virtualization and cloud to paint a visionary picture of agile, on-demand and cost-efficient IT that will meet changing business requirements for their business users. While this is possible, many IT organizations by now should have realized that at the heart of this capability is capacity management.

10. Managed View – From Silos to Services

Platform-As-A-Service For The Enterprise

5 days ago

Is platform-as-a-service (PaaS) relevant to the enterprise? Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) offers small organizations compute, network, and storage resources on par with the IT capabilities afforded previously to only larger, well-capitalized organizations. Now, PaaS has the potential of taking this IT on-demand concept a step further with applications and services. IaaS was first popularized by Amazon Web Services (AWS).

11. Virtual Geek – an insider's perspective, technical tips n' tricks in the era of the VMware Revolution

EMC Partners - our internal kickoff content - OPEN FOR YOU!

5 days ago

Those of you that know me, know that I truly, fundamentally believe in the power of openness and transparency. You also know that I’m a fan of a simple rule, a simple axiom that leads to good partnering: “Anything that is available for EMC internally, I think should be open to our EMC Velocity Partners”. I’m not claiming I’m Gandhi here :-) This statement to me is a statement of the blindingly obvious. 2012 was a year of a lot of learning for me – the power of the bully pulpit when you are a leader is you CANNOT reach down and affect directly, but you can set tone, and guide direction – and man, it can move a lot.

12. EMC Consulting Blogs

Big Data Storymap

6 days ago

Bill Schmarzo created this "Big Data Storymap" which clients can use to see where they are in Big Data journey. Instead of just posting blog with regular static image, we created a new functionality and integrated Prezi interactive tool , so readers can literally scroll thru the story map (zoom in and out) and also click on specific links within storymap that take them to EMC collateral, other blogs, etc.

Agile - Business Practice or Business Procedure

7 days ago

I have been asked at least once whether I would describe Scrum as a process. My answer was something like “it’s a framework” a “very high-level process” but I don’t think that was helpful. It occurred to me recently that a more helpful explanation of the distinction between Agile processes and some other development processes would be to use the definitions of Business Practices and Business Procedures.

Matt Buckley | EMC EMEA Communications | t. +44 (0) 20 8758 5603 | m. +44 (0)7500 799565 | http://twitter.com/mattbuckley

Big Data Storymap

steven.goddard — Thu, 31 Jan 2013 14:36:00 GMT

http://infocus.emc.com/william_schmarzo/the-big-data-storymap/

Agile - Business Practice or Business Procedure

peter.measures — Wed, 30 Jan 2013 15:57:00 GMT

Most business processes focus on “procedures,” with an emphasis on predictability, automation, standardization, quantity and control to produce a clearly defined outcome. Qualities of a procedural process are

• Need to cover every possible decision

• Procedural process flows are handed over from one department to another.

• Procedural process flows tend to be linear

• Procedural process flows are inflexible

• In procedural process flows the process controls the process.

But there are exceptions to these procedural processes which are often referred to as cases.

These cases are performed by knowledge workers. Knowledge workers are individuals who are valued for their ability to act and communicate with knowledge within a specific subject area. Knowledge worker processes

• Are driven by events or goals

• Involve collaboration, flexibility and creativity

• Have a high level of uncertainty without a definitive path or known outcome

• Adapt to changing circumstances

If knowledge workers have no process

• Efficiency improvements are difficult to make

• Effectiveness is determined by who performs the work

• Change is difficult to make if the practices are not understood

• There is a lack of visibility due to the use of un-integrated media and systems

However, it is difficult to assign procedural process as outcomes are uncertain and collaboration, flexibility, agility and creativity are constrained.

The alternative is business “practices”. These are goal-centric and guided, rather than controlling. If the work requires something special, or a variation from the standard, knowledge workers can exercise their judgement. The focus targets knowledge, process awareness, flexibility, creativity, and quality. Features of a business practice are

• Complex decision are made by people (within constraints)

• Often involve cross-departmental collaboration

• Can be non-linear or iterative

• Can respond to changing circumstances

• A person (or people) controls the end-to-end process

A classic example is a medical Doctor. A patient will consult the Doctor with an ailment. He has chest pains. The Doctor decides to send him for a chest x-ray and a cardiogram (non-linear). The patient goes to the x-ray and cardiogram which is conducted following a step-by-step process. The results return to the Doctor who decides that the results are inconclusive and suspect it may be a stomach ulcer. He sends him for more tests (iterative). When these return the Doctor consults a specialist (cross-departmental collaboration) and they concur he has heartburn (complex decision) and prescribes appropriately and he closes the case (owns the whole process).

The cardiogram and chest x-ray were processed following a set of defined steps which is necessary as known-precise-consistent output is required. The Doctor is less constrained as his ability to act based on knowledge cannot be replaced by process – there are just too many permutations and an unclear outcome. Of course the Doctor is constrained. He has guidelines to which he must adhere like patient confidentiality, but these guidelines do not preclude the human element.

It occurs to me that the distinction between Agile development and more traditional “Waterfall” development is that Agile is more of a Business Practice and “Waterfall” is more of a Business Procedure. Which is better? It can depend, but I think the question you need to ask is whether you consider yourself a knowledge worker or not.

Footnote:

There are software applications that support Business Practices called Dynamic Case Management tools. EMC's Documentum xCP is such a tool. In 2011 Forrester rated Document xCP as a "Leader" in Dynamic Case Management. To find out more go to

http://uk.emc.com/collateral/demos/microsites/xcp/index.htm

Weekly Digest of what EMC's bloggers have been writing about 24/01/13, via @mattbuckley

steven.goddard — Thu, 24 Jan 2013 11:16:00 GMT

1. Reflections – EMC Executives Report From The Road

How EMC Uses Big Data to Deliver Value to the Business

6 days ago

By KK Krishnakumar, Vice President and Chief IT Architect

Harnessing Big Data is an important strategy for all companies in today’s information-driven world. But where do you begin in choosing a project to utilize this vast resource effectively? Much has been written about the three Vs of Big Data – Volume, Velocity and Variety. But the unsaid fourth V–Value–is the one where we have to direct our focus. It only makes sense to start where Big Data analytics will have a big impact right away.

2. Chuck's Blog – An EMC insider's perspective on information, technology and customer challenges.

What A Modern Factory Can Teach You About High-Performance IT

7 days ago

I'm not the only who's fascinated by high-performance IT organizations, and the transformations required to get them there. In my travels, I've encountered others who share my fascination. And -- each and every time -- we all inevitably gravitate to the same set of analogies: modern factories and how manufacturing works. This should be no surprise. In the digital economy, IT is the new factory -- it's responsible for delivering the organization's value proposition in the digital world.

Enterprise Storage Heats Up – Again!

7 days ago

Once you spend any time inside the storage marketplace, you'll come to appreciate there are many segments and subsegments. The need to store information is ubiquitous -- the approaches are not. Sit down and attempt to segment the storage marketplace, and you'll quickly end up with a fairly complicated model. One familiar category is what is imprecisely called "enterprise storage" or sometimes "tier 1" -- the storage that supports the enterprise's most critical applications.

What I Mean When I Say "Enterprise Storage"

7 days ago

The recent announcement of the VMAX 10K brought up an interesting discussion for us storage folks: what -- exactly -- might "enterprise storage" be? I find that the definitions offered by the industry analysts are incomplete and unsatisfying at best. And there's certainly strong motivation for any storage vendor to slap an "enterprise" label on their product in an effort to attract more potential customers. My credentials to offer an informed perspective are substantial, but not impeccable.

The End Of The Group File Share?

7 days ago

It was certainly a big deal many decades ago: the notion that one of your desktop drives ("H:\") could actually be shared with your co-workers over a LAN. No more floppies. A shared repository, usually up-to-date. A huge productivity leap forward, back in the day. Over time, shared drives became file shares, and repositories, and content-oriented collaboration was layered on top, and then -- the world changed.
We all went mobile. Not just on one device, but often several. We wanted personal control of who we share with, and under what terms.

3. Information Playground – Global High-Tech Innovation

Russian Re-use: An Innovation Mentoring Tale

1 day ago

I am starting the year with two mentees: one in China and one in Russia. We meet every two weeks. In both cases the mentees drive the agenda. They state their career goals and ask me to help in specific ways. These meetings are a fascinating opportunity to discover the intersections and differences between cultures. It still surprises me how my software engineering business relationships have not only become increasingly international, but also geographically distributed.

Hybrid Analytics

6 days ago

Every IT organization (and IT vendor for that matter) has one of those performance geeks who answers every question with "It depends". When I designed storage systems, I tried to justify implementation choices with our performance team. I would ask specific questions about I/O workloads to our performance guru (Malcolm). I could never get a straight answer out of him, so I stopped asking! Dave Vellante and his Wikibon team are publishing interesting research on the use of Amazon public cloud in the enterprise.

4. Speaking of Security, the RSA Blog and Podcast – featuring a group of experts in identity management, encryption, privacy, policy, and enterprise security standards.

