Scripting
It's time for a
short pop quiz: Automating
tasks can save
time and money. True or False? I've taken the
time to learn
how to write
scripts that automate tasks.
True or False?
If you're like most systems administrators, your answers are
True and False, respectively. Let's face it—the benefits of scripting are undeniable, but learning the craft isn't exactly
easy. It takes time and practice. Fortunately, there are automation products available to do the scripting for you. One of
the best products I've encountered is Network Automation's
AutoMate 6.0. Using its drag-and-drop task-building capability, you can automate virtually any task in any business process without writing any code. AutoMate is also scheduling
software, so you're able to not only automate tasks but also
to configure them to run according to a schedule or when an
event-based trigger (e.g., a Windows event log entry or an
exceeded system threshold) occurs.
The fact that AutoMate has both automation and scheduling capabilities is a main reason why the University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer
Center in Houston decided to purchase the product five years ago. "Up until the time
we got AutoMate, we had not found a tool that did both automation and scheduling
within a single application," says Juan O. Garcia, the center's systems analyst. "Aside
from that, most of the automation tools we looked into contained only basic functionality. AutoMate went above and beyond that by sending notifications about failures
and/or successes. It also has some neat error-handling options." The only feature
Garcia wishes the product would include is Web deployment capabilities.
Garcia notes that the Anderson Cancer Center uses AutoMate to automate numerous FTP, data-manipulation, and application tasks. The center automates thousands
of file and data transfers (via FTP) that occur among the center's critical nurse-staffing, attendance, and HR systems. The center also automates data-manipulation tasks.
"Here at Anderson, we have lots of data that comes out of systems, so there's a lot of
data manipulation that we have to do. Because it's repetitive work, we use AutoMate
to clean up and sort the data." The application tasks that the center automates are
the kind of tasks you'd automate with macros but at a more sophisticated level.
Garcia estimates the Anderson
Cancer Center is enjoying an annual
full-time equivalent (FTE) savings
ranging from 0.5 to 0.8, depending on the particular system AutoMate is
being implemented on. (The highest
FTE a product can have is 1.0, which
means it's equivalent to a full-time
worker.) Perhaps more important, having this product offers peace of mind.
"Although the IT staff is basically 8 to
5, the health care staff works 24x7, so
it's important for us to have software
that automatically handles errors and
notifies IT staff of any problems,"
explains Garcia.
—Karen Bemowski
Security
In a year in which data leakage was a hot topic and stories about companies losing control of thousands of customer records became a staple of the nightly news, security vendors rose to the challenge, offering encryption and other protection solutions for data that's stored and accessed within the enterprise as well as traveling
with an increasingly mobile workforce. A data encryption solution for USB drives,
RedCannon's KeyPoint solution, is my Editor's Best choice in security.
As John Jeffries, RedCannon Security vice president of marketing, puts it, "USB
drives are in the enterprise and out of control." KeyPoint's value proposition is to
manage these devices so that they continue to be a convenient vehicle for carrying corporate information but don't become a security threat. KeyPoint can harness
a USB drive and turn it into a thin client that performs health checks on the PC it's
plugged into, strongly authenticates the user to the corporate network (by using RSA
one-time passwords), establishes a Juniper VPN connection, and even lets the user
access applications via a corporate Citrix server. These secure remote-access features make KeyPoint stand out in a crowded field of USB drive encryption solutions.
However, KeyPoint's main function is to centralize control over all the USB drives in your organization. The KeyPoint Alchemy server appliance can provision and manage drives from almost any manufacturer, so you can leverage drives that you might already have purchased. You can set
policies to encrypt any data that's copied to drives and to lock out or destroy the data on drives that are lost or stolen. Other differentiators, according to Jeffries, are that KeyPoint Alchemy can push policies and documents out to the drives and can monitor
any access of a drive (even when the drive is offline) and report it back to the Alchemy server. Thus you have a complete auditable
record of the activity on a drive if it's temporarily misplaced and so can determine what action to take if it's subsequently recovered.
—Renee Munshi
Storage
If you own or work in a small-to-midsized
business (SMB), you know that choosing and managing any type of storage technology—whether DAS, SAN, or NAS—can be
difficult. Additionally, you likely have a limited
staff and resources at your disposal. My pain
reliever for your storage headache is StoreVault S500. This product is an all-in-one
storage solution, with NAS and SAN support
out of the box and ranging in capacity from
1TB to 6TB. StoreVault is a division of Network Appliance (NetApp) devoted entirely to
SMBs. StoreVault's General Manager Sajai
Krishnan explains, "NetApp created StoreVault for IT generalists—people who work on
all aspects of IT. And because we've typically
focused on enterprise customers, almost
ninety percent of the StoreVault division
staff was brought from the outside to help
better serve our new customers."
I spoke with StoreVault customer
Gary Hensel, director of IT for FES Systems, about his reasons for purchasing
StoreVault S500. Gary told me that one
of the reasons FES Systems purchased
the product was because StoreVault is
part of NetApp. Gary says, "NetApp is a great brand and is very highly respected.
NetApp has always been associated with
the higher-end market, so when they create a division strictly for SMBs, you take
notice. In fact, we already had a storage
solution on order from another vendor but
cancelled when we heard about StoreVault." Gary also pointed to the product's
iSCSI support, which lets him connect
StoreVault S500 directly to his network,
turning it into its own file server. He
also likes the product because it's very
affordable, starting at just $6,000. Along
with the favorable pricing, the product's
multiple configurations really help Gary
configure the unit to his business needs.
For example, StoreVault S500 supports
as many as 12 disk drives—right now, FES
Systems is using 7 of them.
StoreVault S500's data management
features are worthy of mention. The solution comes equipped with the StoreVault
Manager, which provides volume management, snapshot scheduling, and capacity
allocation. (For more details about StoreVault S500, see John Green's comprehensive product review in the June 2007
issue, InstantDoc ID 95847.)
—Blake Eno
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