Social-Point

SharePoint in the Cloud: SharePointConnections

JeffDeVerter — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 13:40:24 +0000

I will be presenting at SharePointConnections in Las Vegas next week in a session called “Demystifying SharePoint in the Cloud”. My session is Wednesday 3/28 at 2:30.

In this session I’ll be helping to put some definition around:

What is “the Cloud”
What it means to have “SharePoint in the Cloud”
When it’s appropriate to put data in the Cloud

I’ll also be presenting a “decision matrix” that helps to provide some context around when it’s appropriate to used cloud-based technologies.

Hope to see you there!

Today is a Great Day

JeffDeVerter — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 18:57:52 +0000

Today (which is a great day) you may have read the press release from Rackspace, an article in the Wall Street Journal, or saw a twitter from a friend – but today Rackspace announced that we have purchased SharePoint911. I can’t tell you how thrilled I am about this announcement!

Nearly 4 years ago I launched Rackspace’s SharePoint Hosting service, which is built on Rackspace’s Fanatical Support ™. This was such a successful product for us that we began looking for ways to not only be the best SharePoint Hosting company – but the best SharePoint company. That has quest lead us to SharePoint911 and the team that Shane Young has gathered. You see when Rackspace looks for an acquisition – we never look to capture market–share but acquire talent; and that’s what we’ve done here. These guys & girls rock!

I am pleased to welcome the SharePoint911 team to Rackspace and to our journey. The collective horsepower of our teams standing atop the worlds largest (and greatest) hosting company is awesome! But more than that – I am thrilled to be on this journey with people I’m happy to call friends. Each individual voluntarily made the decision to join the team. To each of you new “Rackers”, I’m humbled that you’ve come to Rackspace – Welcome!

To the test of the world – how can we serve you! (In our datacenter…. or yours… but more on that later.)

Here are a few links to what some of the team has posted about the event:

SharePoint in the Cloud

JeffDeVerter — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 12:21:17 +0000

This is a quick post to let you know about a new resource, it’s called “SharePoint in the Cloud“. Over at Rackspace we have created a Linkedin Group to have a discussion around all things “SharePoint in the Cloud“.

While this is a new group, I’d encourage you to go over and subscribe – we’ve got some very interesting things planned for the group and the discussions we’d like to have. But first…it takes group members – so if you find this topic interesting – go sign-up and we can get the conversation started!

Content Delivery Networks and SharePoint

JeffDeVerter — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 15:31:22 +0000

Content Delivery Networks and SharePoint

In the previous post I covered why someone would need to deal with global SharePoint and the 4 different options that exist to help SharePoint work over long distances. As a reminder, they are:

Shorten the distance by using a more efficient network (CDN)
Shorten the distance by staging SharePoint servers closer to the users
Shorten the distance for some of the content by putting some of the larger content closer to the users
Increase the efficiency of delivering the content from SharePoint by combing the many packets into a few packets – and compressing as much as possible

In this post I’d like talk about Content Delivery Networks. The goal of a CDN is to either

Shorten the distance between the servers and the users by utilizing a more efficient network
Stage content from your sites in regional points of presence (POP) in the CDN

Now different CDN providers have their own “secret sauce” that they can add to the picture to help with performance with either all traffic or with some solution specific traffic. Some CDN providers (like Akamai) will even create guarantees on the quality, speed, reliability, and availability of the delivery of your content. the challenge with some providers is that they have issues when delivering content that requires NTLM authentication (aka SharePoint). This doesn’t mean that it can’t work with SharePoint – they just can’t work with SharePoint in certain use cases. For instance – a CDN with NTLM issues would be fine for a public facing web-site but would fail when trying to us it to accelerate your Intranet. There is a way to work around this – but requires that your site be configured with Forms Based Authentication (or with basic authentication). Now this creates some usability “challenges”. You will need to decide if those will impact you.

As CDN providers deliver traffic – they are are also caching some of this content in POPs along the way. The result is that on the second request for the same content – the distance to deliver it is dramatically shortened.

So by a combination of a more efficient network and caching content along the way – CDN’s have the ability to speed web sites (and SharePoint sites) up for users who are far from the source servers. This speed does come at a technical cost depending on any authentication requires as well as a financial cost.

Here are few CDN providers that come to mind:

A Gartner Analyst I’ve met with while she was being brief by Rackspace is Lydia Leong. Here is a post where she talks about research she is doing in this space. If you’d like to get an analysts perspective on the key players, I’d recommend her.

