Storagezilla

Hou-chan One Million

I'm a big believer in if you throw enough money at a problem you can make it go away.

Now usually that's not the case, but in this case I'm right. Looky.

Dear Fellow APJ Employees,

I am writing to make you aware of a support group that has been established to help raise funds for the life-saving surgery of Houku Katagiri (Hou-chan), the 2-year old son of Katagiri-san, a fellow EMC employee in Japan.

Late last year, Hou-chan was diagnosed with restrictive cardiomyopathy which is an incurable heart disease that takes the lives of 50 percent of those afflicted within one year.   Heart transplants for children are not permitted in Japan, where by law organ donors must be at least 15 years old.  Hou-chan's condition is deteriorating and he is currently hospitalized at Kyorin University Hospital. He needs a transplant operation as soon as possible.

His surgery can be performed at Loma Linda University hospital located in the United States, however, the estimated medical costs for Hou-chan's heart transplant and recovery are USD 1 million. Japanese medical plans do not cover the costs for Hou-chan's heart transplant surgery, and no governmental support is available.

Katagiri-san's colleagues and friends in Japan have established a fund named Hou-chan wo Sukuu-kai to help raise the required funds. Below is more information on how to make a voluntary donation and attached is a flyer with more details on Hou-chan's condition and donation details.

On behalf of all EMC Employees in APJ, I want to extend our heartfelt support to Katagiri-san's son and his family during this difficult time.

So I read this and it was poor kid I wish him the best of luck, here's some cash. And then something amazing happened I spotted on Twitter that they've already made nearly 75% of the goal.

Wow!

Now, I'm not going to shake the hat under your nose and ask for money. Times are tough for everyone and nothing turns me off like trying to get into or out of a shop in town only to be accosted by some Charity Mugger who have set themself up on the footpath right outside the front door.

But here's Hou-chan, three quarters of the way towards getting a lifesaving heart transplant.

And he takes PayPal.

Option 1: Donate through bank transfer - recommended for group/collective donations

You can directly transfer payment to the Hou-chan's bank account.  Please note that Hou-Chan's account is charged approximately USD 15.00 per transfer so ideally individuals can combine their donations and remit in groups to reduce the banking fees for every overseas remittance and normal banking transfer fees. 

Bank Account of "Hou-chan wo Sukuu-kai"
    Bank Name:                    Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ Banking Corporation
    Branch Name & No:           Mitaka Branch (#222)
    Account No:                    0046571
    Account Name:                HOUCHIYANOSUKUUKAI

Option 2: Donate through "PayPal"

You can also use "PayPal", an on-line service for transferring money safely and easily.
Please note the transfer fees from overseas before calculating your donation:  3.9% + $0.3 per transfer

PayPal　URL：　https://www.paypal.com

How to Use Pay-Pay
1. Create your own "Personal Account" on Pay-Pal.
2. Please transfer your donation to paypal@hou-chan.com

How many two year olds do you know take PayPal?

How do you do your home backups?

Me? I use Mozy (Of course) but for those ridiculously large files I'm not going to wait for my ADSL connection to upload I use SyncToy 2.0 for Windows.

SyncToy makes the copy to an external drive, Mozy scoops it up and moves it offline. I now have a fast local restore as well as an offsite copy. For any of you Macheads I'm sure there's an Automator Action somewhere which will do the same thing.

And if you use Linux you're using rsync anyway so nothing to see here. Move along.

Are you smart if you ask the question or if you have the answer?

I've just spent close to an hour and a half quickly reviewing the entries to this year's EMC Innovation Showcase. All in all not bad but I haven't seen the one yet. Every year there's one I want to see win as I think it's a dynamite idea, I just haven't seen this year's one yet.

There's three weeks to go and twenty pages of ideas so far, I expect an avalanche of submissions in the final week as people give up their unique little snowflakes for final review.

Of course it's easy for me to log into the system and leave people feedback on their ideas. Have you thought about this, what's the effect of that, but the way I see it if I'm not submitting an idea myself the least I can do is ask questions to ensure their idea is the best idea it can be when it's time comes.

