IT Architecture: WordPress

What I like about WordPress

Ease of use, quick development, built in SEO, and plugin availability are just several reasons to like WordPress. For a development project, I designed a website called Story64. It’s a website for writers to submit stories exactly 64 words long. As an avid writer, I chose something of personal interest. I used a free theme and only had to do minimal coding. WordPress is so widely used, finding code snippets for almost anything is just a Google away.

What I don’t like about WordPress

Constant Updates. WordPress websites have to be continuously updated. I designed a Flash website IcyGrail.com back in 2010 and it still l runs great (check it out if you got moment). Story64, if left untouched, would likely break within a year’s time.

While updates are a pain, the biggest negative to WordPress sites are their load times. Story64 takes too long to load a page. This was an issue for me. After doing some research, I found most WordPress sites use CDN’s (Content Delivery Networks). CDN’s act as a middle-man between your host and the user. CDN’s cache all of the pages of your website, and when a user visits a page from your site, the CDN will load the page for you. They provide better performance and also protect against host downtime. The negatives. All CDN’s cost dollars, and I’m all about the zero-cost options. Another issue is updates. The CDN can take some time to re-cache your site, causing a potential delay in delivery of the most current content. There are ways around this, but sometimes further customization is needed.

All and all, WordPress still eclipses the development time of building a site from scratch, and I highly recommend getting familiar with it or one of its comparables.

 

Flash Research: Virtualization

Datacenter Build with Virtual Machines

Our company can save $9,200,000 over three years by incorporating server virtualization into our new datacenter build. We can reduce the purchase of 1,000 servers to just 280. The implementation will downsize our datacenter, simplify our disaster recovery plan, and improve our energy efficiency. In addition, server administration will be more centralized, reducing maintenance costs by $1,360,000 annually.

Virtualization is a technology that allows a single physical server to simultaneously run multiple virtual servers, each running its own operating system and applications. Each virtual machine is encapsulated, independent of each other; all data is secured within each virtual machine.  This enables each physical server to deploy a variety of services, regardless of operating system or platform. Virtual machines are snapshots that can be easily transferred to a different physical server; this allows for faster re-deployments when a physical machine fails, providing easier disaster recovery. Fewer physical machines means less energy and fewer hot aisles. Reducing heat means lower cooling costs.

A datacenter consisting of 1,000 physical servers at $8,000,000 to purchase and $6,000,000 to maintain would result in a three-year $14,000,000 benefit. Introducing virtualization into the datacenter build consolidate the number of servers to 280. The server purchases and maintenance would incur a three-year cost of $4,800,000. The new datacenter can be maintained for three years for less that it would cost to run a physical datacenter in just a single year. We will reduce our physical servers by 72% and our overall costs by 66%. Virtualization will yield a higher return on investment with a three year net benefit of $9,200,000.

Flash Research: Datacenters

Think Business Interruption, Not Network Downtime

At losses incurred at $14,800 per minute, our Tier I Datacenter lost our organization $25.6 million this past year simply due to outages. I propose a one year investment of $35,000,000 that create a three-year net benefit of $13.3 million.

The losses associated with Tier I Datacenters are a measured certainty; however, these losses can be controlled with equal certainty by upgrading our Datacenter to a Tier III infrastructure. The upgrade would provide redundant power and cooling distribution paths that will be concurrently maintainable. A downed power line or leaky water pipe will not cause our Datacenter to fail. Maintenance and repairs can be achieved without taking any system offline. In an age of Just-In-Time manufacturing, our company’s brand starts with our capacity to deliver products on time and without interruption.

Eliminating the Tier I Datacenter would result in a three-year $35,000,000 benefit. The Tier III Datacenter would incur a three-year cost of $48,307,200. Investing in a Tier III Datacenter will introduce a new level of confidence in our organization’s ability to reach operating initiates, manufacture products, and yield a higher return on investment with a three year net benefit of $13,307,200.

Information Systems Project: Surf Cafe

 

As part of an exclusive class project, I designed Surf Cafe, using Microsoft Access, to provide professors with a working database for class demonstration. It illustrates how primary keys are used as criteria for queries and how queries can populate a screen. It can also provide a visual to the importance of foreign keys and the normalized relationships they build. The presentation below can be downloaded here.

 

 

Kaggle: Analytic Olympics

Kaggle is a crowdsourcing community and a predictive-modelling platform. It’s also a data dump and job board. Together, it’s ground zero for some of the biggest analytics competitions in the world.

When a company like Walmart or Home Depot needs a data solution. First, it posts the problem to Kaggle in the form of a competition. Second, it dumps its historical datasets to the website. Then researchers, statisticians, and data miners from all around the globe submit problem-solving models. And literally anyone can join and submit their own algorithm. What’s at stake? Cash.