Reinforcing our doors in 2013

1 day ago

In my last blog I talked about the key technologies breaking down our doors in 2013. The four key areas were Cloud Computing, Social Media, Big Data and Mobile Devices. None of these should have come as a surprise to anyone in the industry today. These are all topics that are discussed and debated around tables of security teams in most enterprises. So, what can we do today to ensure we are prepared for these challenges and how do we start reinforcing our doors so that we allow these new technologies but have greater control and visibility and provide transparency for the user? There are three gaps that will help with this reinforcement. Addressing these gaps will require organizations to act now!

The next marketing buzzword in security is…

1 day ago

Every year we seem to have a new buzz term in security. As someone who lives in the security product marketing world I’ve seen trends come and go. Terminology that was once mandatory in every piece of collateral suddenly becomes stale and cringe-worthy (APT is becoming one of these). We’ve had a bunch of buzzwords and phrases; some were pretty good and some were really terrible. I should know I helped propagate some of these buzzwords.

Deceit as a Defense

1 day ago

An information security professional’s job is becoming more like military defense every day. We are charged with battling on multiple fronts, typically without enough resources to do the job well. Yet, our creativity can serve us well in defeating any number of attackers before they steal our goods. Now we have another great example of a company taking military defense techniques to a new level and leveraging deception in their daily process.

New name, Same Game: Red October and the Question of Attribution

2 days ago

Earlier this month, Kaspersky Labs announced the discovery of a new style of cyber espionage campaign. Research on this threat campaign began in October of 2012 according Kaspersky’s whitepaper. I’m not convinced that it is entirely new but let’s press on and see what the boys there have to say. The researchers there began their investigation by examining the aftermath of a series of attacks conducted against networks belonging to the diplomatic services of various governments and their respective agencies.

Big Data Fuels Intelligence-Driven Security

3 days ago

This month, RSA released a new Security Brief titled “Big Data Fuels Intelligence-Driven Security.” Indeed, one of the themes of this blog over the last year or so has been looking for the bad guys hiding in plain sight. Your standard controls won’t catch them—or at least won’t catch them in time. Instead, you will probably rely on poorly constructed logs and expensive forensics to try and piece together exactly what happened.

Disruptive technologies breaking down our doors in 2013

4 days ago

RSA recently launched its latest SBIC report titled ‘Information Security Shake-up – Disruptive Innovations to test Security’s Mettle in 2013’. It introduces some interesting food for thought on what organizations should have on their ‘to do ‘list for 2013. Four key innovations are highlighted which shouldn’t come as a big surprise to anyone, I think we have all been addressing some of these in the last year but it’s time to hunker down and really start focusing on these four key innovations which will test the true grit of our security systems.

Keys in the Cloud

6 days ago

The Cloud Best Practices Network has just published the second installment of the e-magazine TRANSFORM. This issue, which focuses on various aspects of cloud security, includes my article on “Key Management Strategies for the Hybrid Cloud”, leveraging the use cases that we developed in OASIS KMIP for our work on the next version of KMIP. I presented a version of this information at RSA Conference China and touched on it in an earlier blog.

Secure Crypto: Cluster Cracker

6 days ago

At a recent conference, Passwords^12, Jeremi M Gosney the Founder & CEO of Stricture Consulting Group, presented his latest password cracking project. Jeremi combined 25 AMD Radeon GPUs, across eighteen cards, and across five servers in a cluster. This beast he created has the ability to make nearly 350 billion (yes, that’s 350 million million!) guesses per second on NTLM secured passwords. It can also make 180 billion guesses per second on MD5 protected passwords and 63 billion guesses per second on SHA-1 protected passwords.

The Public Cloud, Pigeons and Risk Management — Part 4

6 days ago

I have recently been asked if the research paper about key leakage across VMs running on a hypervisor invalidates the position I advanced in this series of blogs? No, it doesn’t, although key management is something which deserves far more attention than it gets from the general INFOSEC community, outside of the government COMSEC agencies. Oh, and by the way, this is a very cool piece of research.

5. The Backup Window – 360° view of backup and recovery

Tape is Alive? Inconceivable!

1 day ago

To begin each year, Joe Tucci brings 400+ people together for the EMC Leadership Meeting. We spend a little time reflecting on the prior year, but most of it focusing on the future. After that, the Backup and Recovery Systems Division leadership spends another day planning our future. So, imagine my surprise when I saw, on the Backup and Recovery Professionals Group on LinkedIn, a thoughtful discussion about the role of tape in the backup environment. I’ve just spent a week discussing cloud, big data, and the evolution of data protection… and we’re still talking about tape? Inconceivable!

6. EMC IT Proven – Leading our IT Transformation

“There’s never been a better time to be in IT” says EMC CIO Sanjay Mirchandani

5 days ago

EMC IT, spearheaded by EMC CIO Sanjay Mirchandani and his team, has been on course to evolve into a fully-enabled cloud environment. EMC IT’s “Journey to the Cloud” has required a new way of thinking of service management and service delivery. The benefit has been significant savings in operation expenditures and a more dynamic IT environment. This transition signifies a changing of the guard in the industry, which is why Sanjay told InformationWeek that “there’s never been a better time to be in IT.”

How EMC Uses Big Data to Deliver Value to the Business

6 days ago

7. Thought Feast – The technology blog to feed your brain with industry trends and topics

IT Transformation – What We’ve Missed (Part 1)

1 day ago

Welcome 2013! Lady Backup is not one for predictions or resolutions, so don’t worry I’m not looking into my crystal ball. Rather, I thought we would start the year by looking at an element of IT transformation that we didn’t talk about in 2012. It is an enabler of IT transformation – contributing to your infrastructure transition from physical to virtual servers and in moving mission critical applications to the cloud. What is it? Archiving. Don’t get me wrong – we need to transform our IT Infrastructure from a static, physical model to one that is dynamic, agile and infinitely scalable. But the question in my mind is whether you are transforming your infrastructure to store content that is outdated, no longer of value, or potentially damaging to your organization.

Re-enforcing our doors for security in 2013

2 days ago

In my last blog I talked about the key technologies breaking down our doors in 2013. The four key areas were Cloud Computing, Social Media, Big Data and Mobile Devices. None of these should have come as a surprise to anyone in the industry today. These are all topics that are discussed and debated around tables of Security teams in most enterprises.

8. InFocus – EMC Global Services Blog

How to Make Better Decisions Using Big Data

1 day ago

In past posts, I’ve written about the profile of a Data Scientist, especially the skills needed for people to grow into this new role. I’ve also written about the opportunities that Big Data provides, drawn in part from the Human Face of Big Data book, written by Rich Smolan. Despite all of the terrific possibilities that Big Data can enable, people ultimately need to realize that the value of the data is about people and driving change.

Notes From The Field: Inside A Real World Large-Scale Cloud Deployment

2 days ago

I’ve been granted an incredible opportunity. Over the past three and a half months I have gotten to lead a real world large-scale delivery of a cloud solution. The final solution will be delivered as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) to the customer via an on-premise managed service. While I have developed SaaS/PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service) solutions in the past, I was fortunate enough to have been able to build those on public cloud infrastructures.

What it takes to be a Great Consultant … The Top 10 List

6 days ago

Many of you know I was a Worldwide Partner with Andersen and also worked for Accenture. As a result, I stay in touch with my former partners and business associates. Gabrielle Wallace, Consultant with St. Charles Consulting Group and former Director of Andersen’s Education for Financial Assurance Services, recently published her Top 10 list of Great Consultant Attributes. The following is based on her list – but updated and expanded for consultants that work in the IT and Telecom Industries.

9. Managed View – From Silos to Services

Service Outage Hits Home for Cloud Provider

5 days ago

Are there blind spots in your service assurance approach? Netflix, a provider of online streaming media, made news over the holidays when customers experienced a service outage on Christmas Eve. Imagine taking the wrapping off of your new mobile device and deciding to try it out to stream a movie. For those located in North America, you probably found that the Netflix movie streaming service was down. This outage was caused by issues within Amazon Web Services that Netflix employs to support movie streaming.

10. Virtual Geek – an insider's perspective, technical tips n' tricks in the era of the VMware Revolution

Oppa EMC Style!

5 days ago

Here by popular (infamous perhaps – it’s pretty bad :-) demand… “Oppa EMC Style” from the 2013 EMC Kickoff. Click to watch some bad dancing (on my part) – the rest of the team was sharp and hit their mark :-) The folks in the video represent a cross-section of EMCers – great, smart, hardworking people. We try to not make this represent “somebody”, but more “everybody” – a cross section of the great technical folks at EMC that work with customers.

