Bob Muglia addresses the question of software-defined networking at the Juniper Tech Field Day Roundtable at Interop

But what I’d really like to talk about is the great conversations that come at Interop. From the Roundtables to lunch and dinner to the show floor, it’s always amazing to witness spontaneous discussions of key topics. This just seems to happen when you put great people together!

Watch all of my video from Interop over at Vimeo!

For example, the Tech Field Day discussion with NEC began with an overview of their OpenFlow integration. But before long, the delegates began to muse on the role of integrated networking, what software-defined networking (SDN) really means to the future of the datacenter, and even the implications of SDN on the career of a networker!

It’s really an interesting question: What does it mean to a networker when they have an API to program their switches in a generic manner? Do they need to do this? Who will help them out? Thanks to Jason Edelman, “Mrs. Y”, Rob Novak, and Colin McNamara for picking up this thread!

This discussion continued when Juniper Networks’ Bob Muglia took to the table. Although this talk was ostensibly focused on that company’s software integration efforts, it quickly turned to the same idea: What does OpenFlow mean for networking and networkers? Colin McNamara kicked this off right from the start, asking about talent sourcing, certifications, and what companies like Juniper and NEC can do to foster this new skill.

This is far from resolved, and the rise of “software-defined storage” and the greater “software-defined” datacenter movement makes it relevant beyond networking. Are we infrastructure folks to become programmers? Will SDN lead to a shift towards the DevOps mentality? And is any of this really relevant to non-service provider enterprise IT?

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2013. | How Does OpenFlow Impact The Daily Life Of Networkers?
This post was categorized as Enterprise storage, Virtual Storage. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

“Booth babes” perpetuate the “men only” stigma of high-tech

Sexist Tech Marketing Is Wrong But Legal

Let me be clear: I’ve got nothing against sex generally or sexy imagery specifically, especially when it’s consenting and in context. Clothing, luxury goods, alcohol, and perfume companies pour on the sex because that’s essentially what they’re selling! If you didn’t think a certain t-shirt or drink choice would enhance your personal allure, why would you pay 10x the price?

My field of enterprise IT is entirely different. Storage arrays aren’t sex objects. A better server won’t help you land a better mate. Yet marketers too often resort to the same tactics to sell these things, and this hurts more than their company’s reputation. Sexist marketing hurts the entire industry! Let me explain.

Contrary to the stereotype, there are lots of smart techies who happen to be women. But women tend to stand out in tech due to their scarcity: Many are assumed to be less-technical just because of their gender! My women techie friends tell tales of mistaken identity (“you’re the sales girl, right?”) and even serious harassment due to these assumptions. This is especially prevalent on the floor at events, where attendees, accustomed to vacuous “booth babes”, often refuse to talk to technical women!

Note that some conferences and events have a Code of Conduct that would seem to prohibit sexist marketing. For example, the Interop Code of Conduct states that “clothing that is not suitable for a professional work environment, that is provocative, or otherwise potentially offensive” is prohibited. This would seem to block any excessively-skimpy “spokes-model” attire without banning models from the floor.

I suppose there’s nothing illegal in selling tech with sex. But it creates an atmosphere that excludes women and exacerbates the already-harsh career environment they face in technical areas of IT. “Booth babe culture” keeps women out of tech, and this wrong is a serious issue for the IT industry.

Want to attract nerds to your company? Hire this guy!

Sexism in Recruiting is a Crime

Note: This post was inspired by a specific situation with Storage Staffing, a specialist recruiter who routinely uses scantily-dressed, logo-clad models. I will not link to that company because I do not wish to drive any SEO their way.

Women considering a career in IT already feel unwelcome thanks to “booth babe culture” and an environment of sexist sales and marketing ploys. But the use of these tactics by a recruiter just might be illegal!

The U. S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s Sex-Based Discrimination guidelines seem to apply here. “The law forbids discrimination when it comes to any aspect of employment, including hiring”, according to their web site. “It is also illegal for an employer to recruit new employees in a way that discriminates against them because of their … sex”, according to the EEOC. And liability cascades from the recruiting firm to the hiring company!

So, would a recruiter that used “booth babes” be guilty? I am not a lawyer, but I believe so. According to the EEOC, “employment policies and practices that have a disproportionately negative effect on applicants or employees of a particular … sex” are prohibited. Since women are unlikely to be attracted to a recruiter using scantily-dressed models, I believe that such a practice falls within these “prohibited practices”.

When I pointed this out on Twitter, I received a flood of support and just a few dissenting voices. Yet the company in question defended their practices, proclaiming “we are proud to use models to promote our brand.” They also claim to believe that “the implication that anyone hiring models is actively keeping women out of tech is ridiculous.”

