Rethinking RAID Cards on Isolated ESXi Hosts

February 15, 2012 1 Comment

When building any standalone server (a server without a SAN or NAS for storage), one of the considerations is how to handle storage. This typically includes a conversation about RAID, and making sure the local storage has some protection.

With ESXi, this is a bit trickier than most operating systems, since ESXi doesn’t do software RAID like you can get with Linux or Windows, nor does it support the motherboard BIOS RAID you get with most motherboards these days (which isn’t hardware RAID, just another version of software RAID).

So if you want to RAID out your standalone ESXi box, you’re going to need to purchase a supported hardware RAID card. These cards aren’t the $40 ones on Newegg, either. They tend to be a few hundred bucks (to a few thousands, depending).

Most people who are serious about building a serious ESXi server dig around and try to find a RAID card that will work, either buying new, scrounging for parts, or hitting up eBay.

My suggestion to you if you’re looking to put a RAID card in your standalone ESXi host, consider this:

Are you sure you need a RAID card?

The two primary reasons people do RAID is for data integrity (lose a drive, etc.) and for performance.

As far as data integrity goes, I find people tend make the same mistake I used to: They put too much faith in RAID arrays as a method to keep data safe. One of the most important lesson I’ve ever learned in storage is that RAID is not a backup. It’s worth saying again:

RAID Is Not A Backup

I’ve yet to have RAID save my soy bacon, and in fact in my case it’s caused more problems than its solved. However, I’ve been saved many times by a good backup. My favorite form of backup that doesn’t involve a robot? A portable USB drive. They’re high capacity, they don’t require a DC power brick, and easily stored.

Another reason to do RAID is performance. Traditional HDDs are, well, slow. They’re hampered by the fact they are physical devices. By combining multiple drives in a RAID configuration, you can get a higher number of IOPS (and throughput, but for virtual machines that’s typically not as important).

More drives, more IOPS.

A good hardware RAID card will also have a battery-backed up RAM cache, which while stupid fast, only works if you actually hit the cache.

But there’s the thing: If you need performance, you’re going to need a lot of hard drives. Like, a lot. Remember that SNL commercial from years ago? How many bowls of your regular bran cereal does it take to equal one bowl of Colon Blow Cereal? I’ve got an SSD that claims 80,000 IOPS. Assuming I get half that, I’d need about 500 hard drives in a RAID 0 array to get the same number of IOPS. And that’s without any redundancy. That’s a lot of PERC cards and a lot of drives.

So want performance? Why not ditch the PERC and spend that money on an SSD. Of course, SSDs aren’t as cheap as traditional HDD on a per gigabyte basis, so you’ll just want to put virtual disks on the SSD that can really benefit from. Keep your bulk storage (such as file server volumes) on cheap SATA drives, and back them up regularly (which you should do with or without a RAID array).

Another idea might be to spend the RAID card money on a NAS device. You can get a 4 or 5 bay NAS device for the price of a new RAID card these days, and they can be used for multiple ESXi hosts as well as other uses. Plus, they handle their own RAID.

Ideally of course, you want you server with RAID storage, ECC memory, IPMI or other out of band management, SSD data stores, a SAN, a backup system with a robot, etc. But if you’re building a budge box, I’m thinking the RAID card can be skipped.

Filed under Storage

A High Fibre Diet: Twisted Pair Strikes Back

February 10, 2012 10 Comments

I saw a tweet recently from storage and virtualization expert Stu Miniman regarding Emulex announcing copper 10GBase-T Converged Network Adapters, running 10 Gigabit Ethernet over copper (specifically Cat 6a cable).

I recalled a comment I heard Greg Ferro made on a packet pushers episode (and subsequent blog post) about copper not being reliable enough for storage, with the specific issue being the bit error rate (BER), how how many errors the standard (FC, Ethernet, etc.) will allow over a physical medium. As we’ve talked about before, networking people tend to be a little more devil-may-care about their bits, where as storage folks get all anal rententive chef about their bits.

For 1 Gigabit Ethernet over copper (802.3ab/1000Base-T), the standard calls for a  goal BER of less than 10-10, or one wrong bit in every 10,000,000,000 bits. Which incidentally, is one error every second for a line rate 10 Gigabit Ethernet.  For Gigabit, that’s on error every 10 seconds, or 6 per minute.

