John Furrier

Dell World 2012: A Retrospective

December 18, 2012 By Stephen 1 Comment

Dell invited me to attend their Dell World conference in Austin, Texas last week, and it was an enlightening experience.

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!

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.

The Rack Endgame: Converged Infrastructure and Disaggregation

September 19, 2014

As Iâ€™ve written about what Iâ€™m calling the â€œRack Endgameâ€, the specter of converged infrastructure hasnâ€™t been far from my thoughts. As others have pointed out, disaggregation of servers, networks, and storage doesnâ€™t require a rack-sized stack; it can exist in a rack-mountable chassis and is already on sale!

Microsoft’s Big Chance to Change

August 23, 2013

It takes a truly-remarkable leader to be willing to kill his old golden geese to make room for a new one; so far, only Apple and Amazon seem willing to forgo continuity in the name of profitable destruction. But new corporate leadership at Microsoft might un-stick the company and awaken the once-innovative Redmond powerhouse. The retirement of Steve Ballmer is welcome news.

Faster Ethernet Gets Weird

June 19, 2015

“One size fits all” doesn’t work for Ethernet, but this proliferation of speed options sounds like trouble without automatic capability negotiation. It’s nice to have options, but the IEEE must remain focused on interoperability and rein in the interests of the various companies proposing next-generation Ethernet technologies.

GPS Time Rollover Failures Keep Happening (But They’re Almost Done)

April 6, 2019

This is week “1111111111” in the GPS system. Tomorrow morning it will roll over to week “0000000000”. How well will various systems handle this change? Not well, judging by what we’ve seen so far!

Introducing Rabbit: I Bought a Cloud!

September 10, 2020

We live in a world of cattle, not pets, and Kubernetes rules the roost. I’ve been meaning to spend some time getting up to speed on the latest but didn’t have enough hardware to make that happen until now. I recently bought a whole pile of surplus hardware so I will be able to experiment with orchestration and container platforms in the office.

What’s (Still) Wrong With Dropbox For Business

April 17, 2013

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.

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.