The opinions expressed here are my personal opinions. Content published here is not read or approved in advance by EMC and does not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of EMC.
This is my blog, it is not an EMC blog.
The guys who write the Mozy blog sent Steener out to the mean streets of LA to make a point: your data is precious and you should back it up. And not just to a local disk, but to something far away too. Like Mozy.
SearchStorage.com: How has the EMC/Data Domain acquisition impacted the competitive environment for IBM's ProtecTier?
Barrera: Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. EMC and NetApp both sort of woke up about same time and realized this dedupe stuff, particularly in backup and large archiving environments, is going to matter a lot and went hunting for a company. We went through that exercise a couple years ago and landed on Diligent.
SearchStorage.com: What about EMC's earlier acquisition of Avamar?
Barrera: Avamar isn't a big pervasive player in this area.
Clod is the Chief Technical Strategist for the junk pile that is IBM's storage portfolio, the only shining lights of which are SVC and N-Series boxes you can buy cheaper from IBM than from NetApp as IBM doesn't look for a 67.5% margin on sales, so you should expect no less.
To look at the reality of the situation Diligent was never a big player in any space (Dedup/VTL/Otherwise) and even to this day the majority of Diligent installations still have Hitachi arrays sitting behind them. So IBM did their market evaluation and then bought Moshe out of yet another company he was never going to see a return on.
IBM purchased a product which requires a hell of a lot of spindles on the back end before it can do anything, and to date the majority of those spindles are Hitachi spindles and with an estimated 70% of all Diligent customers being NetBackup shops Data Domain probably has more TSM, iSeries and zSeries customers using it's target Dedup appliances than IBM has.
2. It May Be The Year Of Mobile Malware News
Ah…the press. There is news here. It is meaningful because I still hear people ask if there is inherently better security in one platform over another. These people need to know that there is no security in obscurity. There is no platform that is inherently superior to another, although some platforms handle security as a process better than others. These people will be shocked to learn that their Macs, Linux, BlackBerries, Androids and iPhones are all potentially as vulnerable over time to attack. In fact, the more valuable platforms become to people, the more the bad guys want to attack them.
There’s news here. There isn’t a clear-and-present danger to everyone on these platforms, so I only hope that the press acts responsibly in couching the relevance of these attacks.
Hot on the heels of another jail broken iPhone worm (One thinks the only one who benefits from such news is Apple. Don't jail break or this will happen to you) Sam Curry focuses his RSA borrowed brain on the security of mobile devices and the economics of malware.
Over the past month I’ve been researching (mostly searching and the results have been #fail) cloud providers to understand what they use to “assure” trust. In other words – if I’m a company is of sufficient size that risk outweighs convenience and I want to make sure that if I use the cloud – my site will be secure, my information will protected with the privacy controls I require for my business (be they HIPAA/HITECH, SOX, PCI, etc.) and the site will maintain good availability via service levels.
Many of the providers want you to believe that they are in fact transparent – which also happens to be the latest buzz word in the blogosphere (there are some great articles by Hoff,Randy Bias to name a few) regarding the information that the providers is willing to put up on their website. On the one hand I’ve found that just getting this information as a non-customer is not an easy feat. Some providers like Google and Microsoft provide what I would call one-stop-shopping (e.g. Google Privacy Center,Microsoft OnLine Privacy) . They have a web page that gives you the core stuff like their terms of service, privacy policy, and either a security policy or at least a white paper on their controls. Microsoft has developed a full online Compliance Framework that they “appear” to be applying to Azure
Following on from my Trust me I'm a Cloud post Blogger@EMCWayne Pauley has a rather interesting post about his adventures trying to find out what Cloud providers mean when they "assure trust".
I was speaking to someone a few weeks ago who sniffed at the security aspect of cloud computing. When the rest of the company catches up one thinks that tune will change quite fast.
While a lot of people reading this are all about the Home NAS I'm all about the Home Media.
Earlier this month Iomega announced and started shipping the ScreenPlay Director in Europe. I had previously bought the ScreenPlay HD for my parents and the ScreenPlay Pro for myself. As the Director is to the Pro, the ScreenPlay Plus is to the HD. A device for every price point, capacity and need.
The Director has a similar form factor to the ScreenPlay Pro but the dimensions are slightly different to accommodate a roomy 2TB Drive, also, the reflective buttons have taken on a more matte effect while the blue LED on the front of the panel has been replaced with a not as eye catching white version. It's all about making the Piano Black device more subtle looking when it's under your TV.
This isn't a bad thing.
While the Pro's light was subdued the blue LED on the ScreenPlay HD blares at you somewhat and while others don't find it irritating I used to find my eye drawn to it a bit too often when I should have been watching the screen.
I never had that issue with the Pro.
The credit card style form factor for the remote control of previous ScreenPlays has been replaced with a proper sized IR remote, which means there's no more fat fingering the wrong button at the wrong time for me. One of the features which hasn't made the cut from the Pro was the ability to record directly into the ScreenPlay via composite ports in the back of the unit.
