Rich Friedman

Changes in Technology Drive Changes in IT Organizations and Roles

April 24, 2011 By Stephen Leave a Comment

Lots of my IT infrastructure management clients are talking about how the advent of Ethernet/IP and virtualization is changing the roles of storage, server, and network administrators. The evolution of the storage role in particular in enterprise IT organizations has been a topic of particular interest to me for a while: I definitely remember thinking about […]

Remembering Storage Magazine

December 12, 2008 By Stephen 12 Comments

All things must pass, but it is with a heavy heart that I note that TechTarget‘s excellent Storage magazine has shipped its last issue. No official word has been posted by the company, but it is now widely reported. All print publications are feeling squeezed by a move to online readership which robs print of advertising […]

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

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!

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.

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!

The Four Horsemen of Storage System Performance: The Rule of Spindles

August 25, 2010

Why do some data storage solutions perform better than others? Mechanical performance, RAM caching, I/O capacity, and the intelligence of the system all have a part to play. Today we examine the rule of spindles: Adding more disk spindles is generally more effective than using faster spindles.

Follow the Yellow Brick Road to the Software-Defined Future

November 29, 2012

The Software-Defined Datacenter is a great concept, but it just won’t work. The big enterprise companies will never allow VMware (and daddy EMC) to commoditize them out of existence, so useful implementations will be rarer than ruby slippers. The best we can hope for is point enhancements to enable greater virtual machine mobility through SDN and improved storage integration.

ZFS Is the Best Filesystem (For Now…)

July 10, 2017

ZFS should have been great, but I kind of hate it: ZFS seems to be trapped in the past, before it was sidelined it as the cool storage project of choice; it’s inflexible; it lacks modern flash integration; and it’s not directly supported by most operating systems. But I put all my valuable data on ZFS because it simply offers the best level of data protection in a small office/home office (SOHO) environment. Here’s why.

Scaling Storage At The Client

November 25, 2013

Scaling storage is a serious challenge for the industry, but there is a great deal of thought, effort, and creativity going into it right now. Companies like Gridstore, Oxygen Cloud, and Cleversafe have come up with effective client-side solutions to enable scale-out storage to sing. If you’ve got an appropriate application, client, or gateway, scale-out is a real possibility!

Hands-On Review: Unicomp Spacesaver M Keyboard for Mac

July 3, 2012

I would not hesitate to recommend the Unicomp Spacesaver M to Macintosh users used to an original IBM Model M, and I am admittedly a tough customer. I wish that Unicomp would update their website, packaging, logo, and keyboard graphics, but none of this really matters as your fingers press the keys. If any keyboard is worth $100, it is the Unicomp Spacesaver M!

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 […]

My 2012 Project: Improving Energy Efficiency

January 3, 2012

I am in the process of upgrading my own home to make it more energy efficient. I do this mainly as an exercise of faith and science, since my electric and gas bills are not currently all that expensive. But I just can’t countenance burning 10 times more electricity than I need to, even if I can afford it. It’s also an exercise in geekiness, since today’s lighting alternatives and appliances have an undeniable techno-cool factor about them.