What is an IP Address?

The Internet works on a transport system, commonly known as TCP/IP protocol, to transfer and exchange data. TCP stands for Transfer Control Protocol and IP stands for Internet Protocol. Both together make the TCP/IP protocol stack. An IP Address is basically an identifier for a computer or a device on a TCP/IP network. When one computer or device transfers or exchanges data to another, it uses the IP address of the destination. The transmitting computer or device is called the Source while the receiving one is called the Destination.

The format of the IP address that we currently use is a 32-bit numeric address written as four (4) numbers seperated by periods. For example, 192.168.4.2 is an IP Address. Each device or a computer connected directly to the Internet has to have a unqiue IP address. No two devices can use the same IP address as this would cause a conflict and the Source would not know which Destination to send the data to. Similary a Destination would not be able to identify which Source to report back to that the data has been received if there is an IP address conflict. Currently, the IP address range, ie. IP Version 4 or IPv4, is being classified in to 3 main classes: Class A, Class B and Class C. There are other classes too, but they are restricted. The art of this classification is called Subnetting which is further enhanced by Supernetting. Since explaining this involves lot of technical understanding of the TCP/IP Protocol Stack, we shall skip it for now. For those interested to know further, there is always Google at your help.

How does an IP work?

There is no better way to understand this but with an example. Let’s take the example of my website www.vishalvasu.com. My website is associated with an IP address since it works on the TCP/IP protocol. The IP address of my website is:

74.53.251.150

The above format is called a dotted decimal format which makes it easier for humans to remember. But we all know by now that computers and related devices communicate in a binary format. The same IP address to a computer or a device on the Internet would mean something like this:

01001010.00110101.11111011.10010110

The four numbers in an IP address are called octets, because they each have eight positions when viewed in binary form. If you add all the positions together, you get 32, which is why IPv4 addresses are considered 32-bit numbers. Since each of the eight positions can have two different states (1 or 0) the total number of possible combinations per octet is 2^8 or 256. So each octet can contain any value between 0 and 255. Combine the four octets and you get 2^32 or a possible 4,294,967,296 unique values.

Out of the almost 4.3 billion possible combinations, certain values are restricted from use as typical IP addresses. For example, the IP address 0.0.0.0 is reserved for the default network and the address 255.255.255.255 is used for broadcasts.

Ok, comming back to the example, imagine if people had to remember the IP address of 74.53.251.150 to browse www.vishalvasu.com. Complicated? That’s just one site and imagine if one had to remember sites like hotmail.com, yahoo.com, google.com, microsoft.com, ebay.com, etc. in similar fashion. The thought itself is boring. To make things simpler, the TCP/IP protocol uses a system called DNS (Domain Name System). The basic role of a DNS is to map text names to an IP Address automatically. This way, one only needs to remember www.vishalvasu.com instead of 74.53.251.150. Even though it is totally invisible, DNS servers handle billions of requests every day and they are essential to the Internet’s smooth functioning.

What Next?

IPv4 offers approximately 4.3 billion possible combinations of IP addresses which can used on the TCP/IP network. This is a limit which is feared to get exhausted by 2012 or probably even before that. This fear also led to lot of discussions, research and debates among Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) since 1980’s. Finally, sometime in 1998, the announcement of IP Version 6 (IPv6) was made. IPv6 fixes a number of problems in IPv4, such as the limited number of available IPv4 addresses. It also adds many improvements to IPv4 in areas such as routing and network autoconfiguration.

IPv6 is expected to gradually replace IPv4, with the two coexisting for a number of years during a transition period. Basically, the address size was increased from 32 bit to 128 bit, which is deemed sufficient for the foreseeable future.

The day finally came and the website of Vanche Gujarat was launched successfully today by the Hon. Chief Minister of Gujarat, Shri Narendra Modi. In his speech after launching the website, Hon. CM cracked a joke that as such doing any event on the 1st day of April is risky business, but he somehow likes to take the risks head-on. Applause!

