Jason Powell - Church IT and Other Musings

Apple Non-profit Discounts? Yup!

I periodically get asked, “Can you get Apple non-profits discounts?” Short answer: Yes! Here are some options to save $ on your Apple purchases.

Willow Creek Association – If you/your church is a member of the WCA you have access to special Apple pricing via the WCA Apple store.  Discount has been 10% across the board.

Apple Account Rep – If you do enough volume, Apple will assign an account rep to your organization.  I don’t know what the volume level is, but it’s worth checking into.  Sadly the Apple Worship Team was axed last year that catered to us churches … so it’s now harder to find out who your rep is if you don’t already know.  These reps are able to offer some very aggressive pricing as well as financing options you won’t find elsewhere.  To get hooked up with a rep at Apple contact Brian O'Neal boneal at apple dot com and he'll get you to the right person.

Your own Apple Store – If you have an Apple Account rep you can have them create an Apple store just for your organization.  Nifty eh?  Like the WCA store, we've been getting a 10% discount via our GCC Apple Store.

CDW – At times we’ve been able to get some good discounts from CDW when purchasing a quantity of Apple gear.  I’m sure other vendors that sell Apple could do similar if you push them :-)

Apple Store Refurbs/Clearance – This is not really a “special discount”, but it’s certainly a good option to pursue.  I know several churches that buy all their Apple gear off the refurb site with no regrets. http://store.apple.com/us/browse/home/specialdeals?mco=MTM3NDkyNzc 

What options have you found to shave $ off your Apple purchases?

VMware Non-Profit Eligibility

To piggy-back on my recent post about VMware academic pricing now available to non-profits … here are the requirements, per VMware, on who’s eligible for academic pricing.  If you need VMware pricing you should contact Tom Templin at Ciber: ttemplin at ciber dot com. 

Tom's one of our long time uber IT volunteers at GCC and has gotten us amazing pricing on all sorts of software and hardware over the years.  Document courtesy of Tom.

Download VMware Non Profit Customer Definitions Jan 2010 FINAL

Jungle Disk + Amazon S3 Online Backup Test #2

Continuing from my prior blog post on Jungle Disk Server Edition / Amazon S3 testing …

TEST #2 … see what Jungle Disk does with 67GB of user files.

I found this folder on our shared drive with mainly graphics files and pointed Jungle Disk at it to see how it would compress/dedup the data.  As you can see the bulk of the files are graphics related

Above screenshot is from TreeSizePro

RESULT:

Pretty sweet compression! 40.83GB of files but only 23.70GB pushed up to Amazon S3 storage.  For comparison I used 7zip on its maximum compression setting to see what it could do with the same files.  It didn’t do as well compressing down to 25.3GB vs 23.7GB.  So Jungle Disk is doing a great job with it’s compression engine.

So what about a folder with a mix of audio, video, and graphics files? 

RESULT:

Not nearly as good of compression, but I didn’t assume MP3 and .mov files would compress any so not really a bummer result wise.  Of course you could set file exclusions so Jungle Disk would skip those A/V files you don’t want/need to push them to S3.

You may wonder what the duration column is all about.  This shows how long a backup job has ran and thus how long it took to upload your backup to S3.  For my testing I’ve limited upload speeds to 7Mbps in the Jungle Disk configuration.  And yes, Jungle Disk will use whatever bandwidth you give it.  Amazon S3 is amazingly fast.

So here’s the result after a week of testing.  Jungle Disk is monitoring 113GB of files and has uploaded only 80GB of data to S3 for a 38% compression ratio.  Not bad at all!  Heck, even a 25% compression would enough to get excited about :-)

In Test #3 I’ll test restore functions, add a bunch more files to backup, and look at some of the reporting capabilities you get with Jungle Disk.

Jungle Disk + Amazon S3 Online Backup Test #1

I’ve been pondering recently ways to fill the gap in our current backup strategy.  In our current setup, if a disaster hit with the worst possible timing we could loose up to 4 weeks of data based on when tapes are taken offsite.  Yes, that would bite!

We do have a few measures in place to help fill in that possible 4 week window: 
1) Postini archives all our incoming/outgoing emails in their datacenter offsite.
2) We’ve been pushing our critical SQL backups offsite via MozyPro.  However, this has recently stopped working reliably so I cancelled this service.  And THUS my recent searching for a better replacement.