Stephen’s Stance

Many of the women I spoke to about this issue are hesitant to come forward about their feelings. They worry that, as one publicly pointed out, they will be called a prude and excluded further. Others fear “booth babe” witch hunts that mistakenly blow back on technical women who happen to be attractive. This is heartbreaking. And this is why the entire industry needs a unified, no-tolerance attitude towards sexism.

Sexism is rampant in enterprise IT, driving women out and creating a negative “frat house” atmosphere. I have decided to speak out, and have begun with the pernicious case of a specialist recruiter whose practices have a disproportionately negative effect on the career prospects of women. But I will continue to point out sexism and fight “booth babe culture” in my industry. I welcome your comments.

The illustrative image at the top of this post comes from the twitter feed of Storage Staffing. It, in fact, the only image this recruiter has posted on Twitter, and they seem rather proud of their reputation for using models to attract attention.

Further reading:

• (Don’t) Make Your Startup Look Stupid With Booth Babes And Chotchkies!
• Besting the Booth Babe Trade Show Strategy
• Seriously, stop with the booth babes

• CES Doesn’t Think Booth Babes Are A Problem. Here’s Why They’re Wrong

• Interop Code of Conduct

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2013. | It’s Time To Speak Out Against Sexism In IT Recruiting
This post was categorized as Enterprise storage, Features, Personal. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

What Is All This?

I realize that most people may not be familiar with any of the applications I’m talking about here, so let’s get some definitions out of the way first.

• Google Reader is the dominant application used to follow and read the RSS feeds that are everywhere on the Internet, from blogs to sites like twitter and foursquare. But Reader doesn’t make any money for Google so they’re shutting it down on July 1, 2013. Reader is essentially a back-end database of subscribed feeds and read/unread post information, plus a front-end web application and API.
• Reeder is a great native mobile front-end app for Google Reader. It enables offline use and is much quicker than a web app like Reader or Feedbin. It’s available for iPhone, iPad, and Mac OS X.
• Feedbin is like Google Reader: A web app and back end for reading RSS feeds.

So you use Reeder to take Reader or Feedbin on the go, keeping up with RSS wherever you are!

Moving to Feedbin

Google’s “Takeout” service allows you to export your entire Reader account as OPML, and Feedbin accepts this same file! I clicked “Settings” in Reader, then “Import/Export” and “Download your data through Takeout“.

It’s nice that your entire Google Reader account can be exported with just a few clicks!

Takeout took quite a while to export my Reader account, and I was surprised to see it weigh in at over 32 MB. But hey, I guess I’m an active user! After an hour or so, Takeout allowed me to download the file to my computer and I logged out of Reader one last time.

Exporting with Google Takeout seemingly took forever!

Reader took so long to export my account, that I began poking around in Reeder on my iPhone and found an option to export my subscriptions as an OPML file right there. Cool! That’s what I was waiting for Reader to do! So I exported there, mailing the OPML immediately to myself. No more waiting!

Why wait for Google?!

Swinging over to Feedbin, I signed up for an account, deciding to go ahead and pay $20 for a year of service (it’s also available at $2 per month). After all, I’m going to use the heck out of Feedbin and I wanted to offer the developer some incentive to make it great!

Logging into Feedbin, I immediately headed to “Settings”, then “Import/Export”, and uploaded the OPML file from my Reeder email. I suppose that the Google Takeout file might have worked too, but I didn’t try it.

Hello there, Feedbin!

Feedbin failed to import the OPML file a few times, giving strange error messages, but I kept trying. Eventually it “took” with my whole set of hundreds of RSS feeds appearing by magic! Feedbin preserved my “tags” as well, essentially folders for organizing feeds a-la Gmail.

More Feedbin Settings

In order properly to replace Google Reader, I set a few more settings in Feedbin. First, under the main “Settings” pane, I enabled my “starred entry feed”. I use Google Reader stars to feed Buffer through IFTTT, and will swing this over to Feedbin in short order.

It’s also a good idea to set the “Hide tagged feeds” option so that it will match Google Reader, but I held off on this until cleaning house (see below).

I love the open Sharing settings in Feedbin, but didn’t yet have a use for it. We’ll see what I do with it in the future!

Next, I opened Reeder on my iPhone and switched over from Google Reader to Feedbin. I removed the Reader account and added the Feedbin settings and everything burst to life! I also use it on the iPad and Mac but they’re not updated for Feedbin yet. Here’s hoping that comes soon!

