RunAs Radio

Bhargav is back! Richard and Greg talk to Bhargav Shukla about the High Availability features of Exchange 2010. Bhargav digs into the substantial changes in the high availability and "mailbox resiliency" capabilities in Exchange, including the idea that you can today build a web-farm-like Exchange architecture with inexpensive hardware.

Richard and Greg talk to Sumeet Bansal and Chris Featherstone about using solid state drives in the enterprise. SSDs have penetrated deeply into the workstation and laptop market, but are they robust enough to handle enterprise class workloads? Sumeet and Chris also focus on whether the traditional hard drive interfaces of SAS and SATA make sense for the ultra-low latency performance of SSDs.

Richard and Greg talk to Bhargav Shukla of Microsoft's Premier Field Engineering. Bhargav digs into the features of the newly released Exchange 2010 and why businesses still running Exchange 2003 should jump right to the latest version and skip 2007 entirely. For more info on Exchange 2010, check out http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/exchange/default.aspx and http://msexchangeteam.com/.

Richard and Greg talk to Clint Huffman from Microsoft's Premier Field Engineering (PFE) about the new version of Performance Analysis of Logs (PAL). PAL is available on CodePlex at http://pal.codeplex.com. It's job is to help you analyze performance monitor logs for various Microsoft applications and identify out-of-normal values. PAL solves the key problem of Performance Monitor - identifying what numbers are good, what numbers are bad, and what numbers are ugly. Check out Clint's blog at http://blogs.technet.com/clinth.

Richard and Greg talk to Susan Bradley, the SBS Diva, about her other life - patching servers. Susan digs into Windows Server Update Services (WSUS), including what it updates and what it doesn't (check out http://support.microsoft.com/kb/894199 for more info), as well as some third party tools for patching. WSUS lets administrators centralize patching of servers and workstations, so that your machines don't all go fetching the same patches. It also provides means to control what patches get installed and what don't. Susan also points us to http://www.patchmanagement.org/ for access to listservs about WSUS and patch management in general.

Richard and Greg talk to Andy Malone about the challenges of social networking for the enterprise. It's not enough just to cut your users off from social networking at the company - you need to protect the organization from impersonation. Andy digs into what the logical balance of exposure on social networking looks like.

Richard and Greg talk to Sahil Malik on what's coming in Sharepoint 2010. Sahil has been working with Sharepoint 2010 for more than a year, and the NDAs have finally been lifted, letting him talk about the cool new features of 2010 that will help the IT Pro.

Simon Goldstein comes back to the show to talk to Richard and Greg about what IT professionals need to know when being audited. Whether you're dealing with SOX, HIPAA, PCI or any other kind of IT audit, Simon digs into what you should be doing before, during and after an audit.

Richard and Greg talk to Lara Rubbelke about the Enterprise Policy Management Framework (EPM). EPM is a freely downloadable framework for managing detailed policies around SQL Server 2008, 2005 and 2000. You can get EPM at http://www.codeplex.com/EPMFramework

Richard and Greg talk to Dana Epp about DirectAccess. DirectAccess is Microsoft's new technology using Windows 7 (Enterprise or Ultimate) and Server 2008 R2 together to create remote connectivity that acts in all respects like you're still inside the corporate network. DirectAccess has the potential to put client-initiated VPN connection out to pasture. The conversation also dives into IPv6, which is required for DirectAccess, digging into how IPv6 has probably been functioning fine over your IPv4 network and you didn't even realize it!