I'm now at storagezilla.typepad.com or you could just click here instead.
Ah Vox, she's the Brazilian super model girlfriend you've always wanted. Good looking, but incredibly shallow and guilty of one sided conversations.
In order to prevent people with more bandwidth than I from ensuring that the class clown spends all his time standing outside in the hallway it looks like I might have to dump Vox for her bookworm sister, TypePad. Not as fashionable and probably listens to too many albums by The Cure but much deeper and far easier to communicate with.
Now, if I do go ahead with those plans to post a picture of one of my nipples to TypePad I'll probably quickly be in the loving embrace of WordPress, but until then you can always bounce over to the new place and vote in my CDP poll. Assuming that stuff floats your boat.
Today I looked on horrified as I read how "shocked" some delusional people were at the fact that drive failure rates do not magically stabilize with age.
Here comes the Cap'n:
Okay so maybe not everyone reading this spent a week working with QA guys from Seagate but I did so I'm rather underwhelmed at all of this. One humorous highlight amongst the charge of tin foil hat brigade came from the Zerowait blog where Mike wonders why we haven't seen people present this stuff at storage conferences (Maybe they were busy finishing their research first?) before asking if it's because vendors have something to hide? Well FAST 07 was a storage conference (File and Storage Technologies. FAST. Get it?) and if the vendors were doing their utmost to suppress the information they've done a really bad job since most of them sponsored the event if not the very award the paper in question won. Hell, the vendors are even thanked in the acknowledgments if anyone was bothered to read that far:
I'll make this quite clear, when it comes to overthrowing governments and suppressing information the PDL Consortium wouldn't be the folks I'd call. You're talking socks with sandals & beards worth remembering.
Moving off that I was busy today building an EMC Avamar system. I dutifully ordered equipment from DELL which met the requirements and instead of packing things with FC disks I went with SAS drives, thereby leaving me in a situation with no spares to hand when inevitably a drive fails (Newsflash: Your drives will fail eventually. Don't panic.), but it's not for production usage and I wanted to mix things up and see what that SAS magic was like.
What it was like was just like any other bunch of disks with a single LUN created on it before it left the factory, which means they're probably all still spinning away while they bind the LUNs I created after I blew away the factory shipped ones. Even with things binding in the background as I was loading the code eventually you get to a point where your wrist watch overrides your need to see what's over the next hill and you go home for the night.
I suppose it's best not to start these things fifteen minutes before quitting time.
Robin Harris is back on his soapbox claiming that the Google model is the future of storage. He ignores the fact that Gmail has lost people's email proving that it's just as susceptible to the usual admin headaches everyone else has no matter how whizzy you might think the underlying technology is, but I think crowning any storage paradigm as the successor to RAID is premature.
Yeah you would say that EMC boy I'm sure some of you are muttering, but I'm not too worried about the world ending because Google or Amazon or whoever has a big file system, lets ignore the fact that they had to hire rocket scientists to design, build, deploy and maintain it. Lets just learn lesson one, in chapter one, on page one of the Big Book of Admin
Though as usual chances are that the next big thing is being developed by people no one has even heard of. There's a good chance that it won't come from anybody we've seen already as someone else has the current players figured out and has/will have a counter punch waiting anytime one of them tries to plant their flag on the summit of the future. It doesn't matter if it's a big Internet company, a traditional vendor, or the open source folks, there's a competitor out there somewhere who's figured out how to knock their teeth out while dodging their next swing and they'll manage to do it too.
The lesson? No matter where you work or what you do if you don't believe that the smartest people are working somewhere else then you'll be roadkill when the next generation arrives and floors the accelerator. That goes for you, me, and everyone else.
Andy Grove was right. Only the paranoid survive.
When EMC spun off McData EMC shareholders ended up with McData stock, so now I have three whole shares of Brocade Communications Systems. (Ticker: BRCD)
I think that's my full disclosure & conflict of interests statement for the year. If not the decade.
Don't we wish some of the so called "independent consultants" out there were as candid about their financial arrangements while they're out bashing their sponsor's competitors to anyone who'll listen.
Sometimes industry entries can be heavy eating, it can be good to have something light to stimulate the appetite.
Soon to be former employees strike back: Pharmaceutical giant Pfizer started pink slipping employees, so some of the employees struck back with the only weapon the recently unemployed have, humor. I can understand why the rabid dogs in the legal department fired off a cease & desist but they had to have known there was a snowball's chance in hell of it being successful. I suppose even lawyers have MBO targets to achieve.
MegaPixel Myth: Mark Lewis mentions that our need for higher resolution is driving information growth and he's right it is but he chooses the unfortunate example of a 10 MegaPixel camera which while it can generate larger image sizes it may not generate a better quality image.
This falls into line nicely with some buying advice I've been following of late, it's not your number of pixels it's the size of your CMOS sensor. MegaPixels are one of those very inaccurate measurements which people have adopted in the hope it'll speak to the quality of the image a camera can produce. Nice marketing, great at point of sale, but it's like using CPU clock speed as a measure of performance which of course means it's an insanely inaccurate metric.
Given a choice between buying some 10 MegaPixel monster and a Digital SLR with half the pixel count you should buy the SLR. You'll get a larger sensor size which means it'll take a better quality of picture, and as the more pixels you cram onto a smaller sensor the less light efficient they all become it'll take a better picture in lower light levels or at higher speeds.
