RunAs Radio

Richard talks to Chris Conte about his experiences deploying SharePoint into the military. Chris talks about his early days in the Navy as a yeoman, first learning the potential of personal computers to make the work of handling the huge amount of data the military produces easier. The conversation digs into how SharePoint governance is as much a challenge for the military as industry, and how strong metadata infrastructure has made data more findable, understandable and useable. Chris also talks about the concept of 'Responsibility to Share' as opposed to 'Need to Know' - a deep change for the military, but also a huge one to apply to the enterprise. Are you sharing the data you need to share with the people who need to know it? Can SharePoint help?

Richard chats with Benny Lakunishok about storage performance in Exchange 2010. The new storage systems in Exchange 2010 substantially changed the way Exchange works with storage systems. Benny talks about the surprise of having performance problems with Exchange on SANs because of these changes - Exchange 2010 tends to write much larger blocks of data than older versions. Benny mentions JetStress, a free tool from Microsoft for testing the storage system of an Exchange server before Exchange is deployed on it. It can also be used to test how the system behaves under various failure modes, such as a missing LUN, failed disk or array recovery. Lots to think about for the future of your Exchange infrastructure!

Richard chats with Steven Murawski about his work at StackExchange. The conversation starts out digging into how StackExchange avoided hurricane Sandy by failing the site over from New York to Oregon. Steven also talks about the DevOps attitude at StackExchange, how the developers work closely with operations to test new features, keeping performance and reliability at peak. With his primary responsibility at StackExchange being SQL Server, Steven also discusses the benefits he's gotten from moving SQL Server 2012 over to Server 2012 from Server 2008 R2. Check out the blog posts on ServerFault about Moving to SQL 2012, Working towards failure and Failing over for Sandy.

Hey, it's show 300! For the 300th show, Richard chats with Mark Minasi about a variety of topics, including the good and bad of Windows 8. And somehow the metric system creeps in also. Stick around for the next 300 shows!

Richard talks to Alan Burchill about some of the improvements to Group Policy in Server 2012. The conversation starts out with the new reporting features, including the infrastructure status report that will actually show you when policies have been synchronized between AD servers as well as improve group policy reports to help you understand what policies are (and are NOT) being applied to a given account. Alan then digs into local group policy features in Windows RT (yes, the ARM edition) - you can't join a domain, but you can push local policies onto tablets! For more information around group policy in Server 2012, check out Alan's blog.

Richard talks to Microsoft PFE Bruce Adamczak about the new high availability features for DHCP in Server 2012. The conversation digs into the problems in DHCP and some of the fundamental strategies for dealing with implementing DHCP to be survivable. Bruce then talks about how Server 2012 allows active-active and active-passive groups (don't call them clusters!) of DHCP servers in Server 2012. You can read more about DHCP high availability at Bruce's Blog. Also check out the Windows Team DHCP Blog. Time to think about a more robust DHCP implementation!

For the first show on 2013, Richard chats with Dan Rosanova about big data in the Microsoft space. While the conversation starts out speaking about big data in general, Don focuses in on Hadoop, an open source distributed data manipulation technology that Microsoft has adopted in a big way. Hadoop specializes in doing MapReduce across massive numbers of machines, and if you don't have that many machines, you can always use the cloud. Check out Windows Azure HDInsight for the simplest way to get Hadoop running on Azure. And don't worry if you think you need to run on premise, the SQL Server team is there with Microsoft Big Data. Happy New Year!

While on the US Thanksgiving break of the .NET Rocks Visual Studio 2012 Launch Road Trip, Richard talked to Tom Canter about the changes in healthcare information technology going on today. The conversation starts out on the architectural challenges of healthcare information systems. Ultimately, Tom digs into what everyone can learn from building large scale integrated systems, showing advanced data discovery that can turn operations into profit centers. Healthcare technology can lead the way!

Richard talks to Aydin Aslaner about his work deploying IPv6 in the mideast and Europe. Aydin talks about how the Turkish government is mandating externally accessible web sites having IPv6 in the next year and government organizations having internal IPv6 in 2014. The conversation also walks through the evolution of IPv6 implementations in your organization, between internal networks, external networks, public facing and bridging. IPv6 can't be ignored any longer!

While on the US Thanksgiving break of the .NET Rocks Visual Studio 2012 Launch Road Trip, Richard talked with Kamal Abburi about risk assessments around Exchange server. Kamal talks about the common issues he's found in doing risk assessments of Exchange for companies all over the world. Along the way, he talks about a number of powerful tools for doing your own assessment, including the Exchange 2010 Mailbox Server Role Requirements Calculator, the Exchange Performance Data Collection tool, Exchange 2010 Servicing and the Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 Build Guide Templates.