In a great luck of timing Chris Kehayias happened to tweet this week about his experiences with Jungle Disk as their online backup solution.  (side note: if you’re not following #citrt in twitter you’re missing some great Church IT info!)

I’ve not looked at Jungle Disk in over a year, so I was surprised to see how much it’s matured.  Basically Jungle Disk Server Edition is a backup application you install locally, but pushes your data to several cloud storage options like Amazon’s S3 service.

A 30day free trial of Jungle Disk and 10GB of free S3 storage and no transfer fees were enough to make me bite :-)

I installed the Jungle Disk server edition client on my virtual test server (Server2008R2) followed by the Jungle Disk Mangement console.  During the setup of the client it shoots you over to Amazon to setup an S3 account.  Configuring a backup is pretty similar to every other online backup tool I’ve tried (Mozy Home, Mozy Pro, Carbonite, Crashplan, etc).  Do note that Jungle Disk has no SQL or Exchange plug-ins … feed it files.

TEST #1 … give it our SQL.bak backup file we run nightly and see what happens.  It’s 2.54GB in size so I was curious to see how well it would compress/dedup before sending data out to S3.  The result:

Of 2.54GB it only sent 363MB up to S3 to store.  Nice!  Then I waited overnight to see how well it would handle the overall changes to the SQL.bak file.  The result:

Jungle Disk claims they track block level file changes and I concur.  Overnight the SQL.bak file was overwritten, but Jungle Disk was able to track and then upload to S3 only the block level changes … in this case only 20MB of changes.  That simple test was enough to sell me on using JungleDisk/S3 for our new offsite SQL solution.  So now to calc how much this should cost.

Normal pricing is $5/server for Jungle Disk and then $.15/GB/month for S3 storage space and upload transfer costs of $.10/GB/month … of course right now you get 10GB S3 space for free and no upload charges until June 30, 2010 … w00t!

In Test #2 I’ll go over my results from experimenting with about 75GB of various file types to see what we might expect if we pushed all our files up to S3.

First Ever EqualLogic User Conference

If you’re an EqualLogic storage customer, like GCC, you really should try to make it to the first ever national EqualLogic User Conference March 1-3 in Dallas.  We purchased our 1st EqualLogic array back in July ‘06 and we’ve been a big cheerleader for the product ever since.

From the conf website:
The main conference on March 1-3 is packed with educational sessions where distinguished technical staff, EqualLogic product managers, tech support gurus, peer users and Dell executives will deliver:

• Primers on networking best practices for iSCSI SANs
• Tips on how to avoid common technical issues
• Deep dives into the EqualLogic software tools such as SAN HeadQuarters
• Data protection strategies for virtual environments and production applications
• Product and feature demonstrations
• Sessions on 10 GbE networking and SSD technology
• Case studies featuring your peers at leading organizations
• Lessons on how to leverage EqualLogic for cutting edge deployments

I’m also excited to hang out with several other church IT EqualLogic users from Watermark Church and Churches in Covenant just to name a few.  And this post wouldn’t be complete without the obligatory plug for VR6 Systems whom we all, and many other churches, have purchased EqualLogic gear from ;-)

I’m also hoping to get some tasty TX BBQ … I have found memories of Hard 8 BBQ from the Texas CITRT event last Feb … Mmmmm!

ProPresenter4 to Add Windows Support!? Yes!!

This was easily the biggest Church Tech news of the day Thursday.  ProPresenter v4 will break from it’s 10 year tradition of Mac only support and now offer a Windows version!

Here’s the pertinent info from their webpage…

ProPresenter for Windows... Seriously...

For 10 years, we've developed ProPresenter for Mac only, and have been asked repeatedly if there was going to be a version for Windows. Our answers were always the same:

• The tools that enable us to do what we do on the Mac aren't as robust on the Windows platform.
• We have nothing against Windows, but felt we could make a more powerful and reliable product on the Mac.
• We'd rather focus on making the best software for any platform, rather than divide our efforts by supporting two platforms.