Cleaning House

The only issue with Reeder as the source for the OPML file is you lose all of your stars and read/unread information. Presumably the huge Google file would have included these. But I took this as an opportunity to revisit my subscriptions and feed organization, clearing out dozens of old, worthless feeds.

Google Reader used to allow you to subscribe to the same feed multiple times, clogging the application with duplicate posts. This was fixed a few years back, but there was no deduplication feature so old-timers like me (and presumably most of Reader’s clientele) still had dupes. Feedbin preserved these dupes too, so I manually went through my subscriptions, nuking the dupes and anything that hadn’t been updated since the Bush administration.

One note: it appears that Reeder doesn’t update and remove unsubscribed feeds right away, or perhaps there was a bug in the program. They were stripped of their tags but still appeared. And I couldn’t unsubscribe there either. But, the next day, all of those feeds disappeared. So that’s good!

Once I got through this process, I went through and marked all of the feeds as “read” in the Feedbin web app. Now I was good to go!

How Is Feedbin/Reeder?

Feedbin works pretty well in my opinion. It’s nowhere near as quick as Reader was, but I believe developer Ben Ubois is working to improve performance. Now that he has more paying customers, he has every incentive to make it great!

I’m not sure the combination of Feedbin and Reeder is entirely stable and complete yet. Reeder can’t tag feeds, apparently, and I’m not 100% convinced that all of my feeds are showing up when I sync Reeder. But I’m sure they’re working to improve this and stomp out any bugs!

I decided to delete my Feedbin account in Reeder and re-add it. This seems to have helped re-sync the feeds with the mobile app with no harm done.

Stephen’s Stance

I am pleased to report that I now have a fully functional replacement or Google Reader, even retaining Reeder app compatibility on the iPhone! But there are still some loose ends: Reeder for iPad and Mac has not yet been updated to support Feedbin, and that web app is frustratingly slow on the iPad. Still, it’s a satisfactory setup so far and looks to get better in the future!

One aspect of Feedbin that I really like is the fact that it is a paid application. Google killed Reader because they couldn’t make any money out of it, and it requires resources to keep an RSS back end running. Paying for applications is the right thing, especially when they are as critical to your Internet experience as RSS readers are to me! Feedbin and Reeder are well worth the money!

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2013. | Replacing Google Reader With Feedbin and Reeder
This post was categorized as Apple, Features, Personal, Terabyte home. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

As most of my readers are probably aware, I run the Tech Field Day event series, bringing in a panel of independent IT folks like myself with cool companies. This week is Storage Field Day 3, and I thought you might like to know a bit about what we’ve got planned!

We started with a generalist event (Tech Field Day) before adding Networking Field Day, Wireless Field Day, and Virtualization Field Day. But it took three years for me to hold my first Storage Field Day – after all, I’m a storage guy, and I didn’t want the event to be sidelined as “a storage thing”!

Now that we’re no longer worried about that (Networking Field Day and Wireless Field Day have become icons in their space), I’ve added a regular storage event to the roster. Twice a year, we bring together cool storage people and companies, mix them together for a few days, and see what happens!

We decided to take the event to the Denver, Colorado area for the first time this week. Although Denver is a traditional storage location, nearly every company participating is from out of state! Even so, it’s a great scenic city with lots to offer, not to mention direct flights from just about everywhere.

Once again, the delegates come from afar: Four from the Netherlands and two from Italy join eight from the USA. It’s exciting to bring people together like this, and one of the coolest things about the event in my opinion! We’ve also got quite a few first-time delegates – who says storage blogging is stale?

Things get really interesting on the presenter side. While Networking and Wireless Field Day tend to fill up with “big gorillas” like Cisco and Juniper, Storage Field Day has evolved into the premiere venue for startups to get their messages out. This time we’ve got nine (!) companies presenting over a three-day period, each with their own 2-hour timeslot. It’s so cool to have this many companies involved – who says storage is a mature industry?

I invite you to join us at Storage Field Day, even if that’s only possible online. Tune in Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday morning (April 24-26, 2013) at TechFieldDay.com and watch everything unfold through the miracle of Livestream! Afterwards, head over to our YouTube channel to watch recordings of the whole thing!

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2013. | Storage Field Day 3 Is Here!
This post was categorized as Enterprise storage, Events, Personal, Virtual Storage. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

This is a box with a cat in it. It doesn’t really have anything to do with this article about Dropbox for Business, but cats love boxes, just like your employees love Dropbox! Or something…

The Ultimate Honeypot

I often wonder why Dropbox hasn’t yet had a major security breach. Considering the number of people I know who use the service and the incredibly personal and valuable data I know they store there, Dropbox must be one of the richest targets on the Internet!

