Copyright 1998-2010 Tweakers.net Wed, 17 Mar 2010 03:10:08 GMT Wed, 17 Mar 2010 03:10:08 GMT http://tweakers.net/reviews/76 Tweakblogs.net is the weblog service provided by Tweakers.net, the largest hardwaresite and techcommunity in the Netherlands. http://tweakblogs.net/ http://tweakimg.net/g/if/logo.gif 60 60 Tweakblogs.net en http://renegade.tweakblogs.net frontpage@tweakers.net http://renegade.tweakblogs.net/blog/3528/ive-moved-groter-dan-basraayman-punt-com.html Or actually, my blog moved. I decided to purchase my own domain and moved my blogging activities to http://basraayman.com Hope to see you around on my new domain! Renegade 7 http://renegade.tweakblogs.net/blog/3528/ive-moved-groter-dan-basraayman-punt-com.html#reacties http://renegade.tweakblogs.net/blog/3528 Mon, 08 Feb 2010 10:18:32 GMT http://renegade.tweakblogs.net/blog/3190/the-thing-about-certifications-and-flowers.html A discussion on Twitter got me thinking about certifications. The discussion itself wasn't that new, but this was at least the second time I've seen the subject pop up, and more interestingly it were the same people talking about the same subject. Things kicked off with a tweet from StorageMonkeys asking the following:"Just curious... why would anyone get a storage certification when employers really don't care about them?"storagebod and CXI responded and gave various opinions on the pro and contra of being certified. This whole discussion probably boils down to two main questions, namely:Will a certification add value for me?Is a certification a proof or acknowledgment of my capabilities?Now, to answer those questions, we need to put some things in perspective. I managed to become a certified ISO 9001:2000 lead auditor some years back. For those who are not familiar with this standard, it's about quality management. Now, let's use the example of a shipping and forwarding company that transports fresh flowers from Russia to China by truck. Said company is looking to get an ISO 9001:2000 certification. That's not that big of a problem. So, let's take it one step further and say that this company actually ships these flowers in three months in a heated truck. The flowers probably won't survive the trip you say. But can they still get or keep their certification? Yep, no problem at all. As long as they meet the requirements described in the standard and keep to their quality management procedures they will have no problem getting certified. It doesn't mean that business will be booming, or that they deliver a quality product or service. It just says that they keep certain standards for the way they work, and that they try to improve on those defined standards. It's the same thing for certifications in general, or for IT certifications that were discussed in the start of this blog post. So, to come back to my two basic questions: Will a certification add value for me? Let's not be shy here. It can! But your mileage will vary. For one, your certifications mainly show that you are able to learn the answer to some questions, and you are smart enough to click on some buttons in a test. Some test will actually need you to have had some hands on. For example the Microsoft tests changed a lot from the NT4 age to the Windows 2000 or Windows 2003 era. The new tests require a lot more hands on experience, and the chances that you are able to pass the test by just studying the correct answers has decreased quite a bit. But that does not mean that all certifications will require hands on. There are plenty of institutes out there that will have you take a test, and they will only show you that you are able to memorize facts. And usually memorizing facts only works for a while. Talk about the same things again in three months and most of it, if not even all of it, will be long gone. Then there's the fact that most certifications will only be valid for a certain amount of time. Technology evolves and things change. It's good that way, but a certification doesn't always have an expiration date and a certification will not show if people actually updated their knowledge to reflect those changes. Stuff you learned five years back might not be what you need to know on that topic now, which brings me to the other point: Is a certification a proof or acknowledgment of my capabilities? No way! Yes of course! Pick one... There are a lot of people who will have the knowledge required for a job, that haven't even seen a test center on the inside once in their life. These guys and galls are just as able as the certified person. And the same can be said the other way around, where I would not even let a certified person near my systems because their certification isn't worth the paper it's printed on. This situation is largely based on the institute or company that actually created the curriculum and the test, and is largely dependent on the acceptance of the certification. The MCP program that Microsoft has is well-recognized and will most likely increase your market value when applying for a job. People take one look and recognize the program. And even if it won't upgrade your value, it can help you get picked out of a bunch of applications since the people over at Human Resources usually scan for these type of things. Something like a Cisco CCIE certification is hard! It's probably one of the toughest certifications out there and can add quite a lot of value to your resumé. But it will also help that Cisco is well-known and a very commonly used IT supplier. As far as I know there is no such thing as for example a [url=http://www.3par.com]3PAR[/a] certification. And if one were to be created now, it probably won't increase your value one bit, except for the possibility of gaining new knowledge. So what's it all about? Well, that one is pretty easy to answer. For one, you will always learn new stuff when aiming for a certification. Independent from the fact if you perhaps want to know which questions you answered wrong during your test. Or perhaps even trying to find out why someone wants you to give incorrect answers (based on your experience) in a test. Or by learning because you want to prepare for a certification. Secondly, you will always see that you increase your value. Be it because you have more knowledge than before, even when you should flunk a test, or be it because they just might pick up your resumé when they look at certifications. I don't think that anybody out there will know how much a certification is worth, and that won't change. It's something dynamic and will usually only give you a certain amount of recognition among those peers who have the same accreditation. But you will benefit from getting certified either way. Renegade 1 http://renegade.tweakblogs.net/blog/3190/the-thing-about-certifications-and-flowers.html#reacties http://renegade.tweakblogs.net/blog/3190 Thu, 03 Dec 2009 15:39:00 GMT http://renegade.tweakblogs.net/blog/3145/gestaltit-tfd-day-2-top-secret-at-data-robotics.html So, during the afternoon of the GestaltIT Tech Field Day, we were invited to join Data Robotics for something that would turn out to be quite interesting. Since pictures say more than words I didn't want to hold back this picture from you guys just to show that we are all work and no play: So, once we pulled Greg Knieriemen off of the sign, we went inside and entered a meeting room where we had the next issue with some signs: How's that for a greeting....? Yeah, I thought so. So, once everyone settled down things got a little more interesting. Now, in case you don't know Data Robotics yet, they have built quite a name for themselves with two products called the "Drobo" and the DroboPro. Basically the Drobo is a small NAS device that holds up to four drives and offers you a Fire-wire 800 and a USB 2.0 interface. Besides that you get a connector for your power supply and a hole to plug in your Kensington lock. The DroboPro is something that will offer you a bit more. It has bays for 8 drives, a Gbit Ethernet interface that allows you to use iSCSI. The other features are more or less the same, although this unit can be rack-mounted and even supports a dual parity setup (RAID6) and smart volumes. So, one of the features that Data Robotics advertises with is something called "BeyondRAID", or as Data Robotics CEO Geoff Barrall states "The core differentiator for Drobo is BeyondRAID. BeyondRAID is what Drobo think RAID would be if RAID were designed today". That's a bold statement to make, but the numbers that were presented seems to show that this product is in high demand, and it's gaining momentum quite rapidly. Data Robotics actually had 100% growth in 2009 over 2008 with over 85,000 units shipped in just two years. Of those 85,000 there were more than 5,000 DroboPro's, and that's just since April. Now, they also mentioned that the future market for the Drobo is seen in the SMB storage market, or to be more specific, they will focus on sub $15,000.