Storagezilla

EMC Unified Storage Community

The EMC Unified team have put together a community for customers on ECN focused on EMC Unified Storage. Various members of EMC Unified will be around to engage while others, probably more on the development side, will be happy to lurk.

Go check it out, start some discussions and share your insight.

Saving weblinks to org-mode from Safari

In a prior post, I mentioned that I use Emacs's org-mode to organize my notes and tasks. I recently setup org-mode's Capture capability to easily record the deluge of thoughts that come at random throughout the day. While reading the documentation, I discovered the solution to my link saving woes, org-protocol. In particular, the ability to capture links to an org file directly from a web browser as demonstrated in this screencast.

via jcardente.blogspot.com

As a heavy OneNote user when I'm capturing stream of thought I have to give it up to John for using Emacs org-mode.

It doesn't matter what Steve and Mich say John, you'll always be hardcore to me. ;-)

NFSv4.1/pNFS BakeAthon at EMC

BakeAthon week is coming.

A few times a year vendors, users and members of the FOSS community get together to hammer on each other’s technology and check interoperability.

The week starting the 4th of October it’s NFSv4.1/pNFS testing. Hosted in Massachusetts at the EMC Unified Storage Division building.

DART 6.0 was the first commercial implementation of NFSv4.1/pNFS, you’ll find instructions for use buried in the latest Celerra Network Server Command Reference Manual, and while it may take a year or two yet until people begin to transition from NFSv3 support on EMC Storage is here today.

Look at the client side stuff. Poke it, test it but be aware that going forward we think NFSv4.1/pNFS are going to be a very important part of storage infrastructure.

Very important.

How to Tell if Your Cloud Files Are Vulnerable to Drive Crashes

What’s fog?

Fog, is a cloud that’s touching the ground.

And when it comes to cloud storage you can find yourself standing in thick fog were you to investigate where exactly in the cloud your files are stored.

You can download as many copies of a file as you want but if your public cloud storage provider tells you it’s keeping three or multiple copies of your file in it’s storage system how can you tell that they’re not all sitting on the same devices in the same server? Or in the same rack? Or the same data centre?

How can you tell that they’re in different countries or across continents if that’s what you’re paying for and how vulnerable are you to failures?

How to Tell if Your Cloud Files Are Vulnerable to Drive Crashes

This paper presents a new challenge—verifying that a remote server is storing a file in a fault-tolerant manner, i.e., such that it can survive hard-drive failures. We describe an approach called the Remote Fault-Tolerance Tester (RFTT). The key technique in an RFTT is to measure the time taken for a server to respond to a read request for a collection of file blocks. The larger the number of hard drives across which a file is distributed, the faster the read request response. Erasure codes also play an important role in our solution. We describe a theoretical framework for RFTTs and show experimentally that RFTTs can work in practice.

The Geek at home

Where is your home IT lab located?

What’s in it?

All the G’s.

Quick blog post while I resist the urge to literally, literally fling my work laptop out of the second floor home office window.

When I see the HD grind away for as long as it has been I start to get the warm and fuzzies about offline VDI.

A few other things I’m feeling pretty good about at the moment are GemStone and Greenplum.

Gemstone you’ll recall was acquired by VMware a while back and SAP and Oracle have decided doing things in-memory is a wave of the future.

Here’s Hasso Plattner interviewing Hasso Plattner about in-memory database technologies.

  

Remember folks, just like Larry Ellison’s video where he’s standing looking off out to sea as golden sunlight rains down upon him while Titanic style music swells in the background these people are wealthy enough to be eccentric.

It’s us regular folks who’d be called insane.

The upside to this acknowledgement from both men that in-memory will mean a lot to specific types of applications is that GemFire from GemStone is already shipping as part of VMware vFabric today.

Onto Greenplum, what with IBM putting a bid on Netezza I’m feeling pretty good about EMC Greenplum right now. Having spoken to some of the people involved Massively Parallel Processing is the way this stuff should be done and the way it’s done in the data centres of the hyperscale application providers.

The database is changing.

Greenplum are hiring.

EMC Greenplum are hiring. It’s for jobs working on Massively Parallel Processing Database Voodoo, based in San Mateo California.

Click here for Careers at EMC Greenplum.

Cloud my apps? Cloud my games!

I play a lot of videogames, shocking I know.

What this means is that i spend a lot of my time waiting for things to be patched and updated. My XBOX 360, that has updates that need to be downloaded and applied. My PS3? That too has updates which need to be downloaded and applied. then there’s the PC which appears to spend most of my bandwidth downloading various patches, fixes and driver updates numerous times per week.

So tonight after watching the progress bar of the latest System Update for my Wii crawl across the screen at a snails pace down my very poor and highly contended ADSL link I fired up Metroid Other M and then watched Samus talk about her feelings in a beautifully rendered cutscene for a good ten minutes while I slowly died from the boredom of it all.

All I wanted to do was shoot a Space Pirate in the face with a missile. There has to be a better way than this?

