Everything

Sun Launches Their Own Cloud, But For Which Market?

March 19, 2009 by Stephen Leave a Comment

While the bulk of Sun-related news this week relates to reported talks of a buyout by IBM, the company took a break from negotiations to introduce their own cloud computing and storage infrastructure, challenging Amazon, Google, Rackspace, and perhaps VMware, Microsoft, and Nirvanix.

Will Snow Leopard Finally Bring iSCSI To The Mac?

March 18, 2009 by Stephen 7 Comments

ZFS wasn’t the only AWOL storage technology in Apple’s OS X 10.5 – early builds of Leopard included a built-in iSCSI initiator. When the operating system was finally released in October of 2007, both ZFS and iSCSI were quietly dropped, making room for 300 other features Apple felt were more prime-time-ready. With the next major […]

Upgrades Give New Mac Mini a Whole New Attitude

March 17, 2009 by Stephen 19 Comments

It may seem odd to buy a computer intending to upgrade it right out of the box, but so it was with me when I snapped up a new 2009 Nvidia-powered Mac Mini. I had been waiting for Apple to update the aged Mini line, saving up my pennies, but the out-of-box specs for RAM and hard drive space were underwhelming.

Handy Gadget: USB to IDE/SATA Adapter

March 16, 2009 by Stephen Leave a Comment

I imagine every home computer hacker one day finds they have one too many hard drives to deal with. Maybe you are migrating to a new system or installing a new OS. Or maybe you’re upgrading the disk in your new Mac Mini. Whatever the reason, a universal way to connect any hard drive to […]

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Ranting and Raving About the 2018 iPad Pro

I remain enthusiastic about the iPad Pro, despite getting a scratched screen and my concerns about durability. It’s a worthy successor to the original and offers enough improvements that I’d recommend the upgrade for just about anyone who uses their iPad for serious work. It’s still not yet a laptop replacement, but this is due more to a lack of desktop-class software for iOS than anything in Apple’s control.

The 2018 iPad Pro is a Beast!

The third-generation iPad Pro is a great machine but also a bellwether of change at Apple. It will be very hard for the rest of the mobile and client computing industry to keep up with this kind of progress!

What’s the Deal with Containers?

October 21, 2016

Lately, it seems like everyone just can’t stop talking about containers. But I’m sensing a distinct lack of real understanding of the technology from many people, not to mention lots of confusion about what containers really mean for today’s datacenter folks. So I set about learning more and figuring out for myself what the deal is with containers. Here’s where I’m at.

Here’s Something Your Raspberry Pi Can’t Do: Gigabit Ethernet and SATA in the Olimex A20-OLinuXIno-LIME2

May 25, 2016

I’ve really enjoyed experimenting with the Raspberry Pi, and have even deployed a few as UNIX servers in my home and office network. The quad-core performance of the latest Pi models is awesome, but serious I/O limitations remain. With just one USB 2.0 interface shared for all network and storage operations, you aren’t going to […]

Replacing Google Reader With Feedbin and Reeder

May 5, 2013

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!

Download My Free E-Book, “Essential Enterprise Storage Concepts”!

April 4, 2017

I’ve got a lot to say about storage, as you might have noticed from reading my blog. So I finally sat down and wrote a book on enterprise storage. Now you can download the e-book for free, thanks to support from my friends at SolarWinds!

Scaling Storage In Conventional Arrays

November 19, 2013

It is amazing that something as simple-sounding as making an array get bigger can be so complex, yet scaling storage is notoriously difficult. Our storage protocols just werenâ€™t designed with scaling in mind, and they lack the flexibility needed to dynamically address multiple nodes. So my hat is off to these companies and others who have come up with clever ways to maintain compatibility while scaling out beyond the bounds of a single storage array.

Preserving Your Credibility Is Your Prime Directive

June 4, 2012

I hope this post isn’t too “out in left field” but I thought it needed to be said. Independent social media has evolved into a powerful mechanism to influence belief, behavior, and (yes) buying. I take my little dollop of influence very seriously, and feel an incredible responsibility to live up to the trust placed in me by others. I will try every day not to let you all down!

Scaling Storage Is Hard To Do

June 4, 2013

Data storage isn’t as easy as it sounds, especially at enterprise or cloud scale. It’s simple enough to read and write a bit of data, but much harder to build a system that scales to store petabytes. That’s why I’m keenly focused on a new wave of storage systems built from the ground up for scaling!

Regarding My Symbolic Links and Good Reads

April 16, 2015

I’ve been told that my shares drive traffic to the blogs I read. I’m thrilled that I can share great writing with you in this way, and I hope you find it valuable! But just in case you don’t, I hope you’ll take advantage of the fact that I filter these posts for you into “Symbolic Links” and “Good Reads” so you’ll find it easier to ignore them.