What is Amazon Echo?

The latest to come out of Amazon is the Echo.   The Echo is a voice command device from Amazon.   It has a number of functions including fact finding, weather, traffic, music (from iHeart Radio, Tunein Radio, Pandora and of course Amazon Prime Music) as well as the ability to hook in to supported home automation solutions (WeMo and Hue right now).  Additionally, Amazon has recently added the ability to do fast ordering of previously purchased items.   It is a cylinder with speakers (woofer and tweeter) as well as a 7 microphone array.  It has support for Bluetooth and can be utilized like a Bluetooth speaker if you insist on playing music from your mobile device (since you don’t like any of the supported music options).  The package also contained a remote control that allows for giving commands from outside of microphone range, as well as music controls.  It is powered by Amazon’s cloud so the potential capabilities are limited to your imagination at this point (that and the available SDK J)

Functions

When the Echo originally shipped, it had limited functionality.  As a prime member, I had a chance to order one several months ago and decided to pass on it.  I wasn’t sure what Amazon planned to do with the device and so, I decided to wait.  You have to understand, this is something new to me.  I’ve always been ready to jump on new technology that I believe has potential.  Just to name a few devices that wound up being a complete waste of money for me (not a complete list, but you will get the point):

1. Iomega Hip Zip, circa 2001 http://www.ign.com/articles/2001/10/01/iomega-hipzip-review
2. Microsoft Cordless Phone System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Cordless_Phone_System
3. Need I even mention the Zune (yes I had 3 of these)
4. iPAQ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPAQ
5. Pocket PC (not iPAQ)
6. Windows Media Center addition (killed in Windows 10 http://www.extremetech.com/computing/204903-microsoft-kills-off-windows-media-center-for-windows-10)
7. Microsoft DirecTV receiver (had this too https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_TV#UltimateTV) The TV Menu for Windows Media Center and Ultimate TV was (and continues to be ) light years ahead of anything the cable companies or Tivo has been able to come up with.

All of these devices (except for perhaps the Zune) were well before their time.  That said, they were also bombs; so this time, I decided to be more prudent and see where this was going.  In the last couple of months, Amazon has begun to show their hand at what this device was capable of doing.  They added functionality to provide ordering functions for products from Amazon (you had to have previously ordered the item from amazon to do this), Home automation support for WeMo and Hue systems, connections now to Pandora and an agent to work with IFTTT http://ifttt.com.  If you ask Alexa a question, you can have her send the response to your Kindle Fire.  Additionally, Amazon has now published an SDK and is working to encourage application developers do further integrate and expand the lexicon of ‘Alexa’ (the wake word for the echo).  This was now enough for me to buy in and we continue to use it around the house for everything from music, to keeping up with the Padres Score, to setting alarms and planning for the weather when we travel.  Tonight, I will likely let it read my kid a bedtime story, yup, it can do that too.

Usability

I’m always wary of voice driven devices.  There was many a time that I wanted to chuck my iPhone across the room because Siri just plain didn’t understand what I was trying to say.  That has been improved quite a bit and I think that competition from Google and Cortana has helped drive that…that and I suppose that technology has improved some too.  That said, Amazon has shown their intent to invest in ‘Alexa’ and give her more capabilities.  The echo has a 7 microphone array so even with the music playing, it can hear your use of the wake word.  Once the wake word is heard, it will lower the music so you can ask your question.  The same can be done from another room if you have the remote.  Finally, there is an app available for iOS, android and Kindle fire.  The app will allow you to direct the Echo as well as review the last commands that were sent to the Echo and indicate whether the echo understood the command correctly or not.  My kids have found her to be a blast to play with, especially considering the list of non-published commands out there.  So, is the device usable, oh yeah, very usable.

