Today Internet is all about Wireless Connectivity

As I write this blog,I am connected to my Wifi Network!

We all are connected to the internet on wireless network.Doesn't matter a fiber optic cable runs till my doorstep,but am still connected to my wireless router.Its a trend that’s only increasing.To build a better internet, we’re going to have build better wireless networks.

We are getting disconnected from the world of wires ; or we are forced otherwise.

Having said that,It's not about just the availability of a wireless network,it should feed our need for speed and purpose.Gone are those where it was just nice to have a wireless connectivity.Now its the primary and most overlooked one for getting connected to Internet.

Every minute counts in a small company ; and wireless networks are a primary and the best way to enhance productivity. As per the market research,there’s a steep rise in use of smartphones and tablets in corporates and this will only rise.Its like now each employee carries 3+ Wifi devices -Laptop,Mobile-can be 2 or 3 as well, and a Tablet.This undoubtedly puts a strain on existing Wifi Networks.

Few things to look at before deploying a Wireless Solution.

1. Choose Industry Grade Access Points

Obviously,there’s a big difference between the consumer access points with business-oriented models from leading brands such as Aruba, Cisco,Netgear etc.We often end up opting for cheaper consumer grade APs for the sake of cutting down the cost, that are, in fact, inadequate for the task at hand.

Consumer models typically lack features such as throughput,speed,reliability,upgradability,etc.On the other side, business AP’s are designed for solid performance in a 24/7 environment and the processing workload generated from large number of simultaneously active Wi-Fi devices.

2. Operating Frequency

At the moment, there are two main frequencies bands designed for 802.11 Wi-Fi networks: 2.4GHz and 5GHz. Preferred option in the corporates is 5 Ghz.The good news about that is that there's far more room in that frequency spread than there is in the over-used 2.4GHzMost business grade APs can operate in both frequency bands,while higher-end models can serve Wi-Fi clients in both bands simultaneously. The shorter range of 5GHz does allow APs to be deployed in closer proximity without signals overlapping and interfering with one another. This, in turn, allows for a higher number of AP to be deployed.

It should be noted that most Wi-Fi clients still do not work on the 5GHz band.Most smartphones are 2.4GHz only.

3. Positioning of Access Points.

Now comes on the decision of where to place the AP’s,though looks silly,its one of the important factor for good connectivity.

Just increasing the number of AP’s cannot give you a good internet speed;may be a good signal strength ;) It literally reduces overall responsiveness and throughput.Careful positioning and configuration is thus required to deploy a high density of APs to properly support a large number of wireless clients.Too much of close proximity can overlap the signals and lead to collision and lesser transmission speed.Do a proper site survey and study and testing on signal availability,reachability,overlapping,throughout before you place AP.

4. Better Management & Security

Use WPA2 security - For the high speeds on wireless N or AC routers you must use WPA2 security with AES encryption. Using WPA or WEP security with TKIP encryption will dramatically reduce bandwidth. Most routers offer a mixed WPA/WPA2 mode, but you should use WPA2 only. Most devices you have should support WPA2 security, but if you have some that don’t, better change your device ;)

5. Working out the range : 802.11 ac or 802.11n ?

Well,the latest technology is 802.11ac and is said to kill gigabit wired technology,don’t get excited,it’s not the case in reality, 802.11 ac only supports the 5GHz frequency.Drawback is that it has lesser range compared to 2.4 Ghz.At the same time, 802.11ac has another feature, beam-forming technology, that cover up the range problem.This technology broadcast the signal directly from the access point to the specific device and back again.Cool na! All 802.11ac devices will support older Wi-Fi technologies such as your 802.11n equipped laptop or even g network. 802.11ac can't do magic though.

Giving a simple example, if you buy an 802.11ac AP you'll still be limited to your older devices' maximum speeds.If you buy an 802.11ac AP now you're really buying for future use. It's not going to do you much good today ;)

There' so much to explain on (Future) Wifi, may be in my coming blogs.Hope this was helpful for those who have read ;-)

Why do you need to migrate to SSD?

An SSD is the single biggest upgrade you can give your computer, and prices have come down dramatically such that everyone can re-think on his decision before buying an HDD and prefer SSD instead.Its affordable..!

No matter you increase the RAM,processor,Gen,etc..with HDD’s running on the machine,performance will have its limitations!

It’s time to upgrade to an SSD if you’re still using a mechanical hard drive in your computer.

SSD’s are so much faster because they don’t have a spinning magnetic platter and moving head. After upgrading, you’ll be surprised at the performance improvements and wondering why the hell I waited so long.Nothing else will give you the speed increase that a new SSD will.

With a mechanical hard drive, the physical heads need to move around to read data from a spinning magnetic disk. With a solid-state drive, the drive can read or write data from any location on the disk with no performance penalty.