Matt Buckley | EMC EMEA Communications | t. +44 (0) 20 8758 5603 | m. +44 (0)7500 799565 | http://twitter.com/mattbuckley

Morgan Spurlock: The greatest TED Talk ever sold

steven.goddard — Thu, 10 Jan 2013 12:59:00 GMT

Here's a fantastic video on branding and advertising with a slight twist in the end...

http://www.ted.com/talks/morgan_spurlock_the_greatest_ted_talk_ever_sold.html

Weekly Digest of what EMC's bloggers have been writing about 09/01/13, courtesy of @mattbuckley

steven.goddard — Thu, 10 Jan 2013 11:34:00 GMT

1. Reflections – EMC Executives Report From The Road

Information Security Shake Up: What to Expect in 2013

2 days ago

By Eddie Schwartz, Vice President and Chief Information Security Officer, RSA

The Security for Business Innovation Council (SBIC) just released a new special trend report titled, “Information Security Shake-Up” containing predictions for continued cyber security turmoil in 2013. The report assesses how innovations such as big data analytics, cloud computing, enterprise mobility, and social media are rapidly transforming the way enterprises conduct business, will change the face of IT, and will greatly impact the foundation of information security strategies.

Unleashing Corporate Innovation

7 days ago

By Sheryl Chamberlain, Senior Director, Office of the CTO

In today’s world, large corporations are embracing open innovation through new partnerships, entrepreneurial spirit, and existing capabilities. Open innovation expands the potential sources of innovation far beyond the bounds of any single organization with the explicit purpose of accelerating internal innovation and expanding markets for external use of innovation. In this new world, corporations are better positioned to innovate as they create new communities conducive to collaboration and open thinking. The impact is enormous as organizations foster the development of transformational cultures and invest in the talent needed to cultivate this new paradigm.

2. Storagezilla

How to rig the game when asking for new software features.

6 days ago

One of the biggest time wasters I’ve come across in my working life are meetings. That’s not to say meetings aren’t important, they are, but when badly run they’re torture. Meetings with your co-workers or partners or customers are very important but meetings shouldn’t be about deciding things, the decision making process at the top is much less public than anything you’ll ever see presented in a meeting format, so meetings should be about communicating what’s already been decided and taking feedback on that and/or assigning tasks to carry out the decisions that have been made.

3. Speaking of Security, the RSA Blog and Podcast – featuring a group of experts in identity management, encryption, privacy, policy, and enterprise security standards.

The move to an intelligence-driven security model

1 day ago

Albert Einstein defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Reflect on that for a moment. For the past 10 years, the Internet has become a ubiquitous form of communication. Growth of digital content and use of mobile devices have soared, organizations have opened their infrastructures to enhance productivity and, for our reflection on Einstein’s quote, as nation states, criminals and hacktivists have taken obscene advantage of all of us.

Want to Save the Universe?

1 day ago

I like Star Trek. I’ve always wanted to be Captain Kirk (had to pick one…Picard is great too) sitting in that chair on the bridge of the Enterprise with seemingly endless resources at my disposal with a mission to protect the universe. I’m not giving up, but that’s probably not going to happen. However, I do get a bit of the same thrill as I have the opportunity to work in the Critical Incident Response Center lab we have set up at RSA for research and demonstration purposes.

Next Generation Security Operations: Part 1

6 days ago

What does this mean as we head into 2013? It means that the “incident response” plans that were drawn up, tested, implemented and put up on the shelf a few years ago are not prepared for this new battleground. Security threats – from hacktivists to criminal organizations to state entities – have more tools, techniques and attack vectors than ever before.

The SBIC 2013 Trends Report

6 days ago

Today the Security for Business Innovation Council (SBIC) released their 2013 Trends Report which is chocked full of lots of great stuff for security professionals to consider as they begin to tackle the challenges this year will bring. While this report is not like anything the SBIC has released in the past, the four key findings are quite compelling and true to much of what my mission has been over the last several years.

The Public Cloud, Pigeons and Risk Management — Part 2

6 days ago

Many readers will be familiar with the concept of a cognitive bias. A cognitive bias is an irrational decision made because of a “bias” or mental short cut. Sam Curry has written on this subject previously, as it applies to multi-factor authentication. It is theorized that cognitive biases may have once provided mental short cuts in certain high-risk situations, giving early humans a time advantage in survival situations.

2013 Security Resolutions

7 days ago

Now that the Mayan calendar gives us until October 13, 4772, we have some time to focus on 2013 in earnest. As I was thinking of my resolutions for 2013, I thought I’d compile some of the things that I predict will be on the resolution list for many organizations in the New Year.

4. The Backup Window – 360° view of backup and recovery

Five Strategies for Making Resolutions Stick in 2013

2 days ago

According to Jeremy Dean, a research psychologist at University College London, “most resolutions are too vague, too hard and too spontaneous” and that’s why we often struggle to keep them. However, there are things we can do to improve our chances of success, even two weeks or more into the New Year. Specifically, Dean says five strategies can help:

Converged Infrastructure…Is Only As Good As Your Converged Backup

5 days ago

We all have been following the trends over the last ten years towards a converged infrastructure, and the many features and benefits pertaining to it. According to Wikipedia, converged infrastructure can serve as an enabling platform for private and public cloud computing services, including Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS),Software as a Service(SaaS), and Backup as a Service (BaaS) offerings. And according to Wikibon, by 2017 2/3 of IT infrastructure will be deployed through converged offerings. Check out the below Wikibon infographic for a brief overview of converged infrastructure and the key companies involved in this market:

5. EMC IT Proven – Leading our IT Transformation

EMC Security Chief Highlights New Strategies to Meet Big Impact IT Trends for 2013

6 days ago

New, advanced technologies continue to provide a faster, more agile environment. But those technologies – cloud computing, mobile platforms, Big Data and social media – can widen the exposure companies face to potential security threats. To help companies remain proactive in their security measures, the latest Security for Business Innovation Council (SBIC) report titled, “Information Security Shake-Up: Disruptive Innovations to Test Security’s Mettle in 2013,” offers a forward-looking analysis of the new enterprise threats in 2013, and recommendations for how security teams can limit risk.

EMC CIO Sanjay Mirchandani Discusses Evolving Model for IT-as-a-Service

7 days ago

EMC CIO Sanjay Mirchandani and his team have led the company’s charge toward IT-as-a-Service, a more agile business analytics framework and the overall global transformation of EMC IT. Sanjay has worked at the forefront of an effort that has allowed EMC to reduce its spending on equipment, power, space [Capex] and operating expenditures by more than $223 million to date, while simultaneously overseeing EMC’s seven Global Centers of Excellence (U.S., China, India, Israel, Russia, Ireland and Egypt).

6. InFocus – EMC Global Services Blog

2013: Cloudy With a Chance of Growth

2 days ago

As 2012 comes to a close, the entire EMC family would like to reflect on all that we have accomplished within the IT industry for our shareholders, customers, partners and employees. EMC Professional Services continued to play an important role in our customers’ growth and success. While continuing to deliver best in class services globally for our products and solutions, we’ve also extended the value we are able to bring to our customers in the areas of Cloud, Big Data and Trust.

Magnifying Your Analytic Insights Through The Lens Of Another Industry’s Best Practices

2 days ago

Hello 2013! I hope that everyone had a great holiday season. As we launch into 2013, one of the things that I see consistently is the opportunity to share analytic best practices across different industries. There are certain analytic skills, capabilities, and models that some industries have mastered, which other industries could leverage. Let me share an example. Applying Big Data to the Oil and Gas Industry...

Capacity Planning for Your Virtual Data Center and Cloud

6 days ago

Common reasons for businesses to embrace virtualization and cloud are the ability to provision VMs (virtual machines) on demand and to achieve scalability to meet changing capacity requirements. However, in order to achieve these capabilities, organizations must establish a strong capacity management practice. Virtualization and cloud computing are not going to conjure up magic for organizations that instantly solve all their capacity and scalability challenges. IT still needs to plan, forecast, manage and optimize existing or new virtual resource pools or cloud computing resources.

7. Managed View – From Silos to Services

Storage Resource Management Without Spreadsheets

5 days ago

Excel spreadsheets were not intended for storage administrators tracking capacity utilization and needs, but targeted rather towards accountants and others working with numbers. Out of necessity, however, spreadsheets have become the tool of the trade for understanding the storage landscape. Many EMC customers tell me, even with this method, they are still flying blindly with only a stove pipe view of their storage use and availability.

8. Cloud Matters – Ideas, observations and stories about the journey to cloud computing

The Book

5 days ago

When I first downloaded the "Big Data App" I excitedly shared some of the fun examples with my son. Then my iPad went missing for a bit while he explored on his own. It's addictive. Now I have the book "The Human Face of Big Data." and that's addictive too. Some content covers topics that appear in the App. However the book has more and also adds a very neat viewer for any page that contains a key symbol. Download the viewer and point it at the page to automatically load a video on the given topic.

9. Virtual Geek – an insider's perspective, technical tips n' tricks in the era of the VMware Revolution

vCloud 5.1 Suite Home Lab - circa 2013

5 days ago

Those of you that know me know that my deepest, darkest fear is becoming a talking head, a bureaucrat, or that most evil of corporate types – the politician. In my work life as I move into more and more senior roles at EMC – some of that stuff comes with the territory, but god help me if it comes to define me. I find that maintaining the necessary pace for work (and a work life balance of a sort) requires a “sprint/rest… sprint/rest” pattern. This was coaching I got once from a great mentor and coach here at EMC – Frank Hauck.

