Asset Aging

Data storage is not limitless. If you’ve read the previous article, you’ll know that expanding any storage has a ripple effect that requires increased redundancy, time to make backups, and increased off-site storage.

Ideally, you’ll want to archive old, rarely used assets to tape or disc, and delete them off your server. You could make copies of every asset, and keep them with every project, then archive old projects, but depending on the asset, this practice could wildly bloat your space consumption.

Identifying old assets by creation or modification date is easy, but how do you know which ones you frequently use? How do you sift through terabytes of data trying to find the treasures?

The short answer is databases.

At a previous job, we tracked all our digital assets through our document management system. When a user checked out a document they manually entered all the image IDs into the document management system. Our automation team scripted Adobe’s inDesign to place the image on the page and made a record in the database as to the document it was in and when it was used. When it came time to purge the server, another script would query the database, and based on the results would move old files to a special server partition that would be backed up to tape.

Even more important than asset archiving, is managing asset license expiration.

Example : You purchased several images from a stock photo library, but you’re only allowed to use them for a year. Violating the terms could cost the company big fines, or even a law suit.

Who manages the licenses? How do you prevent users from re-using old images?

The answer is the same, databases, but with the added complexity of making sure that old images are not restored from tape after the rights have expired. This boils down to making sure the IT department is well aware of the digital rights management issue, and to check with the license manager before restoring any assets from archive.

This aspect of asset management is something that is rarely discussed within the department, and can easily be forgotten after enough turn over within the group. How do you make sure everyone stays abreast of these issues? Stay tuned next time for, “The Value of the Department Wiki.”

Business Continuity : Data Redundancy

How long can you be away from your data? If your company has copies of data synced across multiple platforms, then it’s minutes rather than hours to get you back to your data.

RAID Redundancy

Every server now has RAID storage. Simply put, a RAID is a collection of disk drives that makes them appear and act as one disk. RAIDs come in many different varieties. For your file server, you’ll want RAID level 5 or 6. With that type of RAID, if one of the disks fail in the RAID the RAID can continue without interruption. To learn more about RAIDs you can read about it here. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_RAID_levels The ad agency invested in a 10 terabyte 16 bay RAID. The agency could easily see two drives dying at the same time, so they invested in a RAID that had two hot swappable drives. It would take three drives failing simultaneously to bring this RAID down.

Server Redundancy

What happens if the server goes down? What if the server going down destroyed the RAID? It could easily take a day to bring the server back up, even with the RAID in place, and the agency didn’t feel they had that time, so they bought a second server with the same RAID configuration as the first. Now it would require six drives to fail over two machines to take the system down. Every night the two servers were synced together, and no ad was more than twenty-four hours out of date.

Historical Redundancy

The agency needed to keep a history of all documents and images, and even though 10 terabytes seems like a lot, it did fill up. (Stay tuned for the article on asset aging.) The agency also needed off-site storage of their data, so they purchased a twenty-four bay, backup tape carousel. The entire server could be backed up on eight tapes over the weekend, with the other sixteen there for future backups and performing nightly incremental backups to data that had been changed during the week. All backups would be run against the backup server, after the sync with the main server was complete. This freed up the main server to serve files to the users as the tape backup continued long into the next day.Each week the full backup tapes were shipped off to an off-site data storage facility, to ensure access to the data if the building was to become unusable.

Location Redundancy

What if you facility is unavailable long term? The agency was able to work out a deal to use another office space, in another city within driving distance, and even secured a standing reservation with a hotel across the street to ensure that the employees would have a place to stay during the week rather than commuting. They purchased another server for that location, and the two locations were synced over a dedicated T1 line nightly.

Users as Redundancy

At the agency we had a proprietary, home grown document management system. Its great strength was that it, checked out the document, copied the documents locally for use, checked it back in to the server, and saved a version on the users machine. This reduced network and server traffic because the user wasn’t constantly saving back to the server, and it also created a history of the file that was not on the sever. If a file was ever deleted off of the server, it was easily retrieved from the history file of the last user.

In the End

Most businesses can’t afford a remote facility, but the other precautions we took is a minimum for any serious organization running their own file server. Many might scoff at purchasing a second server, but buying/repairing a server, installing it, and restoring files from tape might cost you a week of productivity. Before ruling out any redundancy situation, you should also calculate how much lost productivity will cost you.Ironically the one scenario we almost needed, but never planned for was, "We can’t get to our local files, and we’re too far away from the remote facility to get to the ads in time," and it could have been solved by a few laptops and an Internet connection.

Kinect™ vs. Move

Say what you want about the Nintendo Wii, it paved the way for motion controlled gaming, and I couldn’t be happier. For those who don’t know, motion controlled gaming is playing a game, not with button presses, but with movements that mimic the actions seen on screen.

Recently Sony’s PlayStation® and Microsoft®’s Xbox® got into the mix. Which one is right for you? If only it was that easy. Let’s break it down.

