Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat

My mom had a laugh way back then, when I got my first job in this industry: ” I always knew you’d wanted to be an architect,” she said, “but why does it have to be closets and garages?” That was me, Storage Architect at last!

These days, when another parent at the soccer game or church asks what I do for a living, I go through a little semantic dance.  I start with business consulting, move on to big companies and their computer systems, and finally mutter something about data storage.  If I told them I consulted in the field of enterprise storage, they’d probably think of big parking lots and a rental car agency.  It was different in Massachusetts, of course.  There, I could just say ” the stuff EMC does” and they would have a pretty good idea.

But EMC, and Massachusetts, is not the real world, bringing me to today’s topic: information, data, and storage.  We are storage people, and we work in the storage industry, but storage is not important to the world at large.  They think about information, first, and occasionally about data.  Mostly, our industry is a negative in the real world: “my computer died and I lost my data”, or “my credit card company lost a tape of personal data”.

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“There are two kinds of people in this world: those who believe there are two kinds of people in this world, and those who don’t.”

This week, EMC’s Chief Development Officer, Mark Lewis, posted a thoughtful blog “episode” supposing that there are two kinds of data in this world: OLTP and all of the rest.  It’s an interesting idea, so let’s bat it around a little.

Mark claims that, as technology allows data to be better structured and classified, the old distinction between structured and unstructured will disappear.  Surely, many types of unstructured data are gaining tagging and searchability as they move into a networked world.  E-mail is clearly semi-structured at least, and on-line document repositories like SharePoint and Google Docs have followed in the footsteps of Lotus Notes and others to bring structure to the file server.  I know of lots of businesses with historical applications that are transitioning to structured, tiered, and archivable formats, as well.  So we’re certainly moving in that direction, but I think it’s too soon to say that unstructured data is at an end.

I doubt that Mr. Lewis believes that all data is structured, either.  His job is to make sure that EMC does not become irrelevant like so many other big Massachusetts technology companies, so he’s certainly trying to get in front of the market.  As data gains structure, storage products that exploit it will undoubtedly be in demand.  So EMC is wise to work on XAM and to purchase XHive.  But I doubt that the bulk of their revenues will come from storage systems integrated with data structures anytime soon.

The core of Mr. Lewis’s discussion revolves around classifying data according to performance, and latency in particular: his OLTP type needs each transaction to flow quickly, while his “web” type is characterized by other attributes.  This metadata would be communicated to the storage system through some structured mechanism like XML.

Undoubtedly, latency is one way to divide up the world of data.  But is this single element, the low latency requirements of OLTP applications, truly a valid way to characterize the entire wide world of data?  It seems to me an excellent way to isolate one data type, but I believe that there are many others which also need isolation, examination, and tuned storage services.  I understand the argument that OLTP systems need exceptional storage, but I don’t feel that this distinction suggested by Mr. Lewis is the correct way to split enterprise data.

Me?  I believe there are lots more than two kinds of people in this world.

So thin provisioning is everywhere! Well, at least that’s what you would think if you’ve read all the press releases this year. It seems like everyone has just announced and provisioning. So how can you tell them apart? Here are a few easy questions to ask!

1. Is it generally available? Many vendors have announced thin provisioning as a future feature in their next generation software or hardware. But not all of them are shipping it today, and some don’t plan on ever delivering it for the box you have on the floor.
2. How thin is thin? Many thin provisioning implementations use a fixed page size, forcing you to add more space than you want. Others are so granular, it makes me wonder how they manage the overhead.
3. Can my relatives get thin, too? Although some arrays can now virtualize other storage behind them, not all can apply thin provisioning to these “cousins”.
4. How about my brothers and sisters? Again, not all storage volumes are created equally. Some arrays can’t apply thin provisioning to snapshot or replication sources or targets.
5. If I get fat, can I go on a diet? Once space has been provisioned to a thin volume, you may not be able to reclaim it if it is no longer needed. Find out if your allocations can be reversed. Note: This is harder than it sounds to engineer!
6. How automated are my allocations? Find out how much overhead and effort you will have to put into managing your thin volumes. Operator time might be more costly than disk space in the long run.

Do any of the storage vendors in the audience want to comment on this?

After sticking staunchly to real CDs for home listening, I finally succumbed and expanded my terabyte house into the digital audio server domain. In the end, it was audiophile Mark Schlack from TechTarget who won me over - if digital audio is good enough for him, then it ought to be good enough for me!

