Someone posted a note on Twitter about the Sidekick fiasco. Apparently the servers that lost data weren't Microsoft servers. They were actually Oracle, Sun, and Linux servers that were at a Verizon data center. Microsoft bought Danger last year, and when they had issues, they spent time and resources to recover the data. And T-mobile, and possibly Microsoft, is giving customers some credit for the hassles.
I had a Sidekick for awhile, and my son has one as well. I thought it was a great device when I had it, with an easy to use keyboard, and some nice features. I'm not sure how they've changed since the Sidekick III, but now that I've had an Android phone, and an iPhone, I think it's way behind the features in those devices.
I suppose some people will spin this as Microsoft not necessarily having the expertise to run these servers, but that's silly. Microsoft bought Danger, who presumably had the talent to administer these. They were at the data center they've been hosted at for some time, which also likely has talent there to help out.
What was amazing is that Microsoft didn't try to spin the PR on this and say this was an Oracle or Sun issue. They left it alone, letting plenty of people blame MS software and use this as an example of why Microsoft software is poorly written.
But was it MS software?
This report says that Microsoft may have been attempting to move the service, and that's certainly possible. Maybe they were to blame and didn't want to raise that issue.
I don't know that a root cause will ever be reached, but I can definitely see T-Mobile moving the Sidekick brand to an Android phone. It's a better OS, it saves them $$, and they consolidate some of their own support.
This does show that the cloud is an issue. I have my devices sync with Google on the cloud for various things, but it keeps copies locally. Something everyone needs to do with cloud services.
I tend to work with a fair number of documents in my job. Between articles that are sent to me, editorials I write, and presentations I give (not to mention blog posts), I have a lot of data floating around.
Over the years I've organized things into a few folders that I tend to use to keep myself on task. I have one for my OneNote documents that I use for Editorial writing. I have a second folder for all the articles I get from authors, and I have a presentations folder. Pictures, video, etc. I have in other places, but I rarely use this stuff away from my desk.
When I was traveling last fall to various places, I found myself way out of sync. I'd get articles from authors and then had trouble trying to get them back to my desktop, match them up with the correct author, keep track of them based on dates, etc. I ended up losing a couple articles and really annoying authors.
For awhile I would just copy my entire folder of "articles" to a USB key and then copy it to my laptop when I traveled and then reverse the process when I returned home, but I ended up losing track of which machine had the latest version of which article. What I really needed was ...
I really needed some way to easily replicate data. During an interview with Eric Johnson of CSTechCast, he showed me Live Mesh, a service from Microsoft and Windows Live, that allows you to share folders among machines.
It sounded great, so I gave it a try, signed up, and then registered both my desktop and laptop as "devices" in my mesh. This is essentially a cloud for your folders and machines.
I then picked my presentations folder, my OneNote folders, and my articles folders, and marked them as items in my mesh. Once they were registered on each machine, I could see my files in sync from either location.
I've been doing this for about two months, and so far it's been a breeze to use. And my files stay in sync. I can edit something on my desktop, walk upstairs to my laptop, and in a few minutes they're in sync. I can take my laptop on a trip, edit things and then they're back on my main desktop when I get home. Since the desktop is where I do most of my work, this is really handy.
The only downside is that if I go disconnected on the laptop and edit things without an Internet link, I need to make sure I let it sync up at home before I start using those same documents on the desktop.
OneNote is interesting because it saves automatically as you type. If I pause for a minute, I'll see the Live Mesh in my task bar syncing up with the cloud. I was worried about trying it with Outlook PST files, but Google gave me another way to do things, so I'm sticking with that.
There's a remote control option as well, which I tried on a trip, but it didn't work. I'm not sure if my connection was too flaky or the 3 monitors on my desktop broke it, but I couldn't get it to work.
I'll give Live Mesh 2 thumbs up for now. I've found this to be a simple, easy, and reliable way to keep data in sync across multiple machines.
The other day Paul Neilson wrote a simple post making predictions about SQL Server in the Cloud. That got a response from Denis Gobo talking about a few things that need to happen before we can really take advantage of SQL Server in the cloud.
Most of my work takes place in the cloud. Actually it’s half my work, but I had an interesting experience yesterday.
I was working along when bandwidth slowed to a crawl. Pages wouldn’t load, even Google took a minute to bring up their lightweight home page. My tweets wouldn’t post, Outlook would freeze while checking email, etc. Normally that isn’t the end of the world since I do write quite a few things offline, using Live Mesh to synch files among my two different machines.
My process is typically to write offline, load the content into the SQLServerCentral site, and then once it’s up there, delete it from my local files so I can keep them pruned. Writing 5 or 6 editorials a week, every week, means that if I keep too much stuff around locally it’s very hard to remember what’s gone out the door. Maybe that’s not the best practice, and I’m actually rethinking that now.
In this case, however, I needed to get the podcasts prepared for the next day. So usually I open the data online and use it to shoot the podcasts.However I couldn’t get to my application online, so I couldn’t get the podcasts done! As the day wore on, and this was over hours, I stressed more and more, and ended up getting worried. Luckily I had one piece of content still on my machine, as well as a few more that weren’t scheduled.
So I worked with those, got work done, and moved on. Today bandwidth is better, and things are moving along smoothly. But I’ve seen bandwidth issues at companies before, and if you are too dependent, or don’t have backups, than what do you do?
If SalesForce.com goes down, it makes major news because it effectively slows or stops work from being done for a lot of customers. Is that any different than a server going down inside your company? What if your databases were hosted somewhere and things went down?
The advantage of the cloud is that there should be a bit more expertise and effort put into making things more reliable. There are many companies, including two of mine (JumpstartTV and End to End Training) that host their servers in a data center, relying on the Internet for access.
While I’m nervous, and I think the insurance industry really needs to become more involved in ensuring security is well developed here, I do see SQL Server moving to the clouds. I think there need to be a lot of companies offering this, like we have lots offering web hosting now. That has become almost a commodity offering now where you can easily move your application to another company if you have issues.
I’m not as aggressive as Paul since I think there are a lot of tools that need to be built and some maturity in the SQL Server platform, I think that a very full featured SQL Server offering is still 3-4 years away and I can’t see a large percentage of companies avoiding buying servers for a decade. I’d predict that we’ll see more “internal clouds” in companies in the next 3-5 years where you won’t necessarily connect to a particular server, but a URL in a cloud somewhere.
sqlserver://salesdb anyone?
