Storagezilla

What is a Petabyte?

Decho know as well as anyone else as they have more than 15PB of user backup data under management.

Virtual Provisioning for Symm included at no extra charge.

The Bod asked. The Anarchist answered.

From this quarter onwards Virtual Provisioning will now be included on new DMX 4 and V-Max systems at no extra charge.

Go forth and provision. Virtually.

Optimus Info

Ridley Scott liked the look of it on his last picture, so much so that he mentioned it specifically after putting it into a shot. Nice praise from a guy who's pre-Directorial career was in production design. 

This time high concept movie director Michael Bay and his production team wanted to make it really pop on the big screen during Transformers 2: Revenge Of The Fallen.

So there in U.S. Marine Command, as rail gun strikes, naval deployments and infantry engagements unfold on the other side of the world, sits Symmetrix.

Hardware manufacturing say that lighting design is a no go for DMX4 customers. I'm told it's an Autobot only special edition. ;-)

Crank up the volume and headphones be damned

The curtain falls

Is Montserrat Caballé warming up off stage?

As of this morning I think so.

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.