Potential

I can spend pages going over the different potential uses I can see for this device.  With the home automation integration already built in, that already broadens the capabilities.  My only complaint at this point is that I have to cart her from room to room because there is no point in having her in another room if I can’t hear the music or interact with her.  If I actually HAD home automation, I can see the use for it being remote, but right now, I don’t do that, so I want it with me to interact.  There are a couple of things I would love to see Echo do (so Amazon, hope you are listening):

• Hook up via BT to a phone and be able to make phone calls on command.
• Allow some form of remote speaker so I can leave Echo in one room, use the remote to play music or ask a question and have it respond in the room I’m in.
• Allow daisy chaining of devices. What I mean is this, I can see echo’s all over my house, but I want them to be able to work together as well as independently.  So, ask echo to play music, have music play throughout the house, but when my kid goes in their room, they can order the echo in their room to do something else or play different music.
• Integrate with FireTV or the Fire Stick so I can pull up movies, rent movies, buy movies, via voice command.
• Personally, would love to see integration with XBOX Music (I have 2 years of subscriptions to music pass)

There are so many potential applications.

Bottom Line

Bottom line is that I (and my family) love this device.  It’s a winner.  Assuming Amazon continues to invest in its capabilities (and I don’t see why they wouldn’t) this could be the best foray into controlling the living room that I have seen to date.  I’ve done several solutions that were designed to be the “home controller”. None of it has the potential that this device has.  I can’t wait to see what Amazon’s next update will bring us as Echo owners.

Sam

As I predicted back in March, Windows Server 2003 has become THE topic of conversation in almost every customer that we speak to. We are now just under 8 months away from the end of life of Windows Server 2003. Some customers have started their migration, but the reality is that many customers still have not. Specifically, in a fairly informal survey that partner AppZero conducted, only 25% of customers have a plan for their Windows 2003 infrastructure. Even scarier was the idea that 38% of these customers have more than 1000 Windows 2003 Servers out there. Redmond Magazine just published an article in September that quoted Microsoft as identifying Windows Server 2003 running on 39% of the Windows Server install base. That translates to 9.4 million servers just in North America. I thought that now would be a good time to step back and share some customer experiences and what you should be doing about your Windows Server 2003 environment. Time is running out and custom support agreements are expensive.

Recap on why it’s important

Just want to take a minute to refresh everyone’s memory here. The consequences of doing nothing can be severe, they include:

• Security vulnerability
• System failure without recourse (no hotfixes)
• Loss of certification of compliance.

That last bullet is interesting. While often a specific system has been certified (so for example, Application A running on Windows Server 2003 with selected hotfixes has been certified by “such and such organization”) in the case of certain financial certifications, customers may find themselves out of compliance because of the lack of security updates to the platform. This goes for just doing nothing or for isolating the system from the network. Isolation is ok, but as Gigaom points out in their article regarding the risks of migrating, isolation doesn’t help you in the event that you require support from Microsoft. You won’t get it. Now, you can go the route of a custom support agreement, but keep in mind a couple of things:

1. You need a premier support contract to get a customer support agreement
2. As I mentioned above, customer support agreements are expensive
3. You are still going to need a plan to migrate because custom support is only available for 2 years.

It is critical that customers understand what the consequences of doing nothing will be to their environment.

So, I have to migrate, now what

At this point, you have decided that you need to migrate and you think have 2000 servers with Windows 2003 in your datacenter and they all have something on them. What’s the first step? The process of planning and executing a migration off of Windows Server 2003 is time consuming and its easy to miss little nuances. Those little nuances are the risks that come back later to haunt you. This is one of the cases when you won’t want to try to take this on yourself; you need professionals to assist you. Everyone on your team already has a day job to accomplish, and you want to work with someone who has done this before. I’m handy putting in light switches and changing electrical outlets, but I wouldn’t install the 220 line in my garage, I’ll hire an electrician for that. This is the same kind of thing. Professionals have the tools, the experience and the methodology to get this process done faster and with a better sense of quality that your business partners will appreciate.