10. EMC Consulting Blogs

User stories produce better quality results

1 day ago

As a BA I want to provide requirements that are concise as possible. If requirements are not concise enough this can lead to costly changes to a solution. I intend to demonstrate this by comparing user stories with requirements and highlighting why user stories provide higher quality results. By doing so I hope to persuade you why user stories deliver better solutions.

Matt Buckley | EMC EMEA Communications | t. +44 (0) 20 8758 5603 | m. +44 (0)7500 799565 | http://twitter.com/mattbuckley

User stories produce better quality results

peter.measures — Tue, 08 Jan 2013 16:15:00 GMT

Here I define

User story: As a <actor>, I want <goal/desire> so that <benefit>

Requirement: The system shall provide <goal/desire>

Where items in “<>” are variables. The user story conveys more information than the requirement. That is the actor and the benefit. They are concisely defined in one statement.

With requirements the actor can be determined by the mapping between requirement and use case but additional information (the reference) is required which increases the chance of error.

The justification column in the requirements catalogue is often not written as concisely as the requirement as it’s separation from the goal/desire can leads to being treated as "for information purposes only". Furthermore when two actors are involved the justification can be muddled or biased.

This is why I believe the user story creates better quality because it is so concise in all respects.This conciseness can lead to developing a more complex but a much more valuable solution. Say we have a user story and a requirement with the same goal/desire. Two “errors” are possible in the requirement:

- The requirement is mistakenly applied to two different actors.

- The justification reduces the fidelity of what the different benefits each actor may hope to achieve

If either case occurs then a single solution may result for both actors where extra benefit could derived in having different solution for each. As the cost of fixing software based on a requirement misunderstanding increases markedly as it is developed, tested and deployed the cost of separating the single solution into two later will be much more expensive.

The user story has been associated with Agile development, but it’s adoption has become more universal and I hope I have convinced you to use them as well (if you don’t already).

Weekly Digest of what EMC's bloggers have been writing about 20/12/12, courtesy of @mattbuckley

steven.goddard — Thu, 20 Dec 2012 14:17:00 GMT

1. Reflections – EMC Executives Report From The Road

Russia is Ready for Big Data

2 days ago

By Bill Teuber, Vice Chairman

In October, I had the opportunity to travel back to Russia for the 9^th annual EMC Forum, hosted at the World Trade Center in Moscow. With more than 1,500 attendees, including customers, partners and press, it was clear that the people of Russia are excited by the transformation happening in IT and are eager to learn more and capitalize on the growing megatrend that is big data.

New 2012 Digital Universe Study Reveals Big Data Opportunity

6 days ago

By Jeremy Burton, Executive Vice President, Product Operations and Marketing

The 2012 Digital Universe study, conducted by the research firm IDC for EMC, is full of eye popping statistics about the amount of information the world is generating. Consider these findings from the study:

The amount of information in the Digital Universe is doubling every two years, currently growing at a rate of more than 7,600 petabytes per day
Less than 1% of the world’s data is analyzed today, presenting an enormous opportunity for Big Data analytics, which we at EMC believe will become the “killer app” of the next wave of IT
By 2020, there will be 7.6B people on the Internet… and 200B interconnected “things.”

2. Chuck's Blog – An EMC insider's perspective on information, technology and customer challenges.

Thanks For The Chocolate

1 day ago

Perhaps a better title for this post is "Why More Data Is A Good Thing". As we engage with our customers around big data analytics, one of the harder points to get across is why more data can lead to better predictive insights. Perhaps they suspect we've got an agenda to sell them more storage? :)

Does IT Need A New Concierge?

1 day ago

There's a new business model brewing in the ranks of the enterprise IT marketplace. In some ways it's a new idea; in other ways it's a linear extension of familiar concepts. As with any emerging model, you'll hear it described in many different ways: a cloud services broker, ITaaS-as-a-service, a new variation on the outsourcing model, front-desk-and-back-office, and so on. The core idea is conceptually simple: a new, external IT service that makes other external IT services easier to source and easier to consume by the broader enterprise. An "IT services concierge" service, if you will.

Building A Executive Digital Literacy Program

6 days ago

Being perceived as a visionary is a relatively easy task. All you have to do is identify a handful of clearly visible trends, extrapolate a bit, and then loop back with practical advice on what to do about it now. Example: I have a friend who's currently looking at oceanfront property. He showed me a place that was right on the water. I suggested he might consider a house with a bit more elevation? Sure, it might not be a visible problem now, but if you think out a few years ...

Why There Shouldn't Be A Single Version Of The Truth

7 days ago

Legacy thinking can get you in trouble in so many ways. The challenge is that -- well -- there's so much of it around. Maxims that seemed to make logical sense in one era quickly become the intellectual chains that hold so many of us back. Personally, I've come to enjoy blowing up conventional wisdom to make room for emerging realities. I'm getting into more and more customer discussions with progressive IT organizations that are seriously contemplating building platforms and services that meet the broad goal of "analytically enabling the business" -- business analytics as service, if you will.

3. Information Playground – Global High-Tech Innovation

Innovation Lineage Threads: A Longitudinal Update

1 day ago

I continue to lead a Data Science project at EMC that focuses on Innovation Analytics. My approach has been to create a set of hypotheses and leverage a task force of volunteer data scientists to help me prove or disprove them. During this process I ran into a roadblock on one hypothesis: Hypothesis #7 Incubation Lineage and Asset Generation

Technologies for the Emerging Digital Universe

6 days ago

Recently I published a post describing the enormous amount of data being contributed to the Digital Universe by machines. Billions of devices will generate petabytes of information. Much of it will land in deep archives that are eventually mined and analyzed using a variety of fast, parallel analytic techniques. The Digital Universe study posits that by 2020 these machines will not only generate an estimated 40% of all digital content, but the machines will be expecting an immediate (sub-second) response, or instruction, to determine the next robot-like action that they should take.

4. Speaking of Security, the RSA Blog and Podcast – featuring a group of experts in identity management, encryption, privacy, policy, and enterprise security standards.

Fostering the Next Generation of Security Professionals

1 day ago

Information security is one of the most important topics of our time; it’s easy to find a news article everyday about organizations’ plans on allocating more funds to Infosec, which in turn puts security professionals in high demand. In fact the (ISC)2 2012 Career Impact Survey found that 62% of respondents were planning to expand their staff of information security employees in 2012. At the same time, 50.2% reported that it was “somewhat difficult” to find a suitable candidate – an additional 29% claimed it was “very difficult.”

The Public Cloud, Pigeons and Risk Management: Part 1

2 days ago

Risk Management When Your Life Depends on It: On what basis do we make risk choices? When in an unfamiliar retail store, and facing a POS terminal whose design one has never seen before, what reassures the average person that it is safe to swipe their card and type their PIN into that machine? Worse, even if the POS machine is a familiar design, what is the rational basis for assuming it adequately protects card details? It certainly looks like a solid piece of hardware, but is it really? I regularly challenge people on this point, and the sad answer is usually a blank stare. Is that even a question? It should be, surely? But what if the stakes are higher? What if the stakes are someone’s – or in this case something’s – life?

Change your mindset – YOU are the attacker

2 days ago

It seems that for many years , actually probably forever, security professionals have behaved in a totally reactive way when it come to data breaches. For example, if a breach was identified and it was determined that it was an issue with user education then the team would try to educate the user. This whole model is flawed as we are behaving and acting like victims because we really can’t see the who, what, when, where and why of attacks that we are going to be targeted with. We need to move from defense to offence when it comes to protecting ourselves. To be in the mindset of an attacker you need to have answers to the following fundamental questions:

Got an Extra $40,000 Lying Around? Carberp is Back on the Market!

5 days ago

Not two weeks after Citadel’s vendor and spokesperson got banned from the largest Russian-speaking cybercrime community, members from the Carberp Trojan team have resurfaced, scurrying to capture some of the underground limelight. In a surprising move that came about earlier this week, team Carberp decided to offer their Trojan to cybercriminals for monthly usage fees ranging from $2,000 to $10,000 per month depending on the number of modules and plugins desired.

The Digital Universe and the Smart Grid

5 days ago

Among the materials associated with their just-released report on the Digital Universe, IDC has just posted a new YouTube video of John Gantz and David Reinsel, called “The Digital Universe and the Internet of Things,” discussing the implications of this massive explosion of data. John mentions the Smart Grid as an example of machine-generated information. The conclusions he draws about the security implications of the data explosion in general regarding security and privacy certainly apply to Smart Grid.

The Biggest Thing The PCI Council Can Do

6 days ago

The PCI Council has been pretty influential in our lives since its inception on September 7, 2006. They were handed control of the PCI Data Security Standard and have turned it into a cascading group of standards that govern (or recommend controls) for nearly every aspect of payment acceptance and processing. So it almost seems like this PCI problem is sort of solved, doesn’t it?

Where IT happens….is where I’m going.

