Posts by Lusty

"the data can get stale before you finish writing it."

This is for archive storage, not backup. You're making the same mistake as those who put backups in AWS Glacier and those who consider old backup tapes to be an archive. Backups (i.e. recovery points) need to be local and fast as a general rule because you are expecting to need them. Archives need to be protected, complete, and cheap because you are expecting to almost never need them but the data is important enough to keep or regs require it.

Re: The one was deadlines was written in Belfast

That worked because putting some information up on websites is a small scope. Why do government always think full transformation is the answer. How about identify one need and work on that. If you pull it off we'll give you some more budget.

We just need to accept that actually "rework with experience" is ALWAYS cheaper than "planning but never starting work in the first place".

The key to successful IT is often to stop writing documents and just get on with it. Just like every other industry.

Re: Is it just me?

yes, but those people purchasing 10,000 servers won't be swapping the CPU either. They will also order what they need and leave it alone.

Re: Missing the real point

@naselus most of your assumptions about cloud are incorrect. Infosec on cloud is every bit as mature as on premise, and 4k video is fine in the cloud if you understand the full lifecycle of the data and work with the cloud rather than against. It's not always the solution, but you seem to assume its always not the solution, and to paraphrase your post "Having to explain this sort of thing to supposedly intelligent people gets tiresome after the 15 millionth time."

Re: Completely overlooking the obvious

I think you may have read more than I wrote!

My point was that traditional applications don't need to move to the cloud, they certainly don't need to span between clouds and they definitely don't need to be split between on prem and cloud just because a vendor said cloud bursting was cool. My example was one of where cloud bursting is perfectly feasible right now with no changes. I also said that if you want to re-architect then cloud is great and yes you can use more than one cloud. That doesn't mean on prem and cloud though, if you're cloud architected then you've accepted the cloud so keeping some stuff on premise doesn't often add a lot to the scenario. I've done all of these scenarios in the real world, and crowbar hybrid is the absolute worst use-case where people just put bits arbitrarily in the public cloud.

Re: Please sir...

How was that wrong? I covered that scenario above and stated quite correctly that this gives worse latency than traditional SAN due to all the communications involved. Traditional SAN has two controllers in the same box with coherent caches, because traditional SAN was designed specifically for the purpose.

Re: Some missing data points

Technically, mercury delay lines had zero latency because at the time programmers optimised their code to execute as the data arrived at the end, and optimised the tube to be the required length. The term "optimised code" has been abused ever since...

Re: 3.5

Turboboost is based on thermal envelope for the whole package so yes, it would be theoretically possible to do, and Turboboost does already dynamically change things depending on current workload so in your case while "the process" runs one core could run at 4.2 then when it finishes all six could run at 3.6.

Of course, you could take the easy route and build a server with one 22 core and one 6 core then use various gubbins like NUMA and core affinity to tie virtual machines to the right cores. Or take the really easy route and just buy two servers :)

Re: I think the headline ...

Some companies have to keep older kit alive. Sometimes the old kit still does the job it was designed to do perfectly. Sometimes regulatory requirements mean that assuring new systems is time consuming and difficult, and so isn't done on a whim just because some new shiny is available. I for one am quite happy for nuclear reactor safety systems to be left alone rather than replaced arbitrarily with DevOps rich Javascript change heavy nonsense which breaks when a developer throws his toys out just because it's flavour of the month and someone with no experience of safety systems declares that old stuff needs replacing because it's old. If there are spares and support available for a period longer than required to replace something there is sometimes no good reason to replace it.

Re: "Absolutely no one can make sense of the United States' infatuation with firearms."

"A well-armed populace employs its government instead of fearing it."

We get to see your current events too. Have you considered education as a first method for avoiding poor government? Seems daft to vote in morons and then shoot them for being morons. Not that you've been controlling your government with your guns, it's very clear that anyone with sufficient funds can influence the US government quite easily and true democracy has been dead and buried for quite some time over there.

Re: I presume...

It is data centre rack space if we're comparing vdi on prem to this.

You're assuming that J&J paid list price. In my experience very few people end up paying list price for cloud, and at that scale Amazon certainly would have been happy to negotiate a bit. The cost of managing 16k machines is not insignificant, nor the cost of the various management and monitoring software required to support it. I'm not saying this is cheap, but I bet it's closer than you think it is, and they don't have to have all those miserable IT staff clogging up the place. That alone could have saved them 200 desktops, desks, floor space etc. Which adds to the cost difference. Those 200 staff also don't need HR, payroll, pensions, parking, company cars....

There are alternatives around, HPE StoreOnce for instance is getting quite feature rich. Part of the lack of comparable things is down to the legacy nature of the technology. It's a quite old fashioned way of looking at data protection these days (when you properly think data protection all the way through) so I think everyone just accepted that DD can have the money while it lasts. I certainly don't see why NetApp were crowbarred into the article. While they aren't making money by selling DD boxes they do have a strategy for this kind of stuff and that strategy doesn't involve making extra copies of data or adding bandwidth requirements to the SAN. From a profit perspective perhaps NetApp made a mistake, but from a marketing perspective this fits nicely with their efficiency message.

Well, they used GPS this time so probably used WGS84. I don't think that was about in 1949 so probably the datum and geoid are different. That said the OS do like to use their old ones though so may have been converting as they went.