Inventory, Identify and Prioritize

You think you have about 2000 servers out there. Well, you need to be CERTAIN that there are 2000 servers out there. How recent is your inventory? If it wasn’t updated last week, you probably need to do another. If you don’t have a good way to accomplish that, then its time you work with someone who does this for a living so that you can get a good inventory and begin the start of a new CMDB for yourself. You have to be able to account for all of the servers on your network with this OS because (as we have already said) after 7/14/2015 that machine is now a liability on your network.

Next you have to be able to identify all of the applications on those servers. Now, let’s be a little more specific about this. In my experience, I have worked with customers who say they have an inventory and when I look at the applications list, it’s a lot of commercial off the shelf (COTS) applications that generally are part of the server image. I’m going to bet that your new server image has all of those applications already, so we can cross them off the list. What we are talking about here are applications that actually matter to your business. That doesn’t mean all COTS applications are out. Your business may rely on faxing heavily and you have fax software running on the server down the hall and it just happens to be Windows Server 2003. That’s relevant and needs to be accounted for. Can you identify all of the applications (COTS, custom, web, whatever) running on your servers? If the answer to that is ‘no’ then you have a lot of work ahead of you. If the answer is ‘yes’ then the next question is ‘do you have a contact for each of those apps?’. Who from the business is accountable for that application because they need to identify compatibility and understand the migration options.

Grouping & Migration Events

Once you have your list of server, applications, application owners, you can look at tackling the idea of grouping these servers/applications. There are only so many ways to tackle the issue of remediating these environments. The best thing you can do is identify groups of applications that require the same type of remediation. So for example, if you have 200 servers that represent file servers in your environment. Those are all going into one bucket. Print servers, another bucket. When you get to the applications themselves (COTS, custom, web, etc) then you have to figure out what kind of bucket those are going to fall into.

Planning

Now that you have your inventory and you have created your buckets, now you can look at planning/scheduling these servers for migration. This must be a separate exercise, do NOT assume you can do this as you go along. I refer back to my favorite slide when I talk to customers about projects.

The reason the green line looks so much better is because more of the risks are identified up front and planning ahead of time has taken care of them. If you wait to accomplish as you go, you will end up realizing the risks during deployment and that’s not where you want to be (follow the red line).

Conclusion

I’ve talked to a number of customers and have engaged in some activities around this Windows Server migration today. Often I am coming across many of the same issues over and over. Hopefully, this will give you a good idea of how to start on your migration, or perhaps it convinces you that perhaps you need to bring in some help that knows how to do this. In either case, you have to get moving on this because the deadline is looming.

In part 2 of this, I will go through the options around the actual remediation and how those can be realized.

Sam

When we look back on 2014 in IT, there are going to be a couple of things that dominate our thinking and my guess is it won’t be BYOD or Big Data. In reality, a much more mundane yet critical event will be at the forefront. That is the end of extended support status for key workhorse applications Windows XP, Exchange 2003 and Windows Server 2003. I’ve written before about the level of effort needed to migrate from Windows XP and the bottom line is, if you haven’t started that migration, you aren’t going to make it. On the other hand, for Windows Server 2003 you have until July 14, 2015 giving you just enough time to put your strategic plan in place for dealing with your server footprint. If you don’t know where to begin or have already started, consider these suggestions on designing a plan so you can “beat the clock” and avoid the pain.

Parallels to Desktop Upgrade Efforts

Upgrading your server portfolio is similar to performing a desktop upgrade. There are fundamental tasks that must be completed as part of the planning process. Not completing those tasks will put your project at risk and time is not your friend in these efforts.

The diagram illustrates one of my guiding principles. You are more likely to run a successful upgrade if you frontload as much of the risk as you can during the first initial phases. More specifically, when you find the risk during discovery, address the risk in your remediation/migration plan design so it doesn’t bite you when you build out your target environment and begin the migration itself.