Mute your phone

It's always stunning to me that after years in the industry people will still get on a conf call and won't mute their phone.

I'd love to be able to send a current down the line and zap the offending party.

Alas, it's a feature conferencing services are reticent to add but I'll get it someday and the open line crowd are in for a Blofeld style shock.

Atmos and Gladinet

A couple of days ago I was intrigued to read the following over on the Gladinet blog.

EMC Atmos Online is cool and it is different from Amazon S3. We are happy to announce the support of EMC Atmos Online side by side with Amazon S3, starting build 130 in the version 1.1 RC.
This is an important step to bring a multi-storage backup solution to users. One of a common concern about using cloud storage is a single point of failure or locking into a single vendor. By supporting multiple cloud storage vendors from the groud up, the Gladinet Cloud Desktop software allows you to backup data into multiple storage vendors at the same time.

I already had an Atmos onLine account so tonight I decided to give Gladinet Cloud Desktop a whirl. First impressions are that it's pretty impressive and very easy to use even if it doesn't fully conform to the desktop paradigm it's trying to copy. Using the Task Manager in freebie starter edition I downloaded you can see the cloud specific operations, object creations, modifications and deletions running in the background as you point and click drag and drop on the desktop. That being said it's heterogeneous so you can bounce your data from cloud provider to cloud provider via your desktop.

Set up was easy. Download and install the binary (Windows only at the moment) select the cloud service you wish to use, provide it with credentials and it'll login to the cloud provider and attach itself to a mount point you specify as a virtual directory. In reality what it appears to be doing is using the mount point as a store and forward location, it then updates the state with a refresh as background communication tasks with the cloud services occur. So when you drag and drop to your Atmos "drive" in the background Gladinet is working with objects via communication with the Atmos cloud.

All in all an interesting little product and useful for those of us who don't fancy writing our own applications to communicate with these online storage services. If you're interested you can get your Atmos onLine login here, and your Gladinet Cloud Desktop download here.

Hyperscale Green

Nice piece with Jeff Nick about EMCs support for the construction of the High Performance Computing Centre in Holyoke Massachusetts.

Holyoke, an economically underachieving region, has a number of advantages from a technical stand point. Access to high speed communications infrastructure running along the Mass Pike and untapped hydroelectric energy from the the Connecticut River being just two of them.

So the planning team of MIT, University of Massachusetts, Cisco and EMC are currently looking at what they can do to make Hyperscale Green (My name for it, not theirs) a reality.

There's a win here for the local community who'll see an influx of construction work and the logistics that'll require in local goods and services, the academic institutions who'll have access to a hyperscale laboratory environment and the technology companies who'll be able to facilitate ongoing R&D and attract new development and engineering talent.

I hope it gets built soon and want to see it when it is. And lets not skimp on the architectural design folks the grey box building is so pre Green IT.

Light, lots of natural light. There's great light in New England as the seasons change.

Automated Storage Tiering for Celerra

We'll call this one Automated Storage Tiering as it isn't block based. Since I'm waiting for a massive synchronisation of the house's music library to complete this should prove quick and easy.

So what are we going to do?

We're going to automate the placement of files on Celerra storage tiers, some native volumes some deduplicated and compressed volumes, using Rainfinity policies and the Celerra FileMover API all while offering transparent recall during file access.

And what'll that achieve?

Due to the reduced capacity it should deliver a smaller physical footprint, reduce energy consumption and do all nice things for your TCO over a number of years.

And how will it do that?

The same way you always do nice things for your TCO, drive efficiencies out of what you already have.

You'll need:

-1x Rainfinity FMA. Physical or Virtual Appliance. Your choice.

-One or more tiers of secondary storage on your Celerra.

-A Web browser, a mouse and a keyboard.

-My dashing good looks and excellent personal taste. Okay so that's a unrealistic for you and not an actual requirement but I just thought I'd give you something to strive for after you've implemented this.

How does it work?