- DAS and SAN attached storage market. This brought up questions what will happen with the DroboShare that didn't receive as warm a welcome by customers as the Drobo itself. No real statement was made about the future of the DroboShare, but with a focus on the SMB, one can only assume that there is an uncertain future for the DroboShare. So, after a quick introduction we finally got a clearer view of what was so top secret. Two new units the were actually introduced yesterday. The Drobo S and the DroboElite. The Drobo S has some small but welcome changes. The number of drives has now been upgraded to a total of five. Besides the FireWire 800 and the USB 2.0 interface, you can also hook up your Drobo S via eSATA which should make a lot of people happy, even though eSATA is not available on any of the Apple Macs that are released to date. Supposedly you will get up to 50% more performance when compared to the regular Drobo. The new unit also increases it's redundancy so you can actually lose (or pull out) two drives at the same time and continue to work with the data that is stored on it. I should note that pulling all drives at the same time will actually stop you from accessing the data on the unit, as tested by Devang Panchigar, but since the disk layout and parity is stored on the disks, you can just power off the unit, insert all disks back in and your data will be back once you powered it back on. The theoretical limit for the amount of storage is only limited by the size of the drives that are currently for sale, but the number of volumes also changed from just one 16TB volume on the Drobo to up to 15 on the Drobo S. The DroboElite has some nice new changes that include a dual Gb Ethernet port with iSCSI support that will allow up to 16 hosts to connect to the unit. The number of volumes has been increased from 16 on the DroboPro to 255 on the DroboElite. All in all nothing to really shock anyone on this unit, but the dual interface is something that a lot of people will probably be quite happy about. Pricing will start at $799.- RSP for the Drobo S and at $3499.- RSP for the DroboElite, but you will probably find other prices through various other channels. I will do a deep dive in to the technology behind BeyondRAID as this is probably something that is interesting to a lot of people, and I will make sure to add a comparison to that which comes up quite regularly. "Can't I do the same much cheaper and easier with Linux and an LVM". The short answer is just a simple "No.", the longer answer will be contained in the post BeyondRAID post, so stay tuned! Renegade 7 http://renegade.tweakblogs.net/blog/3145/gestaltit-tfd-day-2-top-secret-at-data-robotics.html#reacties http://renegade.tweakblogs.net/blog/3145 Tue, 24 Nov 2009 11:13:00 GMT http://renegade.tweakblogs.net/blog/3117/gestaltit-tfd-day-2-wind-instruments-and-data-deduplication.html Excuse me if I'm going back and forth in the GestaltIT Tech Field Days timeline, but I wanted to start the series of articles with a post of one of two presentations that made the biggest impact on me. So, let's get things started with a company that shares it's name with an "ancient flute-like wind instrument" and instead of being a windbag actually does some pretty nifty things: Ocarina Networks, or Ocarina as they are usually called are a company that specialize in a thing called data deduplication and compression. Basically you can think of it as removing all the data that you find more than once and replacing all duplicates with a pointer to just one original version of the data. This can be done on multiple levels, and the most 'simple' version would be to use a corporate mailbox as an example. Say you would send out a mail to 5 colleagues with a Powerpoint presentation you want them to review. Normally each recipient will have a copy of this file in his or her mailbox and consume the space for the attached file. A deduplication solution could for example look and find that the same file exists 5 times. It saves one version and has the others just point to this one file. Now, you could try and do the same thing on different layers. One of those layers is for example the storage system. There the various vendors look for similar chunks of data and see if there are comparable patterns and then use the same pointer technique. There is one drawback of doing it at that level though. As soon as you have the same presentation and one of the people changes it, the disk footprint of the file changes in a way that avoids deduplication. That is quite odd considering that they probably just edited some small things and a lot of slides, logos and pictures will remain unchanged. Ocarina actually found a way around that by working on a different layer. This also provides some other benefits, and fortunately one of the other attendees, Simon Seagrave of TechHead brought along his Flip camera (I forgot mine) and recorded Ocarina's CTO Goutham Rao as he explained what their product does and where the advantage in their product can be found. http://vimeo.com/7659670// Now, as you have heard, this is actually an optimizer that is content aware. To pick up on the example above, the optimizers created by Ocarina look at the files. They will actually go into files and check their content for duplicate chunks. Think of the example that Goutham mentioned of a corporate logo that appears in various unrelated files. The Ocarina optimizers are actually able to find such examples and effectively reduce the total footprint by combining deduplication and compression. For a rough drill down in the areas of compression and deduplication I would recommend you bring some time and watch the following video, but be sure I warned you since it's roughly 40 minutes long. It's absolutely worth it though! http://vimeo.com/7672795// And yes, you did hear that right. One of the first compression algorithms was the Morse code. For more information on that and a further intro in to compression you can find some more information here. Now, all of this technology is packed into two rack mountable housings called "optimizers". You will currently find two versions of these optimizers. The first one is the 2400 and you can find the 3400. Main differences include the amount of CPU's which is only natural when you take the amount of number crunching that is being done into account. Other differences are among others the amount of RAM, the size (1U vs. 2U) and the built in disks. Now, Ocarina actually makes some pretty big claim as to how they perform. If you read along on Twitter you will have seen the following picture already that shows the dedupe and compressed dedupe results when compared to a NetApp FAS. My apologies about the bad quality of the picture by the way. I didn't bing a decent camera along and only had my cellphone handy at the time. All of the above was crammed in to a few hours, combined with some hand on and a challenge which I already wrote about. The challenge actually showed us some interesting things about the optimizers. First and foremost, this stuff actually works, and works quite good! Because you reduce the footprint of the data going over the line, you actually use less space in all areas. I have seen a reduction in footprint of up to 70% which can make a lot of people very happy. Your storage, network and backup admins will probably be first in line to thank you for using such a product. Second, it does have it's weaknesses. Depending on the existence of for example duplicate files, encryption and the dictionary