7 days ago

The past 7 years have been some of great change in my career. Always one to just kinda “go with the flow” and see what interested me, these past few years have been different. In 2005 I was bugging people about VMware. I had used it sporadically in a previous job and saw the value right away for security. In 2009, I decided to do something about it and through some serious pushing and a very interesting chance meeting, I became RSA’s virtualization evangelist. (and an honorary vSpecialist!)

Investing in Information Security for the Digital Universe

7 days ago

IDC has just released an important new study by John Gantz and David Reinsel on The Digital Universe in 2020 that includes an important discussion of the security and privacy implications for the explosion of data in the digital universe. As the report calls out, “The rise in mobility and participation in social networks, the increasing willingness to share more and more data, new technology that captures more data about data, and the growing business around Big Data all have at least one assured outcome — the need for information security.”

5. The Backup Window – 360° view of backup and recovery

Making your list and checking it twice

5 days ago

Making your list and checking it twice. It’s that time of year again – where does the time go? A friend and I were talking and the conversation ended up being that her husband always buys her things he thinks she needs, like a vacuum cleaner. Not exactly on her top 5 list of what she wants for Christmas. Do you make an assumption on what to buy for gifts or do you do inventory first (which is probably a good idea)? How many times have you found that your company owns more than one software package that performs nearly the same function? I often wonder, for example, how many NetWorker customers are not aware of all the features available to them in the modules that they already own.

6. EMC IT Proven – Leading our IT Transformation

Keeping the Bad Guys on the Run: Working Together to Neutralize Cyber Threats

5 days ago

Threat intelligence is king. The more you have, the better positioned you are to protect your organization from cyber attacks. But staying on top of threat intelligence to fight these sophisticated attackers requires a new, collaborative approach to security—one that most companies and organizations haven’t embraced as yet.

EMC Point of View: Capitalizing on Cloud

7 days ago

EMC President and COO Howard Elias and EMC Chief Information Officer Sanjay Mirchandani discuss how EMC’s IT organization has evolved its technology, people and processes to truly capitalizing on cloud computing, including its mission critical line of business systems.

7. InFocus – EMC Global Services Blog

What is Active/Active, and How Can it Improve Business Continuity?

2 days ago

Lately I’ve had several conversations with clients who have asked about Active/Active architectures and how they can be used to transform existing disaster recovery strategies. Since many companies can benefit from an Active/Active approach, I would like to take some time to discuss the architectures that I typically include in my discussion.

Big Data Starting Path Traps

2 days ago

At a recent CIO Executive Summit with over 90 CIOs in Chicago, I stated that I thought that we were entering Phase 3 of the Big Data journey, where:

Phase 1 was the Big Data Educational phase, with folks reading magazines and blogs, and attending conferences to learn more about what is big data
Phase 2 was Big Data Experimentation, where folks would install a “big data technology” like Hadoop and start playing with the technology to gain some hands-on experience
Phase 3 is Big Data Business Transformation where IT and the business collaborate to identify opportunities to exploit big data to power the organization’s key business initiatives

The EMC Academic Alliance: A “Fantasy Project”

6 days ago

EMC recently announced it has partnered with more than 1,000 colleges and universities, to date, to help educate the next generation of IT professionals and fill the industry skills gap. But what was the genesis of the EMC Academic Alliance program, and why is the program so important? Storage technology, an important pillar of information technology, was being ignored by academia for a long time. Back in 2005, we reached out to as many universities and colleges around the world as we could, and interviewed faculty members about their technology curricula.

You Wanna Be a Rock Star?

6 days ago

Welcome to my blog. I have dedicated my career to helping companies develop strategies to protect and improve the availability of their applications and data. What has excited me recently is Continuous Availability (CA), an IT strategy that enables companies to transform the way they handle availability in their data centers and with their applications. The companies I have worked with in implementing this approach have been able to reduce their server count by 28 to 40%.

Predictions Are Risky Business

6 days ago

I recently read an article, Data Decisions: You Can’t Be Held Responsible (Or Can You?) that brings up an interesting question. Are Data Scientists responsible for their predictions, or are these predictions just another tool for the decision makers? I often refer to what my team does as “decision support,” which puts me in the second camp. I agree with what author Renee Boucher Ferguson reports:

Digital Universe Study Underscores Skills Gap for Big Data

7 days ago

IDC’s Digital Universe study, “Big Data, Bigger Digital Shadows, and Biggest Growth in the Far East,” monitors the growth of digital data, and shows that data continues to grow, both in its raw number and in its rate. Even more so than a year ago, we are seeing the explosion of digital information, driven by social data, sensor data, and the Internet of Things, accelerate at an ever-increasing pace.

I just love lists, particularly about predictions

7 days ago

Forrester’s Nick Heath has some predictions about how cloud computing might change in the coming year: 10 ways cloud computing will change in 2013 | ZDNet. I like a good stake in the ground, so let’s set a reminder for June and see who’s pick-list was closer. This is a nice distraction from reprinting old Christmas letters. My thoughts, by the numbers…

8. Managed View – From Silos to Services

Extend Virtual Data Center Visibility With EMC Smarts

7 days ago

Have you ever wished you had a better way to fix a problem? Writing this post made me think about my meeting today with a data center manager who was looking for a better way to manage his pre-packaged VCE Vblock systems with his non-Vblock VMware environment. He needed a complete view of the entire environment to enable his administrators to work through issues. The Vblocks alone were less of a concern because of the tight integration of compute, networking, and storage. But, the VMware virtual machines (VMs) accessing other storage were more problematic. Occasionally, when VMs or storage got reallocated via vMotion, the resulting configurations would be askew, impacting the availability and performance of virtualized applications or services.

9. Cloud Matters – Ideas, observations and stories about the journey to cloud computing

The Cool of Big Data

5 days ago

It’s Big. Now it’s also very cool. If you’ve been grappling with a clear understanding of Big Data it can certainly be confusing. And depending how geeky you are – or aren’t – “cool” is probably not the first descriptor that comes to mind. But you have to see this, The Human Face of Big Data. You may have heard about this project, which has been underway for several months. It puts the concept of Big Data in practical and personal terms, then connects it to global scale.

10. Virtual Geek – an insider's perspective, technical tips n' tricks in the era of the VMware Revolution

VMAX and vSphere VAAI XCOPY update!

1 day ago

All – as everyone is realizing, while “VAAI support” is a tickbox for storage vendors – vendor implementations vary wildly, and that means different things all over the place. I’ve done a series of webcasts that dive deep into the VNX VAAI implementations (here, here, here), stuff on the VAAI TP reclaim (here), VMAX and VAAI (here) and updates on the NFS VAAI assists (here). Some of those articles are now obsolete (this remains a difficult topic – how to handle older posts?) – but highlight how dynamic this space is.

Weekly Digest of what EMC's bloggers have been writing about 12/12/12, courtesy of @mattbuckley

steven.goddard — Wed, 12 Dec 2012 16:15:00 GMT

1. Reflections – EMC Executives Report From The Road

The Next Wave of Cloud Computing

2 days ago

By David Goulden, President and COO

Hear where the next wave of IT transformation leads, from EMC President & COO David Goulden. [video]

How We Can Use Technology To Transform The Classroom

5 days ago

By Howard Elias, President and Chief Operating Officer, EMC Information Infrastructure and Cloud Services

With each fundamental shift in America’s economy, our public education system has also transformed to meet the needs of both student and industry. When we were a primarily agrarian nation, schools focused on the liberal arts and operated on a schedule that coincided with the cycle of planting and harvest. Following the Industrial Revolution, schools adopted a more regimented model focused on rote and routine, and added a more specialized curriculum designed to meet the insatiable labor needs of our mills and factories.

Road to Recovery: Do you have a plan in place?

7 days ago

By Rodrigo Gazzaneo, vSpecialists Manager, Latin America

Hurricane Sandy was not an isolated event. As the world becomes more densely populated these natural events will cause bigger impact. The world is becoming more interconnected too. More organizations rely on intelligent systems to support their operations than ever, and these systems need infrastructure. Latin America is no exception.

2. Chuck's Blog – An EMC insider's perspective on information, technology and customer challenges.

EMC Joins OpenStack

1 day ago

Today, our EMC logo went up on the OpenStack Foundation's web site as a corporate level sponsor. You'll see many other logos up there as well -- all good. I'm sure each participant sees OpenStack through their own lens. With this post, hopefully I can share a bit of EMC's perspective and motivations. Because -- as with most things -- the pattern should be familiar by now.

Charting The Digital Universe: IDC's 6th Annual Study

1 day ago

Climate change has been hotly debated for well over a decade now. The evidence is largely in, what remains is a discussion around root causes, and what -- if anything -- can be done. Personally, the topic became particularly urgent when I saw a recent documentary ("Chasing Ice") which features stunning time-lapse photography of massive glaciers and ice sheets melting before your very eyes. Seeing is believing. Our world is changing, faster than we thought.

E&Y: Trust And The Cloud

5 days ago

I'm lucky to meet a wide range of IT organizations scattered across all sorts of industries. Some are bravely charging ahead into the new world of cloud-based IT service delivery: transforming their internal operations, consuming more external IT services, and learning quickly as they go. But others are holding back, and for what turns out to be very sound reasons.