Fibre Channel has a BER goal of less than 10-12, or on error in every 1,000,000,000,000 bits. That would be about 2 errors a minute with 10 Gigabit Ethernet.  That’s also 100 times less error-prone than Ethernet, which if you think about it, is a lot.

To give a little scale, that’s like comparing Barney Fife from The Andy Griffith show’s bad assery to Jason Statham’s character in.. well any movie he’s ever been in.

Holy shit, is he fighting… truancy?

Barney Fife, the 10-10 error rate of law enforcement. Wait… Wow, did I really just say that?

So given how fastidious about their storage networks storage folks can be, it’s understandable that storage administrator wouldn’t want their precious SCSI commands running over a network that’s 100 times less reliable than Fibre Channel.

However, while the Gigabit Ethernet standard has a BER target of less than 10-10, the 802.3an standard for 10 Gigabit Ethernet over copper (10GBaseT) has a BER goal of less than 10-12, which is in line with Fibre Channel’s goal. So is 10 Gigabit Ethernet over Cat 6A good enough for storage (specifically FCoE)? Sounds like it.

But the discussion also got me thinking, how close do we get to 10-10 as an error rate in Gigabit Ethernet? I just checked all the physical interfaces in my data center (laundry room), and every error counter is zero (presumably most errors would show up as CRC errors). And all it takes to hit 1010 bits is 1.25 Gigabytes of data transfer, and I do that when I download a movie off of iTunes.  So I know I’ve put dozens of gigs through my desktop since it was last rebooted, and nary an error. And my cabling isn’t exactly data center standard. One cable I use came with a cheap wireless access point I got a while ago. It makes me curious to what the actual BER is in reality with decent cables that don’t come close to 100 meters.

Of course, there’s still the power consumption issues and other drawbacks that Greg mentioned when compared to fiber (or coax). However, it’ll be good to have another option. There are some shops that won’t likely ever have fiber optics deployed.

Filed under Ethernet, Fibre Channel

Initial Thoughts on Apple’s New Initiative

January 25, 2012 Leave a Comment

When I heard about Apple’s new education initiative, I got excited. For one, it’s Apple. And yes, I’m a fanboy. So, like… Squeeeeeeee.

Tony, you have a problem

But it’s not algebra or geography books geared towards primary education that excites me (although that’s pretty cool), it’s how it could revolutionize IT ebooks.

Right now the primary market for technical books is print books. There are technical eBooks available on a variety of eBook platforms, but for the most part, technical books are a print business, with eBooks as an afterthought.

This approach has worked since the tech industry begain, but it does have its limiations.

For one, tech books usually have a percentage of its content that’s out of date by the time it reaches the shelves. Technical books can take over a year to get from outline to ending up on the shelves, and naturally the fast-paced moves from under the book. And going an update or corrections to a book is a major effort. If it’s C programming, it’s probably not too much of an issue. But a book on FCoE or VXLAN? There’s bound to be lots of changes and corrections within the span of a year.

What do you mean my book on cell phones isn’t current?

Also, eBooks right now are mostly just electronic versions of the paper books (ed: duh). The electronic format could do a whole lot more than just words on page, as shown by Apple in their presentation. With a fully interactive eBook, there could be animations (really awesome for networking flows), interactive quizzes (and huge test banks, not just 10 questions per chapter).

And right now eBooks seem to be an afterthought. Not all physical titles are available in eBook format (hint, several important and influential Fibre Channel books), and the ones that are can seem like a rush job. In my preparation for the CCIE Storage written test, I picked up this ebook on the Kindle platform: CCIE Network Storage. The ebook version was riddled with formatting errors which made it sometimes difficult to follow. Also, it looks like they’ve seem to have even taken it off Kindle.

Right now my favorite eBook format is the Kindle. Despite being an Apple fanboy, Kindle has the largest library of technical books, by far. And Kindle’s reader and cloud storage make managing your library stupid easy. Apple also makes it easier, although the platform is limited to Apple devices, and the tech library doesn’t seem to be as comprehensive. All of this this is in stark contrast to Adobe’s shitty eBook platform, which seems to want to destroy eBooks.

The Controversy

So the controversy is in Apple’s EULA. If you create an iBook with the iBook Author, that “Work” must be distributed through the Apple iBook store if you charge a fee for it. The tricky part is how Apple defines the term “Work”. Right now it’s a bit ambiguous. Some claim that the term “Work” defines the totality of the book. Others (like the Ars article) say “Work” only defines the output of the iBook Author program (PDF of Apple’s proprietary eBook format).