used, your results may vary. One of the attendees brought along a small USB stick with 2GB of data on it consisting of ESX install iso files. The compression rate on them? None whatsoever. Yes, that's right. None at all. But that might be due to the fact that we did not have duplicate files, and we just simply didn't have a dictionary for iso files. One of the advantages is that since we are dealing with software, the chances of Ocarina adding such support is not too bad. Especially since they will probably mull on the results of our datasets. All in all I have to say that this was one of the best presentations during the GestaltIT Tech Field Days, and it's probably something that can be used as an example for future similar events. My guess is we will be seeing a lot more from Ocarina networks in the future, and since this technology allows us to save on almost all fronts, I would assume that it won't be too long before we will be seeing similar systems that were created by other companies. I'm looking forward to see the potential of this technology unfold further and would love to see some of your comments on the product. Oh, and last but not least a big thank you to Simon for letting me use his footage! Renegade 1 http://renegade.tweakblogs.net/blog/3117/gestaltit-tfd-day-2-wind-instruments-and-data-deduplication.html#reacties http://renegade.tweakblogs.net/blog/3117 Wed, 18 Nov 2009 15:58:00 GMT http://renegade.tweakblogs.net/blog/3111/gestaltit-tech-field-day-0-it-started-with-a-haiku.html I'm back! And what a ride it was. But, let's start at the beginning, which in my case was November 11th. I needed to get up early to catch my flight from Frankfurt at 11:40. International flights will require you (at least here in Germany) to be at the airport at least 2 hours before takeoff, and you need to get yourself at the airport somehow. After the usual paranoia at the airport and the extensive security checks which you will encouter when using a wheelchair, I was able to get on to the first stint of my flight which would take me to New York, or JFK airport to be more precise. Since you get couped up in your seat for some hours you have the time to do some thinking. You know, just the typical airline stuff that will get you wondering. In my case this mostly happened on the second part, the trip from JFK to San Francisco, where we were told that we'd have the option of getting a snack from Delta's highly successful "EATS" program. So, there you are, stuck on an airplane for 6.5 hours without something to eat besides the (let's not get started on the taste) products offered in the EATS catalog. No Wonder it's successful, what options do you have?! Get out and visit the Burger King on the right wing of the plane? Oh, and there's the fact that you will see advertisements in the magazines for noise canceling headsets from Bose or Sony. They promise to give you the sound experience of a lifetime. Too bad that nobody mentions the crappy audio source in the airplanes which will give you a perfect sounding low pitch sound of the movie your neighbor is watching. Excellent stuff! So, that was the first part of the trip, and you get to wonder if this is just the start of it all. If it can only get worse from now on. Luckily that wasn't the case. After a short trip from the airport I arrived at the hotel where I was one of the last to arrive. Thankfully they had ordered me something to eat, and after a steak and some beer we started off with the first introductions and some discussions. I was expecting to meet some people who were nice and knew how to write, but I had no idea of how knowledgeable each and every one of them was! The learning began on that night for me, and it only partially ended after the event. I'm still processing the things I learned and the conversations we had. The evening was topped off with a small Haiku game that won me a Canon Powershot A1100 IS with a 4GB SDHC card. Nice! You can expect to see some of my posts going on-line in the course of this (and the following) week, and you will be able to find the other posts by the people attending by going to the aggregate link on the Gestalt IT site. One thing I can tell you already is that these events are great! And they show that communicating is key. Hopefully you will enjoy my next posts, and we can get you psyched about the event even if you were not there! Renegade 1 http://renegade.tweakblogs.net/blog/3111/gestaltit-tech-field-day-0-it-started-with-a-haiku.html#reacties http://renegade.tweakblogs.net/blog/3111 Tue, 17 Nov 2009 14:20:00 GMT http://renegade.tweakblogs.net/blog/3060/gestaltit-quiz-part-5-7-do-the-drobo-win-an-ipod-nano-(among-others)-last-chance!.html Ok, this is the last post when it comes to the prizes. Again, with the links in this post you will have a new chance to win (among others) an iPod Nano from the Gestalt Tech Field Day. What do you do? The only thing you need to enter the contest, is to just fill out what you think is the best answer. There is no right or wrong, it's all just a matter of finding out if the people know about the company and perhaps even the product(s). Today it's about the following three companies called Data Robotics, Nirvanix and Ocarina. You might be guessing what a Drobo is? Well, from the name of the company you can already deduce the name of a product. But if you want to know more, you might want to investigate a bit. So, let us pick your brain for the last time a try to grab some of the stuff in this event! Good luck to all you! Oh, and just to clarify. From now on it's all about the event and what's going on there! Look forward to some (hopefully) interesting reads. If you want me to ask any questions relating to the products or suppliers, please send me an e-mail on raayman (at) gmail (dot) com or drop me or the other people attending a short note on twitter and we will see that your question gets the attention it deserves during the event. Renegade 1 http://renegade.tweakblogs.net/blog/3060/gestaltit-quiz-part-5-7-do-the-drobo-win-an-ipod-nano-(among-others)-last-chance!.html#reacties http://renegade.tweakblogs.net/blog/3060 Tue, 10 Nov 2009 09:25:00 GMT http://renegade.tweakblogs.net/blog/3041/gestaltit-quiz-part-3-7-symantec-does-storage-win-an-ipod-nano-(among-others).html Since I'm just posting a repeat post for this quest I'll try to keep it short. Again, with the links in this post you will have a new chance to win one of the prizes from the Gestalt Tech Field Day, among them a new Ipod Nano with video. What do you do? The only thing you need to enter the contest, is to just fill out what you think is the best answer. There is no right or wrong, it's all just a matter of finding out if the people know about the company and perhaps even the product(s). Today it's about the following two companies called 3PAR and Symantec Storage. And as the title says, I'm sure a lot of you will be wondering that Symantec even does storage since most people tend to know them from other offerings. So, let us pick your brain a little and join in and get some "schwag" to show off. Good luck to all you! Renegade 1 http://renegade.tweakblogs.net/blog/3041/gestaltit-quiz-part-3-7-symantec-does-storage-win-an-ipod-nano-(among-others).html#reacties http://renegade.tweakblogs.net/blog/3041 Fri, 06 Nov 2009 08:25:58 GMT http://renegade.tweakblogs.net/blog/3036/gestaltit-quiz-part-1-7-what-the-xsigo-win-an-ipod-nano-(among-others).html Ok, so here is the deal. If you read my last two blog posts you will know about GestaltIT by now, and the fact that I will be traveling to San Jose in California next week. Part of the fun is to interact with the people attending, but what do the people reading the blogs get from it (beside the posts and tweets? Well, you get a chance to win one of the prizes, among them a new Ipod Nano with video. You don't have to participate each day in order to be eligible for one of the prizes, but participating over the course of these seven day won't hurt your chances of winning either. So, what do you need to do? Search? Nope! How about google then? Well, you can, but you don't need to. The only thing you need to enter is to just fill out what you think is the best answer. There is no right or wrong, it's all just a matter of finding out if the people know about the company and perhaps even the product(s). In this case the first company to kick off the event is called Xsigo. Peoplo who attended VMworld 2009 almost certainly encountered Xsigo’s products, whether they were aware of it or not. So, what do you do to enter the event? Simple, just click here and fill out what you think applies. Have fun, and I'm keeping my fingers crossed for you! [Update] The second part of this daily contest is also online. In it you will find some questions about MDS Micro. Renegade 1 http://renegade.tweakblogs.net/blog/3036/gestaltit-quiz-part-1-7-what-the-xsigo-win-an-ipod-nano-(among-others).html#reacties http://renegade.tweakblogs.net/blog/3036 Wed, 04 Nov 2009 18:56:00 GMT http://renegade.tweakblogs.net/blog/3025/prepare-to-zjoin-ze-gestalt!