There Is No Automation Pill

6 days ago

So many discussions these days with customers around IT transformation -- three of them yesterday alone. While every discussion has its own unique nuances, there are observable patterns where people frequently can fall into a predictable trap -- not just IT organizations, but us as IT vendors as well. And, not surprisingly, one of those topics is automation.

Lost In Translation?

7 days ago

Part of my role here at EMC is to spend time with writers, bloggers and journalists on various topics. It's a global endeavor, often crossing language and cultural barriers. Most of the time, it turns out pretty well. What ends up in print is a reasonable reflection of what I said - maybe not perfect, but close enough. Once in a rare while, the result can get jumbled. When it does, I certainly share a decent amount of the responsibility: was I clear, did I speak slowly, did I make it simple enough?

3. Storagezilla

Cheap heat, no mojo.

7 days ago

Looking to generate some cheap heat (And because EMC doesn’t speak to him at all) Robin Harris has started making things up about Project X. The core of his argument appears to be that if it wasn’t going to be incredibly late by his estimate, the company would have conducted private betas by now. But since he hasn’t heard of any they must not be happening. Well that’s a valid point, so valid that EMC actually allowed the results of a customer POC to be posted online by the team who performed it for the customer back in September.

4. Information Playground – Global High-Tech Innovation

Digital Universe 2012: Machine Machinations

1 day ago

A machination is defined as a crafty scheme, a plot, or intrigue. When I look at the wealth of information provided by the IDC in this year's Digital Universe Study, I can't help but think that machines are writing a pretty crafty plot in which we as humans are designing a fairly sophisticated communication network for them. IDC is nearly at the midpoint of their Digital Universe Study. They define the Digital Universe as "a measure of all the digital data created, replicated, and consumed in a single year". The first study was completed in 2007. This initial study predicted that the Digital Universe in 2010 would grow to 988 exabytes.

5. Speaking of Security, the RSA Blog and Podcast – featuring a group of experts in identity management, encryption, privacy, policy, and enterprise security standards.

Citadel’s Steward Banned from Underground Venues

1 day ago

Those following deep-web cybercrime communities know, and have borne witness to, the fate of black hat developers who take on the creation of commercial banking Trojans. Starting with Zeus’ creator “Slavik” and SpyEye’s “Gribodeamon,” developers work overtime to get on the fast track to 6-figure salaries and underground fame. On the way there, they realize they are the glue that keeps the operation together – listening to customers, ensuring product quality, marketing, sales, tech support and keeping appearances in cybercrime forums, where their target audience awaits.

Worried about Advanced Threats? RSA Education Services can help!

2 days ago

I’d like to start out with a quote from RSA’s Executive Chairman, Art Coviello, from his Keynote at RSA Conference in February this year… “We need to champion and develop a new breed of Cyber Security Analyst…This new breed of analyst must have the right analytical skills, ‘big picture’ thinking and much needed collaborative “people skills” to ensure smooth information sharing with multiple stakeholders.”

Applying Security Intelligence to Your Enterprise Threat Mitigation Program – Introduction

5 days ago

Intelligence is no longer solely relegated to the world of the clandestine. It is no longer the exclusive domain of roguish characters featured in heart pounding novels nor is it the sole dominion of the prototypical ‘geek’ pounding away on a keyboard at a secret government facility (or van) near you. No. Threat Intelligence is part of our lives and we experience it daily at work, at home and on the go. This is true for you and me and for enterprise organizations.

BYOD Are We Still Not Getting It Right?

6 days ago

Continuing on my recent blogs on BYOD, I thought I would share some interesting statistics from this year’s PwC Information Security Breaches Survey. 75% of large businesses allow staff to use smart phones and tablets to connect to their systems yet only 39% ensure that data on these smart phones is encrypted. Mobile devices are often lost or stolen with any data on them exposed. In the wrong hands these devices can potentially open up a door into corporate assets.

Sports, RSA, and Silver Tail Systems

6 days ago

I love sports. I am fascinated by the fact that some teams consistently win, year in, year out, and some teams tend to always struggle (to my beloved Golden State Warriors…this is our year!). The New England Patriots recently clinched the AFC East Division Championship for the ninth time out of the past ten years. FC Barcelona hoisted five out of the past ten La Liga Championship trophies. The Boston Celtics and the Los Angeles Lakers have won 33 out of the 63 NBA Championships played since 1947.

6. EMC IT Proven – Leading our IT Transformation

Best Practices for Virtualizing Your Oracle Database

1 day ago

Virtualizing your Oracle database infrastructure without benchmarking and following best practices is a bit like trying to find your way in a strange big city without a street map. You may get where you need to go eventually, but it will be a long and difficult journey. Fortunately, we at EMC are in the midst of that virtualization journey and have put together some benchmarks and best practices to help guide your organization’s path to running Oracle database on virtualized infrastructure.

EMC’s New SAP ERP System Passes the Test: Users muscle through record end of quarter (Q3 2012)

6 days ago

In my last blog, I talked about how EMC succeeded beyond expectations in launching our new ERP system – codenamed PROPEL – in a big-bang cutover that went live without a hitch on July 4, 2012. But the real test of the PROPEL project still loomed: closing out our first ever quarter using the new SAP ERP system. I’m glad to report that PROPEL passed that critical test— thanks to planning, persistence and plenty of hard work by our project team, the business and everyone involved across EMC.

EMC CIO Sanjay Mirchandani to Keynote EMC Forum Boston 2012 on Dec. 7

7 days ago

Get ready for EMC Forum 2012: the one-day conference that aims to transform the way you see the future of IT, Business, and Yourself.

7. The Backup Window – 360° view of backup and recovery

Help, I Need Somebody… to Manage My Backups

2 days ago

Okay, I admit, it…this passage probably won’t mean much to you if you aren’t a Beatles fan, particularly of their 1965 song “Help”, which has been described as the “first crack in the protective shell” John Lennon had built around his emotions during the Beatles’ rise to fame. So what does this song have to do with backups and confidence in data protection? I’m glad you asked. The parallel I’m attempting to make here is that from an IT organization perspective, the way backups and data protection are viewed today is dramatically different than it was a few years ago.

Is Big Data Too Big to Back Up?

5 days ago

Is the new Boeing Dreamliner too big for safety inspections? Was the Titanic too big to need lifeboats? Are some banks too big to follow basic asset safety rules? Was Gmail too big to lose data? So, is big data too big to back up? Definitely not. But that doesn’t mean you can back up Big Data with traditional backup techniques. Big Data’s volume, variety, and velocity (the 3 V’s) force backup teams to transform their approach.

EMC’s Chief Oracle Architect Speaks Out

7 days ago

I recently had the opportunity to sit down with Darryl Smith, one of EMC’s brightest IT minds, and the conversation that ensued was very different than I thought it would be… and in a good way.

8. Thought Feast – The technology blog to feed your brain with industry trends and topics

Simply the best: EMC Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity

2 days ago

Lady Backup is pleased to announce that EMC is the winner for the 2^nd year in the V3 Technology Awards. While EMC was nominated in several categories, readers voted EMC best in “disaster recovery and business continuity” solutions. Also of note is that VFCache was a finalist in the best product of the year. Check out this video interview with Kelly Brown, filmed from the awards ceremony.

9. InFocus – EMC Global Services Blog

2013 – An Inflection Point for Cloud Services in Financial Industry

1 day ago

It’s hard to believe December is already here; time to reflect on the technology highlights of this past year and prognosticate the year in review and see what exciting new trends 2013 holds for the financial industry. What will take center stage amongst all the IT predictions – ranging from Big Data developments, to Mobile Services, Virtualization, Social Media, Digital, or maybe their numerous permutations?

Nurturing Serendipity in the Age of Data-driven Decisions

2 days ago

Recently I had an interesting discussion with my good friend Jonathan Abel. Jonathan heads up the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA) at Stanford University, where Jonathan and his students combine data science with sound and music in exploration of research and commercial opportunities. We got into a discussion about the role of serendipity as a tool in the scientist’s kitbag, and how important it was for a scientist to plan for and encourage serendipity, and leverage human intuition, in designing analytic models.

To Orchestrate or Not to Orchestrate?

5 days ago

Orchestration is a common term you will encounter when talking about cloud computing. Many organizations are currently trying to understand if orchestration is a requirement as they virtualize their Data Centers and adopt private, public, or hybrid cloud models. You will notice that the formal definition of cloud does not explicitly mention orchestration. Could this be another software vendor’s marketing hype to ride the cloud wave in order to sell more software?

How We Can Use Technology To Transform The Classroom

5 days ago

2012: The Year that Service Excellence Finally Got the Spotlight?

6 days ago

At the risk of spilling trade secrets on how I generate ideas for a blog post, I usually start with a general concept regarding customer service excellence then search for objective articles to support my idea. When I first started my InFocus blog in June 2011, there were very few articles available to support my ideas. In other words, customer service excellence was not newsworthy.

After Virtualization: Is Continuous Availability the Next Wave?

