Author: Manek

Posted on

Precise Software adds new performance monitoring features

I don’t need to tell you about the technology industry’s love affair with cloud computing – since as an individual you’re likely to be way ahead of most enterprises in your seamless use of cloud already. After all, you probably use email, you store files on Dropbox, and you sync with Google or iCloud. That makes you a cloud computing user.

For a cloud provider however, extracting maximum value from expensive infrastructure is essential. And for that they need to be able to measure performance accurately – you can’t analyse what you can’t measure. And this is where Precise Software enters the picture.

Precise’s software uses analytics to measure the performance of applications, in the shape of a new version of its flagship product, Precise 9.5, which it sells to large enterprises with their own datacentre and cloud facilities.

The problem datacentre managers are having is tracking data as it moves from virtual machines across the network to storage and back again.

Company spokesman Kevin Wood said: “Users want to track the data through from client to storage, to find why a virtual server is being starved of resources. Are resources being sucked up by another server, for example?”

The software is tailored to work with EMC and VMware‘s storage and hypervisor infrastructure, although a version that supports Microsoft’s Hyper-V and then Citrix Xen are planned in about six months.

Precise is not alone in this area of the industry however, as the explosion of cloud computing is sucking in a growing number of companies keen to sell support products such as Precise. Additionally, the company’s focus on market leaders VMware and EMC may prove a barrier to many potential buyers, who are more likely to run heterogeneous environments.

Posted on

New start for Big Tin

It’s been a while since this blog was updated, but this is about to change, so expect a new beginning.

You’ll be getting regular updates from on new enterprise technologies – and sometimes consumer ones too – as I encounter interesting new ideas and implementations.

Watch for the next posting – it won’t be long…

Posted on

Water companies profit as water bills soar

What’s the phrase you hear most, here in wet wet wet England, these days? Here are some examples that have reached my ears:

  • “Wettest drought ever”
  • “We should have a hosepipe ban more often”
  • “You can’t move on my farm for mud”

The last was said (more or less) by the man who delivers our veg. So what’s going on? I’m not a meteorologist (nor any other kind of scientist for that matter) but I do prefer to draw conclusions based on evidence.

Just under a couple of years ago, the Independent newspaper published its analysis of the performance of the water companies, saying that 3,300,000,000 litres are lost every single day through leakage. This has not changed much since and won’t before 2015. The paper went on to report that this represents “20 per cent of the nation’s supply and [is] 234 million litres a day more than a decade ago” and that “The water lost would meet the daily needs of 21.5 million people”. That’s about one-third of the country’s population.

Meanwhile, following the hosepipe ban imposed on substantial areas of the UK, mainly in the south and east, April 2012 was one of the wettest Aprils ever, or at least since records began. Yet, leaving aside the well-understood — by everyone I’ve spoken to — phenomenon that washing a car with a bucket uses two to three times more water than using a hosepipe, we still have a ban on hosepipes.

Rightly so, given that reservoirs remain well below the levels they should be at this time of year, my beef is first and foremost with the water companies.

The government’s regulator, Ofwat, has a job to protect the consumer against rampaging private enterprise which would otherwise rip us off. Somehow competition is supposed to make things more efficient and maybe it does but not when there’s a natural monopoly. There can be few more obviously natural monopolies than the supply of water but that didn’t stop the government from privatising the industry.

But when things go wrong, such as when water companies find it more profitable to pay directors big bonuses, there’s not much Ofwat can do, especially given that one of its three primary tasks is to “ensure that the companies can finance their functions“. This clearly includes paying the directors of water companies bonuses of up to £2 million, with the highest paid trousering £1.6 million.

More specifically, the average annual customer bill for water has risen by £64 since 2001 and is now £376, while the companies collectively made £2 billion in pre-tax profits, according to The Guardian.

So what do we have? Water companies making big profits. Paying directors millions from our mandatory and ever-increasing water bills. Lots of water leakage. And private enterprises whose primary duty is not to you and me but to their shareholders. This does not, on the face of it, seem to me to be a sensible or efficient way to run a natural monopoly.

So remind me again why the government privatised the water industry? Nothing to do with ideology above efficiency, was it? No, thought not.

Posted on

Whatever happened to the railway?

