11 replies to this topic

[HSS-Dave]

There are those shows you remember and some you would rather forget. Episode 179 will not be forgotten by me due to two things. The first, Skype hates me, and two, Susan Bradley joined us for some conversation. It was hard for me to wrap the show because we all wanted to hear more from the Small Business Server MVP. John, Jim, and Susan chat it up about Twitter, SBS, WHS 2011, Multipoint Server, Drive Extender and more. Dave just sat on mute while Skype played it's game!

Susan Bradley - MVP Small Business Server @SBSDiva on Twitter, sbsdiva.com on the web.

titlerequired.com - Small Business Server Tips and Tricks
UR2 Hotfix for Computer Monitoring Error now available
Windows Small Business Server 2011 Essentials
Windows Multipoint Server 2011
Windows Server 2008 R2 Windows Storage Server
Microsoft Action Pack
http://www.smallbizserver.com/
https://www.facebook.com/HomeServers – The Home Server Show Facebook Page

[ikon]

It was an extemely informative, not to mention fun, show. Thanks for getting Susan to join in.

[yodafett]

We now have gurlz hehehe
Be happy you did not have the wheels off comentary from tonights averageguy podcast

[Joe_Miner]

Great show guys (and gal) -- very educational for me. Thanks!

[StanHD]

Really good to hear things from the SBS end of things. Also very helpful to understand where the different server products "place" and some of the reasoning that MS apply to the product features. Great show thank you all. (the Skype issues were not apparent in the recording / edit)

[pcdoc]

This was a fantastic show and covered allot of territory. Would love to see her come back for a deeper dive into some specific subjects. A special thanks to Susan not only for the show but for helping us with the monitoring bug.

[ikon]

agreed. The background info on the monitoring bug really helped round out the story behind it.

[jazzerjay]

I actually enjoyed listening to her as well, so forgive me if this offends. Sure Dave, Skype hated you, but perhaps this was just a different way to interact with a guest? She is definitively not like some in the past promoting products and such. (Not that many have nor did they flood their time with salesman speak) I actually wouldn't have even noticed the glitches and such if you hadn't come on in the beginning and made mention of your issues. Even with all of the challenges, the conversation was lively and very informative. It may not have been a "perfect" podcast, but that's why I listen to this show and participate in this group of mighty warriors.

As a side note, I really enjoy listening to live music because you get to hear their voices and instruments for what they are. No post production work as you're hearing it live and in front of your face (or ears).

Keep up the great work!

[jmwills]

I was interested to hear how she actually deployed the products within her own environment.

[darkside34]

In response to the "cloud backup" discussion, there is no excuse for not having an offsite backup in any enterprise. If you have employees that depend on you for income
, you need to have a disaster recovery plan that includes planning for the complete destruction of your building and every asset in it. Insurance will replace your equipment, but data is irreplaceable Not to say you shouldn't have a local backup as well, of course. Most businesses who have a building fire will fail within a few years (don't remember the exact statistic.)

Of course, I work for a datacenter, and we have a nice co-location for ourself, but we are our managed service client's backup "target" as it were. You can always find someone local to be your "cloud". If your a client of ours and you have a fire at 4:00am, I will get up and drive to your location with LTO4s full of all your backup data. Hell, most people usually end up restoring their environments on our hypervisor cluster.....


Learn to love your local datacenters, you just might have to look with a magnifying glass to find them .

[ikon]

I'm certainly not going to argue against offsite datacenters, but I will say that there are a lot of factors that enter into disaster recovery calculations. One of them is, how much effort to put into disaster prevention vs recovery. Many will argue more in favour of prevention, but there are a lot of factors even for that (are you in an earthquake zone, tornado zone, war zone, etc?). It's difficult and there are no absolute correct answers; just ones that appear to be the best options under the current circumstances.

[darkside34]

I'm certainly not going to argue against offsite datacenters, but I will say that there are a lot of factors that enter into disaster recovery calculations. One of them is, how much effort to put into disaster prevention vs recovery. Many will argue more in favour of prevention, but there are a lot of factors even for that (are you in an earthquake zone, tornado zone, war zone, etc?). It's difficult and there are no absolute correct answers; just ones that appear to be the best options under the current circumstances.

I prefer to think of it this way:

Fire suppression systems can fail.
Power can fail (the san that housed the production information lost 2 drives in a raid 6 and the backup san lost 4 drives in a raid 6 due to a brownout, all data was lost. They had a redundant dual-building-wide-ups system and 2 200kw generators).
People can fail (fired employee took a wrench to the server rack, all data was lost. All doors and the datacenter had proxcards. Turns out the fired employee was the one that managed the proxcard server)
Things get stolen (tower server at a small buisness was stolen, all data was lost....and compromised....including the backups on a USB drive sitting atop the server)



Countermeasures are important in the infosec field, but at the end of the day all they really do is get you discounts on insurance. In my honest professional opinion, you have to have backups if your data is business-critical. Even (especially) small businesses. Swapping a hard drive to and fro your house counts, although I wouldn't recommend it. Just have some procedure in place to account for that possibility.