Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat

I’ve been working on a new whitepaper for Hitachi focused on privacy laws in the United States and Europe, and what we mere storage folks can do to help comply with them. It’s pretty amazing stuff - the American system is totally different from the European, no surprise. Where they have sweeping top-down rights to privacy and consistent standards, we have bottom-up point laws, a patchwork of state laws, and self-regulation. I tell you, as someone who cares about privacy (and avoiding identity theft and credit fraud), it makes me want to move to Europe!

But seriously, without scooping the paper (which I’ll link to when it’s published), if you’re interested in learning more about privacy laws, I highly recommend the Privacy Journal’s Compilation of State and Federal Privacy Laws, pictured at right. It’s $31, and loaded with data. Also, check out the Electronic Privacy Information Center web site, another excellent source of information!

The other day, I mentioned that a whitepaper I wrote for Quest Software was adapted into an article for Enterprise Systems Journal.  If you’d like to check out the original whitepaper, it is available online at Quest’s web site (registration required).

I’m also putting together a list of all the articles and whitepapers I’ve written.  Kind of the ultimate toot toot list!

Swing on over to InfoStor for an enlightening article on cutting the costs of disaster recovery by the most excellent Michelle Hope.  I’m proud to be part of this article - it’s packed with common-sense advice.

Not to sound too much like Mr. Toigo, but I’ve been telling people this for a long time: Rather than looking to technology to solve your replication issues, consider cutting the volume of data!  Eliminating data to be replicated or adding a cheap short-distance replication target will go a lot farther than fancy link accelerators or WDM hardware.  And getting to know your data is always a good idea!

I remember a few years ago (after the September 11 air-travel earthquake) talking to a friend and saying that airlines needed to invent a new way to allow people to bring along baggage, since checking bags at the counter had become untenable. Well, it looks to me that a little-used old option has exploded in recent years, with planeside baggage checking becoming the de facto standard, especially for business travelers. But take a look at this photo from Philadelphia last week - has it gotten out of hand?

Certainly gate-checking has been relegated to families, golfers, and infrequent fliers. Look at the lines at check-in gates and baggage carousels these days, and it’s no wonder people like me who fly weekly (or even more often than that) choose to check in online and skip these lines. I recall a family trip where we had 12 items to check (no kidding) and waited in line for over an hour, first to get our check tags and then to send them through the bomb sniffer. And since Americans just can’t seem to figure out that standing back from the baggage claim carousel gives more people a shot at claiming their bag, it’s always an hour-long nightmare after the flight, too.

So we frequent travelers invest in 21″ and 22″ cases and garment bags and head directly to the gate. We pause to get our planeside check ticket (which have gotten laughable - US Airways no longer even gives you a numbered receipt to match!) and drop them off on the jet bridge.

But it’s after the flight that the trouble starts. With so many people taking advantage of what was once just an option for baby strollers and such, exiting the plane has gotten pretty crazy. Look at that photo again - there are more than two dozen people standing along both walls, crowding and slowing the exit to a crawl. And it can’t be easy on the baggage handlers to load and unload the planes extra-quick for these folks.

How long before the airlines start pushing back, forcing gate checking again? All these bags slow security (thanks especially to the ridiculous Ziploc rule), slow boarding, slow loading and unloading (even if the plane is big enough to handle the bags in the overhead compartments), and tax the system in general. But I for one intend to go on checking my bags planeside…

So yesterday we finished ripping our entire CD collection - we’ve now completed our switch to digital music at home.  It’s done.

It amuses me to think of the statistics:

• We have 11,284 tracks stored, including 279 Christmas songs and 549 kids songs!
• Most songs were ripped using LAME at the VBR3 setting in joint stereo
• This music library takes up 58 GB of storage on my NSLU2/Firefly server
• The jewel cases take up six large cardboard boxes, but the original discs take up just two fat CD storage books

We’ve quickly adapted to a hierarchical model for home music distribution.  The main server has everything, so our two Roku Soundbridge players play directly from it.  But we also use iTunes on three machines, and have imported a subset of the music to each based on personal preference.  From these iTunes implementations, we sync a sub-subset to our iPods - a 40 GB click wheel, two iPhones, and two Shuffles.

Although our TiVos can play MP3 files over the network, we don’t bother.  It just seems wrong to turn on the TV to listen to music…  Similarly, we don’t use Windows Media Player for much of anything, even though it’s compatible with the Soundbridges and media server.

We listen to a lot more Internet Radio than I thought we would, too.  Sometimes we’ll even tune in WKSU over the Internet rather than hoping for good FM reception.  And I’m listening to WBUR a lot again, too.

