This gem didn’t have a home on any of our sites, but I didn’t want the reporting to go to waste. So it’s going underground on the Enterprise Linux Log. On that note, enjoy some session coverage from LinuxWorld 2007!

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SAN FRANCISCO – Everyone in IT uses storage in their data center, therefore everyone will one day have to deal with that storage failing. It could happen at anytime.Even in the moments before your LinuxWorld presentation on demystifying data recovery.

That’s what happened to Chris Bross anyway, roughly five minutes before attendees starting filing into his session on “Demystifying Data Recovery” here at the LinuxWorld Conference and Expo.

Bross is an enterprise recovery engineer with Novato, Calif.-based DriveSavers Data Recovery Inc., and the good news for his presentation was that he had brought along a backup USB thumb drive with a copy of his presentation. All too often however, Bross said IT managers and decision makers are not taking the steps necessary to secure and recover the data.

All storage fails eventually

“All storage is going to fail eventually. All hardware breaks. Are you prepared for the inevitable?” Bross said before conducting an informal poll about who had ever lost data.

A smattering of attendees, Bross included, raised their hand (In addition to losing a USB thumb drive, Bross would later admit that one of his two Ubuntu laptops failed during a shipping snafu).

But the informal poll belied a much bigger problem in data back up and recovery in today’s enterprise; one which Bross set out to diagnose and recover much as he and his staff have done hundreds of times back in Novato with hard disks damaged by fire, water and mechanical defects (the latter being demonstrated with a variety of drive-head-on-platter audio clips from real life recovery efforts at the DriveSavers clean room).

Disaster recovery: the numbers

“For all of the effort [systems administrators] put into assigning employees backup tasks, 60% of all corporate data today resides on unprotected PC desktops and laptops,” Bross said, citing industry research from Rochester, N.Y.-based Harris Research.

And when natural disasters strike – and they will, despite the disagreement over the disaster recovery between business executives and IT staffs — the track records of today’s data centers is poor.

According to a study from the University of Texas, U.S. small and medium-sized businesses have shown that when they lose data in a natural disaster, 50% never reopen and 90% are gone in two years. Bross said the hourly cost to “recreate” these battered data centers can run anywhere from $50,000 per hour to $2 million per job at large eCommerce sites.

The reality of reliability

Bross said common knowledge in data centers is that the mean time before failure (MTBF) – or “mean time to failure” – for a typical hard drive is between 500,000 to 1.5 million hours. In an ideal environment, the annual rate of failure of any given drive is .88%.

But two studies from Google Inc. and Carnegie Mellon disagree. In both studies, real world testing of drive reliability found the actual annual replacement rate was actually 3-8%. On top of that revelation was word that failure rates double after the first year of service. For drives older than one year, Bross gave simple advice: “If you experience a drive error of any kind, pull the drive. It’s better to be safe than sorry,” he said.

Those were just mechanical failures though; like natural disasters and virus corruption. Truth be told, studies have shown that user error is by far the biggest contributor to data loss. Fully 60% of all hardware failure is the result of the user, Bross said, which includes malicious/accidental deletion of code, incorrect RAID configuration, accidental reformatting and bad maintenance.

Data protection and the inevitable

Bross concluded his session with a number of tips and best practices for systems administers to use in specific situations.

Hurricanes and floods – “Remember if want to preserve data, you’ll want to make sure that the drive is kept wet,” Bross said. “Storage needs to remain wet. If it dries out, there’s lots of calcification and mineral deposits that can form and cause havoc.” Bross instructs all of his customers to keep wet drives submerged and cool.

Data has been damaged, now what? – Rule number one: Don’t panic. Evaluate the failure and check the status of you backup, Bross said. “Don’t run repair utilities on it. Don’t reformat the volume. Don’t restore backup to the drive in question. Don’t remove drives from a RAID system or rebuild it. Instead, cool heads will prevail and you should evaluate and check the backup drive first, he said.

RAID is not equal to backup! — RAID, by its definition, is a redundant array of disks. “The reality is that a RAID device is only part of the backup solution,” Bross said. “RAID is good for one thing and it’s not as the primary backup application–it’s fault tolerance,” he said.

DIY data recovery – Doing things on your own is good for corruption, deletion or logical corruption of volumes. However, Bross warned that this approach is bad for hardware damage or complex configurations.