I must assume that their employees are doing a decent job of keeping on top of the inevitable and continuing hack attempts, but eventually they must fail. After all, it is obvious that user data is not accessible to the company. I hear everything is protected with a single encryption key…

One of the signature elements of Dropbox is global deduplication of data. All uploads are “hashed” with a digital signature which is checked against all the data from every other user. If I upload a file that Dropbox has already “seen”, I’ll get a pointer to their chunks rather than my own. This would be impossible without universal access to the data itself.

This means that the Dropbox software, and thus their staff, can access any user’s data. So hackers probably spend a good amount of time trying to convince the staff to let them in using social engineering, spear phishing, and similar tricks. Plus, if they found a hole in the software and got into the Dropbox servers, hackers could likely access all the data everywhere.

More Than Single Sign-On

Dropbox for Teams sucked. Sure it added a unified control panel for accounts associated with a business, but was ridiculously limited: There was no Active Directory or LDAP integration for single-sign-on. Now that Dropbox has revved Teams into “Dropbox for Business” and added Active Directory and Single Sign-On, they’re set, right? Not exactly.

There’s still no content audit or control mechanism, so users can use “unlimited” online Business storage for whatever they want, be it personal or sensitive (see “Security”). About the only thing an admin can do is see who’s sharing what outside the Business and the last thing they did. That’s not much functionality.

Dropbox really needs to step up their game to appeal to corporate IT folks. But it doesn’t seem that they have any idea what these customers might want. Yes, they added AD support. But what about everything else?

Dropbox really reminds me of Apple: They don’t know anything about enterprise IT and don’t seem to care.

The Single Account Limit

The worst aspect of Dropbox in business environments is the fact that it’s absolutely useless for existing Dropbox users! See, the Dropbox client software (be it PC, Mac, iOS, etc) can only access one account. So each device can be associated with either a user’s own personal Dropbox account or the Business account, but not both.

Considering that Dropbox for Business is supposed to allow companies to wrestle a bit of control back from “rogue” Dropbox users, this sucks. The very people you’re trying to attract will rebel and complain that they can’t access their personal data anymore! They’ll resist this just as much as any third-party product.

Dropbox’s answer to me when I asked this question resulted in a massive face palm: “Share data between a user’s Business and personal account!” Seriously? There’s no way I want to give my employer access to my personal data or vice versa!

The only real solution is for the Dropbox client to support multiple accounts, but the company is reluctant to do this. I suspect that they fear users would just create multiple free accounts instead of paying for the service!

Note: There are hacks to access multiple Dropbox accounts on PC or Mac, but these are not a complete, appropriate, or advisable alternative for businesses.

Drowning In Sync Updates

Another serious challenge for Business users of Dropbox is that the service is “all or nothing” when it comes to syncing. Once more than a few users are actively using a Business account, file updates start coming fast and furious! But users that turn this off with Selective Sync lose all local access to those files!

Selective Sync allows a Dropbox user to turn off syncing of certain folders on certain clients. This helps reduce the amount of data downloaded and could also reduce the flood of syncs for a folder actively used by others.

But Selective Sync is all or nothing: Turn off a folder and it disappears from your Mac or PC with no offline access or even any indication it was ever there! Users have to re-enable an entire folder to see anything in it, resulting in a potentially-large download before they can get to work. And you can’t “Selective Sync” a file, just a folder.

The phone, tablet, and web clients work differently, showing the entire share but only downloading on demand. This is useful if you need to download something from a rarely-used folder, but it’s not useful if you’re on the go and lack connectivity!

Plus, Selective Sync is buried under “Advanced” preferences. I imagine most users don’t even know it’s there.

Stephen’s Stance

Although Dropbox for Business is an improvement over the nearly-useless Teams product, Dropbox needs to do a lot:

• Integrate client-side encryption of data, even as an option, so we don’t have to go “third-party”
• Share more security information so we feel better about trusting it with our data
• Create a real “Enterprise Dropbox” offering with real IT integration and content controls
• Add multi-account support to all clients
• Improve Selective Sync and allow on-demand downloading for Mac and PC clients
• Improve offline access for phone and tablet users

Until we see these, I will not recommend Dropbox for use with corporate or sensitive personal data. Although I am a (paying) customer, I am not completely happy with the product!

