Have you tried rebooting?

Re-Training Technical Staff

// April 22nd, 2010 // No Comments » // Technical Know-It-All

“We have a new product and you need to get up to speed with it. Please make sure you learn it up”

Sound familiar? I suppose it is something that we get all the time as techies. I do understand that, we are paid to be techies because of our ability to grasp technical concepts and understand them easily. But sometimes, I feel managers should understand that technology is not generic. There is a significant difference between the skillsets of an IT Engineer and a NASA Engineer. Agreed?

While it may be possible for an application engineer to be a database engineer overnight, it is usually very very difficult. Even if they were to achieve it, they are usually not going to be as good as someone who has been working with databases all their lives.  It is becoming so common these days with the various mergers and acquisitions in the industry, that tech staff have been asked to learn various contrasting disciplines and given little time to get up to speed on it.

I always believe that in order to convince a customer to purchase your product, you will have to first know and believe in your product. Obviously, that is not the case. Tech staff are constantly blamed for not knowing the product well enough and not enabling the sales team to perform better.

Bottom line is this. Give your techies time to get there, and provide significant investments to get there. Do not expect to have your techies learn a new skill without providing training and equipment. You don’t get good at riding a bicycle without a bicycle now, do you? If speed is of essence, invest in a new headcount. Contrasting disciplines are not easily attainable overnight. For example, don’t expect a Storage Area Network (SAN) expert to be a Wide Area Network (WAN) in 1 week. The only thing common between them is the word “network”.

Horses for courses!

Punggol Nasi Lemak Centre – Upper Serangoon Review

// April 8th, 2010 // No Comments » // Blogroll, Food, Singapore

Being Malaysian, I’m fairly picky over the quality of my nasi lemak. In Singapore, the definition of nasi lemak is somewhat different from across the causeway. In Singapore, nasi lemak is somewhat a blend of sweet sambal, coconut rice, otak-otak (otah as referred here in SG) and maybe a fried tiny fish or chicken wing. Fellow Malaysian’s would probably agree with me that the Malaysian styli is probably much more enticing, with flowing curry, beef rendang and scorching hot sambals as standard fare.

I have been on the hunt for a similar nasi lemak since I arrived in Singapore 2 years ago. Been to recommendations that were “supposedly” best in town but still no joy. Latest addition, the Punggol Nasi Lemak Centre on Upper Serangoon Road. Decided to drive past at around 1am hoping to skip the queues, but no getting away even at 1am. Fairly quick to clear however.

So did I finally find it?

Nope. Nada. Same ole, same ole. Was it good? Well yeah! Could probably go down as one of the better ones for the “Singapore Styli Nasi Lemak”. Definitely worth a try if you are around the area, but probably not so much if you are gonna go there just for that.

Anyhow, meanwhile, if you are a little like me craving the Malaysian Nasi Lemak, the closest fix is to get it at Old Town Coffee franchises around Singapore.

Punggol Nasi Lemak
965 Upper Serangoon Rd
Opening Hours : 6pm-5am

How things have changed…

// March 31st, 2010 // No Comments » // Blogroll

As I’m sipping away my coffee looking out towards Victoria Harbour, I looked back to 2.5 years ago when I was sitting at the same spot now. Can’t help thinking how much have changed. Obviously much younger then, still in excitement as to how it all fell into place, moving to Singapore from Sydney, and a change in role to something I have always wanted to do. Now reminiscing the journey, while the experience was good, it wasn’t always great and while some moments were awesome, some were extremely awful. Nonetheless, made some extremely good friends along the way. The signs are lining up and I believe the decision is a right one.

Hope the next journey will be quite as good.

Earth Hour and the IT Industry

// March 26th, 2010 // No Comments » // Blogroll, Technical Know-It-All

Surely you guys would have heard of Earth Hour happening on the 8:30pm 27th March 2010. While it is a great move to spread awareness about being “green” and potentially save some “energy”, underneath it all we are still a society driven by energy. From a consumer’s point of view, the whole world going dark for a bit and it’s suddenly a statement being made. But what they probably don’t know is that one of the biggest power consumers in the world are datacenters and IT infrastructures. So the question is “why don’t they power-down for Earth Hour?” or maybe use less power. Sure. If you want your bank accounts frozen, mobile phones services offline, Facebook account going offline (OMG, that would be a disaster wouldn’t it), and airplanes sent flying blind just to name a few during Earth Hour. Having said that, I do support the cause of being greener whenever I can.

While much is being done to make datacenters and IT infrastructures greener, I seriously think it will still get worst. For example, virtualisation of servers to reduce hardware and carbon footprint sounds great, but as needs grow its inevitable that the infrastructure will consume more power. Traditionally, provisioning a new server requires quite a bit of time and usually justification, but with virtualisation, this process is made easier and much quicker. Now, admins provision servers in half the time and on readily available resources, and then here comes the catch. Where in the past, 1 physical server will usually run a few applications, today in a virtualised world, 1 virtual machine will often be dedicated to run a single app. After a while, we are back to square one, burning up just as many physical servers like we used to.

So what I’m really trying to say is that in order to be truly green, I suppose technology alone is not good enough, it requires management and education. Guess it’s something to ponder on this year’s Earth Hour.

p/s : I do not usually agree much on what Malaysian Orgs / Govt has to say, but there has been a viral thread circulating about that says “TNB wants to sue WWF for Earth Hour”. I suggest you guys should make your own judgements if its true because it is written on a blog and none of the big news players like Reuters or AP has picked it up. Go figure… I’m not gonna provide you guys the link to endorse it further.

File Virtualisation Recap

// March 24th, 2010 // No Comments » // Technical Know-It-All

Recently SearchStorage covered a piece on file virtualisation and where has it all gone. Interestingly enough, I have had the opportunity to deploy a “few” implementations of Brocade’s StorageX. It wasn’t Brocade’s hottest selling product by far, but I must say that the idea of file virtualisation was good. Having said that, I always knew it was gonna be a challenge for it to sustain long term (at least for Brocade).

1. While the product was great, it was always working on top of Microsoft’s DFS technology. It is heavily reliant on that. If you like, it was really a usable interface with additional bells and whistles riding on DFS. Obviously when compared to Microsoft’s feeble MMC console to manage DFS, the file virtualisation products were leaps and bounds ahead.

2. The product doesn’t work extremely well in a Unix environment. It requires quite a few tweaks and isn’t as straight forward to use compared to the Windows variant. Anyhow, some level of file virtualisation already exist in the traditional Unix systems anyhow, so it was never really gonna take off for the Unix side of things.

3. I’m quite sure most of us are used to the multitudes of drives being mounted as you log on to your laptops at work. While it’s a pain, admins over the years have invested hours creating fool-proof login scripts to ensure users have all the data within their reach. To change this, is to throw away all these hardwork. File virtualisation is supposed to makes things easier, but being easier means reducing all this scripts and potentially re-educating users. Sounds like a lot of work? Yes. Albeit only done 1 time, admins rather justify to have more hardware than to invest in a software as such.

4. Costing. In times like this, IT Departments are usually asked to do more with less. So with a file virtualisation product (which is really bundled free with Windows Server), the savvy admins will probably go through the hoops and get it done using Microsoft’s “improved” DFS MMC snap-ins while the non-savvy admins will be made to learn it. Period!

But having said all that, I personally think that maybe (just maybe), file virtualisation will make a comeback sometime in the future. With storage-tiering being a big thing, the fad of the word “virtualisation” and in-line with the mindset of “doing more with less”, file virtualisation could potentially be an alternative. Food for thought.

F5 ARX File Virtualisation