So if I write a book, and create an eBook version of it with Apple’s iBook Author (which looks like it create amazingly interactive ebooks), can I take the material from the book and make a (probably less interactive) Kindle version of the book?

Tony’s Take

Whether you like Apple or not, you have to admit this certainly ups the game. It’s high time eBooks took center stage for technical eBooks, instead of being an afterthought.

Right now the networking and data center landscape is changing fast, and we need new and better ways to cram new knowledge into our brainbags. A good interactive ebook, riddled with animations, audio, and large test banks would certainly go a long way to help. I don’t really care if it’s Apple or Amazon that provide that format. But right now, it looks like Apple is the only one saddling up.

Filed under Always Be Learning, Certifications, Learning

Is The Pearson VUE Testing Center Network Collapsing?

January 5, 2012 11 Comments

Since my day job is teaching, I need to do a lot of certification tests. There are periods of time when I seem to live in a Pearson VUE testing center. However, In the past three months I’ve noticed the number of testing centers has dropped significantly.  There used to be three in the Portland metro area, but about three months ago that number went down to zero. One came back, but there aren’t any open testing dates until March now.

Which is a problem, because I need to do my VCP5 certification before Feb 29th, 2012, otherwise in order to get the VCP5 certification I’ll have to take a course (I’m a current VCP4 holder).

I brought this up on Twitter a few months ago, and a few people responded they had issues as well recently with no local testing centers.

So I wonder, is the Pearson VUE testing network collapsing? Or is it just Portland, Oregon?

My dream of a VCP5 is collapsing

Filed under Certifications

VDI: The Depressing State of Statelessness

January 3, 2012 1 Comment

Desktop virtualization (VDI) is a huge topic in data center discussions lately. I’ve worked with it somewhat in a limited fashion (such as virtual desktops for instructional courses) as well as dealing with some of the fallout  from infrastructure requirements (HULK NEED IOPS). Just before Christmas, I got a briefing from a colleague who teaches VDI on the current status of VDI, from both a Citrix and VMware perspective, and I can tell you this: VDI is insanely depressing.

Why is it depressing? Because it’s 2012, and yet the current slate of VDI solutions are a convoluted mess. Both Citrix and VMware offer comprehensive solutions (and many opt for both: A VMware base and a Citrix presentation layer). However, the bending-over backwards both companies need to do to work within the Microsoft world is astounding. And it’s not the fault of Citrix or VMware. The fault is entirely that of Microsoft.

Dude, You’re Getting A Dell. Or Else.

This guy represents the antithesis of VDI

Microsoft, for what is likely a variety of reasons, seems to absolutely despise the very concept of VDI and statelessness. They’re just fine and dandy with the opposite of VDI: Dude, you’re getting a Dell. Everyone gets an individual PC, with Windows and Office, and every PC that ships results in Microsoft getting a check. Not bad work if you can get it.

Back In My Day

I had perfect VDI 15 years ago. In 1996, I worked for a company called digitalNATION as a green Unix admin and doing dial-up tech support (Trumpet Winsocket… eghh).

Even today, The Networking Stack That Shall Not Be Named is only mentioned in hushed whispers

Every employee had a NeXT workstation, from the receptionist to the CEO. The NeXT workstations could be run independently, or they could be completely stateless, with my home directory stored on an NFS server. Steve Jobs called it “NFS dialtone”.  I’d sit down at any workstation, log in, and have all my files, email, etc. at my disposal. The profile even knew that I used my mouse left-handed.

Oh, hello. You sexy workstation you.

Everything could be centrally managed. It was a desktop managers dream, and represents everything that an enterprise wishes Windows could be like.

Of course NeXT didn’t really take off and floundered for years until they got bought and took over Apple, and NeXTSTEP became the basis for Mac OS X and iOS. Sadly, with Apple being a consumer company, they never really pursued this marvelous statelessness. It just didn’t make sense at the time for consumer devices, especially given the networking infrastructure in 1997. Even today, it’s still a bit iffy, as the Google Chromebooks have shown.

NeXT wasn’t the only company that had functional statelessness. Sun had it with their Sun Rays (Scott McNealy recently lamented the loss of his stateless Sun Ray), and Oracle also tried a while back. Microsoft has nothing like this, and it doesn’t seem like they have any plans to have it in the near future.