6 days ago

You may be wondering where the linkage is between virtualization and continuous availability (CA) — two computing trends that are getting a lot of attention these days. As you know, virtualization has been the hottest “no brainer” migration over the past 5 to 7 years. But, it was not always that way.

Controlling Chaos with Technology: An Overview of Transformation in Health Insurance

6 days ago

A transformation of unprecedented scale and speed is sweeping through the health insurance market. Health plans face numerous and competing demands as the market tries to reign in cost growth while improving health quality and outcomes. Driven by members, providers, regulators and payers, four primary forces are at the heart of this transformation: Consumerism, Care Delivery, Regulation, and Consolidation.

IT as a Service from a CxO’s Perspective

7 days ago

Today’s CxO is besieged with pressures, both from the macro level and at the company level. The uncertainties of the economy and the ever-changing regulatory landscape are just a sample of the macro-level issues. At the company level, C-level execs are constantly trying to find competitive advantages and be more innovative, while continuing to improve efficiency. When you then add in the impact of technology from social networks and the consumerization of everything (including IT), you have to wonder how these folks sleep at night.

10. Managed View – From Silos to Services

Infrastructure-As-A-Service Goes Mainstream

5 days ago

Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), the fastest growing segment of the rapidly expanding cloud market, is going mainstream into the enterprise. Concurrently service providers, who were early adopters, are moving upstream to more higher-value services. IaaS is a simple concept, but with complexities that must be dealt with to successfully implement.

11. Cloud Matters – Ideas, observations and stories about the journey to cloud computing

Buzzwords, Business and Murder

6 days ago

Looking to predict the future is no new idea. How it is done has changed though and that's one reason that Time magazine lists “Big Data” as the number two buzzword of 2012, led only by the not very surprising “Fiscal Cliff”. (Thanks Chuck for the heads up tweet.) We’ve been through this buzzword fatigue before – green, cloud, everything “e”. Perhaps the key lesson is that while they can indeed get tiresome, the terms draw early attention to something that will ultimately become quite valuable and will also entwine with normalcy enough to be hardly noted as special. Just essential.

Weekly Digest of what EMC's bloggers have been writing about, courtesy of @mattbuckley

steven.goddard — Wed, 17 Oct 2012 15:13:00 GMT

Your weekly digest of the topics that EMC’s bloggers have been exploring over the past seven days – a brief summary designed to help you scan their various musings in order to find your topics of interest.

1. Reflections – EMC Executives Report From The Road

Costly Consequences of IT-related Risks

2 days ago

By Hakon Jacobsen, Vice President EMC Consulting Asia Pacific & Japan

Governance Risk Management and Compliance is one of the core services of EMC Consulting. Speaking with executives all over Asia Pacific & Japan, we hear a consistent message that they need help to re-assess their IT systems in terms of resilience and inter-dependencies. In the aftermath of an online service outage which reportedly crippled branch, ATM, Internet, and mobile banking services for customers of a large bank in Singapore back in 2010, The Monetary Authority of Singapore instructed the company to set aside an extra $230 million in regulatory capital for operational risk.

The Key to Keeping Customers? Big Data.

5 days ago

By Jim Bampos, Vice President of Customer Quality

By integrating customer experience information and demonstrating how customer intelligence translates into value through improved customer experiences, companies can use Big Data and Big Data analytics to uncover truths they didn't even know existed and optimize their business outcomes. I recently wrote an article for Fortune.com which focuses on applying Big Data techniques to improve the Total Customer Experience (TCE) for customers.

How We Teach Customers to Use Big Data

7 days ago

By Bill Schmarzo, CTO, EMC Consulting, Enterprise Information Management & Analytics

At Oracle OpenWorld last week, Joe Tucci and Jeremy Burton shared insights on how customers are using big data. I was also at the show, meeting with customers about where and how they can employ big data to make smarter business decisions. One of the ways we help customers do that is through a Vision Workshop, which helps clients identify use cases for where and how big data can deliver business value and competitive differentiation.

2. Chuck's Blog – An EMC insider's perspective on information, technology and customer challenges.

Growing Your Digital Business Model? Fertile Ground Helps!

2 days ago

The next major wave of disruption appears to be starting its tear through organizations everywhere. It's not a technology wave, it's a new way of doing business in our digital world. Learning to compete using a digital business model appears to be comparatively easy if your company or organization was fortunate enough to be "born digital". For the 99%+ of organizations that aren't so lucky, the far greater challenge lies in transforming a function that was born in the physical world into a modern digital one.

3. Storagezilla

From invention to innovation.

6 days ago

Still on the road so I'll keep this brief but I had a conversation yesterday with someone lamenting the progress of ideas in IT. Everything old being new again. To that I say 'not hardly.' Let's take an example all of us will be familiar with. In 1830 a man named Edwin Beard Budding wondered if the mechanism for a cloth cutting machine could be turned on its side and used to solve another problem. The problem of cutting a large grass lawn and leaving it with an attractive finish.

Read the release notes. (It's the law)

7 days ago

There are two technical resources I'm always somewhat amazed I have to mention to people. And since I speak to *a lot* of people I'm thinking of just putting them on a business card. The first is the fact I can't talk community.emc.com up enough. It's a gold mine of hard earned experience from people who are your peers. The other resource are product release notes. The moment you ask yourself 'I wonder what's new in...?', grab the release notes. If it's new, it's in the release notes. If it's changed, it's in the release notes.

The road surface.

7 days ago

Some wacky limitations in Safari Mobile for iOS make it a hideous platform to blog from and as I increasingly leave the laptop behind while I rack up the air miles the net result is a blogging downturn. If Microsoft port Live Writer to Windows RT I'll be all over Surface.

4. Information Playground – Global High-Tech Innovation

Taking the Train to ETH Zurich

1 day ago

I manage EMC's global university research portfolio, and in that role I help pursue research engagements with faculty that specialize in areas such as cloud, big data, and trust. Several weeks ago I stopped by ETH Zurich and met with the Department of Computer Science. My colleagues and I also met with faculty from the ZISC center: The goal of the ZISC center is bringing together academia and industry to carry out research and education in information security.

Building X: Rethinking Core Design Criteria

5 days ago

Several days ago I found the time to sit down and watch Joe Tucci's and Jeremy Burton's Oracle OpenWorld speeches. Jeremy's discussion of "Project X" was something that stayed with me for a few days. Not only did I find what he did say interesting, but I also think it's worth emphasizing something that he didn't say.

5. EMC IT Proven – Leading our IT Transformation

EMC IT Integration Best Practices for Mergers and Acquisitions

7 days ago

Mergers and acquisitions are commonplace in today’s economic environment and that is no different here at EMC, where M&A has played a vital role in the company’s expansion and deliverance of a wide range of specialized, innovative services. The size and scope of EMC as the industry’s foremost information infrastructure provider is not the sole reason for EMC’s successful track record of M&A. The trail has been blazed due to accumulated proficiency within the technical and operational process of assimilating a company into EMC.

6. The Storage Chap

AccessAnywhere ProtectEverywhere

2 days ago

Learn why and how customers can use EMC VPLEX and EMC RecoverPoint to enable application availability and recovery in distributed datacenter environments.

7. Speaking of Security, the RSA Blog and Podcast – featuring a group of experts in identity management, encryption, privacy, policy, and enterprise security standards.

Don’t wait in line for your burger, purchase it with your app!

6 days ago

According to Reuters, McDonald’s has been testing in-store fast food purchases via mobile apps in France. Why? Well, so that you can order your burger with your app on your mobile device, skip the line to order and pay as you will pay via PayPal and wait in a separate line, presumably shorter than the regular line for people without apps. Another testament to mobile apps becoming an integral part of our daily lives. Not convinced yet?

You Down with PPI?

6 days ago

We’ve all heard of Personally Identifiable Information or PII (social security number, drivers license number, birth dates) and Protected Health Information or PHI (medical diagnosis codes, medical history), but have you heard of Personal Password Information or PPI? No?

How important are your passwords to you? What would happen if someone got a hold of your password to your bank account?

Unity in Multiplicity

7 days ago

I was in Abu Dhabi last week, speaking at Khalifa University in a conference on cloud computing. Never having been in Abu Dhabi before, I found many things new and unfamiliar, but also wonderful – particularly so, that evening, when we had dinner at a restaurant that looked across the water to the Shaikh Zayed Grand Mosque. It is an extraordinarily beautiful complex, particularly as we saw it that evening.

Split-value Cryptographic Authentication: Building Advanced Threat-Resistant Software

7 days ago

Advanced Threats are deeply impacting the way we develop secure products by fundamentally changing our working assumptions. We used to design and develop products to be attack resistant assuming that the environment where they will be deployed may be compromised. We now have to develop and design products assuming that every system in the customer environment, in the development environment and in the supply chain may be compromised.

8. Big Data Transforms Business

20 Node Hadoop Cluster, With Hive, No Pig Please

6 days ago

We can all agree that Hadoop is a key component to a Big Data strategy, but without a simple and fast way to stand up a complex Hadoop system, IT cannot deliver the value promised by Big Data. The good news is that VMware has addressed the challenge with Project Serengeti, enabling enterprises to quickly deploy, manage, and scale Apache Hadoop in virtual and cloud environments.