Lastly – it is possible for you to manually handle the staging of content in a CDN while leaving the delivery of the SharePoint experience alone. Take the scenario where your site has a lot of very large graphic or media files that need to be delivered to your users around the globe. When you publish these items to SharePoint – first stage them in a CDN (like Rackspace CloudFiles) and publish the URL for those assets to SharePoint – and not the assets themselves. This helps with the end user experience. This technique doesn’t work with content that is collaborative in nature – that content has to remain in SharePoint for SharePoint to manage the experience. But for the static content that doesn’t change frequently – it is a good solution.

In the next post I’ll start to deal with staging SharePoint servers closer to your users.

Global SharePoint Deployment – the “Why”

JeffDeVerter — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 14:37:41 +0000

Alright – Let’s talk “Global SharePoint Deployments”. When setting out to create a global SharePoint deployment it’s important to understand what the drivers that push an organization to do this.

The symptom they are either trying to fix or prevent is a slow user experience within SharePoint. This begs the question, “why does distance impact the viewing of WEB Sites – more specifically, SharePoint Sites?“ The answer is one word: Physics. It takes time and effort to travel thousands of miles even when you are just a stream of electrons. This is compounded by the number of routers that the data needs to pass though. Think of each router as a stop light on a road which helps to keep people safe, but adds time to your trip. We call this latency when we talk about the addition of time to a trip with a packet of data. The routing protocols used on the Internet do a pretty good job of choosing the shortest path for your data to travel – but routers still exist along the way.

The last variable that adds time to the trip is “size of the road” or network path along the way to the destination. This is compounded by the amount of traffic in those pipes at the time your data is passing through them. For instance, Los Angeles has a massive highway system – but traffic still moves slowly at rush hour.

So here are the variable that can make a site fell “slow”:

Distance to be traveled
Number of routers along the way
Size and congestion of the pipes

Ultimately, there isn’t anything you can do about any of the three items listed above. But there are ways to increase the performance of your SharePoint site when your users are “far” away from the SharePoint site.

Before I go into the ways to increase that performance, I think it’s important to talk about when distance actually becomes and issue. Disclaimer: what I’m about to share is from my personal experience and not from a detailed scientific study. While a site will perform better by employing any of the items I’ll talk about later – the impact will be much less. Think of it this way – I’m not going to get to work all that much faster if I drive a Ferrari to work because there isn’t that much distance to travel. Now if I’m driving from Texas to Colorado – the Ferrari will make a huge difference.

One last piece of information – SharePoint sites are much more susceptible to issues with distance. The reason for this is even the most basic Team Site in SharePoint has about 50-60 packets of data that needs to transported to the user from the server. This matters… a lot. Think about moving from one house to another – using a fleet of trucks to transport your belonging where you could only put one item in each truck. This would take forever. Every truck has to arrive at the destination before your home is whole again. In the same way, all the packets of SharePoint data has to arrive before the user “gets” the web page. In 2 words: distance sucks… the life out of SharePoint.

So how do we make it better? There are 4 options that can be used on their own or together:

Shorten the distance by using a more efficient network (CDN)
Shorten the distance by staging SharePoint servers closer to the users
Shorten the distance for some of the content by putting some of the larger content closer to the users
Increase the efficiency of delivering the content from SharePoint by combing the many packets into a few packets – and compressing as much as possible

In the next post, I’ll dig into these 4 items, how they work, and the complexity this adds to your solution.

Geographical SharePoint Redundancy

JeffDeVerter — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 04:48:02 +0000

Working for Rackspace I have had the ability to architect some truly BIG SharePoint farms. One thing to realize along the way is that a lot of people lead with the need for very large, very geographically dispersed farms – but the reality is that not many companies have the appetite for the financial and complexity bill that comes with such a farm. So I thought I start a series on “Geographically Dispersed SharePoint Farms” to help demystify when such a farm is warranted and the options that exist along the way.

Why Geographically Dispersed Farms:
There are two primary reasons companies come to me

A Company perceives this as the only way to achieve Disaster Recovery (DR) capabilities.
Their users are located in more than one central location far away from the SharePoint Datacenter.

Let’s first take on DR. In order for a company to attempt to solve for DR they first have to define what DR means to them. Should DR mean “No single point of failure in the SharePoint Farm”, then we can easily solve for that by making sure that every role in the SharePoint farm is duplicated. I would consider this a minimum shopping list for a truly redundant farm:

2 Routers
2 Load Balancers
2 Web Front End Servers (WFE’s)
Clustered SQL
Shared Storage

One thing to note is that if you are using visualization technology like Hyper-V or VMware, the roles of the Hypervisor need to be redundant as well.

