Is there longevity in Private & Hybrid Clouds?

Posted on August 8, 2014 by workinghardinit

This blog is just thinking out loud. Don’t get upset

Private & hybrid clouds demand economies of scale or high value business

Let’s play devils advocate for a moment a look with a very critical eye at private & hybrid clouds. Many People are marketing, selling and buying private & hybrid clouds today. Some of us are building them ourselves, with or without help. Some of us even have good reasons to do so as it makes economical sense to do so. But for many that do it or consider doing it that might not be the case. It depends.

Why are so many marching to the beat of those drums? It’s being marketed as great, it’s being sold as what you need and that’s what makes money for many people. But one can say the same of Porsches, but chances are you’re not buying those as company cars. Well it’s perhaps a bit like VDI. If you have a use case that’s economically sound, design and implement it well, it will serve your needs. But it’s not for everyone as it can be expensive, complex & restrictive.

You want your cloud to be this:

Not this:

To get great results you’ll need to do more than throw your money at vendors. So what’s the real motivation to do private/hybrid clouds for companies? If the answer is “well so many people are doing it, we can’t ignore it”. Well not doing something is not ignoring it, it’s a valid choice as well. And what others do isn’t relevant per definition. You need to know what you do where and why to make plans & choose technologies to achieve your goals. Think about what you do. When does a private/hybrid cloud make sense? How big do you need to be? What kind of delta should you have to make this worth while, i.e. how many VMs do you deploy per week? How many do you destroy each week? What economies of scale must you have to make it wise? What kind of business? What are your pain points you’re trying to solve? What are you trying to achieve? Private clouds today are not void of complexity and there a are few abstraction layers that are at the quality/functionality level they need to be at.

My biggest concern here is that too many companies will build expensive, complexes private & hybrid clouds without ever seeing the return on investment. Not just because of the cost, complexity but also because they might not be very long lived for the use cases they have today. Many see these as transition models and they are great for that. The question is how good are you at transitioning? You don’t want to get stuck in that phase due to costs of complexity. What if the transition lasts to long and you complete it when public cloud has evolved into services that wipe away what the reasons your TCO/ROI was based on?

Note: as cloud means everything to every one you could call doing on premise & Office 365 + backup to the cloud also hybrid. So in that case Hybrid is a better fit for many more organizations.

Things are moving fast

Cloud offers are increasing at the speed of light and prices are dropping in free fall. While some say that’s a race to the bottom, it’s not. This is an all out battle which is raging to grab as much market share as possible. When the dust of this settles who’ll be left? Google, Amazon and Microsoft. They’re not loss leaders, they have a purpose and only they know the financial picture behind their solutions.

From there they’ll defend a fixed and entrenched position. Where will that lead us? Stalemate and rising costs? Or a long term tug of ware where mutual assured bankruptcy will make sure prices won’t rise too much … until some game changing event that breaks it all open. For many people IAAS is still (too) expensive and non of the cloud vendors seem to run a profit, all this at ever lower prices. Sounds like a price hike will be in order once the market shares have been grabbed. But have people really calculated the cost of on premise? Can one compete? Or is the benefit of on premise worth the cost? Oh and I take on premise as being anything that even resembles racks in local or regional data centers running a cloud stack on it for you. Now I have to admit that in my region of the world most cloud hosters are not on a level of professionalism & scale like they are in the Nordics for example.

SAAS, PAAS, IAAS

That’s my order of preference actually. I think SAAS & PAAS are the areas where cloud really shines. IAAS can be a great solution for many needs but I don’t see it as ready yet a a whole sale replacement of on premise. While many offerings in IAAS are not perfect yet and there are many blocking issues to be solved there is a lot of value in the cloud when you do it right for your needs. If you have a very modern and optimized IT infrastructure IAAS can feel like a step back right now but that will change in the right direction over the next 2 to 3 years I think. And as during that time frame you start using SAAS & PAAS more en more I which means improved IAAS will be able to cover (all?) your remaining needs better. Again, you need to things that deliver fast or you run high (financial) risks.

