DougHughes.net

I’m happy to announce that Alagad has recently had yet another talented and experienced member join our ranks. Our newest employee is Mike Brunt.

Mike is a server and systems guru. He used to be a support technician for Allaire and Macromedia. After that, he helped found Webapper. When it comes to things like JVM tuning, advanced server configuration, application bottleneck troubleshooting and a lot more, I’ve never met anyone who comes close to Mike’s capabilities.

For example, he recently helped me with a client who wanted a very, very, complex IIS and ColdFusion configuration. In particular, they had four servers, two IIS web servers and two ColdFusion servers. The IIS servers were load balanced (I think) and the two ColdFusion servers were distributed (meaning not on the same servers as IIS), clustered, made use of session replication and sticky sessions. This was to meet the client’s specific needs for this configuration.

On the surface this sounds simple, but it’s possibly the most complex setup you can have for ColdFusion. It took many, many, hours to work this out. In the end it required a specific version of JVMs, ColdFusion, Jrun and more installed in the correct order! But Mike worked it out and the client has exactly what they needed working perfectly.

Beyond that, Mike recently (before he started with me) did some work for another client which he described in an email to me:

“Well I thought I would share what I had to do tonight for an old client I have. They have a small CF Server farm of three CFMX 7 Enterprise boxes running an eCommerce app with three CF instances each. So they wanted me to install SeeFusion on each and wrap the DSN with the SeeFusion JDBC wrapper but with no noticeable loss of service. This sometimes requires two restarts of CF, one for the initial SeeFusion install and another for the JDBC wrapper to take effect and tonight was no exception. Just to spice things up they have two levels of monitoring one is a heartbeat from the Cisco Load Balancers, the other an ISAPI monitoring system called TEALEAF and they asked me to complete this exercise with neither system picking up any service outage. I was successful and this is not braggery and I apologize if it sounds so. I am just glad to be here.”

Beyond that, I’ve worked with Mike to track down memory leaks and performance problems in applications. I’ve used him to eek out every iota of performance from applications.

So, suffice it to say, if you need something complex done with your servers or need to figure out how to help your applications run better, Mike (via Alagad!) is your man.

Beyond the server tuning and tweaking, Mike will be writing a long series of blog articles to teach you how to do these things. We’re also going to be putting together some training classes and aggressively growing this wing of Alagad.

Welcome to the team, Mike! We expect great things.