Xbox® Kinect™

The Good : Minimal contollers. The Kinect™ controller plugs into the USB interface of your Xbox®. It’s the only thing you’ll need to control Kinect™ games. No extra controllers to purchase, no batteries to buy, one item and you’re ready to go. The crazy thing about the Kinect™ is that it recognizes your whole body with almost no calibration. Feet, hands, and head are all recognized just by standing in front of the camera.

The Bad : Xbox® Kinect™ has a definite lag, and doesn’t interpret every move correctly. I found myself kicking repeatedly in Kinect™ Sports Soccer before it registered my movements. Kinect™ also recommends a 6’-10’ distance from your television. If you live in a major metropolis your limited floor space might bump you out from using the Kinect™. Kinect™ is also limited to “waving” style games, no shooters, guitar hero, or delicate movements here.

Why you should get this : If you want to get some exercise and bust a sweat NOBODY does it better than Xbox® Kinect™.

PlayStation® Move

The Good : True one to one movement. The buzz term “one to one,” refers to the exact replication of movement from what you do, to what appears on screen. The PlayStation® Move is everything the Wii promised.

The Bad : If you want two people playing at once, the maximum for simultaneous play, you’ll have to buy two move controllers ($50/each) and the PlayStation® Eye ($35), and possibly additional Navigation Controllers if you’re looking for more “hardcore” gaming options. The additional dollars, plus the management of keeping them all charged can cost you a lot of time and money. Plus the move only registers your hands, so soccer and dodgeball are right out. Be very careful in choosing a game for this platform. Many developers are not as solid as writing for the Move, so each title should be scrutinized before purchasing.

Why you should get this : Gaming should be about real life skills, not about button combos and power ups. If that’s your mantra, then this is the system for you.

In the end
I’ve been playing the PlayStation® for fun and Xbox® for exercise, but bottom line I recommend them both. If you’re like me you’re a video game addict from the 70s and need to snatch up all that these two platforms have to offer.

The internet is not forever.

I'd like to say that there is some cosmic reason why we think things we see on the internet will always be there. Something about our concept of object permanence or maybe how a magazine is printed, it's real and tangible so we just think the internet applies to the same rules. But I think it's just out of laziness. The same laziness that prevents us from backing up our computers is the same laziness that keeps us from saving that recipe that we saw online. Here are the most common scenarios that demonstrates the fleeting fancy of the web.

Free on the web

The craziest thing I've seen people do is put their precious thoughts and memories into free online sites expecting them to always be there. I've seen blog sites throw away old posts and photo sites deleting old pictures. There's nothing in any free site's policy that says they need to keep your uploaded assets there forever. All that storage on their end costs money and in bad economic times they might start pruning your files to cut costs. The next time you write a blog post, write it in Word, Pages, or Note Pad, save it on your computer and then copy and paste it to the web.

Mobility

Mobile phones are probably the most unstable of any computing environments. Most people think that they're backing up their phone by synchronizing it to the internet. You should still synchronize any mobile device to your home computer. The most shocking example of why you should do this was when the T-Mobile phone "Sidekick" went to synchronize itself to the web, and a glitch in the system wiped out all the data on the phones. All the major phone providers provide software to backup your phones to the desktop.

Unavailable

It's 5:00, they're coming at 7:00, you click on the bookmark for that dish you were going to make tonight, and the site is down for maintenance until tomorrow. Back to square one and another trip to the grocery store.

It doesn't do that

We make the mistake thinking that the makers of internet applications think like we do. So what happens when you want to retrieve an old post that your friend made on Facebook? I search my old emails for information all the time, but most social networking sites aren't built around the idea of recalling old posts that contained information you didn't need...until right...now.
If it's important to you, keep a copy on your computer. Hard drives are huge, so you won't run out of space, and every major platform has an indexing system that will pull up any file quickly.

What Everyone, Including Microsoft, Missed About the Courier

Microsoft Courier from aswin indraprastha on Vimeo.

The Microsoft Courier was hinted at and cancelled with most people never noticing. Sadly I don't think even Microsoft knew what they had. To the casual observer it was a tablet prototype, but its true innovation was never about the dual screens, the camera, or the drag and drop environment, it was about the workflow. When I say workflow, I don't mean how you work at work, but how you work with your data.

The Past

For years we have been stuck in a files and folder workflow, where each piece of data is put into a folder, as if there is only one way to think about it. This was fine before all aspects of our lives were converted to data. Our data now is not a series of stand alone events, but a complex fabric of interrelated information that demands a new paradigm (that's right I said it) be entered. A new way of thinking that relates all aspects of our data to one another. The Microsoft Courier was the first attempt at that new way of thinking.