Local service providers – This is a good option for transfers, but not for data recovery (this category also encompasses a local expert).

Professional data recovery services — For mission critical data where risk is not an option. Employ clean room facilities as required by drive manufacturers. Bross said that even in these pristine professional conditions “not every patient makes it though this ‘ER for hard drives’.”

Remote access services — Cannot be used with physical device failures. There is the potential risk to customer data that hardware or logical volumes could degrade during diagnosis. Potential benefits are a quick resolution and recovery of data. And there’s no need to ship hardware to lab, either.

Bross said users can avoid needing these data recovery strategies in the first place by making complete backups regularly. “Have a process and a schedule. Assign responsibility and create a chain of command,” he said. “All storage eventually fails. Run home and backup your data now. Be happy you did and sleep well tonight.”

As a journalist, I get perturbed when I see talking heads on TV (on issues political, technological or otherwise) “attack the messenger” when the message they’re delivering isn’t something they agree with. The theory is, of course, that if you can discredit the person, then the public will not focus on the message — however legitimate it is to the conversation — and your position will win out.

I hate this. Reminds me of immature schoolyard antics from grade school. I know you are but what am I, etc. In the land of adults, which many of us presently inhabit I hope, I see no place for this kind of discourse. It leads to stagnation, and I’m fond of progression.

Today, I took another look at Ron Hovsepian’s keynote address from LinuxWorld last week, and his message of “expanding, extending, and enlarging” the Linux operating system. Was the message tainted a bit by the fact that Hovsepian is a businessman at the head of the number two commercial Linux distributor in the world? Sure it was, but there were points to be gleaned from his talk that I think the Linux community would be apt to mull over for a bit before they jump on the Microsoft hating bandwagon.

Red Hat’s Michael Evans, vice president of corporate development at the company, didn’t get that memo. Speaking to InfoWorld, Evans said he liked the idea but at the same time expressed doubts about the effort since Hovsepian was involved. “Personally, that he’s the guy that did the deal with Microsoft, I’m suspicious of things he says,” Evans told InfoWorld.

I’m not sure I agree. If this is true, shouldn’t we not also be suspicious of what Red Hat executives say, because they’re also trying to make a buck off of Linux? Maybe “paying a premium for Linux support” from Red Hat because it’s the best in town deserves a deeper look, eh, Oracle? Should we outright dismiss what Red Hat has to say about Oracle Linux whenever Oracle fires off a press release about another big name customer making the switch to that which Ellison has wrought? Obviously not. If we’re suspicious all the time, then we’re not doing work. We’re getting complacent — which was one of the pillars of Hovsepian’s keynote. Ironic, don’t ya think?

These personal attacks muddy the issue, which I am going to assume is exactly the point. They also do little to advance intelligent conversation (and this is where I’ll concede that my blogging may also fall into this category). Why is Red Hat attacking Novell so much these days anyway? Aren’t they currently kicking ass in the commercial Linux market? Last I checked it was bad business to even acknowledge the competition when you’re so far ahead in the standings.

Hovsepian’s keynote focused, as I said, on the expansion of Linux. He used phrases like “vendor neutral” to describe his ideas, and never once implied that Novell (or Microsoft) should be the one driving the ideas he put forth. Unlike many of the LinuxWorld keynotes last week, Novell’s was refreshingly lacking many of the self-aggrandizing remarks that plagued those of eBay and Amazon.com. Note to Amazon — we get it, you have a new SaaS initiative coming out, thanks for the advertisement for it in the middle of your keynote. Novell’s keynote did see a product pitch or two, as Hovsepian took some time in the middle there to gush about ZENWorks. It seemed out of place in a keynote full of general ideas about expanding Linux, but that doesn’t mean we should ax the entire speech en masse.

Aside from his moment of ZEN, Hovsepian seemed to be about promoting ways to take Linux past the enterprise success it’s enjoyed for the past five years or so. Linux is mission critical, sure, but there now exists the danger of complacency both with its developers and its corporate handlers.

Some points to address:

Today, if an ISV writes an application on Linux, it might run everywhere, and it might not. Even if it runs on multiple Linux distributions, the market desires that it be certified on multiple distributions. We need to work more on standardization. The Linux Standards Base is doing incredible work, but does anyone out there agree that there could is something more to be don? In a vendor neutral kind of way? Maybe you don’t agree with that. Why?