9. The Backup Window – 360° view of backup and recovery

The New Relevancy of Backup

1 day ago

There’s no question about it – our world has become data-centric. Mountains and mountains of content-rich data surround us, fuel our businesses and touch virtually every aspect of our daily lives. And while this data enables us to achieve things we’ve never done before, think in ways we never dreamed of and reach people we may never have thought possible, these opportunities do not happen without foresight.

Optimizing VMware Backup and Recovery is the Game Changer

2 days ago

Let’s face it, managing multiple backup applications or trying to adapt traditional backup applications for a highly virtualized environment is not only challenging, but far from optimal. It’s not so different than watching my favorite football team, that always strives for optimal performance, in a very dynamic game. Scoring involves analysis of the defense, proper play calling, time management and precise play execution.

What’s Your (Backup) Game Plan?

6 days ago

It isn’t whether you should change your backup approach (remember, backup transformation is key to reducing your organization’s “time to”), it’s how you do it. More specifically, what do you do, and when do you do it? If you’re like most organizations, you probably have a multi-quarter strategy to improve backup speeds, recovery times or de-duplication rates; another multi-phase strategy to help your backup team keep pace with the massive data growth you’re organization is experiencing; a longer-term plan to address specific backup issues with the applications you’re running; etc.

10. Thought Feast – The technology blog to feed your brain with industry trends and topics

Fashionistas Use Mobile technology to Put Customers First

6 days ago

I was recently invited by Drapers magazine – the retail fashion industry bible – to comment on what UK fashion retailers are doing with mobile technology. To be honest, I struggled to think of genuinely innovative activity that put customers – not the product, brand or retailer – first, certainly in the UK. If you check out the Neiman Marcus 'Service' app you will see something that genuinely helps customers and staff, delivering a better customer service experience.

11. InFocus – EMC Global Services Blog

Don’t Think Cloud Stack: Think Data and Applications

1 day ago

A lot of the discussion around cloud deployment focuses on the various layers described by NIST: infrastructure-as-a-service, platform-as-a-service and software-as-a-service. While this may be a useful way to think about cloud for those who are building clouds, it’s not necessarily the way in which the business finds it easiest to consume IT.

The Latest Life Sciences Challenge: Regulated Information and Business Model Transformation

1 day ago

As a Solution Partner in the EMC Global Services Health Sciences industry group, I observe firsthand the radical business model transformation that is happening in the Life Sciences industry. Organizations which historically were vertically integrated must now rely heavily on partners and service providers for key value chain activities.

EMC Support App – Support on the Go!

2 days ago

I have been waiting for this one for a while! As an enterprise technology company, EMC has a leadership position and a responsibility for information management – after all, it’s what we do. Recently, one of the biggest areas of feedback from our customers is the desire to access critical business updates in a faster, more efficient way. Enter the EMC Support app.

A Customer First Culture, Driven By Data

2 days ago

When you’re providing decision support to a global business unit, there are lots of questions about best practices.

Ø What are they?

Ø What should they be?

Ø What can we do to make them real?

Business Models are Broken? Don’t Bet On That!

2 days ago

Next week I’m going to be speaking at the Strata NY conference (11:15 am Tuesday, 10/23/2012) on a panel titled “Great Debate: The Old Models are Broken.” I love these sorts of discussions because they force us to challenge existing business models by questioning the validity of those models given market changes and technology innovations.

Continuous Improvement on a Global Scale

6 days ago

In this video blog I give a few examples of how EMC Customer Support is constantly striving to learn and improve, in our own operations and in how we support customers around the world.

How We Teach Customers to Use Big Data

6 days ago

Professor for a Day

6 days ago

A very good friend of mine, Terez Anderson, is a professor of Speech Communication at MiraCosta College in Oceanside, CA. She and I attended San Diego State University together. Now she works with my old Forensics coach at MiraCosta, Neil Moura. These are great people and great programs with which I am proud to have been affiliated.

My home as a test bed for Data Management, ILM Policy, and Catalogs

6 days ago

I know I am opening myself up for some ridicule and perhaps more than a few comparisons but my house has a few terabytes of data to manage. Eight terabytes of files, pictures, movies, audio and miscellaneous “stuff” in the library and as I digitize more and more of my records I find the estate growing every day. When I managed the Legoland California infrastructure 15 years ago we had well under a terabyte of data in total. Things sure are different these days. I manage more demanding users at home, for one.

The Data Scientist Will Be Replaced By Tools…Really?!

7 days ago

There has been a recent debate across the blogosphere and social media communities around an article titled “The Data Scientist Will Be Replaced By Tools.” It’s a provocative article that postulates that due to a scarcity of data science talent, a slew of start-ups providing “data science as a service,” and new data science tools that automation will be able to address this problem.

12. Managed View – From Silos to Services

Object Storage In The Public Cloud

5 days ago

Enterprise IT and service providers are transforming how they do business by leveraging cloud architectures to deliver infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS). Cloud architectures are ideally suited to the unique storage demands of unstructured data, which is forecasted to grow at 80%. This growth is driven by the increasing size and amount of digital images, video, audio, and a combination of these media as seen on sites such as Amazon and others.

13. Virtual Geek – an insider's perspective, technical tips n' tricks in the era of the VMware Revolution

SAP HANA Real Time Race - The Cisco/EMC team

2 days ago

I think these sort of fun competitions are always a gas… (think the Diamond Sponsor “Hunger Games” at VMworld 2012)… What’s this one? It’s a competition between two SAP consulting companies (Bluefin Solutions and Optimal Solutions) who specialize in SAP analytics to showcase how fast and easy a customer can migrate BW to HANA – then deploy Analytics use cases, and delivering them on mobile devices using SAP’s mobility portfolio.

Transparency. EMC Partner - Q4 "Backstage Pass!"

5 days ago

As always, I think there should be no air gap between EMC and our partners. I’ve said it before, but it’s worth repeating (IMO) don’t spend much time thinking about EMC competitors. It’s not a matter of a lack of respect or humility – we have many very respectable competitors. Rather, my view is if we do our job right, be willing to cannibalize ourselves (after all – the most material competitor are wholesale industry changes), innovate organically and inorganically, and always, always, always serve our customers and partners – it almost doesn’t matter what competitors do.

What EMC have blogged about last week, 12th to 19th September via Matthew Buckley - Introducing the Human Face of Big Data

steven.goddard — Wed, 26 Sep 2012 12:47:00 GMT

Introducing the Human Face of Big Data

Brian Fitzgerald, Vice President, Marketing RSA, The Security Division of EMC

Sometimes, in the technology world, the hype wildly overstates the real power or impact of a new product or idea. But ironically, sometimes the hype does the opposite: it actually masks the real-world transformations that are being shaped by a powerful new concept in our industry. After all, nothing was more hyped than the dot-com boom, or more publicly lamented than the dot-com bust that followed. But underneath the mountains of news coverage and pundit predictions, the internet and web quietly marched on, and completely transformed how we use digital information to communicate and collaborate across our business and personal lives, even in ways the best experts of the day could not predict.

The same is true of big data. While the analysts argue about definitions, the vendors promote technologies and the cynics angst about the hype, people all over the world are already busy using today’s emerging capabilities to gather, analyze and visualize breathtaking amounts of data in ways that are often so creative and impactful that they can truly be called inspirational. They are making a positive impact on the world today—and giving us a glimpse of a future where the power to analyze data translates into the power to see our world with greater insight and clarity.

A new breed of data scientists (although most of them have probably never even heard that term) are using the insights and epiphanies they are gaining from big data to re-shape how we live, work, play, govern and heal ourselves and our world.

That’s why everyone at EMC is so excited to be part of the Human Face of Big Data project. Through this project we believe we can help shine a light on big data in a way that shows all of us the real-world impact this phenomenon is having today on the world around us, through the eyes of the teachers, researchers, artists, visionaries, small business owners and health care professionals that are making it happen.

Sure, EMC has a vested interest in big data—after all we are a leader in providing the technologies and expertise that help make it a reality. But the Human Face of Big Data project is more than a marketing exercise. Coming across this project, and deciding to sponsor it, was like finally finding the right word to describe an idea or emotion you’ve been wresting with for months—our participation is the way for us to fully express what we see as the tremendous opportunity of big data to address some of our world’s most intractable problems, such as hunger, crime, and disease. And it’s a way for us to inspire others to transform their businesses and organizations to deliver better products and delight customers, and pursue their missions, no matter what they may be.

The emergence of big data will be a journey. None of us know for sure where it will take us—but we at EMC believe it will take us to new heights of creativity, insight and positive impact on the world we live in. We hope you join us for the journey by joining the project, and adding your own experiences to the Human Face of Big Data. Learn more about the project by visiting http://www.humanfaceofbigdata.com/, and register to be part of the world’s largest crowdsourced portrait of the human race ever conducted.