• My State of the Art Thin Provisioning series
  • Storage is Not Getting Cheaper
  • Thin Provisioning: Attacking Storage Utilization
  • De-Allocating is the Core Issue for Thin Provisioning
  • Thin Provisioning: Playing the Telephone Game
  • Monitoring Filesystem Metadata For Thin Provisioning
  • Zero Page Reclaim: Savior of Thin Provisioning?
  • What is WRITE_SAME? Green Eggs and Ham!
  • The Bridge: Veritas Thin (Provisioning) API
  • Is TRIM Useful For Thin Provisioning?
• The Raising the Floor podcast series
  • Raising the Floor 1: Cloud Storage Gateways
  • Talking Cloud Storage Gateways With Nasuni and Cirtas
  • Raising the Floor: How the Cloud Impacts Enterprise IT
• Tech Field Day links
  • Data Robotics Is First Three-Time Tech Field Day Presenter
  • The Nerd’s Going to Have a Field Day! | The Networking Nerd
• And more links!
  • I wrote this piece for SearchStorage: Is PCIe SSD right for you? Deploying PCI Express SSD devices
  • I was interviewed for another thin story: Thin provisioning driven by technology advances, best practices
  • My friend Erin Collopy from HP is starting a blog: A new year, a fresh slate « Social Swimmer
  • Bob Plankers always impresses with his technical writing: How To Create and Measure NTFS & ext3 Disk Fragmentation
  • I loved this idea from Freedom to Tinker: Monitoring all the electrical and hydraulic appliances in your house
  • Chris Mellor spills the beans on EMC’s big announcement next week: Storage Virtualization, Unified and the VNX
  • Chris also posted a great piece about InPhase: How I watched a holographic storage company implode
  • Then there’s this Winextra bit on Microsoft’s Biggest Mistake of 2010
  • A new EMCer blog, Storage Savvy, has a nice pNFS piece: Why pNFS can be a big deal even if NFS4.1 isn’t…
  • Martin Glassborow is always worth reading: Reading the Ruins
  • Floyd Strimling makes a go at prognostication: Fun Alert: Insane 2011 Predictions That May Come True
  • Another great Bill Hill post on cloud: Cloud Crossroads
  • And Ian Foster isn’t happy with Amazon: Amazon – Masters of marketing or perfecting the art of customer dissatisfaction?

Subscribe to my Google Reader feed or follow me on Twitter to see these in real-time.

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2011. | Back From the Pile: Interesting Links, January 7, 2011
This post was categorized as Computer History, Enterprise storage, Everything, Personal, Terabyte home, Virtual Storage. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

I invited two excellent guests to join me for this conversation:

1. Josh Goldstein, VP of Marketing, Cirtas
2. Andres Rodriguez, Founder and CEO, Nasuni

It was a pretty broad discussion, all packed into less than half an hour. I urge you to check out the podcast (and subscribe in iTunes, rss, or email) but I wanted to share a few excerpts. You can also read the entire transcript over at Foskett Services: I’ll be posting it as a series of articles over the next week!

Andres Rodriguez: I think one of the things that hurt StorageNetworks at the time was the fact that they couldn’t deploy the equipment in an efficient, multi-tenant way. And so, if you look at the new cloud architectures, (places like Nirvanix, places like Amazon) those systems are designed from the get-go to be shared among many, many users, and make very efficient use of the equipment and the software running it across that user base.

…

Josh Goldstein: Today, the cloud is built on top of process that are very difficult for most companies to replicate on their on. So, the price you’re paying to your cloud provider includes not just storing your data but also keeping multiple replicas of that data spread across different geographical sites.

You’re highly protected against not only a disk drive failure, but also an entire array failure or even an entire site failure where your information’s still is survived those kinds of events and is remaining accessible to your when you need it.

That’s something that for most organizations to engineer that level of reliability is extremely expensive and difficult for them. The cloud providers have been able to do that at scale and still deliver the capacity to you with that type of protection at a price point that’s really pretty amazing.

…

Andres Rodriguez: I’ll start there and I said anything that traditional storage world, we have file based systems. We have block based systems and that is exactly where Cirtas and Nasuni stand. We are the equivalent of say a company named EMC and NetApp for the cloud world. The approaches are complimentary. And they are both trying to solve the same problem. I’ll start on the file side but Josh can take on the block. But on the file level is really, look, if you want to have something that behaves very much like a file server, say like a NetApp box. It means you are going to have a file system, you want to have a protocol to export it locally on so something like CIFS, you are now going to have access to directory integration so that you can have access control. This is what makes a file server useful in the datacenter.