What they missed

In all of the videos demoing the Courier, you see a woman using the Courier for her freelance design job. What’s impressive about the video is how all of those items that she compiles for her project aren’t a series of files stored in a folder, but are items that live in their own space, and are linked to the project and presumably a thousand other projects in the future. Microsoft should have picked a more common scenario for their videos that everyone could relate to. For instance, let’s say you go on vacation and take pictures. You get back home and download your pictures to your computer. In the current file/folder model you have to put them in one place on your hard drive. What folder do you put them in? How do you know who’s in the pictures? What’s the name of the hotel you stayed at in the picture? You can find out this information, but you’ll need to check four or five different programs to do so. In the Courier model, you download the pictures to your computer, you associate those pictures with the events on your calendar, in the calendar events is your complete itinerary of your trip (e.g. who from your contacts list was on the trip, where you stayed, the dates you were there) and now all of that information is linked together and can easily be found from any number of ways. All of these relationships are built using the assets that are already on your computer. You don’t need to create a series of custom tags because they all exist as entries in other programs.

Why it was cancelled

No one knows why the Courier project was canceled. There was a theory that this was impossible to do. There are some crazy bells and whistles shown in the video, but at its heart this is just a relational database. Every blog, forum, Facebook post is just an entry into a relational database, and it's something that computers have been doing easily and for a long time. I’d rather think that it was canceled because they couldn't figure out how to translate the experience to another platform. A big part of the Courier was sharing your projects with other people and fostering an open collaborative process. If the other people are not on the Courier OS what does the experience look like to them? Is it a series of emails about project updates? Is it a Courier desktop emulator that you run on your XP/Linux/OS X desktop?

Hope for the future

This is what Windows mobile should be. I still have no answer for replicating the experience on other platforms, but maybe the shared component is less important in a phone. If you married the Courier OS with strong XBOX 360 integration, you could deliver a defining new experience for phone users. Right now Microsoft needs something bold to get anyone to care about a Microsoft phone.

Your Hard Drive Will CRASH!

It's not a matter of if but a matter of when. So what can you do. To avoid data loss from a hard disk crash I'm personally endorsing Carbonite. It's a great system that automatically backs up your files over the internet to your own secure location. What I like about carbonite over other services is: unlimited space, clear indication about what is backed up and what isn't, it's all automatic. The big negative to the service is how to restore your data after a crash. I advise, after you get your machine up and running again, call their service department and they'll walk you through getting your files back. Don't try it on your own.

I know most people are thinking, “I'm not gonna pay $55/year per computer, I'll just spend $80 on a USB hard drive and that'll be fine.” USB hard drives have the same problems that the hard drive in your computer has. They crash. USB drives are especially problematic because they are frequently moved around, increasing the chance for failure. A service like carbonite has the added bonus of being automatic and out of your house. If anything happens to your house or to that USB drive all your data is gone. Your income taxes that you filed electronically, your photos, all your documents that you never got around to putting on google docs, gone. If you really want to have a home solution I would recommend a Network Attached Storage unit.

NAS are very simple file servers. I prefer the one made by QNAP because it can also work as a web server, ftp server and media server. NAS are great because they attach to your home network, you leave them on all the time, you never need to move it from computer to computer, and any computer in your house can get to it, including your networked XBOX or PlayStation 3. If you plan to back up your files to a NAS make sure you get one that has at least two hard drives in it that are mirrored in a RAID 1 configuration for two drives, or a RAID 5 configuration if you have four or more drives. I realize all these terms sound scary, but the great thing about the QNAP is it's very easy to setup.

None of these options are as cheap or as fast as the portable USB hard drive, but they are vastly more reliable, and definitely cheaper than a data recovery service. What you really need to ask yourself is, “How much is my data worth to me?”

I'll be posting every now and then to remind you to back up your data. Here's to safe computing.

Laptops

The good news is any new laptop you buy these days will be fast enough and have enough room for RAM to do email, web, and Word. The bad news is there’s many new things to consider before buying a laptop.

Size
Even though a 17” screen is preferable to watch a movie on, whether it’s trains or planes, no seat back is far enough away to allow you to open your 17” laptop comfortably.*

Weight
You’ll have to dig through the stats to find it, but when “weighing” the options on which laptop to buy, weight is just as important as any criterium if you’re planning on commuting with your computer.**

Video Out
If you envision yourself hooking your laptop up to your TV or external monitor, make sure to get one with a digital video out. This will limit your laptop choice dramatically, as most manufacturers still don’t offer this, but the difference is very noticeable.

DVD burner?
With the advent of YouTube the need for this has decreased, but you may consider it if you need to share large amounts of data with friends.

Used? Refurbished?
I’ve never tried the refurbished route, but I would never buy a used laptop. You don’t really know what kind of abuse the laptop has suffered, and any repair needed to the body or the screen will be very expensive.

Netbooks?
I am currently writing this on my 10” netbook running the Ubuntu flavor of Linux. Coming in at just over $220 it’s a great travel laptop. I got mine running Linux because it starts up faster, it came pre-installed with Open Office and a web browser, and Linux is free. If you want to pay more you can get the same model running Windows.

The Bottom Line
Figure out what you need and don’t pay more for things you don’t. Always buy trusted brand names. Shop around. There are a bunch of deal sights out there that are always offering coupons and deals on products, like this one : Deal News

* I’m sure this isn’t true if you’re sitting in first class, but this website is for the average computer uer.
**Pun intended.