Now if the customer needs to plan for situation where the Datacenter becomes unavailable, then it is time to plan for at least one more DC with a SharePoint farm inside to be able to pick up the traffic. You must realize though, that anytime you want to replicate SharePoint content and services to another DC, you are adding an exponential level of complexity and cost. The question I ask my customers is this:

“Do you need SharePoint back up and available in 3 hours, 30 minutes, or 30 seconds”. Invariably, they say: “oh not that fast, inside of 24 hours is fine”. (Here is where Rackspace often wins – they have some amazing SLA’s). Also, if time is not a requirement – but recovery is the requirement – then what you need is a solid backup/recovery strategy mixed with some off-site storage.

Not many companies have the appetite for the work or the bill that comes with multiple farms for the purpose of DR. In light of that – they build a farm with plenty of redundancy and in the end – are always on. Now should they chose multiple DC’s – specialized software is required. here are some good choices:

Now the second half of the conversation is dealing with the scenario where the company has users who are geographically far away from the SharePoint server. What I’ll be answering in tomorrow’s post is these questions:

Why does distance matter?
At what distance does it start to matter?
What are the techniques available to increase user experience when the users are far away.

SharePoint Conference 2011

JeffDeVerter — Fri, 07 Oct 2011 18:15:50 +0000

Well the SharePoint Conference 2011 is over and everyone is either home or on their way home. I’ve debated on what content should go in this post and have come to the conclusion that I’d like to take a little different path. I’d like to say “So WHAT!”.

I’m not trying to be rude – but simply asking the question – “What will be different now that I’ve been to this conference?”. My accomplishements were as follows:

Fantastic strategic meetings with Microsoft on how our company interfaces with them in the future. The result of these meetings will have long reaching “product decisions” at Rackspace.
I met some great people who have the potential to be “Great Rackers” (that’s what we call Rackspace employees). So I had some great interviews that will ultimately enable us to build out an even better team to serve our customers. You probably already realized that I work for Rackspace Hosting. What you may not have realized is that our core product is “Customer Service” – which is enabled via our Hosting business.
We met several pre-customers who see the value in what Rackspace can bring to their company. I love helping people.
I reconnected with some good friends and made some new ones. This is what “moves the needle” for me. At then end of the day (or even farther off from that) it’s the people and the relationships we build along the way. SharePoint will someday fade away (shocker)… but I’ll still be friends with Shane, Nicola, Laura, Heather, Eric, John, Randy, Katy, Scott, Matthew, Ted, Andrew, Chris, Larry, Jeneen, Susan, Rob, Fitz, Rick, Marcy, Erica, Per, and many more.

So – Take what you’ve learned and the relationships you made/deepened… and make a difference!

Randy Drisgill: SharePoint Conference 2011

JeffDeVerter — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 17:37:57 +0000

SharePoint MVP Randy Drisgill (@Drisgill) of SharePoint911 talks briefly about 2 of his sessions coming up this week here at the SharePoint Conference 2011.

We are but shadows

JeffDeVerter — Sat, 30 Jul 2011 22:21:13 +0000

Michelle had me take this pic as we walked home tonight from The Prince Arthur – our neighborhood Pub.

That’s right – after six weeks living and working in England we can say we have a neighborhood pub that we call our own.

We’ve gotten to know Windsor as “locals” while I have worked here. We have our grocery, our Larder, our cleaners, our Church and our pub. I have never lived 6 weeks that have evaporated as quickly as these have. What a wonderful time we have had. My mind and my camera are full of fantastic memories and the satisfaction of a job well done.

The bitter sweet part is – tomorrow we leave. We are already shadows here.

What I keep telling Michelle and the boys is though it is sad to leave – we get to leave together.

Don’t get me wrong – We are all excited to get home and back to our life in San Antonio – it just feels – bitter sweet.

I wonder if this is what it will feel like when we go home after this life is finished – or – will we just be glad to be home.

Peace.

So the “Good-byes” begin…

JeffDeVerter — Fri, 29 Jul 2011 13:09:42 +0000

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[This is a post I published at work today...]

I have been over here in the UK launching Rackspace’s SharePoint support for the past 6 weeks and today is my last day here in the office. As a token of the team’s appreciation they bestowed upon me today a very nice engraved pewter cup:

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Working with the Rackers here in the UK has been an honor and a pleasure. It was great to see some familiar faces (Taylor Rhodes) and some that I didn’t expect to see (Jeff Adams). It is with mixed emotions that I leave here today but I am very anxious to get back to my San Antonio Racker team (and my family, house, dogs, fish, grill…) and re-engage there.

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The SharePoint product Rackspace is a new product now – a truly global product – and the team will have to go through an adjustment period as we all adjust to the new demands that places on us. Suffice it to say – we will strive to ensure we maintain our high NPS, love for the product, love for the customers, and love of the Rack.

So tonight I will raise a cup (the very cup you see in this picture) filled with an English Bitter and toast the team (both US and UK) who made this trip a success…

Cheers ya’ll!