This is probably a good idea. A company needs a single name, and NetApp is what lots of people (even me) have long called the company. Plus, it’s never good to have your company name be the same as one of your products, at least when you make more than one. And NetApp has lots of different products, many of which are not network appliances…

They’ve added a new logo, too, which ironically looks like a thick blue dolmen to me, but was probably supposed to evoke a door and the letter, N. I always liked the old round peg in a round hole idea, myself… But then again, I always kinda liked yellow and purple and silver storage devices, too!

Remember the old days, when it was Apple Computer, HP still stood for Hewlett-Packard, Sun for Stanford University Network, and EMC for Evil Machine Company? (Just kidding, guys, I know it was Egan, Marino and Einstein’s equation…) But the world will end if IBM ever changes its logo!

Update: More coverage:

• Marc Farley liked the old logo better
• Robin Harris is wined and dined by NetApp in New York – where’s my invite, guys?
• Rajeev Karamchedu thinks it looks like an IBM lego house…
• Zerowait calls it a staple and compares it to New Coke – Ouch!
• The Register is even less complimentary…

Image by Andrew Dunn courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, cc-by-sa-2.0

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2008. | The Artist Formerly Known As Network Appliance
This post was categorized as Computer History, Enterprise storage. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

Here’s a quick primer for those of you who aren’t familiar with it, and thus are wondering why anyone would get stoked over a filesystem!

ZFS (originally “zettabyte file system” but now just ZFS) takes the essential technolgy from file systems and volume managers and stirs it together into one important new way to manage storage.  It’s an open source project started and managed by Sun, using the CDDL license (so Richard Stallman wouldn’t approve).  It’s loved by both Sun and Apple which makes it much more important.

See, ZFS will probably replace UFS (on Sun), HFS+ (on Mac), and every other file system and volume management product out there, especially on these platforms.  And I expect to see it appear on Linux once the tricky bits are resolved (which have to do with licensing not technology…)

ZFS creates a truly flexible, extensible, and full-featured pool of storage across systems and disks.  No more (of the old) arcane syntax, commands, ridiculous GUIs (ahem, Sun), and unnatural limitations of old system storage management.  With ZFS, you add some disks, get some space, and use it.  But it gets cooler than that…

ZFS “zpools” (file systems) live on “vdevs” with striping and optional RAID-Z/Z2 (which is double-parity kinda like RAID-6).  And, get this, every block is protected with checksums to ensure that the rapidly rising incidence of disk errors won’t bite you.  Want capacity?  128-bit addresses mean near-infinite space (in theory).  Oh, yeah, and all blocks are “copy-on-write” for snapshots and clones, something that barely works on most desktops and workstations.

But alas, there are some limitations…  Adding (and especially removing) vdevs is hard (read: maybe impossible) depending on how your storage was set up.  Stacked RAID is impossible, so no “Z+Z2″ for you!  And, until Sun integrates Lustre, there is no clustering support.

And then there’s the fact that Sun and Network Appliance are actively suinging each other over the fact that the technology in ZFS has ended up looking an awful lot like their bread and butter super file system, WAFL.

So there you have it.  If you’ll be in Washington DC on March 4, or Durham NC on March 6 and are interested in this topic, and the wider world of storage and server virtualization, I’d love for you to register and attend this free seminar!

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2008. | ZFS: Super File System!
This post was categorized as Apple, Enterprise storage, Terabyte home. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

Apple pulled the plug in typical fashion on February 19, closing the online Apple store down and reopening without an announcement. Users were greeted by cheaper and expanded iPod Shuffles and a new rev of the Xsan SAN filesystem product. It was quickly noted that the latter now supported third-party Fibre Channel storage arrays, but little mention was made of Apple’s own FC array product, the Xserve RAID.

It turns out that there was a reason for the oversight. Visitors to the former home of the product on Apple’s web site were greeted instead with a splash page pointing them to Promise Technology’s VTrak E-Class array, and all documentation for Xsan 2 prominently features the Promise array. Users fumed, bloggers blogged, and Apple said nothing about the demise of their product.

Gizmodo finally teased something like an official statement from Apple later in the day. Apple’s Anuj Nayar admitted that the product was no more, and claimed the company would still sell drive modules “while supplies last.” SearchStorage.com got a much more official-sounding answer, but it remains the same: Xserve RAID is gone.
Users were having none of this. Although the Xserve RAID was outdated, with PATA disks and 2 Gb Fibre Channel, most expected a refresh. And they voiced exasperation with Apple’s quiet retirement and less-than-strong statements of continuing support for existing customers. A few users suggested stocking up on spares, while others defended Apple’s cutting off of a “non-core” product line.