Have you noticed how no-one talks about the railway any more? From BBC downwards, the place where you catch a train is now a train station, not a railway station. In other words, we talk about the vehicles, not the system. And the problem with that is that we’re getting a worse service and it’s costing us a lot more.

The reason why we’ve lost the concept of a railway system is clear: there is no system any more. Since the rushed, ideological privatisation of British Rail in the dying days of the last Tory administration, the railway has been run by train operators, such as Southern or First Great Western, and an infrastructure operator, Network Rail. Within each of these two broad groups — train and infrastructure operators — there are further schisms, such as train leasing companies, train refurbishment companies, track maintenance companies, signalling and telecommunications etc etc. The list goes on.

Railways are inherently complex organisations: they’re subject to disruption by all sorts of events, most of them not entirely or at all under the railway’s control. People fling themselves off platforms in front of trains, hardware wears out or fails before its time, external electricity supplies go down, weather results in key personnel — think train drivers and signalmen — being unable to get to work, and so on. You can imagine.

At the best of times, for a system such as a railway to work effectively it needs communication between the various elements. In the days of a single railway organisation, it wasn’t perfect but at least everyone was working for the same employer and could be orchestrated as such.

Today, that is no longer the case. Each organisation has a profit motive first which means there has to be a cash incentive to make something happen that’s out of the ordinary. Usually, that works to the disbenefit of the rest of us. For example, you want to make a train connection but your incoming train is 10 minutes late. In BR days, the connecting train might well have been held for the benefit of the arriving passengers. No longer. There’s a financial penalty for train operators if they are late so today you can happily watch your connecting train drive away as you arrive at the station.

Another classic example is a small incident that happened in July 2011 at the entrance to Edinburgh Waverley station. A train derailed but it was a slow-speed incident, the train stayed upright, and no-one was hurt. In BR days, a crew would have been out to to jack it up and get on its way, and make overnight repairs to the track. In this incident, before the train could be moved, there had to be a full investigation to find out what had failed in order to establish who would pay for the damage. This meant that, instead of there being a delay of perhaps an hour or three, it took a day and a half before Edinburgh was fully open for trains again.

Given that, you can imagine what happens when one railway company needs to contact another in an emergency. Something has gone wrong and it needs to be sorted out, as passengers are stranded in the middle of nowhere. Since the profit motive comes first, the various parties have to talk about who will pay, who is at fault and therefore potentially liable, and whether it’s worth fixing now or later. That’s before they get around to talking about how to solve the problem. Meanwhile, passengers sit in trains for hours.

This is not a hypothetical problem: it’s happened plenty of times. Yes, we’ve had some nice new trains following privatisation. We’ve also had beyond-inflation price increases every year to pay for them — and for the huge profit margins the trains companies demand before they will get involved, even though their profits are underwritten by the government — that’s you and me.

Privatisation of the railways has been a disaster overall. We’ve lost the concept of a railway system, and replaced it with a patchwork of train operators’ turfs, each of which doesn’t connect, and results in a blizzard of confusing ticket prices as they attempt to segment the market and screw more cash out of the customers (we’re no longer passengers). Woe betide you if you miss a train, even if it’s not your fault, as the mega-prices are backed up by penalties if you don’t get exactly the right ticket.

As my good friend John May sings: it’s time for a change.

Posted on

Lessons from Murdoch’s News Corp

There’s a number of depressing conclusions to be drawn, even at this early stage of affairs from the revelations about News Corp’s activities.

The first is that people — from individuals rightly sickened at the thought of News of the World journalists poring over Milly Dowler’s voicemails to politicians who should have known better — only seem to have voiced concerns when it involved a little girl. ‘It could have been us’, runs the thought.

And yet, the hacking — if it deserves that description as it only seems to have involved dialling into publicly available numbers and trying passwords until they found one that worked — had not only been going on for years but was known about for years. Few seem to have cared much about it when it involved people seen as disposable — actors, sportspeople, Z-list celebrities and the like.

It’s much the same when you discuss the issue of whether the UK should retain the monarchy. The two most common responses I’ve encountered concern the individuals — the Queen’s doing a good job and I wouldn’t want Blair — or the tourist money they supposedly bring in. Whether or not a country that describes itself as a modern democracy can continue to do so while it has an unelected head of state seems to be irrelevant: it’s simply not part of the discussion.