Intersecting fields of fire

In this race at light speed,which cloud vendor is best? If you want and need to have all bases covered I think it’s reasonably safe to say Microsoft holds the most complete port folio from IAAS, PAAS, SAAS & Cloud storage. They’re now throwing in MPLS networks (http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/expressroute/) to tie it into hybrid scenarios which should take last century VPN technology out of the picture. Some more standardization in network virtualization, flexibility and capabilities would be welcome as well. But in the end will it matter? People might choose based on possible use cases or capabilities but if you don’t need them that’s a moot point. They become commodities you buy from a few players, I just hope we like our cloud dealers a bit better than we do our energy and telecom providers. Nobody seems really happy with those. But as a buyer I like the idea of having options, as the saying goes “I’d rather have it and not need it than need it and don’t have it”.

Now MPLS s coming what else is missing? A storage gateway / proxy in IAAS

One of the biggest issues in airlifting the entire on premise infrastructure into the cloud is the legacy nature of the applications in combination with the high cost of IAAS (VHD) storage and the limitations compared to what you can do with VHDX on premise. That’s probably an artificial licensing decision bit what can you do? What we need to alleviate this is a REST based cloud gateway to present storage to legacy apps in IAAS while storing the data in Azure blob storage. It’s a bit of a cludge as we’’ just love the fact we can get rid of pass through, vISCSI, vFC thanks to (shared) VHDX. Why do I think we need a solution? Apps have a very long (too long?) live time and it would speed up cloud adoption big time. Just dropping the price for virtual disk storage would be the easiest path to go but I don’t see any indication of that.

The lure of being in the cloud is big but bandwidth & latency in combination with storage costs is keeping people from going there when it comes to so many “legacy” on premise applications. There is a fix. Put everything in the cloud where is is close together and where bandwidth and latency can become a none issue. We need affordable storage and a way for legacy apps to handle object based storage. The fact that the new StorSimple offering has an azure appliance doesn’t really help here as it’s tied to on premise and it’s iSCSI to the guest in IAAS. Not that great is it? For now it looks too much like on boarding to Azure for non MSFT shops and people who are way behind the herd in modern technologies. At least for the environment I work in. Physical server are there to host VMs, so no StorSimple. Other physical servers are point solutions (AD, Exchange or specialized software that needs more hardware access than virtualization can supply). Again, no StorSimple target.

I cloud, you cloud, we cloud

Building and maintaining a data center is loosing it’s economic edge fast. At least for now. I’m not saying all data center or even server rooms will disappear but they’ll reduce significantly. The economics of public cloud are to attractive to ignore. Private and hybrid clouds cost money on top of the cost of running a data center. So why would you? Sure, the cost of cloud isn’t cheap but there are other reasons to move:

Get rid of facility management of data centers and server rooms. It’s a big issue & cost.
Power/cooling needs. The big cloud players are rapidly becoming the only ones with a plan when it comes to developing an energy plan. Way more innovative & action driven then most governments. They’ll have way better deals than you’ll ever get.
Infrastructure costs. Storage, networking, compute, backup, DR, licensing … the entire life cycle of these cost a lot of money and require talent.
Personnel costs. Let’s face it. Talented people might be a companies most valuable resource in HRM speak, but in reality they’d love to get rid of a much of that talent as possible to maximize profits. The only reason they employ talent is because they have to.
The growth in compute & storage in the cloud is humongous. You’ll never keep up and compete at that level. It was said recently Moore’s law has been replaced by “Bezo’s law’’ http://gigaom.com/2014/04/19/moores-law-gives-way-to-bezoss-law/

I’m going to make a bold statement. If you want/need to do cloud, you should really seriously consider spending your money in public cloud and minimize your investment in private/hybrid clouds. Go as directly to the future and try to keep your private/hybrid stack as simple and cheap possible as a transition to the public cloud. Leverage PowerShell, SMA and for example Azure automation to manage what you leave on premise. I have my doubts about the longevity of private/hybrid clouds for many organizations and a such investments should be “optimized” => cheap & easy to replace. So unless you have a real big business case for wanting to keep on premise and can make that economically feasible, it’s not your goal, it’s a transition tool. If you’re a huge enterprise, an agency involved in national security a hosting company or Switzerland you can ignore this advice Winking smile . But I see no one rushing to buy RackSpace?

Security, Privacy, Concentrated Power?