-or-gestaltit-tech-field-day-preparation.html As you may have read in my previous post I was asked to join the GestaltIT tech field days. Some people commented on the win-win fact for both the person attending, and the company presenting. And yes, I agree with both. But a post made by Ocarina Networks on their blog gave me a different view on what would be my own benefits. Basically they posted a challenge for the attendees, stating the following: [q]In anticipation of this event, we’re challenging the attendees to bring us their toughest data set on a thumb drive. It can involve whatever files they want Ocarina to try to shrink–JPEGs, video, audio, PDFs, homeshares, email databases and so on. They will probably want to include several similar but not duplicate files, such as a series of PowerPoint files that contain some of the same slides but also different ones, or similar slides that have been edited. On November 13 when the participants arrive, we’ll collect all the thumb drives. Then we’ll pick a few at random from a hat, and do a real time demonstration of the Ocarina ECOsystem compressing and deduping the files.[/url] Now, as you might have guessed from the text in this quote, Ocarina Networks specializes in data deduplication. Basically they have a look at the data you want to store, find similar patterns and have them all point to one valid copy of the data. The process itself is a little more complex than that, but this short version should give you the gist of it. Now, how did this change my mindset on what benefits these kind of challenges have to the attendees? Simple. By challenging you, they are asking you to bring a tough dataset. They want to prove that this technology works, no matter how impossible the set of data may be when it comes to dedupe. And that's where the catch is. Investigation! Since most of the people attending like a good challenge (or so it would appear to me) and most of them are not the experts in dedupe, they need to investigate! Sure, bringing a thumb drive along with some data is no problem. But you probably want to make it challenging, so you need to investigate what kind of data gives dedupe solutions a hard time. You can look for reviews, blogs, tests and a lot more and you will find a lot of information on the various dedupe solution types (end-to-end, back-end, etc). And that brings me to the point of this post. I want to give the guys from Ocarina a run for their money and I want to see what the product can do. So I searched for a dataset that is hard, and I created a fairly normal dataset. Both containing some structured and unstructured data and I am curious to see what the results will be. Independent from the results however I learned a lot about dedupe, not just from this vendor but in general, and that is to me one of the biggest personal benefits I can see when it comes to this event. So let's see how this goes, and expect a longer post on dedupe after or during the GestaltIT tech field days! Only a little over a week left until we kick it in to a higher gear. By the way, the first part of the title of this blog post was supposed to be slightly German sounding since "Gestalt" is an actual German word. Somehow I can't help but think of some sort of dodgy Monty Python sketch when talking about "the Gestalt". Renegade 7 http://renegade.tweakblogs.net/blog/3025/prepare-to-zjoin-ze-gestalt!-or-gestaltit-tech-field-day-preparation.html#reacties http://renegade.tweakblogs.net/blog/3025 Tue, 03 Nov 2009 15:14:00 GMT http://renegade.tweakblogs.net/blog/2972/you-are-an-industry-thought-leader-ehm-did-you-pick-the-right-guy.html The title of this post was my first thought when I received the invitation to join the Gestalt IT Tech Field Day. To start off from the beginning, I'm a regular reader over at Gestalt IT. "So what is Gestalt IT" you may wonder now. Well, on their website you will find the following:We are collecting the best analysis and commentary from leaders in the fields of virtualization, networking, storage, and desktop engineering. ... We work with independent experts, bloggers, and writers to generate content focused on IT infrastructure topics. Many of our articles and posts are syndicated from the blogs of their authors, meaning that they select their best and most relevant work and transmit it to us using an RSS feed, just like Google Reader and other feed readers use. Posts are then formatted and edited for publication here.So, you could call it an agregate of posts that are collected and submitted by people who know their stuff in things IT. So, I read that they were organizing something called a "Tech Field Day", which is basically an event where they invite bloggers from all over the place to come to San Francisco and see and test new products by various vendors. You can use the stuff they introduce, punch holes in their product and exchange ideas and opinions. The big difference to a regular conference? It's not sponsored by a big company. The main point is not profit. The people there are free to say what they want and can write about the things that they find interesting. So, after reading about it I asked the initiator of this Idea, Stephen Foskett, when we would be seeing something similar in Europe. Shorlty after I received a short tweet from him with the question if I would consider attending. Now, having the quote from the field day website in mind, namely:The following industry thought leaders have tentatively agreed to attendI was pretty confident he just sent his tweet out to the wrong person. But actually he did mean to talk to me. Can you imagine that? Anyway, after confirming that I would be more than happy to attend I am now on the list as it appears and will probably be in San Jose, CA on the 12th and 13th of November and you can expect some blog posts about what I will see there and if we have some WiFi going on you will also see some tweets. We will be seeing products introduced by:3PARData Robotics, Inc.MDS MicroNirvanixOcarina NetworksXsigoAnd the event is sponsored by some other companies who won't be presenting but will for example help in hosting part of the event:Bhava communicationsTechValidateTruth in ITVMwareI'm looking forward to it, because instead of spending some time with myself, I will actually be able to talk to some genuinely smart folks there and be able to exchange ideas and opinions. Renegade 7 http://renegade.tweakblogs.net/blog/2972/you-are-an-industry-thought-leader-ehm-did-you-pick-the-right-guy.html#reacties http://renegade.tweakblogs.net/blog/2972 Fri, 23 Oct 2009 14:42:00 GMT http://renegade.tweakblogs.net/blog/2948/the-kindle-is-coming-to-europe!