…

Andres Rodriguez: One of the really interesting things about that is that Josh is essentially describing thin provisioning in the classic sense. But unlike doing thin provisioning and this is the cloud is automatically provisioned. So he is essentially promising the volume. But then the volume is growing gradually, smoothly without any administrative interference. Without you having to worry about it; the volume is filling in its data as it goes. And that is one of the things we talked about in the beginning.

The cloud really allows you to build a different type of storage system, because automatic provisioning is really thin provisioning should be but isn’t. When you’re talking about physical linked arrays that are limited by actual hard drives, you know, running, spindles running in your datacenter.

Again, you can watch the video of the whole conversation right now over at Foskett Services, or you can read the transcripts that will be posted there over the next few days.

Disclaimer: I worked at StorageNetworks, and Nasuni is a client of Foskett Services.

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2011. | Talking Cloud Storage Gateways With Nasuni and Cirtas
This post was categorized as Computer History, Enterprise storage, Gestalt IT, Personal, Virtual Storage. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

Uh, oh, the iPhone refuses to let you download a podcast over 20 MB, even with 3G!

Ever see that screen? You want to download a podcast from the iTunes Store on the iPhone, but you can’t. It’s over 20 MB, so it’s off limits. Surprise! There is a way to stream any podcast of any size to the iPhone, even over EDGE, with no hacking required!

Although Apple and the wireless providers limit downloading to 20 MB, they allow streaming files of any size. This simple feature has been included in the iPhone OS since the very beginning, but it’s not self-evident. In fact, although I’ve told friends exactly how to do it, many still have problems getting the hang of this trick.

How To Stream Any Podcast

Tap the TITLE to stream, not the download button!

Ok, here’s the secret trick:

1. Tap the title of the podcast, not the download button.
2. There is no step two.

That’s it! Seriously, there’s no secret, no hacking, no URLS or tricks. You just tap the title, wait a few seconds, and a QuickTime screen opens up with the podcast streaming over 3G or EDGE. This even works for video podcasts!

Gotchas

Streaming audio of Chicago Public Radio's "This American Life" over AT&T's slow EDGE network!

Although there really isn’t any trickery involved, some patience might be required. I do this all the time since I live in a part of the USA that has no AT&T 3G service. Here’s what I’ve learned:

1. You have to have patience and let the streaming start. It sometimes takes a minute or more before you hear the sweet sound of success.
2. You can not exit the QuickTIme streaming page and still listen. Tap the home button and the audio stops. Read an SMS and the audio stops. Get a battery warning and the audio stops. You get the picture.
3. QuickTime will buffer audio ahead, so it survives road trips through small middle-American wireless dead zones, but this isn’t saved anywhere. Exit and you lose the buffer.
4. You can scrub ahead to skip to the middle or end of a podcast, but it takes some serious patience to let the audio re-sync. And you lose the previous buffer when you do this.
5. This has been in every version of the iPhone OS I’ve tried, way back to day 1. It was more useful back then, too, since the limit used to be 10 MB!

Hopefully the new background audio framework in iPhone OS 4.0 makes this experience a little nicer.

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2010. | How To Stream Any Size Podcast to an iPhone, Even Over 3G or EDGE!
This post was categorized as Apple, Personal. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

The Blue Snowball is the size of a softball and packs killer sound performance

Over the last year I’ve really jumped into recording podcasts, from InfoSmack to the VMware Communities Roundtable. Since I work out of my home office, I’m also an avid audio and video conference user. I’ve long suffered listening to the inaudible and miserable microphones used by so many others, but my own gear wasn’t much better. Wanting better sound, I upgraded my Logitech microphone to the highly-regarded Blue Microphones Snowball desktop USB microphone. Here are my initial thoughts.

Tip: Although Blue Microphones enforces a “minimum advertised price” of $99, Amazon actually sells the Blue Snowball for under $75 with free shipping!

The Blue Snowball

Ironically, the Blue Snowball doesn’t actually come in blue. It’s a white softball-sized usb mic with three selectable audio modes. The Snowball has received great reviews (I first heard about it in Wired magazine) but since Gestalt IT handed out a few as door prizes at our first Tech Field Day in November the raves have been coming in from folks I know and trust.

The great eye of the Blue Snowball peeks out of the retail package

The Blue Snowball impresses from the start. It’s heavier than one would expect thanks to a cast metal housing. The bundled tripod is solid and stable thanks to three low and wide legs. The mic can be located by telescoping the tripod and tilting the Snowball mic itself. But the included USB cable is so burly that its weight tugs the mic out of alignment – I used a slimmer USB A-B cable instead.