The alternative is to forgo planning and attempt to find and deal with the risk as you are migrating production. I’m not sure I know anyone who would be willing to sign up for that. Why do that to yourself or your team. Take the time and effort up front. Right now, organizations have almost 18 months left before the day comes. Take advantage of it.

Addressing the Risk – It begins with understanding your footprint

Now that we have agreed that addressing the risk up front makes the most sense, how do we address that risk? In my experience, we start by understanding the problem. You need to migrate off of Windows Server 2003 before July 14, 2015. Therefore, you are going to need a complete inventory of all servers running Windows Server 2003 and ultimately all applications that are running on those servers. This includes any “commercial off the shelf” (COTS) applications you may have (such as antivirus, firewall, management software, printer drivers, etc) as well as any custom applications or more importantly, any BUSINESS CRITICAL applications that are running on that server.

Hopefully, your organization has a management process in place that uses tools and agents to be able to track the servers that are active in your environment. Even if it doesn’t give application inventory information, knowing which servers in your environment are running Windows Server 2003 is better than having nothing to start with. The servers themselves aren’t where the risk is. Being able to understand what applications run on those servers and their relationship to the business is what is important. Another consideration is the compatibility of your applications with Windows Server 2012. There are tools to help with this issue but I don’t have space to address it here. Feel free to drop me a line if you have any questions.

Next, you need to identify the owners of those applications. This could become challenging since if you are running custom applications on Windows Server 2003. What if the developers are not in your organization any longer or the company you bought the app from no longer exists. In any case, someone needs to be responsible for the app or you should consider retiring it. J

Other technical considerations that might be of interest are the architecture of the servers and version of Windows Server installed. Windows Server 2003 is a 32-bit flavor (remember those?) and Windows Server 2012 comes only in 64-bit. Windows Server 2008 was the last 32-bit OS Microsoft produced. Be sure to note the OS flavor and whether it’s a physical server or a virtual server. The more info you can capture, the better your design considerations and ultimately, the smoother the transition.

Now what?

Now that you have your server and application inventory, you will be in a better position to begin determining what you will do with these servers and applications. Will you take them to a public cloud (AWS, Azure), put them in a private cloud or perhaps try to do a like for like migration to other physical hardware. Regardless of which path you choose, there is a lot to consider and whether you have a strategy or not, there are ways for you to do the planning to determine what the best course of action will be for those applications.

Remember, one size may not always fit all your applications so consider your options. If you already have a strategy worked out, perhaps you are taking your entire physical inventory and moving it to a converged infrastructure, then you are ahead of the game. It is worth noting though that since you have applications running on Windows Server 2003, those applications may not be suitable for virtualization on your converged environment.

Remember, when reviewing your application portfolio, it is important to understand what kind of downtime can be accepted as part of the migration effort. If you have production critical business apps, you may have to put a strategy in place to migrate carefully to minimize or eliminate downtime. Working with the applications owners to understand these hot points needs to be a part of your risk mitigation process.

Performing this due-diligence is the Design Phase of our curve and by going through this process, you have put yourself on the green path above to frontloading your risk. As you can see from the curve, if you get the risk taken care of first the rest of the process is downhill.

Getting the rest of the way

Once you are able to the Construction Phase, you are getting to the more mechanical processes of the project. The way you migrate the applications and the servers becomes a more mechanical process that you can leverage tools to complete. Tools such as Flexera’s Admin Studio, AppZero and RiverMeadow are available for assisting in testing compatibility and assisting in the migration of your workloads to the target environment. It would be worth investing in experts in the tool so you aren’t learning as you go, but you may decide that your team can perform the migration of the less critical applications in house and leverage assistance for the more critical applications. Understanding your limitations and ensuring that you have budget for possible assistance, not just for tools, will be important to your planning.

Conclusion

Windows Server 2003 represents a significant install base of servers out in enterprises today. IT shops need to turn their attentions to this looming giant of a task so they can limit risk and ensure success. Take my advice. Following the green path is the secret to sleeping better at night through this process.