It’s not just theoretical benchmarks that improve. Your computer becomes much, much faster to boot. How much of an improvement depends on your operating system, hardware, and what software is loading at boot — but you can make it down to 7-15 seconds, even on an older Windows 7 system. Your desktop will load much more quickly after you log in too. Even if you have a lot of nasty bloatwares your desktop will become usable much more quickly.

Launching a program, opening a file, and saving something to disk will all happen much, much faster. Click a program, and it can load almost instantly. All those little moments of waiting you don’t notice when you use your computer are adding up. Even just browsing the web will be faster — with your browser’s cache files stored on an SSD, they’ll load almost instantly instead of more slowly from a mechanical drive.

Here’s the testing performed with My Laptops with:

• Kingston EV 300 120 GB SSD
• Seagate 298 GB HDD

And the result was amazing..!!

More meaning below to understand the test results using CrystalDiskMark:

• 5 – the number of test passes you want to run.  If you want a fast seat-of-the-pants guess, do 1, but keep in mind it can be wildly variant between passes if something else happens to be going on in the SAN.
• 4000MB – the test file size.  I like using 4000MB to reduce the chances that I’m just hitting cache and getting artificially fast numbers.  Smaller test file sizes may look fast but don’t really reflect how a large database will work.
• E: – the drive letter to test.  Keep an eye on the free space there – you don’t want to create a test file that can run your server out of drive space.

• Seq – long, sequential operations. For SQL Server, this is somewhat akin to doing backups or doing table scans of perfectly defragmented data, like a data warehouse.
• 512K – random large operations one at a time.  This doesn’t really match up to how SQL Server works.
• 4K – random tiny operations one at a time.  This is somewhat akin to a lightly loaded OLTP server.
• 4K QD32 – random tiny operations, but many done at a time.  This is somewhat akin to an active OLTP server.

Gmail (New) Feature : Recall an email within 30 seconds of it being sent.

Google has rolled out a (New) feature where you can undo an email within 30 seconds after being sent.This feature (hidden) was available earlier as Labs:"Undo Send" option and by default was set to 10 seconds.
And now that it can be custom 10, 20 or 30 seconds as chosen by user and is available as a formal setting in Gmail.If you make a typo or regret sending a message,sent to a wrong person,missed an attachment,accidentally replied to all,you got 30 seconds (max.) to take back the message you just sent.

To enable Undo Send:

1. Click the gear in the top right .
2. Select Settings.
3. Scroll down to "Undo Send" and click Enable.
4. Set the cancellation period (the amount of time you have to decide if you want to unsend an email (10,20, 0r 30 seconds).
5. Click Save Changes at the bottom of the page.

Masroor P Mohamed
Email: info@masroor.in

Time Management

Effective Time Management is one of the most highly valued skills by Corporate. Its obvious there is no one right way, so it's important to find a system that works for you and stick to it.

The hardest thing to learn for me was “How to Plan?” Its quite easy to execute what is already planned, but to make a to-do list and to schedule it so productively,is a tough go.

Before you begin to manage time, you need to know what time is.There are two types of time;

Clock Time and Real Time.

In clock time, there are 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour, 24 hours in a day and 365 days in a year.When I say I am 28 , I am exactly 28 years old.

In real time, all time is relative. Time passes like a blink of an eye or drags or pull you depending on what you're doing. Sometimes I feel like I have slept for long hours,but in reality I had slept only for 2 hours.

There are tons of Time Management tools available in the market,but it helps an individual to an extend in executing things because it's also designed to work on Clock Time (fact is we don't live there) and many situations we re-schedule our tasks(Hope you agree).In Reality,We all create time ourselves for whatever we need to accomplish and anything we create is something we can manage as well.

Some Tips on how to Manage time from my experience:

1. Don't just answer the phone just because its ringing and read emails just because it pops up.If you are really in the middle of some important work,finish it off and find a suitable time to revert on emails and return on calls.Unless it's super urgent!
2. Allocate time to what is important and critical.And when I mean time,it's again created by you.
3. Everything cannot be done in one go and it's possibly impossible.Instead Prioritize!
4. Put a “Do not Disturb” sign when you should and must have to complete a given task.
5. Do Multitasking ; it's a talent that not all of us possess. Realizing whether you are the type of person that can do it or not is important. If you’re able to multitask, great. If you’re not, then don’t bother trying. Many people make themselves less effective by trying to multitask when they simply can’t do it. This leads to multiple projects being started and none of them being finished.
6. Kill the unnecessary and unproductive; So how do I know what’s unproductive? Anything that blocks you or delay from reaching your target.

If you enjoyed this post, I’d be very grateful if you’d help it spread by emailing it to a friend, or sharing it on Social Media. Thank you..!

-Masroor P Mohamed

Email: info@masroor.in

Optimizing IT Operations

In transition of my role into Consulting,helped me gain insight on how Technical operations can be further optimized in Organizations to cope with the rapid evolving technologies and its adoption to enhance productivity.