Image credit: peptic_ulcer

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2013. | What’s (Still) Wrong With Dropbox For Business
This post was categorized as Enterprise storage, Features, Virtual Storage. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

The Mophie Juice Pack Air really delivers the goods, giving my iPhone 5 all-day power

The iPhone Needs Juice

I was initially quite impressed by the iPhone 5′s battery life. It definitely lasted longer than my iPhone 4S in day-to-day use! But over time, it has deteriorated significantly. So much so, that I am beginning to wonder if my battery is defective. It recently dropped from 20% to powering off in less than a minute!

Even a brand-new fully-charged iPhone 5 really doesn’t last all day for a heavy user like me, and I doubt any phone will for a long time. I received a Mophie Juice Pack for my iPhone 4 as a gift, and it really helped when I was traveling. But that Juice Pack doesn’t fit on an iPhone 5, so I gave it away.

That’s why I was so pleased to hear Mophie announce the availability of a Juice Pack for the iPhone 5.

But, boy, did they fumbled this launch! The Juice Pack Helium came out first, priced at $79 but not packing enough power for a full iPhone 5 recharge. Then Mophie announced the Juice Pack Air for the iPhone 5, priced at $99 and matching the internal battery’s capacity. I can’t imagine they will sell many Heliums, since the Air is almost as thin and light, and brings much better performance for only a little more money!

If you’re interested, here’s a great comparison of the Juice Pack Helium and Juice Pack Air

Buying a Juice Pack Air

The Juice Pack Air is not yet widely available, though the Helium can be found in the Apple Store and online. In fact, the Air is only this week beginning to appear in stores! My local Best Buy store had at least 3 of each color, however, so I decided to pick one up there instead of ordering from Amazon. That said, I’ve embedded a live Amazon pricing widget below so you can grab one from them if you want.

The Juice Pack comes in a slim and attractive package that opens easily instead of the typical hard plastic shell. I love that it is pre-charged so you can take it out and start using it immediately. This is a big help for someone desperate for a charge on the go!

The Juice Pack package includes a Micro-USB cable and a short headphone extender. The former is necessary since, even though it features a Lightning connector internally, the Juice Pack uses Micro-USB to charge. The latter is just a nice thing to have, since some headphones won’t fit into the hole in the bottom of the case.

The Juice Pack Air in Real Life

Overall, I’m impressed by the Juice Pack Air. It’s well built, with a nice slightly-rubbery texture. The bottom snaps on very securely and features nice “speaker redirectors” so you can still hear the phone. The Air is quite slim, too, adding very little bulk to the phone!

Unlike previous Juice Packs, the Air for iPhone 5 is a slide-in design, making it easier to insert and remove the phone. And the integrated volume, mute, and power switches are much easier to use than the recessed cutout on the iPhone 4 Air and iPhone 5 Helium cases! The power switch and charge LEDs are now on the back rather than the bottom and they seem well-built too.

I do have an issue with the Micro-USB port. It’s charge-only, so you can’t use it to sync or connect to a vehicle entertainment system (like the Sync system in our Ford Flex). I’m not really troubled at having to bring along another cable (I already carry a Micro-USB cable anyway) but the lack of data passthrough is a surprising design defect.

My partial solution is to carry the Apple Micro-USB to Lightning adapter on a Micro-USB cable rather than the official lightning cable. That way, I can charge the Juice Pack or connect the iPhone using the same cable. But I still can’t jack into the phone without pulling off the bottom of the Juice Pack. I would have preferred data passthrough or a Lightning port on the Juice Pack.

Stephen’s Stance

The Mophie Juice Pack Air for iPhone 5 is well worth the money for folks on the go who need more battery live. It’s slim and light enough to carry all the time and helps protect the phone to boot! Although the charge-only Micro-USB port is a disappointment, the increasingly-wireless world means I can live with it. Overall, it’s a solid buy.

Buy one at Amazon and help support my blog!

Pros:

• Doubles the iPhone 5 battery life (or more, if your phone is on the older side)
• Well-built, slim-ish and light-ish enough to carry
• Nice design touches like slide-in design and integrated volume buttons
• Comes pre-charged in easy-to-open packaging

Cons:

• Charge-only Micro-USB port means you’ll have more cables to carry and might have to rip off the bottom sometimes
• $99 is a little pricey
• The availability of an inferior Helium model will confuse customers

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2013. | Mophie Juice Pack Air for iPhone 5: Hands-On Review
This post was categorized as Apple. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

How to Encrypt the Nifty MiniDrive

First, it’s important to remember that you’re not really encrypting the Nifty MiniDrive at all; instead, you are encrypting the Micro SDXC card it contains. The MiniDrive is transparent to the operating system, as it contains no or logic circuits. So this same guy applies to encrypting any SDXC card!