What about security, privacy, vendor lock in? You have to worry about that now as well, and you’re probably not that good at avoiding it on premise either. Switching from Oracle to SQL is not an easy feat. Cloud companies will have a lot of power due to the information they distill form big (meta) data. On top of that they’re set to be the biggest providers of compute, energy & if they buy some telecoms companies even of data communications. More and more power concentrated in ever less players. That’s not desirable, but it seems that’s how it will play out. The alternatives cost more and that determines most of all what happens. The economies are too good to ignore.

Government clouds to mitigate risk?

I now also see the call to build government clouds. Often at various levels. Well for decades now, bar some projects, a lot of their IT efforts have been slow, mediocre and expensive. 400$ to lift & place back some floor tiles. Having to buy a spool of 2km fibre channel if you need 80 meter. 5000$ to answer a question with yes or no, a VM that costs 750$ per month … (1000$ if you want a backup of the VM). 14 days to restore a VM from backup … abuse & money grabbing are rampant. Are these people going to do private cloud and compete? Are they any better at securing their infrastructure than Amazon? Is on premise encryption any better than in the cloud? And even if it is, it’s only until someone pulls a “Snowden”. And who’ll build ‘m? Where are the highly skilled, expert civil servants after decades of outsourcing leaving them at the mercy of 3rd parties? Are they going to buy them away in an era of cost cutting? And if they could, can they use them, do they have the organizational prowess to do so? So they’ll be build by the same pundits as before? Outsourcing to India would at least have been “the same mess for less”, while now it’s the same mess for more.

Sheep, lemmings, wolves & a smart CIO

I see way to little strategy building on this subject and to much “comfort” decisions being made that cost a lot of money and efforts delivering not enough competitive advantages. The smart CIO can avoid this an really deliver on “Your Cloud, Your Terms”. The others, well they’ll all play their role …

Just some food for thought. But I leave you with another musing. 100% cloud might be a great idea but it’s like leasing or renting. There are scenarios where ownership still makes since depending on the situation and business.

What You Need To Hear, Not What You Want To Hear

Posted on August 6, 2014 by workinghardinit

The usual disclaimer covers this blog. Dilbert® Life series are humorous post on corporate culture from hell and dysfunctional organizations running wild. This can be quite shocking and sobering to those who take themselves to serious. So these blog posts need to be read with a healthy dose of humor and be put into perspective. If you can’t do that, leave now. If it hits home too hard, you have other problems. It could be that you don’t like what you see in this mirror. Or perhaps …

You’re so vain, you probably think this blog is about you
You’re so vain, I’ll bet you think this blog is about you
Don’t you? Don’t you?

Many thanks to Carly Simon’s “You’re so vain”

Shopaholic Organizations

There is a shocking addiction to trying to buy ones way out of problems. If the service desk process sucks then you buy a CRM package. If this doesn’t do what you hoped out of the box, have it customized. You don’t have 100% IT automation? You need to buy a CMDB! Need to track changes? Go ITIL & do ITLM/ITSM all over the board. Projects don’t respect their boundaries? Hire some PRINCE expertise. Can’t keep up with all the project & resource management? Buy a ERP and integrate it with the project management software you’ve been abusing. You have no clue what to do next? Hire management consultants! We have one for every flavor of management. Your employees suck? Hire consultants. Slow applications? Buy flash only storage and 40Gbps switches. Your employees are disengaged? Get a coach, buy a team building experience and a 5$ pizza discount coupon as an “atta boy”. Maybe you could even gamify the company to success? And if you feel all alone and misunderstood you can join all the peer groups & professional organizations you can find to play that same broken record to each other over and over again whilst hoping you catch a break to a better gig.

Whatever the problem you’re facing, there is a product to buy and help to be hired. Like a true addict you keep using more of the same in the hope it will work. Nice twist on what Einstein called the definition of insanity. Yet why do so many people think it will help, all evidence to the contrary?

The obsessive and compulsive need to buy stuff to fix or even solve problems, needs, lack of skills, knowledge and insights is staggering. Sure the world is full of people and companies that will gladly take your money. Why? Well that’s their business model. The only aim is to separate you from your money. They’ll tell you they understand you, that they’ve helped hundreds of people and businesses like you. So they’ll sell you whatever it is they sell and they couldn’t care less if you’re still around next year. Until perhaps the moment in 18 months they know they can sucker you again. The only line of defense you have against that is your own good judgment. It’s not that all of them their products or services have no value at all. The better vendors will even walk away from an engagement when it not mutually beneficial. But the core of the problem is that you are having issues and that’s your inability to deal with problems that cannot be solved by buying something. It’s very much like a shopaholic.