-hurray-so-what.html I was pretty psyched about the Kindle coming to abroad to Europe. First of all it means that we get a halfway decent e-book reader over here, and more importantly a lot of books in a format that is at least somewhat of a standard, be it a proprietary one. The pricing model is also okay in my opinion, be it not overly cheap. Since I do a lot of reading I was actually seriously considering the option of purchasing one, but decided to wait. An important reason for me was a missing option of using a backlight. Instead of clipping on additional accessories that light up half the room, a built in solution that offers soft lighting in the dark would be a great option. Anyone who ever worked with a back-lit keyboard on a MacBook will know what I'm talking about. Today Robert Scoble replied to me in a tweet and wrote about a new e-reader that Steve Jobs is supposedly working on. He also responded that the new device will do a lot more than black and white books with crappy typography. Now, first of all I'm sure it will do a lot more. Apple or if you will, Steve Jobs are not the kind of players in this market to just copy someone else's product and features and then introduce it on the market. Independent of the fact if you like Mr. Jobs or not, usually they take several good ideas and try to build a product around that. E-Ink (the company) already introduced color E-Ink displays and I think this will be a big change for those media. Instead of reading a 16 gradient monochrome screen, you can now actually read something on true black and white. Think of things like school or college where you would be able to just have your study books with you in one device, with the option of marking things, making notes and so much more. You could add the 3G-service we already know from the Kindle so that we can purchase new books wherever we are. And perhaps, what the heck, even throw in wireless so that we can use it to browse blogs or websites without the need of a subscription. Or perhaps introduce the subscription, but just for the situations where we don't have a wifi connection. If we get "the next generation of e-book reader" as Robert Scoble says, I just hope it won't make coffee. I don't want a halfway decent e-book reader that does other things good. I want an e-book reader that is truly great, and perhaps does other things but not at the cost of being a lesser e-book reader. So, let's hope @Scobleizer is right and we get a great new device and not a mediocre one as we've seen it way too many times before. Update My bad, Robert talked about Steve Jobs, and yesterday I was probably short on caffeine so that somehow got changed to Steve Ballmer. Woops. Be it that this does not change my idea that even Microsoft is more of an idea combiner. Anyway, the post above got changed just slightly so that I am now actually naming the correct Steve. Renegade 7 http://renegade.tweakblogs.net/blog/2948/the-kindle-is-coming-to-europe!-hurray-so-what.html#reacties http://renegade.tweakblogs.net/blog/2948 Sun, 18 Oct 2009 08:26:00 GMT http://renegade.tweakblogs.net/blog/2934/lo-and-behold!-the-emc-community-expert!-or-something.html About two weeks back (Friday October 2nd to be exact), I received an e-mail from Erin Capellman. She's one of the people working for EMC and seems to be at least partially, if not even full time, responsible for the EMC community network. Basically it's the same as a lot of other online communities. People meet in a digital environment and exchange ideas, meet peers and get new information. Something that can be quite useful and add a lot of value to projects you are working on. Apparently someone noticed that I spend some time asking and answering questions, or even talking about ideas or trends in the EMC community. The e-mail stated that:EMC has initiated a program across all communities, entitled the EMC Community Expert program, to recognize outstanding member contributions. Only 20 individuals have been selected to receive this leadership designation. You were nominated by managers across EMC communities because you have consistently demonstrated extraordinary commitment to helping customers, partners, or employees. ... We deeply appreciate the time and commitment that you continue to make to EMC, its customers, partners and employees. Thank you and congratulations from all the communities of EMC and their thousands of members.Now, it's quite nice to get such a mail, but it also made me think if this is something related to a persons interests. The answer is yes. You can't be successful or spend a certain amount of time just because you are hoping to get some recognition. It simply won't work. However, I am convinced that certain people have a nack for communicating online. Be it in a community or by various other means. When I look at my own "online CV" I can look back at quite a history. I've been part of a very big community right here at Tweakers.net and got a good feel on how to talk to people online. I don't know if this made a huge difference in getting the above "leadership designation", but I am certain it didn't hurt. Yesterday they announced the community experts on the various pages, and it's kind of funny to see a picture of youself online with such a title: So, to end this with a question. Is being successful in one online community also beneficial if you want to be successful in other online communities? Renegade 7 http://renegade.tweakblogs.net/blog/2934/lo-and-behold!-the-emc-community-expert!-or-something.html#reacties http://renegade.tweakblogs.net/blog/2934 Thu, 15 Oct 2009 08:26:00 GMT http://renegade.tweakblogs.net/blog/2877/symmetrix-access-control-when-unique-is-everything-but-unique.html So, youve got a million dollar storage box standing there and want to make sure that it's secure? Sure thing you want to do that! And you ask your vendor "What can I do?". One of the replies could to use access control lists or ACL's. And all is great. Or is it? From what I have heard, very few EMC customers in Europe tend to use ACL's on their Symmetrixes. Perhaps even for a good reason? If you take a look at the documentation on Powerlink you can find some technical papers on Symmetrix Access Control, and the papers will state (among others) the following:Today, anyone with access to Symmetrix-based management software can execute any function on any Symmetrix device. Many product applications such as EMC® ControlCenterTM, TimeFinder®, SRDF®, Optimizer®, Resource View, Database Tuner, and various ISV products can issue management commands to any device in a Symmetrix® complex. Open systems hosts can manipulate mainframe devices, Windows hosts can manipulate UNIX data, and vice versa. Shared systems, such as these, may be vulnerable to one host, accidently or intentionally, tampering with another’s devices. To prevent this, the symacl command can be used by an administrator of the Symmetrix storage site to set up and restrict host access to defined sets of devices (access pools) across the various Symmetrix arrays.Now, I have to admit that this info is from an older version of this guide, but the same is still true for the most part. You can change to in-band or out-of-band management, you can use the Symmetrix Management Console, but as soon as you install Solutions Enabler on a client connected to the storage box, you more or less open up a world of possibilities on said client. Usually you don't want that, so why not implement some restrictions? symacl is just the thing for that! Normally I would create an access pool, in which I define permission to a host to perform certain Solutions Enabler functionality or commands on a specified set of devices. These sets of devices are referred to as access pools. Now, once I have set up these access pools, I can assign single clients or groups of clients to these pools. I do that by creating access control groups. These contain unique access IDs and names, and are assigned to hosts and sorted into access control groups So now I have one (or more) clients that I allow a certain piece of functionality or a certain (set of) command(s). In order to uniquely identify my client, I can run the following solution enabler command: code:1 symacl -unique and will receive an output similar to this: code:1 The unique id for this host is: 254A30A9-54319DC0-8A476069 Now that we have the unique host id, we can add id to the configured access group via a command file using the normal preview, prepare and commit routine. After that, you should be good to go. And that is where things can get nasty. As we have found out the hard way, a unique host id is not necessarily unique. We have had occasions where we had multiple hosts with the same unique host id on the same Symmetrix. Fortunately, the DMX is so confused at that point that it won't allow any of the hosts to access the configured devices - and normally your masking and zoning provide some extra protection - but it is still a nasty thing that can happen. That