As data volumes and larger workloads continue to increase, virtualization has become the standard environment and cloud computing becomes a base model for many functions. As the result of all these additional IT layers, the complexity and scale of IT application infrastructures necessarily rise. There are more powerful servers, more storage capacities, faster networking equipment, bigger channels for connecting it all and a lot more apps running outside the firewall serving the enterprise.

IT needs to plan for and manage these changes carefully and provide accessibility, flexibility and privacy for their employees and customers without adding more to IT budgets. Thus, clear visibility into the entire environment is a must.

Here are some learnings from my consulting experience on how to optimize Technical operations

-Assessment of end-to-end Infrastructure on the go

No IT system is perfect forever, so even if you're incorporating comprehensive platforms that help you be proactive v/s reactive, you must continue to monitor your end-to-end infrastructure. New technologies and system upgrades can impact the health of your overall IT environment, but with the time you've saved by reducing troubleshooting operations, you'll be able to integrate these new technologies and push your organization forward.

-Do an Audit of Your Critical IT Infrastructure.

Before making any major changes to your environment, conduct an audit of your critical IT infrastructure to measure its health, utilization and performance. By conducting a thorough one- to two-week critical infrastructure audit of end-to-end performance. Whether you have a physical, highly virtualized or cloud environment, an audit can provide you with a deep insight of your systemwide performance, as well as inform your decisions for future upgrades and investments.

-Upskill IT Team members

IT teams need to stay abreast of technology and tools to be effective, and one-time training isn't enough to accomplish that goal. Keep your internal teams, as well as your partners, on the leading edge of performance, utilization and availability trends by instituting regular training programs and taking advantage of vendor-specific programs that will keep your teams fresh on system component upgrades.

-Review your IT Spend

Because of this prevalence of legacy systems, as well as over-provisioning by IT teams to provide a buffer during peak utilization times, IT departments tend to spend more money than necessary on maintenance and performance insurance rather than on system upgrades and improvements. By implementing infrastructure performance monitoring platforms that can provide you with highly accurate health, utilization and performance data, you can stop the over-provisioning habit and invest in innovation and upgrades instead. As per market study,It's common for companies to save 40% to 50% percent or more after re-looking at the IT Spend.

-Understand the Complexities of Your Infrastructure.

IT application infrastructures are often heterogeneous environments made up of components from multiple vendors at various levels of the infrastructure stack. As new technology emerges, IT builds on top of legacy systems, creating an environment that consists of disparate components that can't provide systemwide insight. For IT teams, sifting through complexity to make applications and their supporting infrastructure perform optimally together can be a challenge, especially when the root causes of performance issues are obscure.

-Set minimum performance for business Critical Apps.
Every Organization will have a critical application on top of which the business runs.You will have to be really focussed on the performance of the application with the allocated hardware.To meet the business expectations, you need to set an uncompromising minimum performance standard for business-critical applications and seek partnerships with vendors and providers who can meet a guaranteed service-level agreement.

If you enjoyed this post, I’d be very grateful if you’d help it spread by emailing it to a friend, or sharing it on Social Media. Thank you..!

-Masroor P Mohamed
Email: info@masroor.in

Work Life Balance..

Doesn't mean equalizing numbers(hours) what you schedule for work-life.
People look at "work life balance" in different ways.Usually the quest end up in adopting an unrealistic way of it than what they really were really looking for and give them satisfaction.








How I  look at work life balance: 

"Just do things your way (lifestyle) what makes you and surroundings happy and satisfied for the day....It (things) can be just opposite the other day ;)  "





Work life balance is different for each of us as we have different priorities and way of living.Each people have their own visions of looking at things.Things keep changing and are dynamic as we step into different stages of life(I should be briefing this soon).I have seen people who are "workaholic" but that doesn't mean that they do not have time or find time for family,may be lesser in numbers.Its all about being satisfied in what you do-A sense of well being.While I write this, I remember a saying “The 10 minutes I give my kid at night is one million times greater than spending that 10 minutes at work,”

Some views when it comes to work and family..

When work and family responsibilities collide, for example, men may lay claim to the cultural narrative of the good provider. Several male executives who admitted to spending lesser time with their families consider absence an acceptable price for providing their children with opportunities they themselves never had. Some of the men, poor during his childhood, claims that his financial success both protects his children and validates his parents’ struggles. Another even put a positive spin on the breakup of his family: “Looking back, I would have still made a similar decision to focus on work, as I was able to provide for my family and become a leader in my area, and these things were important to him. Another says, let me focus on my kids education…and spend a lot more time with them over weekends.



Now which I believe is right,realized late though ;)
When I’m at home, I really am at home. I force myself to not check my e-mail, take calls, etc. I want to give my family cent percent of my attention. But this also works the other way around, because when I’m at work I really want to focus on work. I believe that mixing these spheres too much leads to confusion and mistakes.” which I realized in my life, lucky that am early and not too late.