It’s a business model for someone

The idea that there is a an easy fix to solve the issues your facing and make sure you can shine as a successful leader instead of being stuck in your current mess is very temping one. There is always someone who understands this. Who’s ready to step up and deliver. Which would be great if it was not for a few simple rules:

A fool and his money are easily separated. And if not, as long as the money is good enough they’ll put in more effort.
Your problems are internal, they are caused by you and need to be fixed by you. Any addiction to whatever (products, services, consulting, coaching) are actually keeping you away from the solution.

You as a manager, perhaps even a leader, will have to step up. Be all you can be and if that is not enough step aside. Do the latter yourself before it’s done to you, it’s less messy that way.

Listen, when the money is gone, all that is left are your internal resources, if you’re lucky. Acting as if they don’t matter means they won’t be very engaged. All budgets are limited, but that doesn’t mean that you need to be a scrooge. It means you need to create and build a capable organization even when budgets are plentiful that can stand on its own feet. One that is able to analyze and decide independently what it needs to do and act on that. Spend your money there. Otherwise as soon as you run out, you lose all your capabilities to act. It’s like a ship without power, on top of not even not having a rudder. You’re a drift, floating between the sharks that bled you dry.

Also, if all your organization knows what to do is hire & buy everything from others it can easily replace it with a cheaper one that’s optimized that model needing 40% to 50% less employees & managers. Pure substitution play. Game over. Economics 101.

You need to get a clue, make it happen, you and your team, no one else. But it has to start with you. If you need coaches, consultants, products just to get started you’re not going to make it.

Ouch, that hurt!

Deep down you know the painful truth. While it would indeed be great if you’d be able to hire a coach, consultant or buy service, product that can take away your pains it doesn’t work that way. You cannot purchase those magical bottles of pixie dust or unicorn tears that can put the struggles and headaches behind you allowing you to solely focus on enjoying a successful business and be forever bliss.

I could tell you that you’re in luck as I have a nice stash of pixie dust bottles I can use in a pinch and for a price. But that’s not it. It’s experience, knowledge, having to work and live with solutions, see the good, the bad and the ugly of both marketing, “marchitecture” in combination with grand and hopefully realistic visions of analysis & architects what’s need. The only thing this has in common with pixie dust is that is doesn’t come cheap or easy neither, but it does work

Too many times solutions are nothing but rehashed marketing & sales pitches that succeed due to a lack of skill on both sides. All kinds of schemes are used to justify them. They don’t achieve much at all. These are often self-serving “quick fixes” to something that is as structural & often over-hyped, over complicated problem serving some people agendas.

So you spend your money and for a little while you experience the illusion that you’ve solved something. But like any addict, you, the shopaholic, will return hard and fast to reality. Poorer and sadly none the wiser. You coast from purchase to purchase never breaking this destructive pattern. You like to fool yourself into believing that you’re investing instead of spending money because you see so many successful companies buy the same products or services. It’s kind of painful and sad to watch. Some of you will blame the market, incompetent employees or dishonest vendors, lack of commitment, disobedience. While all these factors do exist and play their role it’s not the real cause of your woes. The environment you operate in is no different for you or competitors. Sure there might be a hobby business around, run by the son of a super-rich business tycoon but that’s a minority. No, the playing field is the same, so could it, however painful that thought, be you, that’s not made of the right stuff?

What if despite all your best efforts and even some pixie dust you still have issues that are killing your performance? You can suck it up and BS your way out. Say that what you did is the best in the world and nothing more can be done. Hire consultants to audit whatever it is you want to audit (or whoever you want to put in their place if you’re really political), blame you predecessor, the lack of (upper) management vision or the current sun spots cycle. You can also really dive in and pint point where the issues are. But that’s hard, very hard. A lot harder than buying a vile of unicorn tears which seems the missing ingredient in any unrealistic project, overly ambitious architecture or design. It’s horribly difficult to obtain because it is scarce beyond imagination.

I’ll make you a deal. While I possess some flasks, they are the most expensive substance ever to come by. So if you require the tears of a unicorn, you’re going to need truck loads with money of large denomination kind.