brings us to the second point. The unique host id can change. EMC will not tell you what changes influence the generation of the unique host id, but for example a change of FC-HBA will cause the unique host id to be changed. On Windows, there are versions of Solutions Enabler where a change in the NetBIOS stack seems to cause this change. Now you might think that you can check what unique host id was configured in the access group, but you would be wrong. Unfortunately, all the unique host id's that are entered in to an access group will be crypted/hashed by the Symmetrix, and you won't be able to retrieve the unique host id. So my advice. If you want to compare the values you entered, store them somewhere so that you at least have the option to compare the values. It can make troubleshooting a bit easier. Just as a hint, there is also a way to create static unique host id's, which are unaffected by hardware and software changes. Should you need it, ask your EMC support and refer to Powerlink ID emc198823. They should be able to give you a solution with that ID number. A last word of advice. If you are working with ACL's and changing stuff, please make sure you back up your access logix database before you start with the changes. It might be a good idea to implement that as the first step in any scripts you might create. ACL's are not a bad thing. They can increase your (sense of) securty. However, the way it was implemented in the Symmetrix environment leaves a bit to be desired, and troubleshooting issues can be a pain if you are not aware of the fact that the unique host id's aren't always unique. Renegade 7 http://renegade.tweakblogs.net/blog/2877/symmetrix-access-control-when-unique-is-everything-but-unique.html#reacties http://renegade.tweakblogs.net/blog/2877 Fri, 02 Oct 2009 08:22:00 GMT http://renegade.tweakblogs.net/blog/2872/computer-evolution-and-we-continue-to-wait.html It's all about waiting when it comes to computers. Let's take a short trip down technology lane and look back at "what was" back then. For me, it all started with a C64. My dad worked for a shipping and forwarding company, and they made the change from punched or IBM card systems to a new form of computing. The company he worked for made their employees an offer to purchase a Commodore 64 and use it at home. So he brought home the first computer I worked with. One of the most notable things was that once you got it to display all of the files on one of the floppies, you needed a certain amount of patience to get it to actually start the program. There was no such thing as switching on your computer and just starting to work. Following (or something similar) was seen more than once in the lives of the C64 users: code:1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 LOAD "$",8 LIST LOAD "TOM AND JERRY",8,1 <get coffee> <drink coffee> <flip over the floppy> <wait some more> RUN And you would be ready to start playing, or perhaps even start working. And this is just one example that I am quite familiar with. Something probably not even expected when Alan Turing described his Turing machine, but somehow managed to start with the ENIAC, follow us even after the transistors were invented and then integrated in to integrated circuits, and has since followed us from the Intel 4004 past the more modern systems like the Intel 80386 that included the FPU, and even nowadays with the new AMD Athlon and Intel Xeon processors. Now, one would say that we have an immense amount of computational power. And I can't do anything else but agree with you. If you take a closer look at Moore's law and plot everything out you can even see that our computational power made a great leap. And that's absolutely great! So by now we have so much computational power that we don't have to wait anymore when we want to do something, right? That must have changed since the days of the C64? That's what you would probably expect, right? It's true, we don't have to insert floppies anymore. Instead we use a different medium with a higher data density. And we can run programs that are much bigger and complex on our machines right now that we ever imagined in the days of the Intel 4004. But we continue to wait. How many people do you know at the office who start off with switching on their computer and then getting a cup of coffee while we wait for the operating system to load or for the programs they work with to start? I know loads of people. If I take the company I work for in to account, you can see that it's a huge piece of software that you install to your servers. But we still wait quite long times when we try to work with the program, and it's usually not the system that is waiting for some user input. Fact is that we continue to find new things that we can actually compute. The more computational power we have, the more we try to compute. New technologies like nanocomputers won't change anything there. We will have a short lived feeling that is like "wow, this is really fast!", and then compute more and lose the (feeling of) speed. In short; The computer continues to evolve, and we continue to wait. Renegade 7 http://renegade.tweakblogs.net/blog/2872/computer-evolution-and-we-continue-to-wait.html#reacties http://renegade.tweakblogs.net/blog/2872 Thu, 01 Oct 2009 09:29:00 GMT http://renegade.tweakblogs.net/blog/2724/storage-provisioning-do-you-really-really-really-need-that-much.html I received a link to an article where we can find an interview with Symantec's Mathew Lodge and their view on data deduplication. I couldn't help but noticing the following quote:According to a recent survey by Applied Research, more than half of all organizations expect to spend more on storage in 2009 than they did in 2008. But at the same time, the latest Symantec State of the Data Center Report indicates that storage utilisation hovers at just 50%.Now, that got me thinking on a couple of things. First off, I tried to look up this survey. Unfortunately, the results from the Applied Research-West seem to be beyond my Google skills. On the other hand they seem to be the standard company used by Symantec for surveys that somehow seem to have results that are aligned with Symantec's product portfolio. Talk about a coincidence! Anyway as they said, "more than half of all organizations expect to spend more on storage in 2009 than they did in 2008" I was pondering how this could be? We are seeing technologies like the deduplication mentioned in the article. Almost all vendors are able to offer something similar. Same can be said about thin or virtual provisioning. Heck, thanks to the effort in the blogosphere and feedback from partners and customers, EMC even decided to change it's policy and make virtual provisioning free for the V-Max, DMX4 and DMX3. Seems a bit odd that almost all storage vendors are delivering methods to reduce the disk space footprint in their SAN and NAS, but we still see an increase in expenditure. Sure enough the licensing costs for such new features are to be included. And perhaps you even need to buy new hardware to fully utilize such new features. But all of the big vendors are quick enough to tell us the return on invest when we purchase new stuff. So that can't be it, right? And you know what? They are right! Simple enough, we don't know how much disk space our users need! Hell, most of the time, the user himself doesn't even know! And then there's the fact that it's too easy to get new storage. We provision like there's no tomorrow. Not just disk space, but also computational power. You need to test something? Here, have a VM and go right ahead. What? You're on Solaris? No problem, here's a brand new sparkling zone, just for you. How much disk space do you need? Two Tera? No wonder we called it Terabyte, those are monstrous amounts of disk space. I know the dilemma, and when you ask your users if they really need all of that, you usually get a blank look on their faces, outrage - How dare you ask me that, isn't it obvious? -, or perhaps even an educated guess.Some will even give you forecasts... If you are lucky. Things will get better with technology like TP and dedupe. And things will get worse when we go for new technologies like cloud., but fact of the