Storagezilla

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.

Data Domain Plus Plus

I'm just after reading Joe's letter to Data Domain employees.

Well, that's not true. I read it. Thought about it. Read it again. Had dinner. Watched some TV while thinking about it some more and now I'm back here. 

Strip it down and to me it looks pretty simple.

Data Domain becomes a new backup and recovery business within EMC's Information Infrastructure portfolio. That portfolio shown on Joe's most recent slides, none of which I'm going to repost here, is now storage, security, cloud and content management with services running horizontally across all of them.

But let's zoom out and think bigger, and I'm just spit balling here, but it seems to me that Data Domain becomes a corner stone of an entire EMC Backup and Recovery division. Avamar, NetWorker, Data Protection Advisor, EDL and so on all moving into this division.

Maybe the brand for such an organisation is the Data Domain brand? I don't know. It's a great brand with a lot of juice to it and think of the possibilities.

All of that is just speculation on my part but if EMC were to arm Data Domain with EMC's existing technology resources, boost their R&D budget to typical EMC product division levels and send EMC's massive sales force out with Data Domain's current products under their arm, they would be in a position to leap up an entire energy level in the backup and recovery space and leave a lot of their current competition behind in the process.

This isn't about getting some tech it's about building the next great franchise in the Backup and Recovery market. 

If Joe's talking about this becoming a Billion Dollar business then it also means getting someone to run it. Someone who might report directly to the CEO the way RSA, Content Management, Cloud, VMware and the EMC Storage Division do.

That's effectively a Backup and Recovery business unit with a leader who sits on the Executive Team, who has access to the EMC M&A machine, who's development team has access to EMC's now sprawling company wide R&D program but who gets to keep the existing culture intact.

The same way RSA, Content Management, Storage Products, VMware and Cloud all have their own unique view of what it means to be an EMCer.

Culture wise EMC is now one of the biggest melting pots in the IT industry. I can't go to a large EMC meeting without running into all sorts of people from all different places many of whom have transitioned to their current job via an acquisition.

It's cultural dispersal the Brownian Motion way and with every new influx of employees what it means to be an EMCer evolves into something greater than what it was.

There's a long game yet to be played but for Data Domain employees the offer appears to be as follows.

Be Data Domain with the other guy or be Data Domain++ as a product division of EMC.

The Conchango tango

EMC Consulting/EMC Conchango have been busy keeping a low profile blog.

And they would have gotten away with it too were it not for those pesky kids and their nuclear fire breathing reptile.

There's only like seventy zillion people blogging over there so there should always be something new to read.

Oh, and they're hiring in the UK.

Air travel to get even worse

Regardless of the episode of Dallas currently playing out in our industry, it's now a share holder decision so we won't speculate on who is JR Ewing and who is Cliff Barnes in this one, I was wrong about a revised EMC bid since the company stuck to it's offer of $30 in cash and a quick close.

In a duff economy where the finances of institutional investors could probably do with an injection of cash to make their book look stronger before year end we'll see how that plays.

Moving on I read something incredibly disturbing in yesterdays Wall Street Journal.

In order to cram in more seats the airlines have started shaving inches off of the legroom in coach, have reduced the number of bathrooms and are replacing the galleys with even more seats.

Air travel truly has reached the point where it's now like riding the bus. Except the bus doesn't require a near Colonoscopy as you pass through security and you won't get stuck behind some moron who thought the rules about liquids didn't apply to them so now they're arguing with the people running the X-Ray machine as to why that large Bottle of Plonk in their hand luggage is such a big deal?

If you thought being a road warrior was a chore before soon you might think back on your current journeys as being the glory days of air travel.

Though I wish they'd just remove peoples ability to lean back in their seats. It's bad enough flying transatlantic with your knees tucked up under your chin without some inconsiderate Oink deciding that you should also you suffer the indignity of eating your tasteless in flight meal while fixed in an even worse position.