But there are no unicorn tears. YOU will need to fix your problems. Forget about buying products, that’s in essence automation and optimization. If you do that to a problem you only make it bigger and worse faster. Forget about coaches and consultants, they’ll only enable you to move faster and more targeted if you know the goal, that is. They will not solve your problems. That’s your job.

Don’t try to improve things with tools and services until you really know what’s wrong. Look very deep, hard and honest at your company, your managerial results and your actions. If you only find you do things to save your own behind, cover your back and hopefully move ahead you’re not fit to lead anything at all and you’re a much a strategist as my hamster. But in defense of my hamster: he lacks any ambition. As a leader / manager you should care a bit more. Action is needed, from you. Lip service is useless. Talk is cheap. Fear kills. Deflecting decisions and responsibility makes you lose all credibility. If you care, act like it. If you don’t care no one else will for sure. If you can’t be bothered to do the hard work, no one will. You can’t lead from behind.

So what needs to be done?

Stop what you’re doing right now. Observe, orient, decide, and act (OODA) and see the progress of intelligent decisions and watch how money invested differs in results so much from money spent. There is no substitute. You don’t need tools, coaches, taskforces, committees and services. Those are only for amplification, they are force multipliers and that’s great as long as you don’t apply them to your problems. Hard as it may sound, its (free) advise that you won’t get from a sales person. You cannot avoid your responsibilities.

The eyes of the world are upon you

You brought this on yourself. You stepped on the plate as a leader. So yes, your employees are watching and they don’t miss much what affects them. I know employees can act very entitled and be a major pain in the proverbial behinds, but this discussion isn’t about that. Do you want to know why they doubt you, don’t follow you, ignore or possibly even oppose you? Because you show no leadership and do not portray any sign of competence or insight. For the good of the company and themselves they do what they need to, with or without you. No one goes over the top anymore at the blow of the whistle. So don’t pull rank, instead try to become credible.

Migrate an old file server to a transparent failover file server with continuous availability

Posted on August 4, 2014 by workinghardinit

This is not a step by step “How to” but we’ll address some thing you need to do and the tips and tricks that might make things a bit smoother for you.

1) Disable Short file names & Strip existing old file names

Never mind that this is needed to be able to do continuous availability on a file share cluster. You should have done this a long time ago. For one is enhances performance significantly. It also make sure that no crappy apps that require short file names to function can be introduced into the environment. While I’m an advocate for mutual agreements there are many cases where you need to protect users, the business against itself. Being to much of a politician as a technologist can be very bad for the company due to allowing bad workarounds and technology debt to be introduced. Stand tall!

Read up on this here Windows Server 2012 File Server Tip: Disable 8.3 Naming (and strip those short names too. Next to Jose’s great blog read Fsutil 8dot3name on how to do this.

If you still have applications that depend on short file names you need to isolate and virtualize them immediately. I feel sorry for you that this situation exists in your environment and I hope you get the necessary means to deal with swiftly and decisively by getting rid of these applications. Please see The Zombie ISV® to be reminded why.

Some tips:

Only use the /F switch if it’s a non system disk and you can afford to do so as you’re moving the data LUN to a new server anyone. Otherwise you might run into issues. See the below example.

If you stumble on path that are too long, intervene. Talk to the owners. We got people to reduce “Human Resources Planning And Evaluations” sub folder & file names reduced to HRMPlanEval. You get the gist, trim them down.
You’ll have great success on most files & folders but if they are open. Schedule a maintenance window to make sure you can run without anyone connected to the shares (Stop LanManServer during that maintenance window).

Also verify no other processes are locking any files or folders (anti virus, backups, sync tools etc.)

Continue reading →

SMB 3, ODX, Windows Server 2012 R2 & Windows 8.1 perform magic in file sharing for both corporate & branch offices

Posted on July 29, 2014 by workinghardinit

SMB 3 for Transparent Failover File Shares

SMB 3 gives us lots of goodies and one of them is Transparent Failover which allows us to make file shares continuously available on a cluster. I have talked about this before in Transparent Failover & Node Fault Tolerance With SMB 2.2 Tested (yes, that was with the developer preview bits after BUILD 2011, I was hooked fast and early) and here Continuously Available File Shares Don’t Support Short File Names – "The request is not supported" & “CA failure – Failed to set continuously available property on a new or existing file share as Resume Key filter is not started.”