But boy do enterprises want it. So much so that a huge industry has sprung up (at least in the hundreds of millions, possibly billions per year) that essentially attempts to drag Windows Desktops kicking and screaming into something that vaguely resembles stateless.

Enterprises beg and plead for it, and what does Microsoft do? They put out studies on why VDI is more expensive.

Thermonuclear Licensing

The weapon that Microsoft is using in its subtle but undeniable battle against VDI is licensing. Brian Madden (who is the king of all VDI) has a great piece on the absurdity of Microsoft claiming that VDI is 11% more expensive than “Dude You’re Getting A Dell”.  The root cause? Microsoft makes it more expensive with licensing.

The licensing scheme is also quite convoluted, and ever changing. There could probably be a certification based just on MS licensing for VDI, and it’d be a tough one, too.

Microsoft is afraid of killing its twin Golden Geese: Windows and Office.

Windows has a lock on the desktop because of the Win32 API. This has been the dominant way to get applications on the desktop for the past say 20 years. While you can certainly argue about the quality of Microsoft Windows, you can’t argue with its pervasiveness.

But with web applications, HTML5, and the like, Win32 is less significant than it used to be. And by itself, it could be usurped.

But Microsoft has another trick up its sleeve: MS Office. Office has been holding our documents, spreadsheets, and slide presentations hostage for even longer. It’s the ubiquitous format for sending documents, and it would be tough for any organization to eschew it in favor of another format. It’s simply too pervasive. Some document exchanges can be replaced with PDFs and HTML(5), but Office still has the lions share of document exchanges.

As others have, through the years I’ve tried to get rid of Office in favor of other office suites (Apple’s suite, OpenOffice, etc.). All of those suites are capable applications that do exactly what I need them to, but even with the ability to read and write Word/Excel/PowerPoint, the workflow just sucks. There’s too many little details that don’t translate well. All of us who’ve tried have had mangled spreadsheets, weirdly formatted doc files, and PDFs with funkiness. Let’s be clear here, Office doesn’t do anything the other suites can’t do functionally. In fact, it probably does too much which is why it’s such a bloated mess. But everyone uses it, and nothing else gets the formating 100% right. Many get it 95% right, but that extra 5% is a hassle.

That’s the most depressing part. Nothing so far as made a dent in Office’s dominance. So Win32 is relatively safe. So Windows isn’t going anywhere for a while. So VDI is going to be a miserable mess, until Microsoft decides to do something about it. Which they likely won’t.

I need a drink.

Filed under VDI

Gigamon Side Story

December 12, 2011 1 Comment

The modern data center is a lot like modern air transportation. Not nearly as sexy as it used to be, the food isn’t nearly as good as it used to be, and more choke points than we used to deal with.

With 10 Gigabit Ethernet Fabrics available from vendors like Cisco, Juniper, Brocade, et all, we can conceive of these great, non-blocking, lossless networks that let us zip VMs and data to and fro.

And then reality sets in. The security team needs to inspection points. That means firewalls, IPS, and IDS devices. And one thing they’re not terribly good at? Gigs and gigs of traffic. Also scaling. And not pissing me off.

Pictured: Firewall Choke Points

This battle between scalability and security has data center administrators and security groups rumbling like some sort of West Side Data Center Story.

Dun dun da dun! Scalability!

Dun doo doo ta doo! Inspection!

So what to do? Enter Gigamon, the makers of the orangiest network devices you’ll find in a data center. They were part of Networking Field Day 2, which I participated in back in October.

Essentially what Gigamon allows you to do is scale out your SPAN/Mirror ports. On most Cisco switches, only two ports at a time can be spitting mirrored traffic. For something like a Nexus 7000 with up to 256 10 Gigabit Interfaces, that’s usually not sufficient for monitoring anything but a small smattering of your traffic.

A product like Gigamon can tap fibre and copper links, or take in the output of a span port, classify the traffic, and send it out an appropriate port. This would allow a data center to effectively scale traffic monitoring in a way that’s not possible with mere mirrored ports alone. It would effectively remove all choke points that we normally associate with security. You’d just need to scale up with the appropriate number of IDS/IPS devices.

But with great power, comes the ability to do some unsavory things. During the presentation Gigamon mentioned they’d just done a huge install with Russia (note: I wouldn’t bring that up in your next presentation), allowing the government to monitor data of its citizens. That made me less than comfortable (and it’s also why it scares the shit out of Jeremy Gaddis). But “hey, that’s how Russia rolls” you might say. We do it here in the US, as well, through the concept of “lawful interception“. Yeah, I did feel a little dirty after that discussion.