Although both of my TiVos can browse and play mp3 files, they require the television to be on and a special server running on a PC (or so I thought, more on that later). It was critical that any digital music solution be directly browsable and searchable using a remote control, since the kids perk up whenever they hear the big tube on our Sony TV burp to life.

Although there are a good many home music players available, two immediately rose above the rest: the Slim Devices Squeezebox, and the Roku SoundBridge M1001. Both are somewhat similar in that they are designed to connect to a home network and browse and play digital music in a variety of formats to an audio receiver. I rejected out of hand all those devices that lacked their own display, sadly including Apple’s intriguing AirPort Express with Air Tunes.

My research quickly revealed that the Squeezebox was the audiophile-preferred solution with its fancy Burr-Brown digital audio converters, while the SoundBridge was the hackers choice with its open interfaces and wider server compatibility. It was widely claimed that only the Squeezebox supported lossless codecs, but I found that this was not the case - although FLAC must be transcoded, the SoundBridge does support ALAC and even WAV for high quality audio. The difference in DACs made no difference to me, since I would be using a digital (S/PDIF) connection to bypass the SoundBridge’s DAC in favor of the one in my Denon receiver.

In the end, the flexible SoundBridge won me over with its wide range of interfaces. It can browse and stream an iTunes library directly, since Roku licensed Apple’s DAAP API. There are a variety of other DAAP servers that can use, too, including Slim Devices Slimserver! But I settled on the open source Firefly (nee mt-daapd) server, since it was full featured, and lightweight enough to run on an embedded NAS server like the Linksys NSLU2, which I intended to add in short order. The SoundBridge also has an open API and telnet interface!

Making my choice even sweeter, at $127, the SoundBridge was half the price of the Squeezebox, too! I placed my order, and thenerds.net delivered it the very next day, even though I chose ground shipping!

The SoundBridge is amazing! It does exactly what I wanted, letting me listen to the tunes stored on my wife’s and my laptop as well as my home PC server without any configuration required. Once I discovered that you can quickly move from letter to letter with the right and left buttons, locating the right song from our 7800-tune collection could not be easier either.

The one major letdown that I had is that Apple will not allow any other hardware, even under license, to play the protected m4p files purchased from iTunes. Although most of my music is ripped from CD, I have got a few dozen iTunes purchased songs. There is a way to crack that DRM protection on these files, but it galls me to have to hack them open just to listen to them!

All in all, I’m very pleased with my new digital music solution at home. I’m seriously considering buying Roku’s SoundBridge Radio, which would let me wirelessly browse and play music anywhere within range of my access point. And I did add that home server - more on this next time.

I guess I kind of touched Jon Toigo nerve when I said he was “promoting himself”.  Sounds like he took offense to the term, but perhaps he shouldn’t have!

Let me give you some background, gentle reader…  I’ve never worked for a “product company” in the storage industry, I’m a services guy.  And services are all about selling people - their skills and their time.  So rather than promoting a new box or piece of software, we in the services business promote ourselves, which I personally feel is the most honest thing to promote!  After all, we each have different skills - all we services companies can do is try to distill a similar set of skills to offer and hope that people are interested. 

And, frankly, we all engage in self-promotion every time we blog (as a verb).  Blogging is all about rising above the crowd and saying “my opinion is important.”  Unlike traditional media, however, it is democratic:  Anyone can blog, anyone can try to be important, and the world will judge just how important they are.

Perhaps this is why people find corporate marketing blogs (aka blogketing) to be so insidious.  They are, seemingly, not the acts of individual initiative but of organizational co-option and perhaps even surreptition.  We feel that they are somehow less honest, since the person writing the words may be checking his true feelings at the door.

But perhaps not.  I agree with Jon’s assertion that corporate blogs give us a little insight, even if it is packed in salt grains.  And they certainly give us democratic communication - just like anyone can blog, anyone can comment, and blog writers (even the most corporate) tend to read their thoughts.  Plus, as Beth Pariseau noted, the back and forth can be both enlightening and enjoyable to watch!

