Storagezilla

AX4: Costs less than you think.

Scott Lowe over at TechRepublic went looking at storage and decided on an AX4.

Having sat at the other side of the table for so long I always enjoy reading what conclusions customers come to after evaluating all their options, and how they came to them.

Scott admits that EMC wasn't on his shortlist due to the perceived "Rolls Royce" Enterprise pricing shadow cast by the EMC badge but he was surprised at how the pricing turned out in his favour.

The unspoken lesson here being regardless of the sticker price on the box everything is up for negotiation right until the moment it isn't. Then you either have a deal or you don't.

It's not like EMC just walked in and cherry picked that business either, Scott being a big fan of EqualLogic and having looked at other offerings from DELL and LeftHand Networks.

Those are very capable competitors. You don't just roll over those guys when it comes to IP SANs for customers of that size.

All in all it appears that the AX4 is an iSCSI dynamo well able to play with the single protocol folks in that market.

EC2 users find that hardware isn't software

Looks like users of Amazon EC2 feel they're not getting what they've paid for. Though to be honest they haven't paid for all that much to begin with.

I figured this little nugget out last week.  I had failed a piece of code to the point where an infinite loop would happen in an edge case.  It took a while to debug this because looking at top in the EC2 instance only showed 40-50% CPU usage.

At the same time, I noticed another metric, the CPU %st, hovering around 50%.  This stands for "CPU time stolen", and you'll notice that as your CPU usage rises, so does steal-time.  What exactly does "stolen" mean?  Time is stolen when your instance requests CPU time but the Xen virtualizer chooses to give that CPU time to something else, such as somebody else's instance.

I am not the only one to notice this, either.  There are threads on the AWS forums by other users who are seeing their code run half as fast as it should, given the specifications for a Compute Unit.  These posts are met by dismissive replies from Amazon employees.  Great job.

We can argue Amazon stretching the definition of a compute unit right way to the moon but the bottom line is that this is a case of paying next to nothing and getting next to nothing.

piWorx

Earlier when EMC bought Pi Corp I called it "a startup with no shipping products".

This was and remains true, but what I didn't say at the time was that piWorx was well along in the Beta process. No don't bother registering for it since it remains invite only but the products should ship later this year.

Infoworld have the scoop.

"We will develop the core applications that average folks use," Maritz said. Pi already offers an e-mail application online, and a document editor is under development. The software will also be opened for third-party developers to offer applications, Maritz added.

Smart Desktops, the second product from Pi, will focus on the desktop and help users better organize information in Outlook and Windows.

Three different days

Yesterday for me/Today for you Sun were/are celebrating MySQL, IBM are celebrating the Mainframe and VMware are celebrating..well VMware.

Out of those three different offerings I've used two in production. Yes VMware is one of them. (Duh!) 

The S/390 IBM managed to flog an EMC internet hosting customer never made it since the customer spent a ton of money acquiring the Mainframe (With it's wacky OS/2 WARP V4 management station), the maintenance and the software to run on it. Throw in the truckload of money they had to pay the Mainframe contractor who knew how to fly it and there wasn't much left to run their business with.

An other company who bought a ton of Compaq boxes which looked like they were built in Soviet-era Russia running LAMP outlived EMC's hosting group and a check of their domain shows they are still in business and serving pages today.

It's weird since they migrated away from Solaris on SPARC to LAMP on x86 only to find that 8 years later Sun have followed them. Or at least they've followed them as far as trying to establish SAMP, which lets face is a lame FLA.

Sure the Mainframe has it's place but unless we're all going to start doing our web browsing and gaming on VAX machines and eating Soylent Green it's not the future.

Just an echo of a very successful past.

Who is Paul Maritz?

EMC buys a startup with no shipping products.

Okay...

HUH?

Let's break it down. It just hired the guy who used to be the third most powerful man inside Microsoft during it's endless expansion in the go-go 90's and put him in charge of it's Cloud Infrastructure and Services Division.

That didn't exist on the org chart until the press release but now it becomes the fourth pillar of the company joining the Storage Division, Content Management & Archiving and RSA divisions. Maritz being appointed CISD President with Fortress, Mozy, Maui, Pi and things to be revealed later now being his.

