Executive Summary:
Readers highlight their favorite products from Microsoft, NetIQ, and Strangeloop.
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File Copy Utility
Microsoft SyncToy 2.0 (Beta)
Reader:
Jeff
Kowalke
Senior
Microsoft
Systems
Engineer
Product:
Microsoft
SyncToy 2.0
(Beta)
Company: Microsoft
Contact: www.microsoft.com
As many IT pros know, some of
the best tools and utilities to help
make their jobs easier are freeware
and shareware products. Such is the
case with Senior Microsoft Systems Engineer
Jeff Kowalke, who was often asked
by end users for a quick backup solution.
Kowalke had been relying on the robocopy
command in script files, but wanted something
easier to use.
After some research, Kowalke came
across the beta version of Microsoft Sync-
Toy 2.0, a file copying and synchronization
tool. “I recently upgraded my home computer,
and I had to search for old digital
photos scattered across a wide variety of
sources, like my old computer, old DVD
backups, and backups saved onto an external USB disk,” says Kowalke.
“SyncToy helped by finding sub-folders of those backups that I
would have ignored…SyncToy has been a true time saver.”
The ability of SyncToy’s backup feature to keep files in their
original format after backup operations is one of Kowalke’s
favorites, a feature that avoids end users dealing with .BKF
or .ZIP file compression formats that they may not have the
correct software to uncompress.
“Since SyncToy is considered a free and unsupported utility from
Microsoft, I really can’t complain about it,” says Kowalke. “I’m happy
that Microsoft is willing to make this tool available for free to fill an
obvious need for a simple, visual backup utility. That said, I would
[suggest that Microsoft] add the ability to schedule backups, and
add a reporting feature that would display backup results via email
when a backup completes. I could then use this product in a server
environment for disk-to-disk backups.”
.NET Performance Optimization
Strangeloop Appscaler
Reader:
Jackie Reid
VP of Client
Services
Product:
Strangeloop AS1000
Application Scaling
Appliance
Company:
Strangeloop
Networks
Contact:
www.strangeloopnetworks.com
Improving the performance of
ASP.NET and AJAX applications
is a task that many web
developers often struggle with, just
as web marketing technology developer
Marqui has. In order to improve
the performance of their .NET applications
and hosted Web sites, Marqui
decided to give the Strangeloop
AS1000 Application Scaling Appliance
a try.
According to Marqui VP of client
services Jackie Reid, their primary
goal was to improve the customer
experience by improving the speed
of their web applications. “We’re
using two AS1000 products, and we’re currently treating web traffic
on our Marqui 5.0 Application Server and a main hosting server,”
says Reid. “When the [next AS1000 OS upgrade] becomes available
that offers failover redundancy and analytics, we’ll be moving the AS1000s in front of all of our Web traffic.”
Reid says that deployment was straightforward, and that they
were up and running on the appliances within roughly an hour.
After deploying the AS1000s, Reid says that they’ve experienced
“significant performance improvements” in both developed ASP.net
applications and on Web sites they host for clients.
Colin Edwards, Marqui’s manager of client operations, likes the
AS1000’s ability to create custom data filters, an ability that lets him
“really control what’s going on in my data center.” As useful as those
filter treatments are, Edwards does have some advice for anyone that
may use them. “One of the treatments I created caused a problem
with the traffic going out of the data center,” says Edwards. “I talked
to [Strangeloop] support to find out what I did wrong [and to resolve
the problem]. You should really know what you’re doing before
experimenting with different filter treatments.”
Systems Management
NetIQ Aegis
Reader:
Neil Forster
IT Director
Product:
NetIQ Aegis
Company:
NetIQ
Contact:
www.netiq.com
Outsourcing IT and Web operations
to a third party has become
a viable option for many companies,
a development that plays into the
strengths of Attenda, a UK-based company
that specializes in providing IT management
services. In the interest of improving
the services that they offer to customers,
Attenda recently adopted the NetIQ Aegis
IT automation platform.
“As a company we’ve been a long-term user of NetIQ’s AppManager product,” says Neil Forster, an IT director at Attenda.
“We’ve also been looking at the run book automation (RBA) market
for some time, and we knew that NetIQ would be coming out with
something in the RBA market, which eventually turned out to be
Aegis.”
According to Forster, Attenda decided to implement Aegis in
order to make their IT management services more efficient. “One of
our concepts is operational certainty, [which we define] as the ability
to do something the correct way over and over again. [NetIQ Aegis]
gives us the opportunity to automate responses that have historically
been handled manually…such as taking help desk calls from notification
to resolution.”
Forster likes the ability to easily create basic process workflows,
and believes that adoption of the NetIQ Aegis system has helped
them make some of their existing processes more efficient. “For
example, we used to have a manual procedure that would require an
engineer to look for particular events in an event log, check a registry
key value, and then reset that value based on the log information…
we now have automated that process using NetIQ Aegis.”
Basic process workflows may be easy to configure and use,
although Forster points out that creating more complex process
automation tasks may take some additional time. “Configuration
of more complex processes wasn’t entirely intuitive,” says Forster. “We also had some problems with performance, particularly with
an environment with a large number of servers. We did work closely
with NetIQ to address those problems, and they provided hot fixes
for those.”