Still, it could be used for good by removing the standard security choke points. Even if you didn’t need to IPS every packet in your data center, I would still consider architecting a design with Gigamon or another vendor like them in mind. It wouldn’t be difficult to consider where to put the devices, and it could save loads of time in the long run. If a security edict came down from on high, the appropriate devices would be put in place with Gigamon providing the pipping without choking your traffic.

In the mean time, I’m going to make sure everything I do is SSL’d.

Note: As a delegate/blogger, my travel and accommodations were covered by Gestalt IT, who vendors paid to have spots during the Networking Field Day. Vendors pay Gestalt IT to present, so while my travel (hotel, airfare, meals) were covered indirectly by the vendors, no other remuneration (save for the occasional tchotchke) from any of the vendors, directly or indirectly, or by Gestalt IT was recieved. Vendors were not promised, nor did they ask for any of us to write about them, or write about them positively. In fact, we sometimes say their products are shit (when, to be honest, sometimes they are, although this one wasn’t). My time was unpaid. 

Filed under Ethernet, Security

Do We Need 7200 RPM Drives?

December 12, 2011 1 Comment

Right now, all of my personal computers (yeah, I have a lot) now boot from SSD. I have a MacBook Pro, a MacBook Air, and a Windows 7 workstation, all booting from SSD. And the ESXi host I have will soon have an SSD datastore.

And let me reiterate what I’ve said before: I will never have a computer that boots from spinning rust again. The difference between a computer with an SSD and a computer with a HDD is astounding. You can take even a 3 year old laptop, put an SSD in there, and for the most part it feels way faster than the latest 17 inch beast running with a HDD.

Yeah yeah yeah, SSD from your cold, dead hands

So why are SSDs so bad-ass? Is it the transfer speeds? No, it’s the IOPS. The transfer speeds in SSDs are a couple of times better than an a HDD, but the IOPS are orders of magnatude better. And for desktop operating systems (as well as databases), IOPS are where it’s at. Check out this graph (bottom of page) comparing an SSD to several HDD, some of which run at 15,000 RPM.

As awesome an unicorny as that is, SSD storage still comes at a premium. Even with the spike in prices caused by the tragic flooding in Thailand, SSDs are still significantly more expensive per GB than HDDs. So it doesn’t make sense to make all of our storage SSD. There’s still a need for inexpensive, slow bulk storage, and that’s where HDDs shine.

But now that we have SSDs for speed, 7200 RPM is overkill for our other needs. I just checked my iTunes directory, and it’s 250 GB of data. There’s nothing that MP3 sound files, HD video files, backups, etc. need in terms of performance that would necessitate a 7200 RPM drive.  A 5400 RPM drive will do just fine. You might notice the difference while copying files, but the difference won’t be that great when compared to a 7200 RPM drive. Neither are in any position to flood a SATA2 connection, let alone SATA3.

Even with those USB portable hard drives which have 5400 RPM drives in them, it’s still more than enough to flood USB 2.0.

And this got me thinking: How useful are 7200 RPM drives anymore? I remember taking a pair of hard drives back to Fry’s because I realized they were 5400 RPM drives (I wasn’t paying attention). Now, I don’t care about RPMs. Any speed will do for my needs.

Hard drives have been the albatross of computer performance for a while now. This is particularly true for desktop operating systems: They eat up IOPS like candy. A spinning disk is hobbled by the spindle. In data centers you can get around this by adding more and more spindles into some type of array, thereby increasing IOPS.

Enterprise storage is another matter. It’s not likely Enterprise SANs will give up spinning rust any time soon. Personally, I’m a huge fan of company’s like PureStorage and StorageFire that have all-SSD solutions. The IOPS you can get from these all-flash arrays is astounding.

Filed under Storage

Ode To MRTG

December 7, 2011 3 Comments

I was wasting time/procrastinating keeping up with current events on Twitter when I saw a tweet from someone with a familiar name, but I couldn’t quite place where I knew it from: Tobi Oetiker (@oetiker). Then it came to me. He’s the author of the fantastic MRTG, among other tools.