Sounds *somewhat* sane, right? Well it’s basically paraphrased from Jeff Jaffe’s blog over at Novell. So now it’s suddenly not worth pursuing or discussing at all?

Jaffe also calls for sacrifice, reducing fragmentation of Linux, and unification (standardization of ISV applications). But we should ignore them all because his company now has a newly created position for working with Microsoft? Maybe the LSB is doing great work, or maybe just good work. There’s now at least one major company out there that thinks more could be done with standards and certifications. Ignoring that opinion, and going along on the road to status quo feels like something to me. I can’t quite put my finger on it… oh wait, that’s right, it’s complacency.

Ultimately, we must remember that this was a keynote, meant to garner a few headlines and begin the brainstorming process–not solve any major problems. But to simply dismiss the message outright because you disagree with a company’s business plan seems kind of reckless to me. Don’t rest of your laurels just yet, Linux, there’s still much more to be done.

So another LinuxWorld Conference and Expo has come and gone — but what’s this?! Where’s the Linux?!

Sure, it was there in sessions on interoperability between Linux and Windows; and in Novell CEO Ron Hovsepian’s “can’t we all just get along” keynote; but overall this year was one to remember for all the things that weren’t 100% Linux-related.

Take the conference that happened concurrently with LinuxWorld, for example. The Next Generation Data Center conference was a treehugging lovefest with sessions devoted to “green computing” and power and cooling. Our brothers and sisters in arms over at SearchDataCenter.com had a field day talking with users and analyst sat the show about these and many other topics, including Site Editor Matt Stansberry. Matt flew down on a puddle jumper from Oregon to cover the show alongside myself and Sr. SearchEnterpriseLinux.com site editor Jan Stafford, and I’m happy to say he was able to basically commandeer our good friend Andy Kutz’s afternoon keynote on greening the data center. SearchDataCenter also managed to corner Andy after the session and get some thoughts up on YouTube, which was an interesting venture to say the least.

Then there was virtualization; a topic that dominated LinuxWorld’s of the past, sure, but seemed to really come a boil in San Francisco last week. At InternetNews.com, writer Sean Michael Kerner described it pretty well, leading off an article with, “If this week’s Linux World were to be summed up under a single theme, it would be penguins gone virtual.”

“Gone virtual” they most certainly did, with the virtualization track getting nice traffic from attendees and from Jan, who threw together a few cool videos on virtualization, Linux and everything else in between with her trusty (and inexpensive) Flip video recorder. A side note: That thing’s pretty good for YouTube quality video. One hour point and shoot recording time for $150? Yes please! /shameless promotion.

Bernard Golden, one of our expert contributors at both SEL and SearchServerVirtualization.com, penned a nice recap of the virtualization news from LinuxWorld that addressed the debate surrounding the Xen vs. KVM camps. Is fragmentation a good thing when we’re talking about virtualization technologies? Read Golden’s column and see if it answers your questions or creates new ones.

Of course, this is but a sampling of our LinuxWorld 2007 coverage. For more, I encourage you to head over to our LinuxWorld conference page and see what SEL, SSV and SearchDatacenter.com had to offer. The page is getting new content every day as we add some post-coverage content too, so check back often.

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In case you missed the Novell keynote with Ron Hovsepian, here’s a quick recap in video form. The theme? Accelerating the progress of Linux in the enterprise. You can catch our extended reporting on Hovsepian’s four vehicles for Linux acceleration over at SearchEnterpriseLinux.com

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The grand SearchEnterpriseLinux.com video experiment continues… This time I play the straight man to SearchDataCenter.com Site Editor Matt Stansberry’s … well, you’ll see.

In this video Matt and I look at all the free junk we’ve accumulated this week at LinuxWorld. Some of it’s pretty cool, and the rest is what it is. I come off kind of bored I think, but believe me, I’m not. THIS is new media at its finest.

Fun fact: Matt and I saw Barry Bonds hit his homer last night live from a “Frank Sinatra” bar in downtown San Francisco. Not quite as cool as seeing it live, but then again we’re really not that cool to begin with.

There wasn’t as much clapping as I thought there’d be. What I mean is; is when a user stepped up to the microphone to grill Novell CEO Ron Hovsepian about Microsoft, the GPLv3 and those infamous “coupons,” there wasn’t the zealous explosion of applause that I had become accustomed to over the years.