At the end of the day, it does seem to be in Apple’s best interest to allow third parties to handle RAID array development and sales, as TidBITS points out. But it would have been a wiser choice to handle their often fanatical customers with more concern and forthrightness. At the very least, the company should issue a statement about the demise of the product and their continued support for existing customers.

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2008. | Apple Customers Vent Over Ex-Xserve RAID
This post was categorized as Apple, Enterprise storage, Terabyte home. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

Let’s start with today’s good news. Apple updated Xsan with broader support for third-party Fibre Channel hardware, making a good product better. Although it requires Leopard, Xsan 2 now allows a single Mac to access multiple SAN devices, improving performance and flexibility. Geared towards the company’s primary professional customer base, Xsan lets a large number of Mac machines share Fibre Channel-connected volumes and file systems.

Now the bad news. I’ve long loved Apple’s simple Xserve RAID for the same reason I loved my old iPod – it was simple, lacking about half the features of my half-decade-old Nomad Jukebox, but so easy to use that I actually, you know, used it! The Xserve RAID was severely limited by comparison to every other enterprise storage array. No snapshots, thin provisioning, tiered storage, deduplication, etc, etc… But it worked. And that was plenty for the company’s core user base, especially if they were using it with Xsan, as probably 90% were. Before Microsoft coined “simple SAN”, Apple delivered it.

But no more. Now, the company redirects visitors to the old Xserve RAID URL to Promise’s web site, and their decent VTrak E-Class RAID system. This Fibre Channel RAID array is up to date with 4 Gb interfaces, SATA, and SAS, and, although basic, is not as stripped down as the old Apple product. But I’ll miss it. I especially loved the nifty LED activity bar graphs, the identifier buttons, and the Appley goodness of the industrial design.

Update: Yup, everyone is noticing the change now!

• TUAW: XServe Raid no longer available, Apple partners with Promise
• Computerworld: Apple outsources its server storage to Promise Technologies
• StorageMojo: Apple’s Xserve RAID bites the dust

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2008. | Apple Revs Xsan and Kills Xserve RAID?
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Pictured below is Apple’s dimensioned image of the MacBook Air from the tech specs at apple.com. This matches the illustration on the Design page of the site. Superimposed over the image is a red box measuring 12.8 by 0.76 inches, calibrated to the width of the MacBook. Notice that the notebook is much thinner than the red box – about 25% thinner.

This wouldn’t be a big deal normally – it’s just a harmless illustration, right? But “thin” is the selling point of this machine. It’s the whole value proposition. So showing the computer as thinner than it actually is could be a major sales boost.

How does this compare to other Apple product images? The MacBook Pro, which also uses thin as a selling point, is dead on in this side view (adjusted to close the lid). And the iPhone is exactly correct, too. So if Apple can get it right with their other products, why not the MacBook Air?

Try This For Yourself

1. Get a ruler (remember them?)
2. Visit apple.com and find some edge-on photos of products
3. Measure their width and thickness
4. Divide the width by the thickness that you measured and compare that to the listed specs.

A 12.8 by 0.76 inch MacBook Air should come in just under 17 times as wide as it is thick, but Apple’s illustrations are over 23 times wider than they are thick!  This would make it .55 inches thick!  Funny, though, that the side and top views aren’t distorted at all!
Back to the Toshiba and Apple Comparison 

As for the Toshiba, it was livable. It only had one USB port, too, and lacked an optical drive. Like the MacBook Air, it’s CPU was a bit underpowered, and the hard drive was too slow (and even lacked a cache). But I was able to get my work as an IT manager done on a daily basis, and it was amazingly portable. Being narrower and shallower than the Apple, I used a compact bag, too, which lightened my load considerably.

I’d definitely consider a MacBook Air for my personal use, but it’s hard to justify at that price. Especially with that flash drive! I’m not bothered by the battery issue except as far as travel goes – gotta look for outlets in the airport!

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2008. | Is Apple Fibbing With Their MacBook Air Renderings?
This post was categorized as Apple, Terabyte home. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

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?

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2007. | No More CDs
This post was categorized as Apple, Personal, Terabyte home. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2007. | Google Revs Apps
This post was categorized as Apple, Terabyte home. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

Buyers have a grand total of 2 days to enjoy their downloaded video before losing access to it forever. Not that I used this source, and not that they really had much content, but it should put the fear in anyone who does buy DRM-ed content online.