The Snowball required no drivers in Mac OS X, setting up instantly. I was able to select it in System Preferences as the default mic, and set Skype to use it, too. I imagine it’s just as easy to use in Windows.

Of the three audio settings, I imagine most will leave the switch in position 1. Being a desktop mic, a directional pattern is most useful. Position 3 is great for recording group conversations, however.

Tip: In Mac OS X, Option-click on the audio slider in the menu bar to quickly select a mic!

How Does It Sound?

Although the Blue Snowball is much hyped in podcasting circles, I wanted to hear the difference for myself. I connected the Snowball and my old Logitech USB mic to my late 2009 iMac and matched the levels in System Preferences. I then recorded the following comparison in Garage Band using the “Male Voice” setting.

Personally, I like the full, rich sound of the Blue Snowball best. The Logitech isn’t as bad as I feared, but the internal iMac mic is just terrible.

An earnest plea: If you are using the internal mic on your computer to record podcasts or Skype, do us all a favor and invest in a halfway decent mic like the Snowball! Amazon sells the Blue Snowball for under $75!

Note: Some of these links include affiliate codes that help pay for this blog. For example, buying an Amazon Kindle with this link sends a few bucks my way! But I don't write this blog to make money, and am happy to link to sites and stores that don't pay anything. I like Amazon and buy tons from them, but you're free to buy whatever and wherever you want.

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2010. | Review: Blue Snowball USB Microphone
This post was categorized as Apple, Features, Personal, Terabyte home. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

I’m really looking forward to joining the CloudCamp “unconference” movement, and will be heading to Columbus, Ohio, at the end of this month for my first Camp!

What’s an “unconference” like CloudCamp? As I discussed on the InfoSmack podcast, it’s a real revolution in the way tech conferences are held. Rather than herding attendees around like cattle and selling them to sponsors (who buy pricey booths and speaking slots), unconferences are user-driven. Think about the difference between a wiki or forum and a corporate web site and you’re getting the idea. When you attend a ‘Camp like this, you are invited to actively participate and even present!

End-user interaction was always the best source of information for me when I went to conferences and expos like Storage Decisions, and CloudCamp is the purest format for this. Many camps are presented in association with other conferences, planned either ahead or behind the main show to share attendees. In my eyes, unconferences are an ideal parallel to the development of business development events like the BD Event recently held in Boston.

If you’re interested in real cloud computing without the hype, why not head to the nearest CloudCamp? And if you happen to be near Columbus, Ohio on June 30, join me at CloudCamp Columbus!

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2009. | Join Me At CloudCamp Columbus, June 30, 2009!
This post was categorized as Enterprise storage, Personal, Virtual Storage. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

Enterprise Storage

• HDS’ HAM-Fisted Announcement did not impress, with many wondering (So Long And Thanks For All The Fish) what exactly the company had announced. But by week’s end (USP-V and Hitachi High Availability Manager) we had figured out How It Works and even had some time for jokes.
• What should be in the cloud? How about some profiling questions nobody’s asking re: cloud applications
• Want your own iSCSI array? StarWind has responded to your comments, 2TB at no cost!
• What Is a Backup? Some great discussion (Backup to the Future) and a solution: When Is A Copy A Backup?
• Howard Marks is also doing a great job with backup and archiving: See Of Backups and Archives, Storing Archival Data – Part Deux, and All Archive Data is Not Alike
• I joined Chris Evans, Marc Farley, and Greg Knierieman for Infosmack Episode #6 – HDS USP-V announcement, EMC non-competes and changes at VMworld
• ‘Nuff said: And people wonder why I hate HP, Google Could Learn a Thing or Two from EMC, Virtualization: Why Microsoft cares

Misc

• Tim O’Reilly took a look at a technology I just didn’t get, but changed my mind with Google Wave: What Might Email Look Like If It Were Invented Today?
• Want a crazy car to get your mind off of GM and Chrysler? How about the 500-hp Ariel Atom 500 V8
• A wonderfully long and detailed article: Lessons from the Vaccine–Autism Wars
• Finally, take a look at this amazing video: Louis CK “Everything’s amazing, nobody’s happy”

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2009. | Back From The Pile: May 30, 2009
This post was categorized as Enterprise storage, Personal, Virtual Storage. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