MRTG was my favorite trending utility back in the day. “But Tony, weren’t you a condescending Unix administrator back then, and isn’t MRTG a networking tool?” Yes, yes I was. But MRTG isn’t just for trending network links, you can use it to graph bandwidth in and out of servers as well as other metrics like CPU utilization, memory utilization, number of processes, etc. I had a whole set of standard metrics I would graph with MRTG, depending on the device.

Connection rate, open connections, and bandwidth for an F5 load balancer back when “Friends” was still on the air

MRTG combined with net-snmp (or in Window’s case, the built-in SNMP service) I could graph just about anything on the servers I was responsible for. This saved my ass so many times. Here’s a couple of examples where it saved me:

Customer: “We were down for 5 hours!”

Me: “No, actually your server was down for 5 minutes. Here’s the graph.”

Another customer: “Your network is slow!”

Me: “Our network graphs show very low latency and plenty of capacity. In addition, here’s a graph showing CPU utilization on your servers spiking to 100% for several hours at a time. It’s either time to expand your capacity, or perhaps look at your application to see why it’s using up so many resources.”

In the late 90s, I set up a huge server farm for a major music television network . As part of my automated installs, I included MRTG monitoring for every server’s switch port, server NIC, CPU, memory, as well as other server-relatied metrics. I also graphed the F5 load balancer’s various metrics for all of the VIPs (bandwidth, connection rate). Feeling proud of myself, I showed them to one of the customer’s technical executives thinking they’d look at it and say “oh that’s nice.”

Instead, he called me several times a day for a month asking me (very good) questions about what all the data meant. He absolutely loved it, and I never built a server farm without it (or something like it).

Plenty of tools can show you graphs, but MRTG and tools like it trend not just when you’re looking, but when you’re not. When you’re sleeping, it collects data. When you’re out to lunch, it’s collecting data. When you’re listening to the Beastie Boys or whoever the kids are listening to these day, it collects data. Data that you can pull up at a later date. MRTG was fairly simple, but extremely powerful.

MRTG taught me several important lessons with respect to system monitoring. Perhaps the most important lesson is that monitoring is really two very different disciplines: Trending and alerting. A mistake a lot of operations made was confusing the two. Probably the biggest difference between trending and alerting is that with trending, you can never do too much. With alerting, it’s very easy to over-alert.

How many times have you, in either a server or network administrator role, been the victim of “alert creep”? When alarm after alarm is configured in your network monitoring tool, sending out emails and traps, until you’re so inundated with noise that you can’t tell the difference between the system crying wolf and a real issue?

It’s easy to over-alert. However, it’s very difficult to over-trend. And honestly, trending data is far more useful to me than 99% of alerting. Usually a customer is my best alerting mechanism, they almost always seem to know well before my monitoring system does. And having historical trending data helps me get to the bottom of things much quicker.

Many have improved upon the art of trending with tools like Observium and even RRDTool (also written by Tobi Oetiker). Many more tried but succeeded in only making overly complicated messes that ignored the strength of MRTG which was its simplicity. The simplicity of graphing and keeping various metrics and providing a simple way to get access to them when needed. MRTG was the first killer app for not only network administrators, but server administrators. And it proved how important the old adage is:

If you didn’t write it down, it didn’t happen.

Filed under Layer 8

Adobe’s eBook Platform Is A Piece of Shit

December 1, 2011 7 Comments

Adobe’s eBook platform is utter shit. To those of you that have dealt with ACSM files, that statement is as controversial as saying “the sky is blue”. To those of you that haven’t, and are wondering what makes it such shit, read on.

It all started with a deal that Cisco Press had on cybermonday this year, offering 50% off if you buy three books. As a certified Cisco course instructor (I do not work for Cisco, I just teach Cisco courses) who is also working on my CCIE Storage, I can always do with a few more books, especially if they’re on the recommended reading list for CCIE Storage.

Also, since I travel quite a bit (150,000 miles this year), eBooks are the preferred knowledge delivery vector, since books are, well, frickin’ heavy. I took a nearly 800 page CCNP route book with me all over Europe last year, and it almost killed me. eBooks it is.  I’ve got an iPad, and I absolutely love the Kindle reader app. If I’ve got a long flight ahead of me (such as to say, India) then I make sure I’ve got plenty of books loaded up into my first generation iPad and iPhone 4 (which is also a surprisingly good e-reader). I also have a half decent PDF viewer for non-eBook format documents to read on the road.