• Intel: Which cancer treatment will be most effective? Winner gets $100,000.
• Planet: Understanding the Amazon from Space. Winner gets $60,000.

 

When Facebook needs a new team member for its analytics department, job recruiting starts with an applicant’s Kaggle score.

Kaggle was founded in 2010, in San Francisco and now has over 50,000 ranked members. Both small and large companies come to Kaggle looking for solutions or simply to recruit for a short term gig or fulltime employment.

Heritage Provider Network put up $3 million for the best prediction model that identifies which patients will be admitted to a hospital in the next 365 days. A team of 7 called Powerdot won the grand prize.

The Fox School’s Data Analytics-2502 is a great introduction to R, ETL, Data Marts, and Data Visualization as all of these concepts are used by the Kaggle community. Kaggle is also great resource for any student at Temple intending to be an actuary or has interest in data science. The platform can challenge a student’s skills and push him or her to perform better with each submission. Kaggle also offers opportunities to network with potential employers and peers. Many of Kaggle’s members form groups offering a unique learning opportunity. Kaggle is the center of the analytical universe and every Temple student with interest in research and analytics should, at the very least, browse the site to see what it has to offer.

 

 

 

 

NBC Universal Luncheon

I had the fortunate opportunity to sit down and have lunch with NBC Universal’s EVP & CIO Michael Bradshaw and his team. What enthusiasm! They were all passionate about what they do. They gave us an inside look to how they make decisions on popular TV shows and how much unstructured data they have and how they capture it. Leaving the luncheon made you want to join NBC.

Security and Privacy Event at E&Y

I interviewed for a consulting position that resulted in an invitation to an event being held at Ernst & Young, April 20th. I attended the event and found it heavily focused on Cyber-Security and the risks involved, both today and in the future. Protiviti was the featured presenter. The information was for real world professionals: they covered issues with governmental regulations and best practices for security and privacy. One of the most interesting topics was that most data breaches come via an organization’s partnership with third-party suppliers. Target, for instance, had a major data breach, but it was caused by one of their third-party suppliers. Protiviti urged everyone to create new policies in how to manage all third-parties. The event gave me a peek into my future, when I’ll be a professional and peer to those that attended.

Salesforce.com Internship

I accepted an internship with Salesforce.com and it has been very fulfilling. The managing representative offered me the position of Project Leader which included handpicking other interns to be part of the team. The project itself is very rewarding. We work with a non-profit organization Siloam that provide support for people with HIV. The project involves migrating legacy data into Salesforce. This has given me a crash course in Salesforce from an admin perspective. Salesforce has also offered to pay for my certification. I’ve been so impressed with Salesforce, I will likely look for future opportunities with the leading CRM platform.

How a BBA MIS relates to my Career Interest

For the past 12 years, I have been working as a Project Manager for a mid-sized non-profit. I enrolled in the MIS Major to get exposed to a wide variety of technologies while working towards a Bachelor’s Degree. The MIS coursework has covered Azure, Domain Architectures, PHP, R, Sharepoint, and SQL just to name a few. This well-rounded approach to learning has given me the confidence to start taking on consulting jobs. I’ve taken on 3 clients with work ranging from databases to WordPress to networking. I look forward to the coming semesters to further expand my knowledge.

AIS Speaker Series: Grant Thornton

Representatives from Grant Thornton kicked off the semester with the first AIS Speaker Series delivering a high-energy, jam-packed presentation on containerization, specifically discussing Docker. Docker is one of the world’s leaders in this new software platform. As the industry moves further into the cloud, containerization offers an alternative virtualization method to the traditional virtual machine layer. Grant Thornton’s presentation included pros and cons of the new technology while wowing the room with the breadth of their knowledge.

Mostly notably, I was pleased to see at least 2 or 3 of Grant Thornton’s representatives were Temple Graduates and former AIS members.

 

 

Setup your email on your smartphone!

When a professor asks a class, “Did you get my email,” I find it strange that so many say they never saw it. Everybody has a smart phone; don’t we all know how to use it? When I first got my TU email, first thing I did was set it up on my iPhone. Why is this important? True Story:

During my campus tour on orientation day, I got an email from the MIS Dept. at the Fox School asking me for an interview (yes, before I had even been to orientation, I had already applied to several jobs on campus). The tour guide probably wasn’t too happy, but I immediately replied. After a short exchange, he agreed to see me after my tour had completed. Before going to the interview, I did apologize to the friendly tour guide.

Moral of this story: Do the following…

Click on this link: Temple’s Mobile Device Setup, scroll down to Mobile Device Setup and following the posted instructions.

Now, when a class scheduling Doodle is posted, you’ll have the pick of the litter of times.

Questions, corrections, omissions: joseph.haas@temple.edu (I’ll get it instantly)