There was some, to be sure, but the response was most definitely more subdued than I thought it would be when Hovsepian opened his keynote with the revelation that he’d be taking questions from the packed hall. In fact, I at first thought maybe he’d have donned various pieces of plate mail as he spoke at length about Linux’s rise to dominance in the data center. This never came to be, and the navy sport coat remained in place; apparently all this executive needed to deflect the four — yes four — questions from a room that held hundreds of sitting and standing Linux geeks.

Anyway, the Q&A…

Q -With so many distros, all with multiple interfaces and APIs specific to each distro, how will you get your first point about standardizing ISVs done?

Ron Hovsepian: That is our tech challenge; we need to leverage the bodies that exist already. We don’t need to create new ones, but we need to take advantage of what the Linux Standard Base has already created. Most of the parts are here but the earnest effort to work with ISVs to get them to standardize on what they are comfortable with remains.

Q – Are you talking to other stakeholders inside of the distro side of things, as well as components?

A- We are having real time conversations now with different partners, and obviously this will be a vendor neutral application driven by people in this room. It is a critical success factor for entire market

Q- You stated that Novell will ship GPL3? Then how will Novell support MS coupons and customer s with GPL3 software when Microsoft has explicitly said that they will not support or endorse GPL3? (pause for applause — Jack)
A – Fundamentally what this relationship is, is that as a customer goes to redeem certificates the customer calls up Novell and redeems, and then with that certificate we will give them the most current release we are shipping to the market — including GPLv3 code. What Microsoft feels is they are not a legal party to the contract. In its simplest form it is a coupon that customers redeem and we’ll deliver to them latest distro on the shelf at that time.

Q – What is the official Novell position on OpenDocument?
A – Life is a series of steps. Novell’s position is that we absolutely want the OpenDocument format (ODF). That is our primary sort key. We support the Open XML translator, and we will talk with whatever group we can get to get things done. We must separate the religious argument and take whatever steps we can take to get customers over to the ODF approach. We support ODF’ that is first sort criteria. We also support OpenXML translators to get you to ODF over time.

More to come!

LinuxWorld vendor news

Wind River Linux announced today that Palm has selected Wind River’s consumer devices Linux platform for Palm’s next gen Palm Foleo device. Palm touts that the Foleo should out-ship and out-sell both Treo smartphones and Pilot PDAs.

Wind River Linux also announced that high-end audio/video electronic control systems designer AMX will use Wind River Linux for its Modero Touch Panel “remote controls.” The designer selected Wind River after a ROI analysis concluding in a forecasted $2 million savings over building its own version of Linux.

I don’t know about you, but I think that someone at Wind River deserves a nice raise.

For more information, visit windriver.com.

Today, EnterpriseDB announced general availability of EnterpriseDB Postgres, a professional-grade distribution of PostgreSQL database for Linux. EnterpriseDB also announced the Postgres Resource Center, an online community for enterprise application developers and DBAs.

Postgres Resource Center includes a forum, downloads, tech information and more.

Postgres includes SSL, pgCrypto (cryptography), libxml (XML support), TSearch2 (full text search), DBlink (database linking), pl/pgSQL, plTCL and pl/Perl, and ODBC and JDBC (database connectors). It also includes graphical administration and monitoring, replication, a geospatial information server and documentation, all in a one-click download.

You can see a live demo of Postgres in booth 1312 at LinuxWorld.

This morning Oracle-compatible database company EnterpriseDB announced the availability of GridSQL for its advanced server.  According to the press release, the software enables OLAP apps to use clusters of commodity servers while appearing as a single database to the applications.

Using grid technology allows app developers to create new apps and run them as if they were on a single server.

EnterpriseDB will be demonstrating GridSQL for its advanced server at booth 1302 at LinuxWorld.

For more information, check out the EnterpriseDB Web site.

LinuxWorld vendor news

Lieberman Software’s Random Password Manager is now Linux-friendly. The security and systems management company announced today that in addition to Windows Server 2003, Windows XP, Windows 2000, Windows NT and UNIX, Random Password Manager will run on Red Hat Linux.

The software connects to all systems on the network via secure connection, randomizes root passwords and verifies that the passwords are working.

You can get a free trial version of Random Password Manager from Lieberman Software’s website at www.liebsoft.com/index.cfm/products?id=270 .

The eval will work for 30 days on up to 10 systems.