In both cases — Murdoch or royalty — the principal of whether it;s correct per se to hack into phones or to maintain an unelected head of state is not an argument it’s possible to have, or that people raise with themselves. Issues seem only to matter if they has a directly personal relevance. How we are governed seems not to fall into that category.

The second issue is that the ones truly responsible for this dismal state of affairs — the politicians who have been kowtowing to News Corp all these years — seem likely to be the ones who will be let off lightly. Cameron will be dented and might, in the most optimistic of scenarios, resign. But the rest of them will get away with it.

This is a direct consequence of the feeble level of political debate in this country, as I’ve already noted. It seems we get the politicians we deserve. If we continue to buy the News of the World — or Sun on Sunday as it will morph — then nothing will have fundamentally changed.

Yet the third issue is one that can be easily fixed: the low level of priority assigned by mobile operators to security compared to convenience. Voicemails seem to have been ridiculously easy to break into because passwords weren’t changed from their defaults; subscribers are unlikely even to have known their voicemails had a password let alone that they needed to change them because the operators didn’t tell them about it.

Britain prides itself on being a stable democracy with traditions many of which have changed little over the last 500 years. Consequently, people are not encouraged to think about issues of governance or principal involving public life. Maybe it’s time we did.

Posted on

Review of new WD 3TB WD30EZRX disk drive

Quiet and huge describes this new 3TB Western Digital disk drive pretty well. It contains enough data that, if printed out on paper would probably cover the whole of Wales or several elephants, but who’s counting? You could certainly fit well over 500 standard DVDs onto it.

The WD30EZRZ updates the previous model, the WD30EZRSDTL, by upgrading to the latest 6Gbps SATA interface, which won’t make much difference to most people as it will take several drives to fill that data pipe. In other words, the update is largely academic for most users, and the drive is mechanically identical to its 3Gbps predecessor.

What this drive promises is an ability to fit into a range of environments without disruption. If you sit next to your PC all day, you’ll know that the disk drive is one of its noisiest components. And if you have a PC in the living room, you’ll know that when it wakes up and does its stuff, you can hear the drive start rotating and then make a rattling sound when it’s working.

All drive makers have gone some way to making disk drives much quieter than before, with WD’s range of domestically-oriented devices dubbed ‘cool, quiet, eco-friendly’ by the manufacturer. #

So in addition to being quieter, this drive is claimed also to use less power. Fortunately for disk drive makers, the main users of power and generators of noise are the same: the motor that spins the disk and the actuator that moves the drive head — that’s the component that ‘rattles’. So by reducing the power to both of these they can achieve their objectives at the cost of performance. WD doesn’t reveal the speeds its ‘green’ disks spin but one enterprising reviewer calculated it from the sound of the disk at between 5400 and 7200 rpm.

The drive is quiet when idle — within a metre of it, it’s barely audible even while out of the PC case — and you can barely hear the drive rattle when seeking. A sound meter sited the standard distance of a metre away didn’t register the sound in a normal office environment.

But what does that quietness cost in speed? I tested the WD30EZRX using an Intel motherboard housing Intel’s four-core i7-2600K CPU clocked at 3.40GHz and with 8GB RAM. Running the SiSoft Sandra disk benchmark against the drive revealed a data transfer rate, at 100MBps, unchanged from its predecessor’s results. This isn’t the fastest transfer rate there, nor is the drive’s access time of nine milliseconds the lowest, but for most purposes the trade-off is probably good enough.

So if you need a drive to store your DVDs or CDs on, this is close to ideal. But watch out: 512GB solid state disks (SSDs), which are silent and hugely faster than mechanical devices, are commonplace if expensive. And while SSDs will always cost more than rotating media, they’re now approaching the point when you might consider abandoning spinning drives altogether.

In the meantime, the WD is at least as good as its rivals in the places where it matters.

Posted on

NAS upgrade on the way

It’s time to rebuild my server. Currently supporting two smartphones, a pair of high-powered desktops, two laptops and a variety of other devices scattered around the house, the lifespan of the Ubuntu server-powered machine in the basement has just about run out.