Vanche Gujarat is one of the programs outlined as part of the Swarnim Gujarat celebrations which focuses on promoting and fostering the culture of general reading across the state of Gujarat. I think this initiative will allow Gujarat to give lot of intellects to the service of the nation in the near future.

For this, the government will actively rope in private and government libraries, students of schools and colleges and voluntary organisations. Around 15,000 granth yatras, 2,500 reading workshops and 1,000 interactive sessions – on the theme ”the book they liked most” – would also be organised.

The website has been developed by us and I wish it shall pass on the message to fellow Indians and hopefully this initiative will not remain confined to the borders of Gujarat.

The fifth edition of biennial global investors’ summit slated for January 2011, which is being tagged as ‘Davos in Action’, will focus more on branding the state of Gujarat as a business hub where deals are done, rather than just an investment destination. In a gradual deviation from previous events, the upcoming summit has been renamed as ‘Vibrant Gujarat 2011: The Global Business Hub’ instead of ‘Vibrant Gujarat Global Investors’ Summit’.

Remote Infrastructure Management

If studied closely, RIM makes more sense not in terms of a measure to cut costs during recessions but more as a business sense. How? Let’s see.

Today enterprises leverage the power of IT to streamline their key business processes and gain a competitive advantage. Even with the investments already made, the key issues relating to application performance, scalability, security, management and effective utilization are mostly unresolved. Apart from helping to reduce the overall IT Infrastructure Management costs, a well structured and managed RIM relationship can bring significant benefits.

Flexibility of Service
Customers hiring service providers have an advantage here as they can align the business needs with the services provided by the Service Provider. Services can be flexed to meet peak times and loads, mission-critical and non-mission critical or a combination of both. This type of flexible pricing model and service delivery helps in apportioning the infrastructure management costs.

Domain Expertise
In this highly volatile IT industry it is hard to keep up with the latest technology trends and it is almost impossible to have on pay roll a staff that can match the ever demanding and changing face of IT technology across all segments. A RIM service provider can add value here as they have diverse IT staffs which are at a client’s disposal, working 24×7. Moreover, these specialists are constantly updated with the latest technology trends via internal training programs, technical training programs from vendors, etc.

This basically helps companies to gain a competitive advantage as it helps to reduce the time to market. Companies can take the bold steps of adopting and switching to new technologies to gain a competitive advantage. Serious service providers in the RIM industry would normally have alliances in place with leading technology suppliers and as a result clients can also enjoy a single window of service from them with an assurance that the team working on their projects would be capable of handling the technology and related needs.

Visibility and Control
Companies retain full control of its strategic components such as physical IT assets, technology refresh, policy and architecture which provides visibility into the availability, performance and utilization of each component. Many of the established RIM suppliers have embraced the ITIL framework which lends itself to RIM very effectively. Putting the collected data in to this type of best practices framework provides lot of insight and visibility. This visibility further enables companies to take control of the situation, make informed decisions on future investments in IT and improve current service levels.

Reduced Costs
Remote Infrastructure Management not only assists in reducing the manpower cost of managing the infrastructure, but also brings down the costs related to future infrastructure investments. It has been reported and endorsed by agencies like McKinsey and NASSCOM that outsourcing the infrastructure management services can save dramatically reduce the labour related costs by 30% to 40%. On the other hand, companies can also reduce costs associated with future infrastructure investments using expertise of the service provider by way of infrastructure optimization, standardization using industry best practises and consolidation using virtualization technologies.

Proactive Services
Most of the time RIM services engagements are driven and governed by SLA’s (Service Level Agreements). Service providers, in order to maintain the SLA, invest in to software and technology that enable them to gain an insight on failing components in the IT infrastructure, usage patterns, thresholds, etc. These tools enable a service provider to provide 24×7 proactive monitoring and management via a Remote NOC (Network Operations Centre). This helps to resolve issues in a faster and structured manner.