Second, since I am using an SDXC card, some of these steps might change somewhat for plain SD cards. SDXC was designed to use the ExFAT filesystem, but they retain the same MBR partitioning scheme of previous cards. This doesn’t mean they can’t be repartitioned with GPT and reformatted with HFS+, however!

Without more fuss, here’s the steps to encrypt the SDXC card in your Nifty MiniDrive!

You have to click a lot to get Disk Utility to repartition your Nifty MiniDrive SD card correctly!

1. First, we repartition the card with GPT and HFS+

   1. Open Disk Utility

   2. Select “Apple SDXC Reader Media”

   3. Click “Partition”

   4. Select “1 Partition” in the Partition Layout drop down

   5. Click “Options…”

   6. Select “GUID Partition Table” and click “OK”

   7. Select “Mac OS Extended (Journaled)” in the Format drop down

   8. Give it a Name

   9. Click “Apply”

   10. Click “Partition”
   11. Quit Disk Utility
2. Now let’s tell Mac OS X to encrypt this new device
   1. Open a Finder window
   2. Find Nifty in the left side menu
   3. Option-click and select “Encrypt Nifty”
   4. Enter a strong Encryption password and hint
   5. Click “Encrypt Disk”
3. Wait…
   1. It will unmount and remount as a CoreStorage Encrypted volume
   2. It will take a long time to encrypt – about 10 minutes per GB in my case, so 10 hours for a 64 GB card!
   3. You can use it while it’s encrypting, but then it will take even longer. Just let it go.
4. Optionally save the password in your Keychain
   1. Once it’s done encrypting, eject the drive
   2. Re-insert it
   3. Enter your password in the dialog and select “Remember this password in my keychain”
   4. Click “Unlock”
   5. Now it’ll automatically remount whenever you insert it

You may want Mac OS X to remember the volume password for you

Watch Out! It’s SLOW!

Micro SD cards are notoriously slow, but encryption makes this even worse. Writing to an encrypted Nifty MiniDrive is absolutely ridiculously pathetically slow. It’s worst than watching paint dry. Seriously. It’s terrible.

Now that I’ve given you the subjective feeling, here are some objective numbers: Before encryption, the 64 GB SanDisk Micro SDXC card would read at a reasonable 40 MB/s but write below 6 MB/s. After encryption, I’m seeing under 2 MB/s writes. That’s floppy drive slow. It makes a USB 2.0 flash drive seem fast.

This is exacerbated by the target market for the Nifty MiniDrive: The MacBook Air and MacBook Pro with Retina are very, very fast, equipped with some of the best SSDs on the market. It’s really jarring to compare the internal SSD’s 200 MB/s or more with the MiniDrive’s 2 MB/s or less. Seriously – it’s easily 100x slower!

Reads are fine, however, even after encryption. Although 30-40 MB/s isn’t exactly speedy, it’s plenty fast for videos, office documents, etc. It’s fast enough on reads that you won’t even notice it except on big transfers.

Note that this performance issue has nothing at all to do with Nifty’s engineering of their MiniDrive. It’s a passive electrical device and does nothing to slow (or speed up) the SD card it contains. The core problem is that Micro SD cards are simple and slow and there’s no getting around that.

Stephen’s Stance

I’m pleased that it’s this easy to encrypt the Nifty MiniDrive. I recommend encrypting all portable media, and this is especially important for a highly steal-able device like this. But the speed impact is so dramatic, it limits the usefulness of the device. Caveat Encryptor!

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2013. | How to Encrypt Your Nifty MiniDrive
This post was categorized as Apple, Features, Terabyte home. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

Storagebeers is an informal gathering of folks in the storage industry – end users, vendors, and people like me who just talk a lot. We’ll get together and talk storage, tech, and anything else that strikes our fancy!

Because the Microsoft MVP Summit is here in Bellevue/Redmond this week, it’s likely that a lot of Microsoft folks will be there. But this isn’t a Microsoft or MVP event – it’s for anyone who wants to come! Even if you’re not a drinker, Storagebeers is a blast!

We don’t really have a sponsor, so we’ll just ask anyone who comes to take care of their own drinks. And if anyone wants to buy a round, we’re happy to drink!

• When: Tuesday, February 19, 2013 from 8:30 to 10
• Where: Joey Bellevue, 800 Bellevue Way, across from the Hyatt entrance
• Who: Anyone who cares to come!

There’s no RSVP or registration. Just come on over and say hello!

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2013. | Storagebeers, Joey Bellevue, Tuesday, Feb 19
This post was categorized as Events. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

VDI loves Wi-Fi and Storage. So much that it overwhelms both, ruining their relationship! Tofu isn’t important for VDI.