And maybe there is.

As we’re all busy talking about running our desktops and apps in the cloud why not our gaming too? Will my PS4 or XBOX 720 or Wii HD3D have local storage media? I’d count on it. Will they deliver Multi-GB Triple A games as downloadable content probably allowing you to pre-order them so they can trickle them down to your system the way Steam does before unlocking them on launch day? I’d bet on it.

Will they allow you to play games directly online? Probably not as that changes the balance of power from the platform holder to the publisher, the console becoming a dumb terminal for the game publisher’s cloud but it’s probably something that will happen for game demos.

Why do we download GBs of data for a 15 minute taster of game play we’ll never look at again after one run through? Stream it into a browser instead.

Today we already have Quake Live, which is Quake 3 in a browser. OnLive, which is the concept of server farms doing all the processing and sending you a highly compressed display stream to your Browser, Gaikai which wants to act as a game advertising network by allowing potential buyers to play vignettes from games accessible directly from an ad on a webpage displayed in your Browser. And OTOY which positions itself as a ‘Render Cloud’ for movies and games. Streaming data yet again to your Browser.

See the pattern?

They all have their problems. Quake Live being an older game you can’t modify. Which is half the fun of most Quake games. I remember the grappling hook mod in Quake which when used blasted Johnny Weismuller’s trademark Tarzan Call out of your speakers. That was always interesting when you were playing in the College computer lab and were supposed to be working on a project.

The other three will always be constrained by the bandwidth on your end regardless of how much processing power they can stand up on theirs. As someone who barely gets email when all the little darlings come home from school and open up blue murder on each other across the internet in teh last game that shouldn’t have been sold to them this shift could curtail my gaming experience.

I don’t doubt that in the coming generations of gaming you’re going to see game publishers looking to run their games on tin they control while they sell you a subscription to play it. Just like Massively Multiplayer Online games today but with no software worth pirating. OnLive, Gaikai and OTOY want to get rid of your processing unit and sell you time on theirs, game publishers on the other hand will probably be happy to let you keep yours to do all the expensive graphics work while they feed you the intelligence off their cloud.

Some of them already are holding your save games on their cloud as one of their anti-piracy measures, the boxes clearly stating you must have an internet connection to play, we’re not that far away to what’s in the box being a collection of art assets while a farm of Vblocks (You knew it was coming) calculate if an enemy has seen you hiding in the shadows or if you’ve flown that space ship through a planet and not around it.

Does that fix the eyeball rolling tedium of game patching? Not yet. But it could take me to the point where I either don’t notice or no longer care.

Now back to finding that energy tank upgrade I missed earlier tonight.

Modern Virtual Applications designed for Modern Virtual Storage.

Being part of the sales organisation my reaction to the VPLEX trial program was resoundingly negative. I don’t do free and here EMC gives you a VPLEX for 90 days and you hammer the hell out of it.

But then I started thinking, while the focus has been on juggling legacy applications running inside VMs what could you do with net new applications written using VMware vFabric running with VPLEX AccessAnywhere?

That I can support, people developing their modern applications to run on modern distributed cache coherent storage. People need systems to develop on, so have at it.

NetApp/Oracle both lose ZFS suit.

Rendering the judgement Jeff Browning predicted to me via email when NetApp first filed their suit against Sun, NetApp and Oracle appear to have shot one another and then both crawled off the field.

It smells to me like NetApp had Oracle on this, they had them but their legal team with it’s awful track record of patent trolling in court (See NetApp Vs BlueArc for more patent troll action) couldn’t get it done but were Oracle entirely innocent they’d fight this all the live long day. Look at Oracle Vs SAP over TomorrowNow where Oracle filed five separate complaints and wanted over $1B in damages or HP Vs Hurd where Larry Ellison publically stated that HP’s actions were damaging HP’s relationship with Oracle.

I’d have thought buying Sun and competing with HP in every market sector they’re in except printers (The year isn’t over yet) and then picking up a guy HP paid $40M+ to go sit on a beach for 24 months would have done most of the damage, but it’s Larry’s world and I just live in it.

So what is the future of ZFS beyond Oracle Solaris? It’s out there, it’s not coming back and it probably suits both companies to ensure what is or isn’t covered by any settlement is murky. They can’t pull it back but they can try and scare you off. It also suits both companies that Oracle doesn’t release any enhancements it makes to ZFS under the CDDL until the last possible moment to ensure the open source version of ZFS is always trailing behind the stuff people are paying Oracle for.

And that’s Oracle’s right but something people have missed.

All in all this episode was a dirty piece of work that ended in a back room and a set of sealed documents which someone will probably go looking for under Freedom of Information.

“We hope that this level of openness will help raise the bar on how people pursue intellectual property suits.” – Dave Hitz

Dave, from filing the initial complaint in patent trolling East Texas to issuing a terse two paragraph settlement notice if this incident lowered the bar any further you’d have to limbo under it.