matter is, we have made provisioning too easy, and we've somehow lost the art of asking if they really really really need it. Usually the answer to anyone provisioning is a simple "no". Renegade 7 http://renegade.tweakblogs.net/blog/2724/storage-provisioning-do-you-really-really-really-need-that-much.html#reacties http://renegade.tweakblogs.net/blog/2724 Wed, 09 Sep 2009 07:46:33 GMT http://renegade.tweakblogs.net/blog/2533/scsi3-pgr-want-support-on-symmetrix-reboot-500-windows-servers-punt-continued.html Alan Shugart introduced something called the "Shugart Associates System Interface" or in short "SASI" in 1981, and created something that can now be called a commodity. He probably didn't realize back then what an impact his new product would have later on. You can find the SASI, or SCSI as it is now called, standard in a lot of hardware that is being produced in the storage oriented market today. Among others, you will find the standard in disks used in servers, you will find the protocol in fibre channel SAN's and you will find it being used in high availability cluster environments. The part about the high availability clusters is the part I want to talk to you about today. I wrote about HA clustering before and one of the parts that is important when it comes to clustering is consistency in the files used in the cluster. Lucky for us, the protocol designed by Mr. Shugart (in later versions of the standard) implemented something called SCSI reservations. Basically you can send out SCSI commands like for example the 6 byte reserve command. Earlier versions of the SCSI protocol delivered to us something that a lot of people in clusters call "disk fencing", or SCSI-2. SCSI-2 is based on exclusive reservations, meaning that only one node owns the disk. This also means that the other nodes can't reserve the disk, which can lead to some "undesired" behavior. For example, SCSI-2 is not reboot persistent. Meaning that a node that rebooted and came up, registered the disk and would be allowed read/write access to it. Not the most elegant solution I would say? Now, SCSI-3 PGR works with group reservations, meaning that every node has a key on a dedicated area of the disk and other nodes can simply remove a nodes key to remove the nodes reservation. It also means that a host will need to register after a reboot, and it will have the option of checking the reservation state. This should avoid multiple hosts having read/write access at the same time, if we don't want them too. Sounds like a useful feature? It is! Now then, back to our problem with the reboot of 500 Windows hosts. After opening a case with EMC, things went a little dormant. Our host base was verified, and as usual we were asked for emcgrabs/emcreports from every attached Windows host in our environment... We checked Enginuity versions on our DMX's and the dreaded support matrices from EMC and found that we really did not have an option, except not upgrading and running the risk of falling out of support. Right now, the situation if even more tense, since Microsoft came out with a new version of the storport driver in a new hotfix. You can find more info on hotfix 950903 here. The problem being that when you run a HEAT report, this hotfix is recommended by Microsoft. But if the FA flags are not set up in a proper manner, you are bound to run in to problems. Now, here's a small list of currently required flags for the various operating systems: Windows Server 2003Common Serial Number (C)Enable Auto Negotiation (EAN)Enable Point-to-point (PP)Host SCSI Compliance 2007 (OS2007)SCSI-3 SPC-2 Compliance (SPC-2)Unique World Wide Name (UWN)SCSI-3 compliance (SC3)Windows Server 2003 with failover clusteringCommon Serial Number (C)Enable Auto Negotiation (EAN)Enable Point-to-point (PP)Host SCSI Compliance 2007 (OS2007)SCSI-3 SPC-2 Compliance (SPC-2)Unique World Wide Name (UWN)SCSI-3 compliance (SC3)Windows Server 2008Common Serial Number (C)Enable Auto Negotiation (EAN)Enable Point-to-point (PP)Host SCSI Compliance 2007 (OS2007)SCSI-3 SPC-2 Compliance (SPC-2)Unique World Wide Name (UWN)SCSI-3 compliance (SC3)Windows Server 2008 with failover clusteringCommon Serial Number (C)Enable Auto Negotiation (EAN)Enable Point-to-point (PP)Host SCSI Compliance 2007 (OS2007)SCSI-3 SPC-2 Compliance (SPC-2)Unique World Wide Name (UWN)SCSI-3 compliance (SC3)PER bit for each clustered device (attribute=SCSI3_persist_reserv)As stated before, these flags are an absolute requirement to get support from EMC, but unfortunately the situation is still more or less the same. It's amazing how slow things can go along sometimes. All I can recommend right now is to talk to your EMC representative and explain the situation, and ask for a solution. This will affect people more and more, and in my opinion, this needs to be solved. Again, I will try to post an update as soon as I have newer information that I can share. Until then I for one am keeping my fingers crossed that we don't run in to problems. Renegade 7 http://renegade.tweakblogs.net/blog/2533/scsi3-pgr-want-support-on-symmetrix-reboot-500-windows-servers-punt-continued.html#reacties http://renegade.tweakblogs.net/blog/2533 Mon, 31 Aug 2009 07:27:00 GMT http://renegade.tweakblogs.net/blog/2608/its-all-about-passion-and-being-a-geek!.html I was sick for a couple of days and that got me thinking about my job and the fact that I am a geek. Yes, I admit it. I'm a geek! Or a nerd if you will. Not in the sense that I'm allergic to sunlight, or have no idea how to talk to women, but much more in the sense that I love my job and like to find solutions to tough problems, or design new landscapes, or even explaining to other departments how the technology in the background works. But it seems (enterprise sized) companies don't value that as much as they did before? I talked to various people from various industries, and to me it seems that a lot of companies tend too sort of "mold" the employee in to something that he is not, or doesn't even want to be. Outsourcing is a big issue. The market, or more likely the stock holders, demand it. "We will save big bucks, no matter what the cost is!". That automatically means that the role of the person doing his or her job before changes in to something else. You will often hear the term "coordinator" or something like "skill/knowledge holder". And those are the people that worked with a lot of passion before. But they need to change. These people have a lot of knowledge, but are said to be "too expensive" for their everyday chores. But are they? Are they really? Or to just paint this picture for myself... I'm in to tech. I enjoy the things I mentioned above, but I am too expensive to actually do those things? I should train people from a different country or even continent and then perform higher level work? I can actually imagine that this might be interesting. But what about others? What about people who are happy were they were, and with what they were doing? Is it actually worth it trying to push people in to different roles, even with the possibility of losing those people? I am all for evolution. We need to accept new things, and we need to learn if we want to be better. But do we want to be better at the things we are passionate about, or should we become something we are not at the risk of not being passionate about the things we learned? I know a lot of people with passion for what they do, and you know what? I love working with them, because these people inspire. They are good at what they do, and I would hope that I get the chance to be a little like them in the things I love. But it makes me sad to see them lose their passion. They will get frustrated, or even worse, in the end it won't matter to them anymore. They won't care, and that is probably the worst thing that can happy to a company? Renegade 7 http://renegade.tweakblogs.net/blog/2608/its-all-about-passion-and-being-a-geek!.html#reacties http://renegade.tweakblogs.net/blog/2608 Tue, 25 Aug 2009 15:15:00 GMT http://renegade.tweakblogs.net/blog/2459/legends-dont-die-or-fade-away-punt-not-even-the-ones-about-sap-and-pagefiles.html Some things just stay around. You can try to tell people that it's just not true, but they won't believe you, or they