VMware IPO redux: Having left the Moscone Centre after General Powell's closing keynote at the RSA Conference I met a friend of mine and went to see Curse of the Golden Flower in the Sony Metreon across the street. The movie was beautifully shot and was enjoyable if you're interested in Asian cinema. "So EMC are selling part of VMware?" he asked. "Pretty much, but I'm not sold on the idea myself." I responded. "I felt the same way when Apple started selling it's stake in ARM but it was the right thing to do and it made us a fortune. There's lots of upside for EMC in this deal and virtually no downside that I can see."
As I was chewing on Popcorn at the time I didn't get a chance to respond, and then the trailer for Sunshine ran where upon we spent the rest of the time before the movie started trying to figure out how practical it would be to re-ignite the Sun.
Get a life: I can't sit down in front of a computer anywhere without immediately logging into my corporate email account & Powerlink. I'm not a Crackberry user but I might as well be as the temptation to check & respond to email or read up on something work related when I'm supposed to be relaxing or getting on with my life is just too much these days.
It's time to take drastic measures.
I'll admit I'm the last one I know who's jumped on the Gmail bandwagon, but I did so just as it was on the cusp of opening up to the world. After a few days of use it is clearly superior to the other offerings available and if Yahoo! and Microsoft don't get their heads back in the game they'll both lose more than just me as a customer.
Lets talk about information security for a minute, I'm not sure how to handle this but since the Execs were happy to mention it to the press at the RSA Conference and the news had leaked anyway we might as well spend some digital ink on PowerPath's upcoming encryption option. PowerPath Data At Rest Encryption is one of those no-brainer wins you only consider to be a no-brainer win after someone else has mentioned it to you.
There's a lot of unencrypted data sitting out on storage already, how to do you realistically apply encryption in a reasonable amount of time without having to install racks of in-band encryption boxes? You use PowerPath Migration Enabler to do it for you.
What about Key Management? EMC already has a battle tested key management system with RSA Key Manager. What will all this give you? It'll give you encrypted data from the moment it leaves the host for the storage, it'll never be clear on the wire.
What about information security before it leaves the host? Thats where RSA Database Security Manager & RSA File Security Manager come in. That's where RSA SecurID, RSA Access Manager and RSA Certificate Manager come in.
How do you deal with the events these and the other products in your environment will generate? How will you ensure compliance, audit & security integrity and so on? That's where RSA enVision comes in.
If you didn't get the message loud and clear at the RSA Conference I'll repeat it for you. EMC is in the information business, information security is but one dimension of information protection and like all the other dimensions it's something the company is going all in on. I'm looking at the value prop and the depth of technologies available and I see a bunch of things which are going to leave EMC's competitors in the dirt.
That's not swagger & bravado, it's the fact that there's a scarcity in the security market of companies who can offer such a product range under the same letter head on the same paper.
This will probably lack logic, reason, and a point since I've spent 16 hours in transit getting back from the RSA Conference and am jet lagged to hell, but none the less here we go.
Since I can't sleep on airplanes I decided to read up on Service Oriented Architectures, I need not have bothered since I've already studied object oriented programming. (Smalltalk-80. So I learned OOP the way Alan Kay wanted it taught.) If you take the concepts of Abstraction, Encapsulation, Inheritance, and Polymorphism then map them to the design of reusable components aligned against business processes, as you throw in the network as your message passing transport, you're pretty much in business.
What's interesting is from what I read they're all pretty much in agreement that Windows is the wrong foundation on which to base your SOA due to it's incredibly poor resource utilization, being a UNIX guy I tend to agree with anything which points out that Windows is a prolific platform for gaming & malware but near worthless for everything else.
I'll admit that I'm bitter as I've had to work with Win2K3 a lot recently and I've found it to be a pain in the testicles.
Going from one waste of money to another, a significant amount of SOA literature advocates allowing the Mainframe weirdos back into your data center. Of course the literature in question is written by IBM'rs who are looking to ensure that the Mainframe pension plan continues for the another 50 years or until the last Mainframe dude shuffles off the mortal coil. Mainframe operators are the only people I've ever met who'd happily be entombed in their Z-series when they expire.
One of the big things which gets me about SOA is how messy backup & recovery becomes. Security you can do if you design it in from the start & not try and bolt it on afterwards, while backup is one thing lets say you're recovering information to a service on which numerous other services have a dependency, and since it's a SOA there should be a lot of other services which have dependencies, who knows what chaos a restore could cause when the information set you're restoring might touch so many different services or end user mashups?
The vision is great, but the implementation and ongoing management looks as if it could be horrific. It's layer upon layer of complexity which typically does nothing but add fragility.
I used to take my camcorder on the road with me when I travelled, but even with non-linear editing you can still spend hours working on footage. Here's my SNW Europe video from 05. A lot of artifacts in this video due to screwed up compression settings but there's nothing I can do about that thousands of miles away from my the editing station.
19K attendees, who knows how many sessions, and a reservoir of carbonated drinks, a few tons of sugar saturated confectionery, and one MIA Larry Ellison.
It's been a busy week, people are sprawled out all over the place, and after Colin Powell's closing address it'll be over.
So long RSA Conference 2007.