This is an awesome capability to have. This also made me decide to deploy Windows 8 and now 8.1 as the default client OS. The fact that maintenance (it the Resume Key filter that makes this possible) can now happen during day time and patches can be done via Cluster Aware Updating is such a win-win for everyone it’s a no brainer. Just do it. Even better, it’s continuous availability thanks to the Witness service!

When the node running the file share crashes, the clients will experience a somewhat long delay in responsiveness but after 10 seconds the continue where they left off when the role has resumed on the other node. Awesome! Learn more bout this here Continuously Available File Server: Under the Hood and SMB Transparent Failover – making file shares continuously available.

Windows Clients also benefits from ODX

But there is more it’s SMB 3 & ODX that brings us even more goodness. The offloading of read & write to the SAN saving CPU cycles and bandwidth. Especially in the case of branch offices this rocks. SMB 3 clients who copy data between files shares on Windows Server 2012 (R2) that has storage an a ODX capable SAN get the benefit that the transfer request is translated to ODX by the server who gets a token that represents the data. This token is used by Windows to do the copying and is delivered to the storage array who internally does all the heavy lifting and tell the client the job is done. No more reading data form disk, translating it into TCP/IP, moving it across the wire to reassemble them on the other side and write them to disk.

To make ODX happen we need a decent SAN that supports this well. A DELL Compellent shines here. Next to that you can’t have any filter drives on the volumes that don’t support offloaded read and write. This means that we need to make sure that features like data deduplication support this but also that 3rd party vendors for anti-virus and backup don’t ruin the party.

In the screenshot above you can see that Windows data deduplication supports ODX. And if you run antivirus on the host you have to make sure that the filter driver supports ODX. In our case McAfee Enterprise does. So we’re good. Do make sure to exclude the cluster related folders & subfolders from on access scans and schedules scans.

Do not run DFS Namespace servers on the cluster nodes. The DfsDriver does not support ODX!

The solution is easy, run your DFS Namespaces servers separate from your cluster hosts, somewhere else. That’s not a show stopper.

The user experience

What it looks like to a user? Totally normal except for the speed at which the file copies happen.

Here’s me copying an ISO file from a file share on server A to a file share on server B from my Windows 8.1 workstation at the branch office in another city, 65 KM away from our data center and connected via a 200Mbps pipe (MPLS).

On average we get about 300 MB/s or 2.4 Gbps, which “over” a 200Mbps WAN is a kind of magic. I assure you that they’re not complaining and get used to this quite (too) fast Winking smile .

The IT Pro experience

Leveraging SMB 3 and ODX means we avoid that people consume tons of bandwidth over the WAN and make copying large data sets a lot faster. On top of that the CPU cycles and bandwidth on the server are conserved for other needs as well. All this while we can failover the cluster nodes without our business users being impacted. Continuous to high availability, speed, less bandwidth & CPU cycles needed. What’s not to like?

Pretty cool huh! These improvements help out a lot and we’ve paid for them via software assurance so why not leverage them? Light up your IT infrastructure and make it shine.

What’s stopping you?

So what are your plans to leverage your software assurance benefits? What’s stopping you? When I asked that I got a couple of answers:

I don’t have money for new hardware. Well my SAN is also pré Windows 2012 (DELL Compellent SC40 controllers. I just chose based on my own research not on what VARs like to sell to get maximal kickbacks . The servers I used are almost 4 years old but fully up to date DELL PowerEdge R710’s, recuperated from their duty as Hyper-V hosts. These server easily last us 6 years and over time we collected some spare servers for parts or replacement after the support expires. DELL doesn’t take away your access to firmware &drivers like some do and their servers aren’t artificially crippled in feature set.
Skills? Study, learn, test! I mean it, no excuse!
Bad support from ISV an OEMs for recent Windows versions are holding you back? Buy other brands, vote with your money and do not accept their excuses. You pay them to deliver.

As IT professionals we must and we can deliver. This is only possible as the result of sustained effort & planning. All the labs, testing, studying helps out when I’m designing and deploying solutions. As I take the entire stack into account in designs and we do our due diligence, I know it will work. The fact that being active in the community also helps me know early on what vendors & products have issues and makes that we can avoid the “marchitecture” solutions that don’t deliver when deployed. You can achieve this as well, you just have to make it happen. That’s not too expensive or time consuming, at least a lot less than being stuck after you spent your money.

Working Hard In IT

My view on IT from the trenches