All of these answers were valid, and as the marketshare of the Mac has increased over the last several years, the question has become a lot less frequent. At the same time, however, we've been troubled by some things:

• There are a lot of churches that don't have Macs, particularly overseas
• There is a great variety of Windows-based machines on the market that are seemingly very capable.
• A new computer purchase is often difficult in today's economy.
• Many PC users get excited about our product only to be let down when learning it's Mac only.
• Some organizations will not purchase a Mac just to run ProPresenter.
• If we can improve the worship experience on the Mac, why not use our expertise to do the same for Windows?

Through the years, a lot has changed. Computers have become far more powerful and technologies have evolved. We've kept our eye on Windows technologies that would enable us to create a quality ProPresenter experience for Windows users, and we now believe we have found the right tool set, and assembled the right team of people to make ProPresenter for Windows a reality!

So, the cat's out of the bag. We'll be keeping you updated via our website as this story unfolds.

But wait! There’s MORE!!  A site license is cross platform!

Site License: $799 (Concurrent use) … $399 for Site License Upgrade

Our Site License allows you to run it in multiple environments on one campus simultaneously (each campus requires it's own license). This license works on both Mac and Windows versions.

At lunch our Tech Arts Director was eager to make the purchase for v4 :-)  Our main auditorium uses ProPresenter on Macs, but all our classroom’s use Media Shout on PC’s.  The ability to standardize down to one software application is huge from a training and troubleshooting standpoint.  To date there’s not been enough ROI to justify replacing all the Media Shout PC’s with Macs running ProPresenter … and this would mean we won’t have to :-)

Of course this all HINGES on the windows version of ProPresenter4 being a solid app.  It WILL BE a 1.0 windows release which makes me slightly nervous coming from a company not experienced in writing windows code.  The upside is that I already know many churches that are eager to try out this windows version.  So if there are bugs they’ll be found quickly and hopefully addressed in similar fashion.  Start crossing your fingers now ;-)

So who else out there will be testing this windows version with us?

VMware Academic Pricing now available to Churches!

Boy, we’ve been lobbying for this for 3+ years … and yesterday VMware announced it’s finally giving non-profit organizations access to academic pricing! w00t!!!

Of course academic pricing is still no where near the crazy discounts we get from Microsoft, but it’s a great start!  Thank you VMware!!

This means on most products expect about 40% off the list price.

Here’s some pricing info for comparison:

VMware vSphere 4 Essentials Bundle for 3 hosts (Max 2 processors per host and 6 cores per processor)
List - $879 … 1yr support $116
Academic - $527 … 1yr support $70

VMware vSphere 4 Essentials Plus Bundle for 3 hosts
List - $2995 … Gold support $629 … Platinum support $749
Academic - $1797 … Gold $377 … Platinum $749

VMware vSphere 4 Standard for 1 processor
List - $795 … Gold $273 … Platinum $323
Acad - $477 … Gold $164 … Platinum $323

VMware vSphere 4 Advanced for 1 processor
List - $2245… Gold $472… Platinum $561
Acad - $1347 … Gold $283 … Platinum $561

VMware vSphere 4 Enterprise for 1 processor
List - $2875… Gold $604… Platinum $719
Acad - $1725… Gold $362… Platinum $719

VMware vCenter Server 4 Standard for vSphere (Includes Orchestrator and Linked Mode)
List - $4995… Gold $1049… Platinum $1249
Acad - $2997… Gold $629… Platinum $1249

Eligibility requirements and who we bought from

Fellowship Church IT opening - Information Technology Manager

My buddy Dave down at Fellowship Church asked me to pass along this IT opening … sweet gig at a sweet church!

Fellowship Church – Information Technology Manager
Fellowship Church is looking for an individual well versed in the Information Technology world, that has a passion to support the message, ministries, multi-site effort and infrastructure of Fellowship Church through Information Technology.
The individuals skill set should look something like this:

You must be:
A team player and love collaborating with others.
Passionate about new and Open Source technologies.
A motivated self-starter and learner
Able to to adapt quickly and work in a fast paced high energy environment.
Able to build and lead staff and volunteer teams

Your Skills:
Network Administration
VPN and VOIP systems
Server Virtualization
Windows and Mac Network integration
Active & Open Directory Administration
Corporate 802.11x Wireless-Network Management
Project Management
Help Desk/Technical Support Management
Knowledge of Cabling and Fiber

http://fellowshipchurch.com

For more info contact Dave Clark