So, in today’s fast paced and ever changing IT world, RIMs makes more business sense and CIOs have to step back and ask themselves what they’re trying to accomplish with infrastructure outsourcing. Cost savings, optimization, transformation or efficiency? CIO’s decisions on outsourcing infrastructure management are going to be driven by more than just cost savings and as a result it is also going to create a challenge for the service providers to tweak their service models to show more benefits and not only cost savings.

I was just waiting for something to happen from Microsoft end and after a long wait, yes it did happen. In a blog posting recently, Paul Cooke, Director of Windows Enterprise Client Security at Microsoft stated that the Sophos claim was deceptive and bogus. Further he adds that, “This test shows that most people don’t knowingly have and run known malware on their system. Malware typically makes it onto a system through other avenues like the browser or email program. So while I absolutely agree that anti-virus software is essential to protecting your PC, there are other defenses as well.” “I do agree that you still need to run anti-virus software on Windows 7,” Cooke noted, “but it is equally important to keep all of your software up-to-date through automatic updates, such as through Windows Update service.”

Now to the main point – I absolutely agree with what Paul Cooke has to say in terms of securing your PC. Being in the IT industry since 20 years now and moreover having given consultancy in Infrastructure Security to number of organizations, I’ve only seen that 40% to 50% of the problems faced by an organization are due to un-patched system, pirated software and out-of-date anti-virus signatures. In fact, when we install Windows Vista or Windows 7 on a PC, the operating system keeps on alerting via its Windows Security system if Automatic Updates are not configured or if the PC is missing an anti-virus solution. If that is the case, the question is – when and where did Microsoft claim that the new version of their Operating System Windows 7 does not require an anti-virus? If you know the answer to this, I would like to hear back from you.

Gartner says that it is almost inevitable for any Enterprise to move to windows 7 and also added that the release of Windows 7 will generate renewed interest in hardware upgrades in consumers and small business segments – though the corporate demand is not expected to gain momentum until the end of 2010.

Gartner, Inc. has highlighted five key issues enterprises should examine as Windows 7 hits the market:

1. Plan to be Off Windows XP by Year-End 2012 — Microsoft will support Windows XP with security fixes into April of 2014, but past experience has shown that independent software vendors (ISVs) will stop testing much earlier. “New releases of critical business software will require Windows 7 long before Microsoft support for Windows XP ends,” said Steve Kleynhans, research vice president at Gartner. “Organizations that get all of their users off Windows XP by the end of 2012 will avoid significant potential problems.”

2. Start Working on Migration Projects Now — The typical organization requires 12 to 18 months waiting, testing, and planning before it can start deploying a new client OS. There is a lot of work to be done in preparation, and delays in getting started will only result in added costs later.

3. Don’t Wait for Windows 7 SP1 to Begin Testing and Deployment — Many organizations say they plan to wait until SP1 ships to begin testing and deploying a new client OS. Gartner analysts suggest starting work now (especially if companies have skipped Windows Vista), but are planning to switch to SP1 before their actual rollout.

4. Don’t Skip Windows 7 — Gartner categorizes Windows 7 as a “polishing” release on top of the architectural change that the Windows Vista “plumbing” release delivered. Gartner analysts said polishing releases should never be skipped. “While organizations that skipped Windows 2000 and waited for XP had some problems spanning the gap, organizations that adopted Windows 2000 and tried to skip Windows XP, waiting for Vista, had a much harder time,” said Michael Silver, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner.

5. Budget Carefully — Migration Costs to Vary Significantly Gartner’s model shows that migration costs could be $1,035 to $1,930 per user to move from Windows XP to Windows 7, and $339 to $510 per user to move from Windows Vista to Windows 7 depending on an organization’s approach.

Inputs taken from Gartner.

The system requirements to optimally run Xobni are a Windows XP (SP2 or greater) or Vista machine, Outlook 2003 or 2007, Microsoft .NET Framework version 2.0 or above, a minimum of 1 GB RAM (most of the desktops have more than that today), a 2GHz of higher processor speed and a monitor with a resolution of 1024×768 (recommend a higher resolution if possible as the Xobni tool bar eats up some screen area of Outlook after installation).