So who is Paul Maritz?

I knew of him having read numerous issues of Byte Magazine (In the shop and straight off the shelf. I had no money/no shame) and having followed the Microsoft Antitrust trial, but I knew nothing of the man. Seconds after I read the press release I fired off a note to some people I know who would have seen Maritz up close and in action. The picture I got back from numerous sources was someone cerebral, brilliant but quite reserved.

Put in context alongside Microsoft's big two Gates and Ballmer were described as "The sound and fury to Maritz godlike creation process. His bandwidth (Zillanote: Microspeak for ability to process new ideas. I think.) is astronomical."

Maritz ran platforms & applications at Microsoft. To you and me that's Windows, Office and everything else. He's the guy who made the call to dump OS/2 and run full speed with NT and Windows 95. A showdown with IBM was inevitable and he wanted it to happen on Microsoft's terms. Lotus, Borland & Novell fell to his sword. Under his leadership Microsoft saw off Java and as for the fall of Netscape David Boies tried to paint him as it's architect.

Though looking back you can probably point the finger right at Netscape on that one. The best thing to happen to Netscape users was the company imploding, taking Communicator and SuiteSpot (Netscape Application Server being the worst piece of garbage I was ever paged at 4:00am to deal with) down with it and sowing the seeds of FireFox.

After less than two years of retirement Maritz decided to get back into the business of ideas and work on software for the cloud. This was a few years after he had recognised that Internet delivery of software and services threatened Microsoft's core business model.

Now that he's at EMC make no mistake this game has changed.

Dramatically.

And I don't know why I'm calling him Maritz since as of today I'd be better of calling him "Chief". Regardless, I'm just glad I'm not competing against him.

Invista at University

When EMC announced Invista 2.0..

Yes I was the one who mistakenly announced it here the first time around in a blog post. The post wasn't worth the dung I ended up wading neck deep through as a result but it ensured I double checked everything before opening my mouth in future. Lesson learned.

..it listed Purdue University as a reference.

Now, getting references in the Enterprise space is no easy thing since anyone with a dual or multi-vendor strategy never wants to be seen as favouring one supplier over another.

They can love the product and love you but they're pretty up front when it comes to telling you to keep that love between you and them only. Hence the reason a solid reference is priceless. 

A skeptical but not cynical (That difference matters. I have lots of time for curious skeptics but none for miserable cynics) Dave Vellante and David Floyer from Wikibon appear to have gone forth and found out what the reality behind the Purdue reference is.

InfoStor has their write up.

Killing satellites

Had people not balked at the cost of Reagan's attempt to weaponize space, okay so it was Bush the Elder who did the balking but he had an election to lose some months later and wanted to look like he was reigning in spending, we now wouldn't be wondering if the US Navy's SM-3 missile and the Ageis Combat System are capable of destroying that satellite which threatens to spread toxic fuel and (depending on how much of it survives reentry and impact) top secret military technology over a couple of hundred square miles.

After the Chinese blasted a weather satellite (Yeah right, aren't they all just weather satellites?) out of the sky last year I have no doubt it'll work unless they suffer a serious systems failure after the launch.

I'd still liked to have seen it blown to pieces by an orbital hypervelocity rail gun though.

What's the point in putting things into space if you can't shoot them down in Sci-Fi fashion?

Straight up with a doubleTwist

So doubleTwist had a big media push today. I've spent sometime playing with it and were it not for the high profile involvement of anti-DRM crusader "DVD" Jon Lech Johansen it would only be notable for how flaky and counter-intuitive it is in places.

The concept is solid enough, tie social media to file sharing while using Jon's experience to "liberate" your iTunes Music Store purchases from Apple's FairPlay DRM scheme by converting them into unprotected MP3s. So long as you had the rights to play the DRM protected AAC files on the computer in the first place that is. What you choose to do with them after that, like share them with your friends on doubleTwist, probably involves an RIAA lawsuit.

Overall it's not that impressive an app, the FaceBook drop box component not having the level of integration with the desktop app that I'd expected. It does download right into the app, but not upload directly from the app.

Everything has Beta slapped on it so with any luck they'll churn out new version pretty quickly.

Even more clouds and do you know where PCs go to die?