Enterprise IT

• Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle Your Reliance On Backup Tapes – What’s wrong with backup tapes? They’re inaccessible, making them unsuitable for most applications. My latest post for my Enterprise Storage Strategies blog.
• Is Licensing Turning vSphere Into Vista? – A group post for Gestalt IT suggesting that VMware’s tiered licensing strategy for the vSphere 4 family might cause anguish for customers
• Infosmack Episode 2 – EMC, David Donatelli and Non-Compete Agreements – I joined the StorageMonkeys Infosmack podcast to discuss EMC, Dave Donatelli, and con-compete agreements with Greg Knieriemen, Marc Farley of 3Par and StorageRap, and Tony Asaro of the INI Group
• IT utilities, the biggest game in town – Chris Mellor of The Register suggests that the biggest IT vendors are positioning to lock up the IT market.
• The Non-Compete Clause Debate….. - Steve Duplessie muses on the pros and cons of non-compete agreements and what they mean for the IT industry
• Who’s the pot & who’s the kettle? - W. Curtis Preston reacts to the skirmishes between Tony Asaro and the EMC bloggers
• The Only VMware-certified NAS in its Category: Why the Iomega StorCenter ix4-200r Will Resonate with Small Businesses - Jerome Wendt expands on the Iomega StorCenter Pro ix4-200r
• Don’t focus too much on costs, cloud computing is about business agility - CapGemini reminds us that cloud computing isn’t just about reducing costs
• What we talk about when we talk about cloud computing - The Google Enterprise blog lays down some of the hard facts about building a cloud on your own
• Review: Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage System - Chris Evans provides one of the best reviews yet of Sun’s Amber Road open source-based storage systems
• Brocade Pokes Cisco in the Eye, Switches for IBM - A great headline and solid reporting by Om Malik on one of the first reactions to Cisco UCS
• TheInfoPro: Analysis or Marketing? - StorageMonkeys continues their probing of the storage analyst community
• A “Tweeterview” with Stephen Foskett, Nirvanix Consulting Director - Sunshine interviews me about Nirvanix, storage, and my new role

Apple

• Achieving Email Bliss with IMAP, Gmail, and Apple Mail – A deep, long post on GMail, IMAP, Mac OS X Mail, and how to get all three to play nicely together.
• Monitor Your Mac Remotely With iStat for iPhone - I love iStat for Mac OS X and the iPhone and had been meaning to write a review. This AppleBlog post is just about what I might have written!

Life

• There Goes Chrysler – NPR’s awesome Planet Money blog reported the breaking news of Chrysler’s bankruptcy
• The Venture Capital Math Problem and The Venture Capital Math Problem (continued) – Fred Wilson points out that there can be no such thing as unlimited venture capital
• Is it time to cut the Ethernet access cable? – Has pervasive wireless Ethernet made wired ports unnecessary?
• Interview with Micah Baldwin, Father of FollowFriday – Micah calls me out as someone who is doing interesting things on Twitter!

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2009. | Back From the Pile: Interesting Content From the Week of May 2, 2009
This post was categorized as Everything. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

The podcast is now available on iTunes!

Although the topic is an open roundtable, I thought I might give my readers a peek into the areas I plan to bring up:

• Why storage is so critical to VMware admins: It’s all about the IOPS!
• EMC’s new Symmetrix V-Max and why it’s important to VMware shops
• The great FCoE/CNA debate and Cisco’s UCS home run
• Super low-end storage for the small business or lab

Of course, what will actually get discussed is anyone’s guess, but it’s good to go in with a list of topics to avoid dead air!

So dial in or listen online, and let the discussion start!

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2009. | Interested in VMware and Storage? Tune In to the VMware Communities Podcast!
This post was categorized as Enterprise storage, Gestalt IT, Personal, Terabyte home, Virtual Storage. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.

So without further ado, I present three lessons on SAN storage:

• SAN School Lesson One: Building a SAN - In this first lesson of SAN School, I discuss the different types of storage arrays, switches, and software that make up a storage network.
• SAN School Lesson Two: SAN Architecture and Topology - In lesson two, I discuss the evolution of SANs from standalone entities, to islands and beyond. Discover techniques that can make a substantial difference in the way data is moved and processed, as well as in your company’s consolidation plans.
• SAN School Lesson Three: SAN Management and Security - In this Podcast, I explain what the options are for management tools. I cover array management, change management, virtualization and more to help you manage your environment. 

© sfoskett for Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat, 2008. | SAN School Podcast Series Posted
This post was categorized as Enterprise storage, Personal. Each of my categories has its own feed if you'd like to filter out or focus on posts like this.