Not only is it running out of disk space, the space it does have badly needs re-organising. Now I know that it’s quite easy to upgrade the five-spindle EXT4-formatted RAID5 disk system in the self-built server but to be honest it’s more time and trouble than I have available to give. Also, the Ubuntu update system seems to have broken. Maybe they’ve moved where they put all the updates since I installed Ubuntu 8.10 but it no longer works and I can’t be bothered spending ages figuring out how to fix it.

Guess I’m not a pure hobbyist any more if I value my time so much that I don’t want to spend it in a dark basement tending an Ubuntu server as it rebuilds its RAID stripes.

When I first set up the server, it was designed to provide more than just storage. It would be the digital hub, functioning as as server for DHCP (IP address serving) NTP (time), VPN termination (using OpenVPN so I could log in from anywhere), and a half-dozen other things that I thought we’d need. Actually we don’t need most of that stuff. Turns out we really just need some central storage, properly managed.

Trouble is it’s not very well managed, in that it consists of five 500GB drives in one case providing about 2TB and an Iomega RAID (kindly donated) box with 1.4TB. They’re connected over the network using NFS to tie the Iomega into the main server’s directory hierarchy. All that’s shared using CIFS for the Windows boxes and AFP for the Apple machines.

The folder structure’s a mess though and the disks need upgrading both because they’ve been sitting there spinning away for over two years in an increasingly dense cloud of cobwebs — can’t keep the bugs out of the server as it’s the warmest thing down there in the winter — and because the volumes of data that video can gobble never ceases to amaze.

So it’s time to upgrade and rebuild it using bigger disks (4 x 2TB I think) and an off-the-shelf storage appliance such as FreeNAS. That way I don’t have too much support to do, costs are contained, and the functions it doesn’t have I don’t really need. I’m also going to build it on top of VMware’s ESX hypervisor (I’ll use my old PC’s motherboard and Intel Core Due CPU as the hardware for this) so if it needs more functionality (which I doubt) then I can just create and fire up a virtual machine.

So far, I’ve acquired an ESX-compliant network card (Intel PRO/1000 CT) and a low-end graphics card (with VGA out for my Adderlink IP remote KVM device that allows me to log in directly to the server from the office), and a 2TB drive that will act as a sink for the data before I move it all over to FreeNAS.

Watch this space for more – and maybe even a review or two.

Posted on

Don’t say plain vanilla, say yum!

It’s an exotic orchid that grew originally in Mexico but now grows in all sorts of places, thanks to a slave — yes, a slave — who discovered that it could be hand pollinated. This freed it from having to be pollinated by natural means, using bees found only in its native habitat. That’s how come today most of it comes from Madagascar.

It’s one of the world’s most wonderful and rich scents and tastes — the two are highly intermingled in our senses. We put the dried form of its beans or seedpods in cakes, ice creams, custard and all sorts of other places. Can you tell what it is yet?

Vanilla. It’s just delicious.

So why, increasingly, am I hearing people referring to “plain vanilla”, when what they mean is the default option or, more usually, something that’s just plain?

Is it because they’ve never tasted vanilla? Is it because they are hard of thinking, and just like to repeat the latest management jargon, on the assumption that it sounds cool? Or is it because they can’t taste it? Once tasted, you’d never call it plain.

Wouldn’t you agree that it’s time to reclaim vanilla as a positive attribute, not as something that sounds about as interesting as a used tissue?

Plain vanilla: don’t just say no — make your views known!

Posted on

Upselling – the curse of capitalism?

I bought loads of stuff yesterday while out and about — but unusually, only one operation overtly tried to sell me objects I didn’t want, hadn’t asked for and wouldn’t have taken even if they were free — which one of them was.

So many organisations seem to have read the Dummies Guide to Selling and decided that what they must do is sell you stuff the whole time you’re within range. It’s enough to drive you bonkers.

On its own, upselling wouldn’t be that annoying. But combined with everything else, I feel upselling — or selling in general — is now a couple of notches higher on the list of life’s annoyances up with which one must put in a capitalist economy.

I bought a railway ticket. No-one tried to ask if I wanted two, or had I considered this nice ticket to somewhere I wasn’t going. I bought a cup of tea. “Would sir like a currant bun with that? Or a sandwich?”. Didn’t get asked that either.