It is also recommended that if the Outlook profile is connected with a Microsoft Exchange Server, then the profile be configured in a “Cached Exchange Mode”. This makes sense since this would create an OST file in the desktop and thus would help Xobni or even a normal Outlook user to gain access to emails in case of the non-availability of the Exchange Server.

Once installed, Xobni takes some time to scan and index the emails in your Outlook and starts ranking your contacts by the number of emails that are shared. It takes about a minute or two for the initial indexing. Much of the indexing is then later done by the plug-in in the background.

The statistics area displays useful information about the selected contact such as the number of emails sent and received, a bar graph showing what time of day most emails are exchanged and the rank which is determined by the number of emails exchanged between you and that contact.

The best part is the Actions area which helps to perform common interactions with the selected contact. For example, assume that there is no phone number stored in the contact information of a particular person. The request phone number action automatically creates a new email for that contact asking for the phone number. When a response is received from that person, Xobni automatically extracts the phone number and adds it to the profile.

Again in the Actions area are two great features – LinkedIn and Facebook tabs. Upon selecting a email from a contact, click on the LinkedIn or Facebook tabs and Xobni will pull out relevant information of that contact from LinkedIn or Facebook. Click on “view profile” and it directly opens up the selected contacts Facebook or LinkedIn profile. Again, the best part is that you can see the wall posts directly from Facebook in to this area.

Now, this is just the tip of the iceberg. The way Xobni displays the conversations using a threaded style similar to Google’s Gmail is amazing. All emails upon indexing are grouped in to conversations based on the subject, people in To and CC header fields, etc.

Each entry in the conversations panel will show the subject line of the email thread, a count of the emails the thread contains, as well as an approximate time that the last email in the conversation was sent. If the conversation contains an attached file, a small paper clip icon appears to the right of the subject line.

The title bar also totals the number of unique conversations. Clicking on the conversations bar expands the viewable area of conversations and gives you the option to filter the results. Clicking on any conversation entry consisting of more than one email will bring up a new sidebar frame showing the conversation thread.

The entry information will be shown at the top of the sidebar and the emails in the conversation are displayed just below that. If the email thread is longer than the sidebar can contain, there’s a detail slider, which can change the visible size of each email entry.

This way you can quickly find the right email that you’re looking for. If the conversation thread includes multiple people, they’re listed below in a panel called “People in Conversation”. Likewise, if there were any email attachments in that thread, these will be shown at the bottom of the sidebar in the “Files Exchanged” panel.

Each email entry in this view can be clicked on to further reveal the entire message. From here, you’re given the option to do standard email actions such as “Reply” and “Forward”. The “Open” button will open the original email from Outlook folders and the “View Conversation” button will take you back to the previous view of the entire conversation. Aside from the standard email header info, we can also see exactly where in the folder structure the email resides.

Xobni Analytics is another cool feature. This can be accessed from the menu bar of Outlook. Whether it’s the total volume of emails today, last week, entire year or the total volume of emails from your friend, analytics is the place to check all this out.

The data that’s displayed for the persons In and Out mail count, Rank, and Emails received graph are all powered behind the scenes by Analytics. One of the most widely used features within the Analytics window is the ability to determine own network rankings.

In short, Xobni is a Microsoft Outlook add-in that:

- Shows up previously hidden information about email interactions with people
- Allows to explore emails by contacts and conversations
- Performs lightning-fast searches
- Gives immediate access to files exchanged with contacts
- Allows to link Outlook and online social networks and data services such as LinkedIn, Facebook, and Hoover’s
- Indexes personal Yahoo! mail for integrated searching
- Provides an in-depth analysis of the overall flow of email traffic via Analytics

Go ahead and try out Xobni today. You won’t regret the decision. Xobni can be downloaded from http://www.xobni.com. If you manage to download and install it, do share your views here so that other visitors reading this post can read more about the user experiences from you.

Open Source is a methodology based on which the design, development and the distribution of the developed software is carried out along with its source code. On the other hand, Open Standards means a royalty-free distribution of technology which has been formalized and approved by committees that are open to participation by all interested parties. For example, W3C is a body working on standards for Web Technologies. Click here for more information.