VDI Issues? It’s the Storage…

I despise pat answers and rules of thumb, but one truism has emerged from my experience with virtual desktop deployments: Storage I/O performance is by far the most important back-end element. Slow storage doesn’t just mean slow desktops; slow storage means end users will revolt and the project will fail.

Hard disk drives are great at balancing capacity and cost, but performance is not their strong suit. An average hard disk drive is capable only of 100 or so read or write operations per second. This might be enough for a single desktop, but the concentrated I/O demands of virtualization is too much for any drive. Even disk-based storage arrays which offer higher levels of performance can’t keep up with the crush of VDI user demands!

I have never seen a successful VDI implementation without solid state storage as the primary media. Many of the best use PCIe SSDs, SSD RAID, or even RAM for virtual desktop storage I/O, and these work remarkably well. Users of these best-in-class systems are thrilled by improved responsiveness relative to their old desktops. In fact, they’re often as thrilled as users of spinning-disk-based VDI systems are frustrated!

VDI Loves Wireless

Another often-overlooked issue with VDI implementations is the client connectivity. Sure, many offices have decent gigabit Ethernet connectivity to offices and desktops, but what about the newly-mobile, multi-device, BYOD workforce? They need wireless connectivity, and solid, reliable, high-performance Wi-Fi at that!

Deploying a solid Wi-Fi network for VDI isn’t as simple as bolting an access point to the ceiling. Wi-Fi networks must be carefully planned and deployed, since the medium is shared and both physical and radio wave interference can block the signal. And as Keith Parsons recently demonstrated, performance under stress varies dramatically by product.

Even the fastest back-end VDI server will seem slow if clients are using a network that is congested, and they’ll curse just as much if coverage is poor where they need to work. Planning and executing a wireless network is best left to the professionals!

Most devices today support the 802.11n protocol, operating in either 2.4 or 5 GHz. Although rated to perform over 300 Mbps, “wireless n” isn’t anywhere near that speed in most cases. For best results, use 5 GHz with plentiful enterprise-class access points and lots of “backhaul” to reduce congestion. The wireless controller is often just as important as the access points, since this is where access control features live.

Stephen’s Stance

Although I’m obviously glossing over the details of storage and Wi-Fi architecture, I hope you’ve heard my message: Make sure your house is in order before deploying VDI, and focus especially on these two areas! And it pays to bring in a professional to help plan and implement storage and Wi-Fi. Remember – VDI is perilous!

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2013. | Storage and WiFi are the Overlooked Keys to VDI
This post was categorized as Enterprise storage, Virtual Storage. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

Eating airline food causes jet lag. Seriously. Don’t eat it!

On the Nature and Cause of Jet Lag

Jet Lag is pretty simple: One’s internal “clock” becomes out of sync with local time when one travels rapidly from West to East. This causes inappropriate sleepiness and wakefulness, indigestion, and trouble with concentration and cognition. In other words, Jet lagged people are tired, sour, and confused.

The cause is simple to understand. Our bodies have evolved an internal “clock” to allow us to function on this planet. We follow a cycle of waking, eating, working, and resting over the 24 hour period of the day.

If we didn’t have this internal clock, daily life would be pretty bizarre: We would sleep when we were tired and eat when we were hungry regardless of daylight or the activities of others. This sort of non-schedule would certainly have interfered with our success as a species, so it’s no surprise that most creatures on earth follow a daily schedule synchronized to the turning of the planet!

Rapidly traveling East or West puts our bodies out of sync with the “natural” daylight-driven pattern of life where we land. We get hungry and tired at the wrong time, but forcing ourselves to adjust rarely works: We can’t sleep at night but fall asleep during the day; we wake up starving but peck at dinner.

Note that jet lag is different from the natural fatigue of travel. Many people (including me) don’t sleep easily on planes, and the stress of airports, taxis, and tickets causes many symptoms similar to jet lag. But fatigue is easily remedied with a good night’s sleep, while true jet lag often takes days or weeks to vanish.

This phenomenon was rare before the jet age because we couldn’t actually travel all that rapidly: Horses, ships, and trains are slow enough (and stop frequently enough) for us to adjust to the local time without much trouble. But, as I recently experienced, a jet can transport you across a dozen timezones in less than a single day!

Adjusting the Body’s Clock

Science tells us it takes a day or so to adjust to a one-hour difference in time, but many frequent travelers seek a quicker remedy. After all, no one wants to spend a week or two adjusting, especially if business, politics, or war demands our skills!