Lets say we have three tiers of storage Tier 0 (Enterprise Flash Drives), Tier 1 (FC), Tier 2 (SATA). We create a filesystem, if one hasn't been created already, on Tier 2 and enable Celerra Deduplication. We then create Archival policies for the Tier 0 and Tier 1 filesystems on the Rainfinity FMA and set them to run automatically.

These policies can be as basic as move anything which hasn't been accessed in a few weeks or months to something with a much more specific set of criteria.

Rainfinity FMA communicates with the Celerra FileMover API which migrates files between tiers and creates a stub file in the source tier to allow for transparent access. Note that the Tier 2 destination can be on the same or a different Celerra.

And there you go, quick and easy Automated Storage Tiering for Celerra.

But my giant music sync still isn't finished so now I'm going to have to think of something else to write about.

Two donors matched for Nick

Hot off the email client.

We learned yesterday afternoon that Stanford Cancer Center has found two donor matches for Nick out of the thirteen potential matches that had been developed by the national registry. Human leukocytes antigen (HLA) typing is used to match patients and donors for transplants. The immune system uses these antigens (markers) to recognize which cells belong in your body and which do not. Stanford was searching for a set of ten markers for the best match. Each of the two donor matches that were discovered, match ten out of ten criterion markers.

Gone from no chance to a chance with the effort everyone has put in. I thank you. We thank you.

When you're four everything and nothing is magic.

What happens when you bring your four year old daughter to work at EMC and set her loose on Microsoft Surface?

This.

Why do I work at EMC? For the 1%

This could be an odd post but the reason I like working at EMC is because it's an object in motion.

My team had it's team meeting today and I flew in to the UK to attend. Around a not so large table were people working across the entire technology spectrum of the company.

Specialists from Storage Products, Information Protection and Data Center Virtualization, Cloud Infrastructure, Information Security, Resource Management, the works. Pretty much someone from every segment except Content Management and you could feed us all with two large pizzas.

When we get together we talk about Macro-EMC, it's about the entire Effect not just a few point products in your particular specialist area. When you speak in front of your peers there's a real risk of getting hammered by them. It's not malicious just inquisitive and it keeps you sharp for when you're speaking to people who aren't co-workers.

I also like the fact that I'm left alone to just get on with things. I work better that way.

I'm not going to say is that it isn't stressful.

It is.

Depending on who you're dealing with and what time in the quarter it is EMC can be very stressful. Some people focus under the pressure while other people fold. That's fine by me but I'd rather you fold fast and go work somewhere else. I have enough on my mind without wondering if someone is going to fumble the ball once again when what I need them to do is move it down the field.  

For those who focus under pressure you learn quickly that you can't operate at this level and micromanage everything, it's like moving from playing three games of chess at the same time to playing three games of table tennis at the same time.

One person doesn't scale, so you really do need other people to be capable of doing their jobs and doing them well.

Things will go wrong and if like me you are your own harshest critic failure is a miserable brooding experience which will play on your mind long after everyone else has moved on.

A wise owl at the company smelling a whiff of defeat off of me a few days after I made what I considered to be an unforgivable screw up gave me great food for thought as we trudged through the Massachusetts snow.

When you feel that things got away from you in a situation I want you to commit to yourself that you'll do better next time. No one can ask you more than that. You can't ask yourself any more than that. Remember the situation but shed the emotion tied up in it. But alternately when you do a good job on something be sure to remind yourself that this is how good you truly are.

It's not you at your best or you at your luckiest, it's just you being you and that's the reason it was a success.

I've tried to keep that piece of life experience in mind when things have gone well and when things have blown up in my face. I'll admit that it's easier to follow when things have gone well, but you'll dig yourself into an early grave if you don't try and leave the negatives while holding onto the experience when things have gone badly.

To finish this up like everything in IT 99% of this stuff is clockwork. It's not magic and in a lot of cases it's not hard, it just requires you to be competent and have the time required to properly apply the trade you are skilled in. It's that other 1%, the wisdom of your colleagues or that sense of speed you get from working at a place that makes it truly special.

It's that 1% where the magic is.