The word “Standards” means a set of guidelines to which a lot of people have agreed upon. Putting this definition in the context of software, “standards” allow a company to pick and choose from competing vendors and interoperate their systems without being pinned down to one of them.

Many think that open source software offers the same advantage, but that is not true. Open source means that you have access to source code for inspection and modifications but it may fail interoperability. This does not mean that open source is not good. There is lots of software available which are better or provide a similar kind of functionality that paid software will do. And the best part of open source is that it is free and comes with the entire source code. But what happens when you need assistance? Is the assistance free or is there a price tag? We all know that there is lot of stake involved in providing support. If you are thinking that support means training people on how to use the product or software, you are mistaken. There is more to support then that. It involves product trainings, more research to fix bugs and vulnerabilities, distributing patches and updates, etc. There may be companies that provide support on open source platforms and have no tie-up or relation with the parent company that designed and distributed the software for free. They may be able to fix small issues since there is access to the source code, but imagine a situation where there is something wrong at the core level and requires dependency on the original developer. Further to this, there is plenty of evidence that suggests that open source does not necessarily equate to cost savings. There are still licensing fees, service fees, implementation fees and support fees associated with it.

I would feel comfortable if I knew that the open source software that I downloaded for free gave me the source code and so I can fix or modify the application as per my needs. But I would be more comfortable thinking that the paid software I use from the vendor is going to be in the industry for long and many brains are working on the software to ensure that it runs smoothly and has improvised functionality with every new release.

All this does not mean that open source is a big NO-NO. Open source does provide the benefit of using someone’s work in your own and then redistributing your work in similar fashion so that someone else can get benefit from your work. This way the community can make progress using a collaborative manner of production. Most of the time this needs to be shared and released under GPL (General Public License) which means that you cannot charge others for a license and you must make your own source code available to the public. This makes it IP (Intellectual Property) unfriendly. Many a times this code will not even make its way to the main stream and will simply end up as an individual company’s product. This leaves a question in mind – will everything in the long run be compatible or provide interoperability? Will my investment in one segment ensure returns in the other or vice-versa? Who’s going to provide updates and security patches to fix vulnerabilities? Who’s going to invest billions to innovate? From my perspective, it’s not a fight between open source and commercial software. It’s all about open standards versus proprietary standards.

I feel we should have more specific and beneficial standards that are not vendor specific or not vendor dictated because ultimately it is the interoperability that counts at the end of the day. If open source software fits your environment and gets the work done in terms of costs, features, support or maintenance – all’s well. But if you are putting security, compliance, performance, upgrades and scalability before everything else then proprietary software designed with open standards in mind is your choice. We can even extend this further and run a combination of both – it’s our choice.

What do you think? Let me know.

Until the knock of environment friendly concepts and public concerns, traditional datacenters had fixed their eye on maximum uptime. Times have changed and datacenters are concentrating on conserving energy. Here are some tips that can contribute towards building eco-friendly datacenters.

Recently, I was involved in redesigning our company’s datacenter to consolidate hardware and systems running at two different physical locations. This was planned not as a “marketing” or “great idea!” move, but in fact it was a pragmatic business decision that helped the company to save money each year. I would like to share here my key learning’s that helped us make decisions to work towards a Greener Datacenter.

Evaluate Current Infrastructure: This is the first step where analysis needs to be done on the energy bills, current consumptions, and how much is being utilized by the servers, air conditioning systems, cooling fans and other devices like routers and switches in the datacenter. This helps in creating a baseline for calculating the Return-On-Investment after the changes are actually put in to implementation. Here is a link to couple of Power Calculators:

India – http://www.indiaenergyportal.org/
UK – http://www.ukpower.co.uk/running-costs-elec.asp
USA – http://www.42u.com/efficiency/energy-efficiency-calculator.htm

Rack Placements: This is an important aspect while designing the datacenter floor plan. Plan the layout of the equipments and structural components in a hot aisle and cold aisle rack layout method as recommended by Green Grid. The basic principle is to maximize the separation between the exhaust air flow and intake air flow. The figure below would give a better idea of the basic design principle.