Tim O'Reilly (A drunken Cork man first, book publisher extraordinaire second) links to speculation about the EMC Infrastructure Cloud. I've no comment on this other than to point out that hundreds of thousands of Web 2.0 folk now know something is on the boil before the marketing machine has swung into action.

This is a good thing, right? I'm not sure that EMC Marketing think so but they're going to have to roll with it.

In other news I finally managed to get around to reading last month's National Geographic and the article on High Tech Trash, discarded computers, servers, monitors and peripherals which end up dumped in third world nations instead of being properly recycled, has put me off buying a new desktop computer.

What I'm using now was built and bought to play a single game (Dungeons & Dragons: Stormreach) but post Mac explosion I find myself using a Windows machine with limited expansion options as my main system for the first time in close to a decade.

I've made it habitable enough to get by on but stories of people using their cook wear to smelt lead from discarded PCBs thereby exposing their family to heavy metal poisoning is enough to have me wondering where exactly this PC will end up if I buy something new and discard it?

Having forgotten the level of upkeep required to keep a Windows Box healthy (AntiVirus from McAfee, Windows Defender to handle malware) last night I think I ran a defrag for the first time since I left college.

PerfectDisk has an interesting SMARTPlacement option which groups rarely, occasionally and recently modified segments together on the disk as it consolidates free space. It then works during idle cycles to keep them together.

Allegedly this will make file access faster but hey since I'm going to be using this box for a while yet it all helps.

When it rains it pours

Since I spent a few years working in EMC's Web Hosting division..

Yeah the company had one of those and it started when some big customers decided they wanted EMC to maintain their web presence back during the boom. I got a job there literally a few months after some big customer said they planned on moving into the EMEA market with an online e-commerce presence and mentioned that they thought EMC's Cork facility would be a good place for it to reside.

Before you knew it they were looking for people to watch the screens at god awful times at night.

So there I was having escaped from manufacturing trying not to trip over all the hastily run network cables while listening to music cranked up way too loud in a small room that used to get so hot that if you didn't open a Window and leave the bitterly cold night air in the Ultra2 box used solely for displaying forwarded X sessions from the monitoring tools would shut down.

Back then it was this weird pirate organisation off on it's own filled with brilliant yet bizarre people from different technical backgrounds running as fast as they could while spending money like water.

And it was amazing.

By contrast the EMC of the time was a painfully dull one trick company (Dull unless you were kicking ass in Sales) which believed in a slow death by pointless multi-hour meeting.

..I think I know what Amazon Web Services cardinal sin is.

They've been treating thousands of Web 2.0 developer customers like dozens of Web 1.0 hosting customers. Scratch that, they've been treating them worse.

This isn't about the fact they had a failure. Even the Internet has failures. (Especially when someone drops a boat anchor sheers the wrong cable and blows the Middle East offline) It's the fact that they don't communicate with their customers at the speed their customers operate at.

Having fixed the problem AWS have or are in the process of writing up a post mortem and filing all the reports which need to be filed. When that's done they'll finally get around to explaining why one of their three locations was inaccessible for a period of time.

But no matter what level of detail they provide it's too little much too late as you've had all these Web Developers (And that's who AWS sell to) who spend their day sitting on Twitter and communicating at the speed of a page refresh kept in the dark for hours. To those people hours are like days.

When you look at AWS what you're looking at is the R&D proving ground for Amazon.com. They've built this massive infrastructure which you can rent space and time on and use their services to run your business, but a lot of those services are in Beta and aren't being used by Amazon's cash cow yet.

You're a fee paying beta testers for technologies Amazon is looking to prove before they'd introduce them into the infrastructure which runs Amazon.com or marksandspencer.com.

You know e-commerce sites where sales revenue is measured in Millions and not Hundreds or Thousands.

So what we have is a symbiotic relationship. Amazon get to test services with a realistic workload of millions of concurrent connections and billions of stored objects (As of October 07 it was 10 Billion objects) in a sandbox while developer customers using those services get cheap storage, cheap compute cycles and a host of bells and whistles they can use to reduce or eliminate the infrastructure advantage of their larger rivals.

I think it works out well for all parties involved, occasional failures and all.