I found three eBooks from Cisco Press that fit the bill, loaded them up in my shopping cart, and pulled the trigger. $150 worth of books for $75, not too bad. Two of the books were in an unprotected PDF format (watermarked with my name to discourage rampant sharing, which is fine), the other book downloaded as a tiny little file, with an .acsm extension.

I’d never heard of a .acsm file, but I would soon come to loath those four letters with the burning hatred of a thousand suns. My Canadian friend Jaymie Koroluk (@jaymiek) had this to say about it:

FFUUUUUU indeed. And thus began my Zeldian quest to get a friggin’ eBook on a friggin’ eBook reader. How hard could it be?

Well, of course my Mac didn’t recognize the .acsm file type. I tried loading it into a couple of readers, such as Kindle (it laughed at it) and a PDF viewer that I use. It turns out that .acsm didn’t actually contain the eBook, just a reference to it (and I believe the DRM rights to open the book). I had no idea what to do with it. The Cisco Press site didn’t have any specific instructions that I could find, so I Googled .acsm and eBook.

What I found was link after link that all said essentially “How the fuck do I get an .acsm book onto my reader???” Searching for acsm on Google reveals a world of woe, frustration, and hopelessness.

Google searches for “.acsm”  should just show this

After sifting through a few links, I found out that I needed to download something called Adobe Digital Editions. So I go to Adobe’s site, and I get this is the message I get when I try to download it:

What? I’ve got a new MacBook Air with MacOS Lion. There’s no “here’s what you need to do”, just that obnoxious error. With a bit of digging, I’m able to download it anyway.

I install Adobe Digital Editions, which is not intuitive and bizarrely laid out, and I’m finally able to load up the acsm file, and download a copy of the eBook. And the eBook is… a protected PDF. All that shit for a protected PDF.

But hey, at least I got it, right? Horray! But wait, I can only read it on my laptop, however. I need to get it on my iPad for this book to be of any use.

Yes, I’ve just experienced the eBook version of “The Princess is in another castle”.

But I told her to meet me here like five… fine. You know what? Tell here she’s on her own. I’m gonna go find a girl who can manage to stay un-kidnapped for say, 30 minutes at a time. 

Laptops are generally not great eBook readers, because among other issues, the batteries don’t last as long. The iPad’s battery lasts 10 hours of active use, and the various Kindle readers have their active battery life measured in days.  If I can’t find a way to get this onto my iPad, then there’s not much point in me having spent the money for this book.

I try to find some iPad app at the App Store that reads that format, that would allow me to open the protected PDF, but I came up blank. Or at least, none of them would obviously work. And most of them cost money, so I wasn’t about to do trial and error on which ones might work.

Jaymie mentioned she found an app called txtr, which I downloaded an installed. Txtr apparently was a failed ebook reader, and moved to a purely software play. They also had the ability to read Adobe eBooks (and as far as I can tell, the only iPad app that can). So Finally, I’m able to read the eBook on my iPad.

All told, it takes me over an hour and lots of tinkering, installing, and Googling to get an Adobe eBook onto my iPad.

So how does the Adobe eBook platform compare to other eBook platforms when you finally get the fucking book loaded up on your fucking eBook reader (which again, should not be nearly as difficult as it was)? Let’s compare.

First, ease of getting a book. How long does it take me to get an eBook on the Kindle, iBook, or Nook platforms? About 10 fucking seconds with a decent Internet connection. On Adobe’s platform? About an hour. By my math, Adobe’s platform is 360 times worse than the competition.

So how about usability? The book is a PDF, and PDFs are not ideal as a book format, even the non-DRMd ones that can be opened up on any reader. They’re just not optimized for eReaders and it shows. When you turn a page, the page is blurry for a split second before coming into focus. You can’t zoom in on individual photos like you can with the other readers. And there are about a dozen other nit-picky yet important UI niceties that Kindle and the others have that a PDF eBook lacks. Adobe’s platform seems like they took their existing PDF format, and slapped an eBook layer onto it in a half-assed manner.

In studying for my CCIE Storage, I came across a fantastic free Fibre Channel eBook from EMC (the storage vendor). It’s in an unprotected PDF format, but I’d happily pay $10 to get it in the Kindle format, which is much more conducive to eBook formats.

Final Thoughts

I have a simple plea to anyone thinking of publishing an eBook: For the love of all that is sacred and good in the world, do not use the Adobe book format. It will annoy your readers, and severely limit your eBook sales.

