What's Hot

File Copy Utility
Microsoft SyncToy 2.0 (Beta)

Reader:
Jeff Kowalke
Senior Microsoft Systems Engineer
Product:
Microsoft SyncToy 2.0 (Beta)
Company: Microsoft
Contact: www.microsoft.com

As many IT pros know, some of the best tools and utilities to help make their jobs easier are freeware and shareware products. Such is the case with Senior Microsoft Systems Engineer Jeff Kowalke, who was often asked by end users for a quick backup solution. Kowalke had been relying on the robocopy command in script files, but wanted something easier to use.

After some research, Kowalke came across the beta version of Microsoft Sync- Toy 2.0, a file copying and synchronization tool. “I recently upgraded my home computer, and I had to search for old digital photos scattered across a wide variety of sources, like my old computer, old DVD backups, and backups saved onto an external USB disk,” says Kowalke. “SyncToy helped by finding sub-folders of those backups that I would have ignored…SyncToy has been a true time saver.”

The ability of SyncToy’s backup feature to keep files in their original format after backup operations is one of Kowalke’s favorites, a feature that avoids end users dealing with .BKF or .ZIP file compression formats that they may not have the correct software to uncompress.

“Since SyncToy is considered a free and unsupported utility from Microsoft, I really can’t complain about it,” says Kowalke. “I’m happy that Microsoft is willing to make this tool available for free to fill an obvious need for a simple, visual backup utility. That said, I would [suggest that Microsoft] add the ability to schedule backups, and add a reporting feature that would display backup results via email when a backup completes. I could then use this product in a server environment for disk-to-disk backups.”

.NET Performance Optimization
Strangeloop Appscaler

Reader:
Jackie Reid
VP of Client Services
Product:
Strangeloop AS1000 Application Scaling Appliance
Company:
Strangeloop Networks
Contact:
www.strangeloopnetworks.com

Improving the performance of ASP.NET and AJAX applications is a task that many web developers often struggle with, just as web marketing technology developer Marqui has. In order to improve the performance of their .NET applications and hosted Web sites, Marqui decided to give the Strangeloop AS1000 Application Scaling Appliance a try.

According to Marqui VP of client services Jackie Reid, their primary goal was to improve the customer experience by improving the speed of their web applications. “We’re using two AS1000 products, and we’re currently treating web traffic on our Marqui 5.0 Application Server and a main hosting server,” says Reid. “When the [next AS1000 OS upgrade] becomes available that offers failover redundancy and analytics, we’ll be moving the AS1000s in front of all of our Web traffic.”

Reid says that deployment was straightforward, and that they were up and running on the appliances within roughly an hour. After deploying the AS1000s, Reid says that they’ve experienced “significant performance improvements” in both developed ASP.net applications and on Web sites they host for clients.

Colin Edwards, Marqui’s manager of client operations, likes the AS1000’s ability to create custom data filters, an ability that lets him “really control what’s going on in my data center.” As useful as those filter treatments are, Edwards does have some advice for anyone that may use them. “One of the treatments I created caused a problem with the traffic going out of the data center,” says Edwards. “I talked to [Strangeloop] support to find out what I did wrong [and to resolve the problem]. You should really know what you’re doing before experimenting with different filter treatments.”

Systems Management
NetIQ Aegis

Reader:
Neil Forster
IT Director
Product:
NetIQ Aegis
Company:
NetIQ
Contact:
www.netiq.com

Outsourcing IT and Web operations to a third party has become a viable option for many companies, a development that plays into the strengths of Attenda, a UK-based company that specializes in providing IT management services. In the interest of improving the services that they offer to customers, Attenda recently adopted the NetIQ Aegis IT automation platform.

“As a company we’ve been a long-term user of NetIQ’s AppManager product,” says Neil Forster, an IT director at Attenda. “We’ve also been looking at the run book automation (RBA) market for some time, and we knew that NetIQ would be coming out with something in the RBA market, which eventually turned out to be Aegis.”

According to Forster, Attenda decided to implement Aegis in order to make their IT management services more efficient. “One of our concepts is operational certainty, [which we define] as the ability to do something the correct way over and over again. [NetIQ Aegis] gives us the opportunity to automate responses that have historically been handled manually…such as taking help desk calls from notification to resolution.”

Forster likes the ability to easily create basic process workflows, and believes that adoption of the NetIQ Aegis system has helped them make some of their existing processes more efficient. “For example, we used to have a manual procedure that would require an engineer to look for particular events in an event log, check a registry key value, and then reset that value based on the log information… we now have automated that process using NetIQ Aegis.”

Basic process workflows may be easy to configure and use, although Forster points out that creating more complex process automation tasks may take some additional time. “Configuration of more complex processes wasn’t entirely intuitive,” says Forster. “We also had some problems with performance, particularly with an environment with a large number of servers. We did work closely with NetIQ to address those problems, and they provided hot fixes for those.”