I’ve also started to rip DVDs to watch on the iPhone, and am storing these on the NSLU2 too.   Add in the iPhone versions created automatically by TiVo Desktop Plus, and I’m amassing a large collection of H.264 media.  In fact, I’ve already got 50 GB of H.264 video stored up there!  Makes me want to go get an Apple TV so I can easily watch it at home.  Is the end of the DVD coming soon, too?

Chris Evans’ posting about the lack of 2.5″ Enterprise Arrays got me thinking. About two years ago, I predicted that the 2.5″ form factor would make a significant entry in the enterprise space as a way to bring performance (in the form of more spindles) to the enterprise storage array world. I reiterated this in August when examining the world of enterprise hard drives. So where are these “small form factor” (SFF) arrays?

While you can already buy an amazing miniature RAID array that fits in a 5.25″ drive bay, and 2.5″ drives are seeing widespread use in blades and other compact servers, there isn’t much noise among enterprise array makers about the topic. About the only enterprise makers are Infortrend, ProStor, and HP.

Infortrend trumpeted the “world’s first external SFF array” in October, so at least they were pretty sure no one else sells one. But HP might beg to differ - their MSA70 shipped at the end of last year, supporting up to 25 SFF drives in 2U. They also apparently offer a 20-drive SFF shelf for other MSA systems, but I haven’t seen one.

Finally there’s ProStor with their cool RDX removable disk cartridges for backup. I’d love to see the TCO for these, but there are probably some enterprise users out there.

Like Chris, though, I’ve never seen these things outside a trade show. Is anyone using them? Or are we right in supposing that the weight, power, and heat issues associated with multiplying drive spindles offsets their performance advantages?

As I mentioned before, and again, I’ve been working with a team at Contoural on an e-Book for TechTarget on the topic of email archiving. Chapter 6, focused on running an RFP, was just published. This is sponsored by Symantec.  Go grab a copy for yourself!

Swing on over to Enterprise Systems Journal to check out an article I wrote with Ron Robbins of Quest Software on the top ten best practices for email archiving.  This was based on a whitepaper I wrote for Quest, and I’m pretty happy with how it came out.

So my family is going to see the Nutcracker ballet this weekend - a beautiful holiday tradition, I think. We wanted to rent a copy on video so the kids could get ready to see what it’s all about, but no dice. We can get Barbie, Tom & Jerry, and even Robot Chicken, but no Tchaikovsky!

A-ha! This is the modern world! How about Amazon Unbox on TiVo? No dice.

And iTunes? Let’s see… There’s Barbie and Robot Chicken… Maybe they thought it was a music video?

Merry Christmas to you, too, Apple!

Ok, so after reading the thoughtful response from Spock’s Maia, I thought I must be crazy.  I know that it didn’t say anything about sending a mail to all those people when I clicked “Request Trust”, but she says it would say that and posted a screen shot to prove it.  Was I a dope?

First, let’s get one general item out of the way.  Social networks typically classify people (user objects?) into two types:

1. Users that have already registered on the site
2. Potential new users that we can try to recruit

Generally, when you’re using a social network site, if you request a connection with type number 1, it puts a little “poke” message in their account page or virtual (non-email) inbox on the site.  I usually consider these users fair game for mass requests - they already use the service, so yeah, let’s go ahead and ask them to link up.

Type 2 users are where the spam comes in.  They are not in the site already, so the service will “helpfully” send them an email in your name which requests their participation.  This is obnoxious, and while it’s technically “ham” not “spam”, it is still something I refuse to do.

Now take a look at this screen grab from Spock’s Gmail address book importer:

You tell me.  Does this look like user category 1 or 2?  Will it send them email?  I decided it wouldn’t and selected “Add to Trust Network”.  After all, they must already use the site, right?  Then it sent out over 100 email messages to people who have never heard of the site.  How do I know?  I’ve gotten more than a dozen questions out of the blue from people who I know but haven’t talked to in a while.  Their message is simple:  “What’s Spock?”

For what it’s worth, here’s Spock’s “phase 2″ page requesting to email people.  This is what Maia posted, and what the site puts up for some other random set of less-defined people.  I clicked “Skip” here for good reason…

So enough with the complaints.  I’m ticked off, that’s true, because lots of my contacts are thinking of me as “the guy who just signed me up for some social networking site” rather than “my esteemed business associate” (or whatever else they thought of me).  Some of those contacts are high-ranking business folks who get enough unwanted email already.  Some were potential partners or customers.

The difference between MySpace and LinkedIn is maturity.  MySpace is a playground to impress your friends.  LinkedIn is a rolodex to keep connected with colleagues.  Where does Spock fit in?  (sorry for the campy title…)

On the other hand, I do have to give Maia and Spock some credit for a thoughtful and professional response.