Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat

Today, Sun released VirtualBox 2.0, a major revision to the (partially open source) desktop virtualization software. I have long used VirtualBox on my Windows machines as my virtualization product of choice due to its compactness, functionality, and low impact on the host system. Although I’m happy with VMware Fusion on the Mac, I intend to try out VirtualBox there, too, to see how it compares.

If you haven’t already tried VirtualBox, you ought to. It works very well, virtualizing Windows and Linux guests on Windows, Linux, Solaris, and Mac hosts with respectable performance. One thing I really love about it is that it doesn’t bog down my Vista system like VMware with installed drivers and services. It just installs and works and gets out of the way when you’re not using it.

VirtualBox supports shared folders, USB, and has guest additions for Windows and Linux to provide resolution independence and performance boosts. The new 2.0 version adds 64-bit guest OS support for 64-bit hosts along with performance and stability fixes. The Mac version now has a native look and feel and better networking, too.

One really interesting twist for folks interested in desktop virtualization (aka VDI on VMware) is integration with remote desktop protocol (RDP). VirtualBox guests can be configured to act as RDP servers, with thin(ish) clients accessing them over a network and even sharing their USB devices seamlessly. I’m getting pretty excited about the desktop virtualization concept - I’ll be keeping my eyes on companies like stealthy Old Road Computing Virtual Computer to see what they’re up to!

Techdirt’s I Learned It From Watching YOU, Big Content, pointed me to a Washington Post story, Hey, Isn’t That… about how the big old media companies have been repeatedly caught with their pants down, stealing content from us little guys.  This got me thinking again about my own similar experiences.

See, I’ve had my work ripped off by big content providers repeatedly over the years, but never could put into words why it bothered me so much.  I mean, it’s not like I was profiting from that snapshot or HOWTO document, so why should I care if someone else does?

But once you juxtapose the attitude of those same companies about my fair use rights of legally-purchased content, the grain that’s been chafing me becomes clear.  Media companies seem to think it’s ok for them to steal from the little guys (either by choice or through a lack of rigor, but they’ll come after me if I try to do anything at all with their content.  The article’s anecdote of a stolen dog photo used in a sports broadcast surrounded by ominous copyright warnings really sums up the whole situation!

The first time I experienced this was back in 1997 or so, when I received an email from a fellow Linux hippie alerting me that a recent Linux book contained a number of online texts, mine included.  The book, Linux File Systems, was “written” by Moshe Bar, better known for his work on OpenMosix and Xen, but also known as a writer for a number of other books and a columnist for latter-days Byte.  I confronted him about his wholesale copying of my LVM walkthrough in his book, and he apologized, claimed he’d run out of time (which is easy to believe, looking at the book), and blamed his editor.  The publisher, McGraw Hill, claimed the book wasn’t selling well anyway so they couldn’t offer me any compensation.  Being young(er) and foolish(er) at the time, I let it drop.

Over my later years of writing columns and articles for Storage Magazine, InfoStor, and others, I became aware of wholesale unauthorized translation and reprinting of English magazines in other languages.  A number of my articles were published in Russian magazines, for example.  Again, I did nothing but chuckle about seeing my name in Cyrilic.

So why the picture of the Saab 900 above?  Because just last month, I was notified that that exact photo was used by the German paper, Süddeutsche Zeitung, (Nov 23th 2007, page 11) without permission and in violation of the license.  This has happened to a number of my other Wikimedia Commons photos, with appearances in a number of papers and magazines that I know of, and probably more besides…

What’s to do?  I suppose I should have pushed harder when these uses were brought to my attention.  I suppose I could have banded together with others to protest.  But I did nothing.  What would you do?

Marc Farley’s challenge of listing all the devices on our home networks got me thinking –I’ve got an awful lot of Linux devices, but all of them are infrastructure rather than interactive PCs. Of the 10 devices currently attached my home network, four are Linux based (two TiVos, a Linksys router, and Linksys NAS), three are Windows PCs (two Vista, one server 2003), and the rest run various embedded operating systems (a Roku SoundBridge, an HP printer, and a 3Com Audrey running QNX).

Notice that all of my PC’s run windows, while all of my servers run Linux! This got me wondering what role Linux plays in enterprise storage. Sure, Linux has a huge role to play on the computing side of the equation. But which enterprise storage devices are based on a Linux kernel?

Xiotech made a big splash a few years ago by announcing that they would switch from a proprietary operating system to Linux. I remember seeing Open-E’s Linux based iSCSI software somewhere, and hearing that Snap Appliance (now part Adaptec) of was using it as well. I consulted LinuxDevices.com and found out about Infrant (now part of NetGear), MaXXan (nee CipherMax), and Raidtec.

There have got to be more! So tell me, who is using Linux as their embedded kernel and why? Was it for convenience, hardware support, or perhaps a financial decision?

It isn’t every day that a new hard disk technology is introduced, but Samsung recently did just that with the introduction of their SpinPoint MH80. This conventional looking SATA hard drive packs 256 MB of NAND flash memory alongside two conventional platters totaling 160 GB of traditional magnetic storage. Tellingly, it’s a 2.5” laptop drive with only 8 MB of cache.

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.

I’ve said before that Microsoft’s work in the field of enterprise storage was truly remarkable. Every other operating system vendor, as well as the grubby hordes developing Linux and BSD, should be ashamed that the “evil empire” beat them to the punch with great storage ideas like VSS, VDS, and transportable backup integration. Well, it seems Microsoft is changing the SAN landscape in another way - the Simple SAN initiative.

Although most folks haven’t heard about it, Simple SAN is Redmond’s way to force vendors to improve interoperability and ease of installation for networked SAN storage, whether it is Fibre Channel or iSCSI. Continue Reading »