Understanding the accumulation of data
Considering the history of computing, from the enterprise to the home.
VMware is in an enviable but tricky situation: The company must work closely with hardware partners, keeping these prime sales and promotional channels happy and supportive. But VMware must also innovate around proprietary OEMs, subverting their products with integrated software before a rival steps up with an integrated alternative.
Every day, I’m briefed by another company with a range of products from entry-level to high-end. And every day I try to figure out their naming scheme: It seems most IT vendors follow the naming schemes of car companies, but few use the same naming system!
No small storage company has had more press coverage and “buzz” than “ioMemory” maker, Fusion-io. I have long marveled at the company’s ability to attract attention, but this has rub some analysts wrong. How, they argue, as component vendors enter their space, can a premium company with proprietary products compete over the long term?
Release after release, Microsoft pushes Windows forward. Yet the operating system is continually undermined by the “value-focused” low-end machines pushed by the majority of OEMs. This race to the bottom has tarnished Windows for a decade and now threatens to derail Windows 8. Microsoft must do something to stop the crap before it’s too late!
Cisco made a massive strategic blunder in the last decade, aggressively moving into consumer devices rather than focusing on their core enterprise and service provider markets. It seems that Cisco is now in the process of rectifying this mistake, but charting a path to growth is an entirely different matter!
The computer industry loves buzzwords. “Greenfield” is a popular way to describe all-new infrastructure built with no regard for legacy compatibility. But what’s the opposite? Lately, I’ve been hearing companies use the term, “brownfield” to describe a solution that is compatible with existing hardware or software. But a quick look at the dictionary reveals what an absolutely terrible term that is!
Samba is becoming more and more important. Windows servers will increasingly use SMB 3.0 as their networked storage protocol in Windows Server 2012 and Hyper-V 3. And EMC’s purchase of Likewise means the rest of the storage industry is looking for an SMB stack. But I’m most interested to see what Active Directory support means for future home and business devices.
If you do any sort of spreadsheet work, you’ll find these functions incredibly useful. I know regular expressions can be intimidating, and I hate that they’re not compatible outside Google Spreadsheets, but it’s worth learning these regex functions!
Many of you have probably heard the name of Alan Turing, but most of those probably don’t appreciate the extent of his contributions. To say that he invented the modern world is an overstatement, but he did dream up the computers we see around us today, and helped win World War II in the process. But the story of Alan Turing is as much about exclusion and defeat as it is of genius.
If I could only attend one conference next year, it would be the Storage Developer Conference. Any storage developer who geeks out about storage as much as me should definitely be there next year. And the rest should watch the web site (and this blog) as the presentations and videos are released!
Ideas in IT come in waves, and recently I’ve been hearing about a great capability: On-demand live replicas of production virtual machines. Want to test your DR environment? Spin up a live sandbox in the cloud or at a service provider using VMware ESX. And if there’s a real disaster, you can always run there for real!
Long-time readers of my blog may remember my adventures with my 2009 27″ iMac – adding eSATA, displaying all of Hamlet, and turning it into a monitor. That last bit has become increasingly handy lately, as I’ve repurposed that now-old iMac as a monitor and server. Here are some tips, tricks, and lessons if you’d like to do the same!
What does OpenFlow mean for networking and networkers? This is far from resolved, and the rise of “software-defined storage” and the greater “software-defined” datacenter movement makes it relevant beyond networking. Are we infrastructure folks to become programmers? Will SDN lead to a shift towards the DevOps mentality? And is any of this really relevant to non-service provider enterprise IT?
I have waged a long-standing battle against the sexist and offensive use of scantily-clad, non-technical “models” at technical trade shows. Sometimes known as “booth babes”, the use of women in this way harms our entire industry and makes companies look stupid, to boot. But when a recruiting firm uses such offensive tactics, it does even more harm, verging on illegal!
I am an avid Google Reader user, so I’m thoroughly annoyed by Google’s decision to kill it as of July 1. But there’s no stopping the tide, so I’ve made the move to Feedbin as a Reader replacement as of today. It’s a slick, snappy web application with a committed developer and, critically, support for Reeder, my favorite offline RSS reading application. Let’s hope this works!
As most of my readers are probably aware, I run the Tech Field Day event series, bringing in a panel of independent IT folks like myself with cool companies. This week is Storage Field Day 3, and I thought you might like to know a bit about what we’ve got planned!
I am a heavy (and paying) user of Dropbox, using it both for business and personal storage and synchronization. Although I find the service incredibly useful, Dropbox is far from perfect, especially for business users. So I thought I would take a few moments to talk about what I’d like to see Dropbox improve.
The iPhone 5 gets decent battery life, considering how thin it is, but it certainly doesn’t last all day. That’s why I decided to pick up a Mophie Juice Pack Air battery case for it. How does this compare to the Juice Pack for the iPhone 4? And is it worth $99? Read on for my full review!
I am lucky enough to have received a Nifty MiniDrive for my Retina MacBook Pro, and am in process of putting it through its paces with a SanDisk 64 GB SDXC card. One of the first concerns I had is the steal-ability of such a small, valuable, content-rich item. So I decided to protect it using Mac OS X’s FIleVault 2 full-disk encryption technology. Here’s a step-by-step guide and my post-encryption thoughts!
Do you love storage? Are you in the Seattle area? Join us for Storagebeers tonight at Joey Bellevue!