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Windows Phone 7

My 10+ year connection with Windows CE continues now with my most recent purchase, a Dell Venue Pro running Windows Phone 7.

I remember way back when Microsoft first released the Pocket PCs (aka Windows CE 3.0), I would travel to the Microsoft campus every other month for the Seattle User Group meetings to check out the coolest new devices and software. Back then it was Microsoft vs Palm and the world was much simpler.

Today the breath of choice in handheld devices (or more specifically, smart phones) is insane. With multiple, extremely robust operating systems and tons of amazing device manufacturers the space is innovating and iterating so fast it feels like the new Personal Computer.

That innovation and rapid rate of advancement is what has drawn me to the smart phone arena so much over the years. It is also what has of late had me so interested in Windows Phone 7. The Windows Phone platform had fallen behind the competition so much that it was beginning to look like a dinosaur - that is until Microsoft hit the reset button and created a truly different product.

Already after showing my phone to a few coworkers I am surprised how many have simply said "I can't believe how well I can READ this thing!". It then occurred to me how many times I've heard people complain about reading on such small screens over the years and I think it speaks a lot to the UX (user experience) design behind the phone, called Metro. A great focus on readability, typography, negative-space, and contrasting colors makes for a refreshing interface experience - and MAN is it usable!

Make no mistake however, this is a version 1.0 product. It has some sharp edges, some bugs, and it's lacking a few basic features. But compared to my last version 1.0 device (Nokia N900 with Maemo) this thing is extremely robust and the App Market is already flourishing. Microsoft has gone from department restructuring to global launch with multiple devices across multiple carriers in less then 18 months. Knowing that, I'm sitting here in great anticipation of what the next 18 months will bring.

PS: Thanks Microsoft Store @ Mission Viejo, CA for the surprisingly good customer support and the free stuff

Storage Area Networks

Boy oh boy can these things be complicated. The plethora of options is mind boggling and once you have finally made a choice, it seems like you are reading configuration documentation for eternity. Fiber Channel vs iSCSI, RAID 5 vs RAID 10, 10K vs 15K, 2.5" vs 3.5", Vendor A vs Vendor B vs Vendor C, single vs dual controller, snapshots, replication, deduplication, multipath I/O, NFS, and on and on. I think this may be the most information I have ever crammed on, in such a short period of time.

So the true reason for writing this article, today we purchased an EMC ax4-5i iSCSI SAN array. We are planning to use it for two main functions, 1) Consolidate our disk-to-disk backup storage and, 2) Migrate our locally attached Virtual Machine storage to Shared storage so that we can use Failover and Live Migration functionality with Hyper-V.

We took a long hard look at the continuing cost of adding hard drives to our servers and also the cost of dealing with outages when our VM host server had problems.  This led us to the search for an affordable but scalable entry-level SAN solution. EMC was able to provide us exactly that, for just under $5k with 5TB of physical disk space (2-3TB after RAID).

And with that, comes weeks of configuration and installation. All while we are piloting out a new Sharepoint 2010 implementation, working on an IT consolidation project for a sister company, and planning a migration to Exchange 2010. Should be an exciting quarter - that is, if business picks up...