A High Availability problem that can only be guided by the expert availability

Sometimes, after searching on ends for a possible and most elegant solution for a technical problem just doesn't come up with the goods. Then it is time to deploy your question on a domain/expert forum. In my case, I had a High Availability (HA) setup problem. I won't go into the specifics here. But it is just interesting that I find asking your own question on a forum like the SQL server forum can draw the attention of experts who will be able to offer their opinions most tailored to your problem!

So here's my Forum Question of the Day as a sample~

Interop Las Vegas (May, 2012)

Interop, the leading business technology event, is held at different times of the year at locations including Las Vegas, New York, Tokyo, and Mumbai. This year, I was very privileged to attend the one in Las Vegas, where there were over 300 exhibitors in the expo and 100 conferences by topics. Here, except for gambling, the areas covered in the conference are very wide range: cloud computing, virtualization, security, mobility and data center advances.

In the enterprise cloud summit, firstly, there is a fact that cloud is becoming generally accepted as companies gain experience with the concepts. According to CompTIA’s survey, 69% (vs. 42% last year) of individuals rated themselves as familiar with the cloud. And 69% of companies are using some form of SaaS application, whilst 36% of companies not using IaaS/PaaS currently plan to do so in the future. So the reliance on cloud is every so increasing. The sited reasons are lower costs, simpler/quicker implementation, and expanded capabilities. There are challenges however, such as integration with existing systems, vendor lock-in & selection, and changes to IT policy and staff training. And there are hidden costs of the cloud as suggested by company like Cloudability. If not under control (which can be hard), high costs due to unused instances and over-provisioning are expected.

Other points of interests as mentioned in this cloud summit are:

1. Openness in cloud platforms are starting to see momentum as initiatives such as OpenStack gains success. The open cloud ecosystem is now very rich. Rackspace, Cloud Stack, Cloud Foundry, Eucalyptus and cloudscaling are just some to name a few. Diversity and cheaper implementation are the two key reasons to adopt these open cloud systems. And since the code is open, these systems should be secure and more trustworthy.
2. Generally, users tend to choose fun(ctionality) over security. And this brings lots of headaches to the IT administrators. One of the solutions at the virtualization level is that the Hypervisor will undergo massive changes starting this year to become the root of security for clients and clouds alike. Startups like Bromium looks toward a Byzantine Secure System as a part of the change. 
3. To be in the economic game these days, companies are building and opening APIs for accessing their data services. The data services can be monetized by APIs to sell to external vendors and partners. In turn, the ecosystem of your business consolidates and grows at a higher level of pace. 
4. The increasing number of people bring their own devices (BYOD) to work is an open security question left still largely unaddressed at this point.

Interop has been mostly a business driven event. The number of topics and products on display at the expo were staggering. And security will continue to be the cornerstone and concern from both the vendor’s and customer’s points of views. It will be very interesting to see how new security problems and opportunities will be created in this every changing cloud era!

Oh, why that DLL is not found!

I was testing a piece of code to do with KMIP (Key Management Interoperability Protocol). The KMIP client code includes a C# wrapper that loads a C++ client library. However, I was stuck in a weird problem where I was getting the exception saying that this particular C++ KmipClient.dll is not found. But in fact, the file is located where the program expects it to be. So a chat with a fellow worker led me to check the DLL dependency for the DLL. I then went onto using the Dependency Walker tool. Below is the result of loading the KmipClient.dll.

The issue has been discovered! The root cause was the INGICAPI.DLL which is needed by KmipClient.dll was not loaded because it was not placed along with KmipClient.dll. So check your dependencies, folks :)