I personally use Apple’s iTunes Store and Amazon Unbox on TiVo fairly frequently, and both could easily lock me out of my purchases if they so desired. I’ve already been bitten by the handcuffs put on Amazon by content providers – new releases can’t be re-downloaded within so many days (usually 90 from the looks of it) even if you didn’t watch them yet. I’ve so far paid for 3 rental movies that I didn’t get to see because they were deleted off the TiVo before I could watch them. At least they were $.99 sale items…

By the way, being the “do no evil” company (and probably lacking customers for this service) Google has decided to refund 100% of Video purchase cost in the form of Google Checkout credits. At least they are being nice-ish…

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2007. | DRM Lock-In Becomes Lock-Out
This post was categorized as Apple, Personal, Terabyte home. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

Now a handful of storage players are talking about SSD’s again, including some respectable names like LSI and Xiotech and some lesser-known outfits like Solid Data Systems and Texas Memory Systems. IDC is predicting mainstream uptake of the technology, too, but note that they’re mostly talking about the PC market, not enterprise storage.

I say that if SSD ever gains footing in the enterprise, it’ll most likely be in a virtualized hybrid system, acting like a mega-cache. Or maybe a non-RAM permacache, if you will! Of course, we’ve seen just how much uptake that feature has had, eh EMC? But hey, it could happen. Even though Apple is soaking up more than a quarter of the world’s NAND flash this year, maybe they’ll force prices down. Or maybe Samsung’s or Hynix’s PRAM will conquer the world!

Let’s get serious, folks. What good is SSD? It improves random access read performance over disk at the expense of longevity, throughput, and, well, expense! ReadyBoost looked like a nice application for flash memory, since the potential content was bounded and could fit on a flash drive, but it seems to have done precisely nothing for performance.

If enterprise applications could benefit from better random access performance, we’d be putting large amounts of memory in front of the disks already. Oh, wait, that’s right, we already do that! Modern enterprise arrays have gobs of cache, more than any SSD, and use it quite effectively. Remember the old RAID-5 penalty?

SSD just serves to remind me of one of those performance-tuning axioms I learned long ago: It’s always better to let an intelligently-designed system manage itself than try to second-guess it. This applies to all areas of system performance tuning, from filesystem and LUN layouts to cache tuning. And this is why permacache and things like it never caught on.

And it’s why SSD will continue to play just a bit part in the enterprise until it’s just as cheap as disk. Like that’ll happen anytime soon.

Edit: Looks like I got the name wrong – the EMC SSD was the Orion.  Introduced in 1989, this evolved into the Symmetrix in 1992.  I used one of these back at Texaco in the 1990′s.

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2007. | Wherefore Art Thou, Solid State Disks?
This post was categorized as Apple, Computer History, Enterprise storage. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

This on board flash memory is what makes the drive a hybrid. If you listen to the marketing spin, you would think that this drive would dramatically improve response time and battery life, but a thorough review over at Tom’s Hardware shows that this isn’t the case, even for a laptop running Microsoft’s Windows Vista.

Vista is the only operating system that’s currently capable of taking advantage of the flash memory in a hybrid drive. See, these drives contain an extended version of the serial ATA command set which allows the host to direct I/O to either the flash or the magnetic platter – the drive doesn’t do it on its own.

So hybrid drives are more of a packaging exercise that a real technology improvement. They simply allow operating system to access flash memory and use it as it sees fit. While I’m certain that other operating systems, especially Linux, will quickly support this flash memory, I’m much more dubious about the long-term impact on it. Intel has their own specification for adding flash memory to an x86 motherboard called Turbo Memory (code name Robson) which is already gaining traction with many OEMs, including Apple! In practice, hybrid drives are just alternative to Robson.

So what will be the impact of hybrid drives on the world of enterprise storage? Probably very little, at least for the time being. Tests of Microsoft’s ReadyBoost technology have shown the practical impact of flash memory of operating system is small. Solid state disk technology is unlikely to gain widespread use without some real performance improvements to report, and if it ever does it would probably be implemented very differently than the current crop of hyper drives, or Intel’s Rob son for that matter. So hybrid drives are here, but no one cares.

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2007. | Hybrid Drives Are Here – But they’re Irrelevant to Enterprise Storage
This post was categorized as Enterprise storage, Terabyte home. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.