RunAs Radio

How does data analytics fit into your business intelligence strategy? While at Ignite in Atlanta, Richard sat down with Jen Stirrup to discuss her experiences helping companies really take advantage of the data they have to understand how their businesses are doing, and what they could be doing better. The conversation starts out with a discussion on data warehousing, which is still valuable in this day and age. Jen talks about how the ETL process sometimes "shaved off the corners" of important data, and that new data analytics strategies are better at avoiding that behaviour. The discussion also turns to R and the statistical analysis approaches available today to really understand data. It's a brave new data world!

Holy smokes, 500 episodes! Richard brings in Carl Franklin to do hosting duties while guest stars on his own show - taking a look at the changes to the IT landscape in the past nearly 10 years. Back in April 2007, Vista was brand new (and not doing well), PowerShell was new also, Cloud was just starting out and DevOps didn't even really exist. 64 bit computing was something that was going to be important and smartphones were just starting to take off. Amazing what can happen in 500 shows... and now on to the next 500!

How granular can mobile application management be? Richard talks to Mike Crowley about the Microsoft Enterprise Mobility Suite, and it's ability to allow Bring-Your-Own-Device to work effectively without taking over the device. Mike focuses in on three key aspects in the suite, starting with identity - being able to identify users through Azure Active Directory. From there, the next aspect is application management, controlling what capabilities certain applications have on the device. And finally, there is document rights management so that you can protect docs on the device. This works, check it out!

What can App Service do for you? While at Ignite in Atlanta, Richard sat down with Jeremy Thake to talk about his new role with the Azure team, working with App Service. The conversation starts out focused on the truth that App Service is for operations folks, not developers. App Service is a set of tools for managing applications in the cloud effectively, being able to measure their health, scale instances, restart, reconfigure, and so on. Jeremy also talks about the role App Service takes in deploying your cloud applications at scale for testing and pre-production reasons, as well as out in the production space. No matter how you use Azure, App Service can help!

Is your IT group in the dark? Richard chats with Mattias Karlsson about his experiences as a consultant coming into companies where IT really doesn't know how well their infrastructure is operating - place where the mantra is "if no one is complaining, we're fine." But life can be better than that! Mattias talks about deploying an instrumentation solution like PRTG to start getting insight on whether or not applications and infrastructure are healthy and in use. You can't get better if you don't know what is going well and what isn't, so you need to do measurements. It starts out knowing what normal looks like, and then trying to do better. You need instrumentation to know if you're improving!

How do Small Business Server and Windows 10 get along? Richard chats with Susan Bradley about her experiences continuing to support Small Business Server and Server Essentials even though the products aren't available for the latest builds of Windows Server. There are some challenges working with Windows 10 as security and access rules continue to evolve. The conversation also digs into the move to the cloud for small businesses - where it works for an organization, there are some significant advantages, but it isn't always an option. And who knows what will happen with Server 2016!

IPv6 continues to gain traction! Richard talks to Ed Horley about the progress of IPv6, including the recent announcement by Microsoft at the Ignite conference in Atlanta that virtually all of Azure would now support IPv6. That's a lot of new IPv6 traffic added to the internet at large! Ed discusses the big penetration points of IPv6, including mobile networks (there are a lot of smartphones out there), some consumer ISPs and now the public cloud. Where is IPv6 not happening much? Big enterprises. Adoption in some countries (including the US) are well past 25% - IPv6 is becoming mainstream!

Ready to move your PBX to the cloud? Richard chats with Avrohom Gottheil about this fundamental shift in telephony. Once upon a time there were analog phone systems, then everything went digital. But now, the location of your phones and phone system is almost irrelevant! Avrohom talks about being able to create unified communications solutions where email, telephony and presence all work together. But how do you get past your old PBX approach? It takes new phones, a careful look at your networking and thinking through what's possible when location and connectivity aren't tied together.

Have you heard about Azure Stack? While at Ignite in Atlanta, Richard sat down with Jeffrey Snover to discuss the Azure Stack announcements. Azure Stack is all about bringing Azure architecture to your data center, or the data center of your preferred service provider. The concept is more about architecture than implementation, although as Jeffrey explains, you won't be running Azure Stack on your existing hardware. The hardware and configuration requirements for Azure Stack are very specific, look at this as more of a partnership with Microsoft doing a fair bit to maintain your new Azure Stack infrastructure - perhaps even more than you do! This is a new kind of on-premises solution and bears careful study!

If you could make storage super fast, how much better would things be? Richard chats with Alan Sugano about his discovery of Simplivity, a card added on to certain Dell, Lenovo and Cisco storage arrays to do inline de-duplication so fast that the iOPs load drops massively. And how many problems does that solve? Alan talks about how improving storage performance changed the way he thinks about hyperconvergence. Different kinds of VMs and roles living together on these high-performance devices makes your private cloud solution so much simpler!