The body expects about 12 hours from dinner through night to breakfast, and it is very difficult for the body to “compress” time – digestion can’t easily be sped up, and it’s very challenging to sleep when not tired. Yet travelers try to do exactly this when they travel: They eat dinner after takeoff in New York and breakfast five hours later as they near London. No wonder the body can’t adapt!

It’s even worse on longer flights, where everyone is roused by an extra meal half-way through. Airlines keep to this bizarre schedule because travelers would rebel if they were left without food for six, ten, or even twenty hours. But it actually contributes to worse jet lag, since the body becomes “confused” about the time even while en-route.

Many people suggest sleep or exercise as a jet lag cure, and I don’t doubt that these can help. A nap definitely helps with alertness, and exercise can cue rest. But these appear to treat the symptom rather than the problem: The body is still out of sync, it’s just not quite so tired. Stimulants and sedatives similarly treat the symptom not the underlying disorder.

Exposure to daylight is another common suggestion with some merit. It is known that sunlight stimulates the brain, and it is logical that this would help calibrate the body’s internal clock. I always let the sun shine into my hotel room to help me wake at the right time when traveling rather than relying on an alarm clock.

Fasting to Reset the Clock

Although it is difficult to “compress” the body’s clock, it may be possible to “elongate” it. This is the theory behind a novel treatment for jet lag. By stretching a single day to 30 or even 36 hours, one can more easily adapt to a new time zone. But how do you pause your internal clock?

Studies in mice have shown that fasting can cause bodily functions to slow to a crawl, yet the metabolism can quickly rebound when food is consumed again. Some have attempted to use this to fight the effects of aging, but it is probably more useful when applied to shorter-term problems like jet lag.

By avoiding all food, the body’s internal sense of time is compressed and a longer day becomes possible. Then, by eating a large breakfast to start a new day, the body is jolted back into action in a completely new time zone!

This jet lag treatment originally included a week of alternating “feast and famine” days to “prime” the body for the big pause. Apparently, Ronald Reagan was a big advocate of this concept, as is the US military. But other studies have shown that even a single fast can do the trick.

Oh yes! A real breakfast to break my fast!

Experimenting on Myself: Ohio to Australia and Back

I decided to give the fasting trick a try on my recent trip to Sydney and Melbourne to give the keynote speeches at their VMware User Conference events. I wanted to be alert, not just for the conference but also an exciting overseas visit! But I was deeply concerned about the effect a trip across the International Date Line and an eight-hour time difference.

I decided to try a simple version of the fasting trick: No food from dinner local time to breakfast on arrival. For the trip out (a Friday afternoon-to-Sunday morning flight) this meant nothing to eat from dinner Thursday in Ohio to breakfast Sunday in Sydney, a span of about 30 hours. On the way home, I ate dinner in Sydney on Friday and breakfast about 32 hours later on Saturday morning in Ohio.

To avoid fatigue, headache, and altitude issues, I drank plenty of clear liquids, including my favorite Vitamin Water Zero, seltzer water, ginger ale, and plain water. Apart from the sugar in these beverages, my body had no calories or bulk to digest.

I was shocked at how easy it was to fast for this amount of time. Although I felt like I should be eating, I didn’t really feel hungry. The excitement of travel probably played a part, as did the lack of appetizing vegetarian food selections on United Airlines. But on the whole, fasting for the trip was really quite simple.

Amazingly, it worked! I tried to sleep on the plane, since I would land in the morning local time, but this is not easy for me. Nonetheless, I arrived feeling tired and dried out but fully alert and ready for a day of sightseeing with a local friend. This despite the fact that the day started at 11 PM Ohio time! I was sleepy that night, but not overly so, and had no trouble waking in the morning.

The whole trip was fantastic, and the return was just as easy. Tired from the flight (I stayed awake the whole time, treating it like a very long day) I had no trouble sleeping and was only moderately hungry in the morning. I did feel a bit laggy, it was more like a 2-hour difference from Mountain time than the 8-hour Eastern Australian zone.

Melbourne is a fabulous city full of wonderful food and art! I’m so glad jet lag didn’t take this view away from me!

Stephen’s Stance

Fasting appears to be an easy and effective method of stretching the body’s cycle to match local time, and a big breakfast is a great way to kick off a new day in a new city! I’m not sure I would bother going through all this for short US trips, but I will definitely recommend it for long international journeys. Considering the “cost” of skipping a few tasteless airline meals, I’d say it’s well worth the effort!

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2013. | Fasting to Mitigate Jet Lag: Surprise! It Works!
This post was categorized as Events, Features, Personal. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.