The benefit of this arrangement is that it affects the required air delivery temperature that must be used to equalize the temperature throughout the room.

Need Analysis: Evaluate what is required out of the datacenter, not just what is needed now but maybe two or three years down the line. This helps in estimating the room for growth and helps avoid costly mistakes which fail to allow enough headroom for IT growth.

Eliminate: Look at every single area where you can eliminate, reduce or consolidate current hardware and equipments. For example, if you have two 24 port switches using only 18 connections consolidate them and shut down one of them. This does not have much impact in small organizations, but when we talk about companies which have lot of equipments in their datacenter, I’m sure figures would be impressive. Moreover, while calculating the ROI also consider the capital equipment and ongoing operational cost savings.

Consolidation of Servers: Identify areas where servers can be consolidated on to one single piece of hardware rather than running multiple physical boxes. By running multiple platforms and applications on a single server with many virtual servers can help reduce the amount of physical boxes. This in turn would help save the power consumption of not only the hardware box but also affect the cooling systems energy consumption.

Usage Patterns: There is a misconception that servers in a datacenter should be available and performing 24×7 regardless of the usage levels. In fact, identify and list out how all different parts of the network are being utilized and what are the peak hours for bandwidth, processing power and storage to handle peak network traffic. Set the power savings features on the hardware or OS level such that it helps in saving power. Allow the servers to sleep when they are not being utilized and explore the Wake-On-LAN technology.

Rated Appliances: Use Energy Star rated appliances, specially the air-conditioning or cooling systems. Devices carrying the Energy Star logo tend to save about 20% to 30% of energy on an average and the specifications differ with each item. Keep an eye on this point as it is estimated that EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) will announce and enforce the ratings for datacenter appliances and servers by 2010. At times, devices with Energy Star rating come costly but it is worth investing that marginal amount during the initial purchase. The overall running costs of power consumption would be much higher if the devices are not power efficient and you will run spending more on the energy costs in the long run.

Monitoring: It’s important to keep a track on the uptime and usage patterns of the datacenter. It basically allows the IT managers to accurately measure the effectiveness of the changes. Moreover, it also assists the top level management to decide on green energy solutions to reduce or eliminate their carbon footprints.

Remember, Green is just not a color – it’s more than that.

Do feel free to add in your comments, ideas and experiences. They would be much appreciated by all those who are planning to make computing energy efficient.

Wolfram|Alpha is an online service that computes and provides results to factual queries. In Google when we search for something, it provides us a list of web sites, documents and links while the same when computed at Wolfram|Alpha would provide a web page with statistical data. This should prove to be a boon to college students, researchers and the like. So out of Google, Wikipedia and Wolfram|Alpha, what do we use and when? Technically, while Google’s automated search algorithms crawl tens of millions of web sites to gather data, Wikipedia is a human-driven effort. Meanwhile, Wolfram|Alpha, uses a team of dedicated experts to add, evaluate, judge, and parse data.

I decided to give this new computational knowledge engine a try and choose “distance between Sun and Earth” as my query.

The results from Google were about 2,060,000 links and pages and the first link that it showed me was that to Wikipedia but not the actual figure.

Opening up Wikipedia provided me not only the figures but lot of interesting facts and data as well.

Feeding Wolfram|Alpha with the above query gave me the numbers in astronomical units – something which would not interest a common person. What I needed was either Kilometers or Miles.

The bottom line? Well, Wolfram|Alpha is surely promising as it offers a good amount of organized data along with charts and graphs. Moreover, Wolfram’s legacy application Mathematica has been put to use in Wolfram|Alpha and so this means that the site will shine in parsing mathematic queries. Maybe I’ve just scratched the surface of the knowledge engine here, but the fact is – how many Internet users would be interested in the statistical data.

Website: http://www.wolframalpha.com/