Blogket away, I say.  Self-promote, too.  It’s a post-modern world: I’ll figure out what your angle is…

One nice thing about living in Ohio is that the Indians don’t sell out every single game (what is it now, Boston, 300 in a row?).  So me and my family are off to see the Red Sox tonight.  First row of the upper deck right above home plate on the first base side, and affordable!  If you happen to be watching the game, look out for us!  We’ll be the ones getting booed by the Tribe fans…

Toot toot again…  That iSCSI vs. Fibre Channel article is in Computer Weekly, a UK TechTarget publication…

XenSource just announced that they’ll embed Symantec-née-Veritas‘ server-side storage virtualization software into their server virtualization offering. This is great news, since server virtualization has boiling for more than a year now with precious little storage integration to be seen. Although XenSource is a distant second in the world of server virtualization, they’re close enough to put heat on leader, VMware. And every time an upstart prompts the market leader to innovate, I’m cheering. Plus, I’ve been a fan of VxVM for decades.

I for one was surprised at the small impact EMC has had on VMware. One systems administrator I talked to enthusiastically pointed out how great it was that big bad old EMC didn’t ruin VMware, but it cuts both ways. EMC has tremendous knowledge of the realities of managing storage in the enterprise, yet this hasn’t much rubbed off on VMware. After all, last I heard, they were still telling users to provision a single LUN for multiple virtual servers, and mixing OS and application data on the virtual C: drive…

Maybe we’ll see a response from EMC. EMC added volume management to PowerPath 4.0 back in 2003, and rumor had it they were developing their own full-featured multi-platform alternative to Veritas Volume Manager/Foundation Suite. Could this be headed into the VMware codebase? That would be a great way to gain some traction outside the storage space!

Cisco’s new product announcements this week got me thinking about our little storage pond.  Sure, VFrame isn’t breaking any new ground compared to Scalent, HP’s Opsware, and BladeLogic, but it’ll be a revelation to Cisco’s customers.  Remember, all the iPod had going for it was Apple’s brand name, customer base, and flawless execution!

The point is, VFrame makes no differentiation between storage and networking, just like Cisco itself.  Look across the rest of Cisco’s storage product line and if you squint hard enough you might be looking at their network line!  This was Cisco’s big contribution to the storage industry: bringing along everything they learn about networking.  For some reason, the rest of the Fibre Channel equipment makers were unable to take the lessons from networking and apply them to storage until Cisco came along.

Cisco’s new switch hardware continues to blur the line between storage and networking.  Although storage products are still separated from network equipment within the company, it’s clear that there’s a lot of technology sharing going on.  I wonder if the advent of 10 gigabit Ethernet will cause the two product lines to come even closer.

Clearly, it’s difficult to differentiate the products - just read the Byte and Switch article about Cisco’s announcement and watch James Rogers “seamlessly” blend Fibre Channel and Ethernet!  Yeah, yeah, like I’ve never made a mistake before!

Edit: Yup, I guess Raffo and the rest are alive - Byte and Switch swapped out the references to “4 gbit/s Ethernet”…

Yeah, I’m a TiVo believer. This thing liberates me from thinking about television shows and schedules - I live my life and watch what I want when I want to instead of thinking “gosh, I better get home Wednesday night or I’ll miss Lost!”

I finally jumped on the Series 3 TiVo in June when they offered a $200 rebate. This is the ultimate TiVo unit - dual tuner, cable and antenna HD, CableCards, nifty OLED display, THX certified… It’s simply to die for. Watching Jon Lester return to the Red Sox last night in 1080i with surround sound was a real treat (once I located the non-blackout channel!) Sadly there’s much less over-the-air HD content here in Ohio than there was in Massachusetts - I’m only picking up PBS, if you can believe that! At least my cable company offers 5 networks (if you count MyNothingTV and CW) and two ESPN channels!

Well, today TiVo released the TiVo HD. My college buddy, Megazone (yes, that’s his real name), released a full review of the unit, and it looks to be a keeper at $299. It still has an eSATA port for adding storage, and rumor has it TiVo will offer a 1 TB RAID array at Best Buy soon. A TiVo marketing guy interviewed at Engadget also slipped in that TiVoToGo will soon be enabled for both the original Series 3 and the new HD.

I still like my plush Series 3 (which came out at $406 after rebate), but if you’ve been waiting to pick up a TiVo, wait no longer. This thing is everything you were looking for!

Unless you have Comcast, that is. They’ll be releasing a software-only TiVo on their OCAP boxes soon that’ll cost you zilch…

Or unless you have SDV cable (which is rare).