In all honesty this was of limited use and I'd have preferred it offer S-Video input support but I did manage to capture some home movies from VHS tape and it automatically saved them as MPEG-2 files. For any of you thinking you can convert your VHS movie collection this way I'm afraid you're out of luck as the Pro was capable of detecting VHS copy protection schemes and stopping the capture process. While I can understand the desire to put those classics you just can't buy into a digital format the film industry has driven DVD prices down to insane levels meaning you can find many mainstream titles for a pittance or even less if you go to the discount outlets.
The Director takes longer to boot than the Pro, a lot longer, but the upside is that there's now a fully featured operating system doing all the heavy lifting. The user interface scaling to 1080i resolution, it appearing on my MacBook Pro as a NAS device when it was attached to the home network and with various online video options, the ability to locate and communicate with any active media servers on the network and with BitTorrent functionality included.
Video playback is gorgeous. Indeed it's better than gorgeous and great to watch even when watching standard definition content. High Definition content, right up to 1080p, is as good as I've seen on more expensive devices, playback obviously benefiting from the latest codec support and the more powerful system on chip hardware running inside the case.
This matters as some of those more expensive devices offer a fraction of the storage and have enough fans in them that it can sound like you're standing on an airport runway when the unit gets hot. There are things which can ruin the home entertainment experience and unless you're willing to crank the volume because you have no neighbors fan noise is one of them.
The user interface is a significant improvement over what has come before it with some entrances and exits of various display elements gliding on to the screen but there are a few user interface elements I would have touched up slightly. Internet update capability is in the device so new code when available can be downloaded and applied with a few clicks of the remote control or sideloaded via your computer so I'd expect the system software to evolve as time goes on.
The biggest issue I had came with ordering the WiFi USB attachment from the online store. Though it's written on the site clear as day I did make the mistake of ordering the 802.11B/G adapter, which works with the Pro but doesn't work with the Director. The 802.11N adapter is supported by the Director (Larger file sizes require bigger transmission pipes) but though it is advertised in the materials and in an insert which comes in the box it wasn't available for purchase when I went looking for it. Th B/G adapter works fine with the Pro but does not work with the Director.
I'm guessing when the Director is available in the US the WiFi Adapter will be made available too. Still, while entirely my fault it's something others should check before they hit the Purchase button.
Since I buy my devices at the retail store like everyone else, to say Iomega is growing would be a drastic understatement on my part. I first noticed they were moving significant amounts of product at my local consumer electronics store when the store appeared to be selling and replenishing stock at a rapid rate.
From my own investigations it appears that Iomega have gone from the eight position to the third in the externally attached consumer storage market while Joe Tucci mentioned the division had significant double digit growth (Significant means something different to Joe than to you or I. He's not easily impressed.) in Q3 and that was before the insanity of the Christmas shopping season kicked off.
Overall it's a hot product and I'd have liked if there was support for an international version of Sonic Wall's Roxio CinemaNow, something which will be present in the American edition of the device, but since it isn't present you do get YouTube. Amongst all the tweener dreck of Miley Cyrus and Twlight which appears to be rated highly by the GooTubers you come across some unusual things you didn't find the last time you were there on your computer.
Carl Sagan meets Auto-Tune brought into my living room via a ScreenPlay Director. And there's billions upon billions of pieces of media available to fill that 2TB drive.
Carl never used the word "and" in that famous quote of his. Go watch Cosmos if you don't believe me ;-)
The ScreenPlay Director is available across Europe now and across North America soon.
I've started a rapid fire blog deeper in the site. It's rough looking at the moment but will host Tech clippings and thoughts on those clippings, usually posted from a smartphone, so don't expect length or too much getting into the weeds.
Anything important or in the need of weed whacking will just bubble up here to the top level.
As the name suggests any comments I'll have are the one's you make as you head out the door. The RSS feed is aggregated on the sidebar and I promise I'll give your feed reader a work out so be aware of that if you choose to subscribe.
New Blogger@EMC, James Baldwin covering SharePoint. Sharepoint as I have referred to it before being the super-flu of enterprise apps. The moment one person has it it spreads like wildfire throughout the organisation.
I've worked with James and found him to be a good techy lacking all sense of self awareness.
One of the ideas I find most interesting is that Cisco/EMC converging on this area alone is going to the speed up the move to private cloud as everyone else repositions and tools up to work with or go to war against the alliance.
While my home town of Cork has been named in the top ten cities of Lonely Planet’s Best in Travel 2010, the EMC Backup Recovery Systems Dedup Roadshow comes to Dublin on the 18th of November.
Well the place had to get something I suppose.
Join us and you’ll see why Data Domain does for backup what the iPod did for digital music and why VMware and Avamar go together like strawberries and cream on a warm summer day.
