Storagezilla

Wireless Power

The old joke being that you had to be careful where you stood or your goose would be well and truly cooked.

As we're in the dog days of summer where, frankly, little of much interest is happening besides the fact my inbox has exploded with a new crop of industry start ups looking to pitch to me (Look Ma, I've got real juice!) I decided it might be time to look out beyond our industry for a bit.

One of the things I came across while browsing the TED coverage was WiTricity. AC power from a generation station converted into an oscillating magnetic field which on the appliance side is then converted back into AC power. To see a small scale version of this you need only look at the Touchstone wireless charger for the Palm Pre.

Touchstone is a tightly localised field but you get the idea. Imagine blanketing your house in a larger field and not having to worry about sockets or power cables. Run fields in parallel with roads and if your car is electric you'll never have to worry about running out of juice ever again. So long as you pay the bill.

It's transportation Minority Report style.

That like the wireless home though will probably remain more an ideal than a reality. Like the paperless office.

Am I using less paper today than I have been or is even more data being delivered to me, but in a digital format? If pushed I'd say the latter more than the former.

But what I'd like to do is reduce even further the mess of cables I have around the place. USB cables, power cables with proprietary connectors for reasons which usually escape me.

Of course then we have the health question. Does exposure to magnetic fields cause or increase the chances of developer Cancer?

The answer right now appears to be "We don't know". It would probably be good to get a real answer on that before we bath the place in so many magnetic fields it could rip the iron out of your blood.

Today some homes come with solar panels on the roof as standard, perhaps one day they'll come with wireless power transmitters built into the walls.

In flight entertainment on the way out?

I've talked about squeezed legroom and now comes the entertainment, airlines are considering ditching in flight entertainment systems.

The picture quality is usually terrible and that's even if you have your own screen never mind some CRT tube which is turning an odd colour. Sometimes there are non standard audio jacks in the seat so you can't just pop in the earphones from your portable music player and if you can plug in there's a good chance the jack is borked beyond belief from years of use and abuse.

But thinking about it I'm not sure how interested I am in preparing or carrying between six to ten hours of entertainment for a transatlantic flight in both directions. Dinner and an in flight movie also goes out the window if you have to move the laptop to eat your meal.

I also don't like carrying a laptop on flights anymore and will leave it behind if I can. If you're like me and need some serious computing grunt to get work done, chances are your laptop is a brick and devours battery power.

Yeah I'm all for adding power sockets to economy seats when it comes to WiFi I'm on the fence. Not having connectivity removes the distraction of email. What I most certainly don't want is phone coverage on long term flights and where there's WiFi there's Voice over IP.

It's good not to be called on a flight, it's better to not have to listen to someone else inane jabbering while you're trying to read or nap.  

Tetraktys

It turns out that RSA Chief Scientist Ari Juels is also a novelist, his first published novel a speculative fiction thriller called Tetraktys due to hit shelves next week.

I haven't read the book yet because Ari didn't send me a review copy (-Hint- -Hint-) but I do have it on order so shipping allowing we'll see how it reads.

Not sure if there will be an eBook edition for all you folks with eBook Readers. Perhaps I should have asked him about that but potentially I'd have risked an email exchange with regard to the weaknesses in the DRM protection schemes used by the major eBook formats. A discussion you wouldn't typically have with a novelist.

Data Domain: An EMC company

Today EMC announced it has acquired majority ownership of Data Domain and effective control of the company.

So what are the changes?

Frank Slootman will head up Data Domain as a product division inside EMC and Data Domain employees will now work for...Data Domain.

Data Domain just happens to be an EMC Company.

Their internal structure and organisation remains intact as do existing products and it appears existing partnerships.

As is the case with acquisitions it's gone from limited communication about strategy to a blizzard of communication about strategy so I'm going to need some time to digest the info drop we've just gotten.

I look forward to working again with a whole bunch of people who were part of Legato in Ireland and the UK. 

SharePoint in the Cloud

StoragePoint's Cloud Adapters allow you to store your SharePoint blobs outside of SQL Server in the Cloud. Microsoft Azure, EMC Atmos onLine and Amazon S3 all shown in the video below.

Looks good, and with all the content people are putting into SharePoint it could be timely.

 

No More Tiers

Professional smart guy Mike Dutch from the office of the CTO in EMC Storage Software Group (SSG) has an interesting post over on The Road to Recovery about Storage Tiers. How we think of them today and perhaps how we should think of them going forward.

Here's a snippet:

Should deduplicated storage be considered a storage tier?  I would say “no” and here’s why: because a technology such as deduplication can span, and optimize across all tiers.

A storage tier is storage space that has availability, performance, and cost characteristics different enough from other storage tiers as to economically justify the movement of data between it and other storage tiers based on the importance (value, performance need etc…) of the data. While storage tiers are often thought of as being tied to a particular type of hardware, e.g.  Flash, FC, SAS, SATA, VTL, PTL, COM (Computer Output Microfiche), or even paper, this is not necessarily the case. For example, highly available cloud or network-based virtual disks could leverage multiple technologies within their single tier.

You can get more at the source. And hopefully this won't be Mike's last foray into the store-o-sphere.

I plan to move back in and attend every meeting

There's doing something and then there's just rubbing it in.

I came back from EMC World to find they had demolished everything around my cube that wasn't my cube. Seriously. It looked like I was protesting something.

I lost my ancient chair, my phone and they moved me to a place with "windows", "light" and "other people".

 

Then to pour salt into the wound they sent me a picture of what they did with the space they reclaimed from me.

I ain't ever leaving the country again.

Steve Todd writes a book

That Steve was writing a book in his spare time wasn't news to me as I read the galleys cover to cover one night and sent him some feedback.

The same feedback I give to everyone who wants their writing to be more than just some writin' on the internet.

Hire an editor.

That's not a knock against Steve it's a must for everyone. Having read my own posts here and read the work of most of the other Snorage Bloggers out there I can put my hand on my heart and say none of us are Hemingway.

None.

Back to Steve's book, which had professional attention from a good editor, this is a software development memoir and not the "guy bets big makes fortune/loses everything" books which you'll find crowding the business section of airport newsagents world wide.

It's how do you innovate at the corporate coal face and still make it home in time for dinner.

Anyone can lose everything and we're only interested in reading about them if the fall was spectacular but on the opposite side anyone who made megabucks from starting their own company and doesn't attribute a fair dollop of their success to being in the right place with a product that did just enough to get by at that perfect moment (That is they were lucky), is nothing more than a damn liar. 

Common sense says that startups are vibrant and nimble while established companies are staid and have the turning circle of an oil tanker as Captained by someone who's been into the cooking sherry a few bottles too many.

Well that's also common nonsense.

Startups are all grind for what you hope is a big pay off. You can easily go from failed startup to failed startup and never get that pay off. Ever But in the same space of time you can be personally successful numerous times inside a large corporation if you have a pioneering spirit and the ability to get things done.

And that's what Steve's book is about, being innovative and successful inside what the common nonsense says are places where innovation should not bloom.

Do you VP?

On Friday I mentioned that Virtual Provisioning was available at no extra charge for new DMX-4 and V-Max systems.

Earlier today I was told that it's available for DMX-3, DMX-4 and V-Max systems, new or otherwise at no extra charge.

DMX-3, DMX-4 and V-Max systems. Virtual Provisioning. No extra charge.

Symmetrix admins, over to you.

Driving Directions

The boss is in Santa Clara for an afternoon meeting.

I've enclosed some driving directions from EMC to his destination. East coast? West coast? Seven minutes by car.

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