will just ignore of forget the things you tell them. One of the most heard things about SAP and hardware resources is that you need at least twice the amount of RAM configured as swap or as a paging file. Sometimes you will even hear that you need up to three of four times the RAM. Now, this was actually true.... In 2003 or so. Nonetheless I still receive mails about this recommendation. One that came in today was something along these lines:The SAP installation guide recommendations that the amount of swap space on the server be twice the amount of RAM - this recommendation is valid for Database, Central Instance, and DIA instances. The following servers all have 32GB of RAM allocated to them. They also all have 32GB of swap configured. In order to comply with the prerequisites we'll need to increase the swap space on each to 64GB as soon as possible.Now, this would still be ok if we were talking about physical machines that are relatively small. If there wasn't the fact that we also have servers that are quite a bit bigger and carry 256GB of RAM on them. Configuring 2x the amount RAM or even 4x that amount would just be a waste of disk space, and to get this part written down: I'ts no longer required on IA64 and x64! People wrote down the numbers of some SAP notes once, and they continue to refer to these same notes instead of just checking if there perhaps is an updated version of it flying around somewhere. Now this could spark up an entirely different discussion about versioning of documents and the ability to locally store copies of documents. Anyone would have a blast at an ISO 20000 audit. Anyway, to get rid of the rumors in this post, at this point in time you can check the following SAP note #146289 (link may require a valid service marketplace account) which in a nutshell states the following:When implementing the 64-bit kernel, we recommend at least 20 GByte of swap space. (Plus approx.10 GB for every additional 64-bit instance on the same computer) See note 153641 for more information.And this is valid for all installations with a 64-bit kernel. If you want to print it, add a date of the last change, or just subscribe to the document, and remember to perhaps check after a year or so if some newer info is available. After all we are working in the IT-business and things do tend to change every now and then. Renegade 7 http://renegade.tweakblogs.net/blog/2459/legends-dont-die-or-fade-away-punt-not-even-the-ones-about-sap-and-pagefiles.html#reacties http://renegade.tweakblogs.net/blog/2459 Fri, 07 Aug 2009 11:43:00 GMT http://renegade.tweakblogs.net/blog/2187/cloud-computing-punt-up-on-cloud-nine.html I started a small discussion on Twitter with blogger (actually blogster, but is that an official word?) Sunshine Mugrabi after she tweeted a link. This link contains the story about the state of Washington’s decision to build a $300 million data center in Olympia. This decision is being challenged by legislators who say that a lot of money can be saved by using cloud computing services. That got me thinking about cloud computing. One of the remarks I made during the conversation with Sunshine was that the name "cloud" seems to be commodity. Everyone is using it, nobody wants to miss out, and I am just going to say that this is one of the buzzwords for the year 2009. Since it's something that is so commonly used, you would probably expect that a lot of people know what cloud computing is. And that's where things go off the deep end. As much as cloud seems to be commodity, I can't help but notice that the definition of the term cloud doesn't quite deserve the label commodity yet. When you go to a medical specialist you will receive a recommendation or reply that is best along the lines of same specialist. When you go and visit a cardiologist you will probably be examined for a coronary artery symptom or for heart failures. When you visit a proctologist, you're going to search for something... Well, let's not go there. Same can be said for cloud computing. Ask a storage vendor like EMC for a defintion of cloud computing and it's likely going to be storage related. Atmos might be the answer there. Ask Amazon and you will get Amazon EC2 or Amazon S3 as a reply, both of which are valid if you are looking for storage or the possibility to run dispersed jobs. But that's just the start of the problem. Let's say one of your managers comes to you and says "We want to use cloud computing!", what are you going to say? Perhaps the first thing you want to ask is something along the lines of "What do you want to do with it?", or "What do you want it to do?". Depending on the requirements you will need a solution or product design that is capable of coping with a distribution of storage, memory, computing power or even software. In a way this can be a good starting point for a true SaaS capable offering. But again, we need a design that can handle all of it in a distributed fashion. You need to think about things like security. Do you actually need a local cloud? Perhaps you can distribute the actual processing of information? It's been done before in projects like SETI@home. Distributed storage? Also done before, ask any enterprise sized company that uses some sort of virtualization and they can confirm that for you. The technical issues aren't trivial, but they are also not mind boggling. It's been done before. Challenges can be seen in things like security. Do I really want to hand over my information to a distributed 'thing' without knowing where my information will end up? After all, information is one of my most prized assets. Most companies and analysts will probably agree on that one. Other things to consider might be the fact that with the cloud you can see a trend going something oriented centrally, going to something vapor oriented. Want an example? Think of the case where a UK based webhoster lost around 100,000 sites after a zero-day exploit. Backup and data integrity should be given a lot more attention. One might even consider implementing the ACID property set found in most self-respecting databases. All of this a practically screaming for a standard of some sorts, but by the sheer complexity of the matter this might a standard that is too big for most companies out there. And until we see a standard, we will probably continue to see various definitions. So as a word of advice, keep an open mind but be sure to ask how your vendor and/or supplier define cloud. Think sharply about the challenges. And if you can, make use of the fact that the term cloud isn't defined that sharply yet and set your own definitions if your boss should approach you. Renegade 7 http://renegade.tweakblogs.net/blog/2187/cloud-computing-punt-up-on-cloud-nine.html#reacties http://renegade.tweakblogs.net/blog/2187 Tue, 28 Jul 2009 12:05:00 GMT http://renegade.tweakblogs.net/blog/2343/dont-move-ever-no-really!.html It's been slightly quiet here in my blog, but with a good reason. My blog is growing more and more important to me, but I've been busy with something that was even more important. I've moved. The horror! In all honesty, I moved to an apartment that was purchased, so no more paying rent. I'm finally at a point that I am going to get my own roof over my head. And paying for that, and the feeling that the apartment is slowly being paid for is quite good. But moving? That's a whole different story. I tend to think that most people just wait long enough with a new move until the impressions of the previous move have been forgotten or alleviated. You put stuff in boxes that you are not even certain you are going to keep and they usually end up somewhere in an attic or in a garage somewhere. You've got dozens of people asking "Where does this go?" and shouting names, even though the boxes have been labeled properly and you have put up notes saying which room is what. Anyway, things have settled in a bit and I'll be more frequent with my blogging again. I promise. I also promise I won't move again. Or at least not until the memory has faded a bit more, or I stop screaming in my sleep. Renegade 7 http://renegade.tweakblogs.net/blog/2343/dont-move-ever-no-really!.html#reacties http://renegade.tweakblogs.net/blog/2343 Wed, 22 Jul 2009 07:51:46 GMT