Adobe either has no clue about the eBook market, or they’re trying to sabotage it with a platform so shitty, so mind-bogglingly difficult for even tech-savvy consumers, that no one will ever want to read an eBook ever again.

That’s right, sometimes you have a product so bad, that it doesn’t just leave a bad taste in your mouth, it actually does harm to the industry. And that’s what we have with Adobe.

So Adobe, what did eBooks ever do to you?

Filed under Always Be Learning, Dick Move

BYOD And Juniper’s Big Brother

December 1, 2011 Leave a Comment

Twitter fight!

I’ve been involved in a few twitter fights discussions recently, which are typically passionate conversations with people that hold passionate beliefs.  However, the problem with arguing on Twitter is that it’s very easy to accidentally be on the same side, while thinking you’re on opposite sides. Such is the limit of 144 characters.

The whole brouhaha started with a tweet I made about Junos Pulse from Juniper, which can do the following (from the Pulse PDF brochure): “SMS, MMS, email, and message content monitoring, phone log, address book, and stored photo viewing and control.”

Junos Pulse is Juniper’s mobile security client, which includes VPN as well as anti-malware capabilities. It also has the ability to peer into the text messages that a phone has sent and received, as well as view all photographs taken by the smarphone or tablet’s camera. Juniper is not just marketing it towards corporate issued phones and tablets (which I have no problem with), but also (as shown in the  fear-mongering blog post with a misleading title that I  wrote about in my last post) is advocating that employee-owned devices, part of the BYOD (bring your own device) trend in IT, also be loaded with Juniper’s spy-capable software. From the fear-mongering article (emphasis mine):

Get mobile security and device management for your personal or corporate-issued mobile device, and mandate that all of your employees – or anyone for that matter who accesses your corporate network from a mobile device – load mobile security and device management on their mobile devices!

If the phone or tablet is issued by the company, I don’t have any problem with this (so long as employees know that there is that capability). This could even be quite handy, depending on the scenario. But employee owned equipment being susceptible to spying by corporate IT? No way. I can’t imagine anyone would allow that on their personal devices. Even Juniper employees.

(Related: Check out Tom Hollingsworth’s post on BYOD)

Hence my tweet, wondering if Juniper eats its own dog food, and requires employees who bring their personal, non-Juniper-owned smartphones into the office to run Pulse with the ability to view photos, texts, and other personal correspondence. I got responses like this:

I don’t think he realized that I was talking about Juniper pulse having the ability not just to spy on VPN traffic (which any VPN software could), but also the text messages and photos on the mobile device/tablet. Also that Juniper is marketing it towards employee owned devices. (Also, privacy concerns are not a legitimate reason to spy on someone.) In the end though, I think Virtual_Desktop and I were on the same page.

So it’s not just a company that I worry about violating an employees privacy, but also a rogue IT employee. I worked at a place once where a Unix admin stalked another employee by reading her email. Having the power to peer into someone’s personal texts, emails, and photos would be very tempting, and difficult to resist for the unscrupulous.

Ah, I see Tony is getting more saucy texts from his super model girlfriends

I get that if I’m at the office, and I’m using their network, that my traffic could be monitored. I get that data on company property, such as a company issued laptop, phone, or tablet is fair game for viewing by the company. But to require an employee to install something on their personal (BYOD) devices that has the ability to peer into an employee’s personal texts and images? That’s downright scary. And stupid. No knowledgable employee would let that happen. If an employer required that I install it on a device I brought into the office even if it didn’t connect to the corporate network, I’d leave the device at home. And I’d probably look for another job, because bone-headed decisions like that don’t exactly evoke confidence in management.

Junos Pulse certainly has some appropriate use cases. The ability to wipe a phone, view emails, texts and images, and other fairly intrusive activities on a company-owned device make sense in some cases. In others, it’s probably overly intrusive, overly-controlling, but within an employers rights. But on an employee’s personal device? No way.

I like Juniper, I really do. But I think they’ve got the strategy wrong for Pulse, and I think they’ll figure it out. It’s a much larger issue as well, with the consumerization of IT and employees bringing their own devices, the demarkation point between employee and employer is becoming hazy. That’s probably an offshoot of the time an employee is on the clock and off the clock becoming hazy as well. We’ll have to see where this goes, but I don’t think people are going to put up with the  ”it’s going to spy on your personal device” route.

Filed under Security

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