Then I bought a magazine in WH Smith’s. I try to avoid the place as, in my town, there are other, locally owned and run outlets, and I’d rather support them so the place doesn’t end up looking like Basingstoke or Bracknell.

But in a railway station, your options are limited. Would you like a free newspaper? The Evening Standard? I don’t think so — there are so many things ahead of it in my priority list that I’d have to live to be 1,000 before it even reached the bottom of the list before working its way up.

What about a lump of stuff that this country calls chocolate but the rest of the civilised world wouldn’t, because it’s got precious little cocoa in it and tastes, well, pretty horrible? Nope. See Evening Standard, above. Why can’t they offer me something I might like?

See, this upselling business is OK for the sellers but they’re not taking it far enough. If they watched my buying patterns — I often use a credit card so they can — WH Smith would know that I have never accepted one of its free offers, though of course they’re not free as we pay for them eventually. They might want to offer me a magazine similar to the one I’ve bought, or something complementary.

Instead, it’s all about what they want to sell, not what I might want to buy.

Then I went to the supermarket. No verbal upsell there but a constant barrage of visual stimuli at eye level designed to open your wallet.

I’m always glad to leave. Much like any shopping experience really, I’m only happy when it stops.

What this means is that, if only these people would only stop throwing unwanted things at me, I might be a happier individual and, since I don’t believe I’m all that unusual, it would apply I’m sure to lots of other people too.

So here’s a plea: stop selling me stuff. I’m much more likely to buy something when you don’t sell it to me, but discover it for myself.

Posted on

Vodafone doesn’t want new customers

Vodafone – how hard can it be to become a customer of yours? So hard I almost gave up, that’s how hard.

It all started about a month ago — a month away from the end of my contract with O2, who didn’t have the phone I wanted. Vodafone does, so I planned to switch — in spite of the company’s current poor reputation for avoiding paying £6bn in corporation tax in the cash-strapped UK.

Around that time, I got a call from Vodafone’s ‘Win Back’ sales team — as a previous customer I’m cheaper to acquire than a brand new one, so they wanted to know if I would come back to Voda. I agreed to a deal, and expected to get a call nearer the time confirming this. Score one point for Vodafone.

But a week before the contract expired, I’d heard nothing so I called the sales number. They’d no record of the phone call or of the good deal (£10 a month cheaper than any advertised price plan) that I’d agreed to. Strike one point for Vodafone – score now zero.

So I tried to cut a deal there but I was told my name would be passed to the Win Back sales team’s list. Four days later I got a call — this from a company that’s reportedly keen to expand its customer base after a long period of decline. Strike one more point for lack of urgency – tally is minus one.

In the end, I got a deal slightly better than the one I’d agreed a month before (one up for Voda, score now zero). I carefully spelt out my address, bank account details and the porting code (PAC) that O2 had given me, to allow my old number to be carried over. The PAC would be activated two days later, I was told.

Next day I got a text confirming that a phone would be sent out the day after — though the abysmal spelling of my address suggested a high degree of illiteracy or lack of attention to detail, or both, and gave me cause to wonder if the phone would actually turn up at the right address. Hmm, nul points each way, I think, score still zero.

The phone turned up on the appointed day — so a grudging point there, score one — but two days later there was no sign of the PAC being activated, so I emailed Vodafone. They’d no record of a PAC. Minus one. They suggested I send it and other details to a specific Vodafone email address, which I did in a hurry, since at this point I’m paying for two parallel phone contracts, and the PAC has a 30-day expiry limit that’s approaching fast.

I got a email back instructing me to enter the same details into a web page — this would be the third time of providing the code. Subtract one point, score minus two so far. An email arrived within a few hours complaining that the details I’d provided didn’t match what they held — I suspect that’s because the address I’d originally given them had been transcribed so poorly. Score: minus three.

So I provided the details for the fourth time and now, at last, have confirmation, and a date and time that the PAC will be activated — one day before it expires. Add one point, and the total so far is minus two.

If the PAC works as Voda claims, no change in score as that’s expected behaviour. If it doesn’t, you’ll hear about it.

If Vodafone wants to gain customer loyalty, it really needs to sharpen up its act. As it is, if another company offers a reasonable deal at the end of this 18-month contract, I’m off.