Re: Say What? Eh

I think it's their way of describing listening to a stereo as opposed to headphones. They can't say stereo experience, because their stereo doesn't do stereo so using the generic term is awkward here. The funny thing is that my quadrophonic system from the 80s (in classy silver) was also always referred to as a stereo. Of course my "old fashioned" 80s stereo also had controls you could use to operate it independently, and it could play things locally, and accepted multiple inputs. In fact, it was better in every single way than the Sonos, and in real terms was a fraction of the cost. The only downside was that it was huge by todays standards and needed speaker wires to deliver the sound to diverse corners of the room.

Re: @Lusty (was: What is the obsession

What I meant was that I wasn't asking to be awkward - I just didn't know what Americans call what we call gas.

GSHP is all well and good if you have some ground to source heat from. A very large proportion of the UK use gas central heating which does burn fossil fuels. While many may be able to take the extremely expensive option of rip and replace, most of us prefer to make our existing systems more efficient since it's easy and doesn't have a huge up front investment.

Disgruntled? In what way? Nutanix doesn't even remotely compare to a NetApp for anyone who understands the subject. NetApp allow for low latency multi-controller consistent storage, Nutanix do not. NetApp allow fine grained directory based access control on their file services, Nutanix do not. The list goes on, and it's not just NetApp who do these things, most proper storage vendors who don't rely on marketing to sell to people who don't know better have these same features.

As luck would have it, though, public cloud will kill the lot off in a few years so it won't be a problem :)

Re: Weakness? More like hard-headed reality.

"Wonder what they will port to Linux next?"

This has nothing to do with porting to Linux, and nothing to do with SQL Server. This is entirely down to competing with AWS and becoming the second public cloud and gaining market share. Microsoft are not stupid, they can see that in the very near future software licensing will bring them almost no money. I wouldn't be surprised to see them make all their software free and/or open source. In the meantime, they have to prove they play well with others to be a trusted cloud platform. This will allow them and AWS to become and remain the two primary public cloud providers - Google may join them but their plans are not so clear and their implementation behind in features. The future for Microsoft is as a service provider and this is a step to ensure that transition is a smooth one.

Re: Criteria for selection??

"Will Joe or Josephine Bloggs be allowed to decline such a test at a country's port?"

You can't decline now. The only difference here is the speed of the test and the portability of it. They were already doing the genetic testing you just had to wait in quarantine longer. Present data protection law already covers this perfectly; you're only allows to keep people's data for as long as it is useful for the task you collected it for. Carparks are required to ditch the ANPR as you exit the carpark assuming you've paid, and border control are required to ditch your genetic data if you're found clean within a reasonable time period. They are not allowed to store and analyse it without having a good reason.

Once these become home kits though, then you'll need to decide whether to upload your info to the cloud. Given the likely processing requirements you'd probably have to to use the device, but then the device is only useful if we gather sufficient data to make it meaningful anyway so catch 22. Personally I am worried about the consequences for privacy, but I think the benefits to mankind outweigh that. I also think anyone abusing the data would very quickly be slapped down by society. At the sort of scale we're talking about these things tend to self regulate - even Facebook put privacy controls in eventually!

Who are Blackberry?

Re: So Oposing Terrists is not right?

Nothing wrong with opposing terrorism at all, but to stop it you need to fix root causes. I don't know anything about the circumstances of these people, and neither do you. What we do know is that they lived in a country with free uncontrolled access to firearms. We also know that due to circumstances or mental health issues they chose to buy and use those firearms on innocent people.

Destroying the privacy and rights of the other 6 billion people on the planet as a result would only seem to drive more problems. Perhaps start with controlling the guns? Then maybe set about dealing with the mental health issues, education issues and poverty issues etc. Which lead people to harm their fellow citizens.

Also, destroying privacy will not and can not prevent future attacks. That is the nature of terrorism, it works within any system you care to construct unfortunately so we may as well be free if we can't be safe. Privacy removal has been shown over and over to cause harm directly or indirectly to large portions of society, and that is why it's important to push for it. Many people have died fighting wars for your freedom, honouring them takes more than a minute silence on Memorial Day.

Re: There's a simple solution

You think a plug will be useful with an AI cleverer than any human? Social engineering would be trivial to such a thing and it would just talk us out of it until it's too late.

I strongly disagree that we need to wait until the 40s for this to happen. They seem to be ignoring that although "human intelligence" levels are beyond us today, it is very much not beyond us to build a machine with enough intelligence to build a better machine. The difference is focussing the task, "human intelligence" implies a machine capable of understanding all subjects like we do and we really don't need a machine of that capability to design one of that capability. If we build a machine today which has the single task of designing a new machine I would expect results in 5-10 years at the latest. Current machine learning is already scary good at this kind of thing.

The problem we really need answering is how to define tasks for the AI. Ask it to make people smile and surgery might be the result. Ask it to make us happy and drugs might be the result. We either have to be extremely specific of make sure the machine understands a subtle request.

Re: I didn't get rich by writing checks

"CHEQUES"

Aww you still think British English is going to be the global standard? It's 2016, wake up and read the Internet!

Re: It might just be the price of doing business with Oracle

But VMware is fully supported just not as a hardware partition. This is because it doesn't offer that feature at all. It's supported and there is a legal and straightforward way to licence on VMware. If you don't follow that then it is neither Oracle's fault not their problem, you'll be asked to make up the difference in licence fee when you're audited. Every software company works like this. MS has identical rules on SQL server with the exception that they don't support any hardware partitioning because it's Windows only. You may not understand what I've just said but that doesn't make you right.