Posts by JL 1

Visually unchanged? Ha Ha

So the software does change the data - presumably irrepairably - by downscaling image sizes in documents. This is crazy talk for automated enterprise use. Imagine the support calls - "Hey, Helpdesk! Who the heck reduced my high resolution image to a tiny jpeg?" Crazy talk, hence Paris.

Shoe-shine

Fowler doesn't make much of a play on the benefits of de-dupe which have a massive upside on long term data storage but realistically need random access. Nice fat SATA disks are lovely for it, particularly if you can build de-dupe pools and then spin then down. You can regularly health check the disks (which you can't really do with tape)... Can you imagine the access time on a 20TB tape? Or the shoe-shone? Horrible... Can you image the impact of losing an unprotected 20TB tape? Nasty... Folks will have to start RAIDing tape somehow (probably double write). All this is pretty obvious to the industry and not to Oracle.

I have to say that this announcement appears to be more about hyping Oracle assets than delivering a sensible product strategy and we've not even started talking about whether the industry actually wants Oracle's bespoke stack approach at all. Perhaps Fowler has forgotten what OpenSystems is all about.

Blimey, it's fast

Fast? I should say so. Just loaded it. I think (no science involved) it's 4x the speed. Lightening quick. Thank heavens you can turn off 'mobile view' by default (although some sites like www.telegraph.co.uk stuff push you to the mobile version). Scrolling is a bit less smooth than Safari but multipage management is a breeze. Overall, great first attempt.

Tax evasion

IR35 was a legitimate reaction to wide spread tax abuse within the contracting industry. If the Tories win I shall lobby for certain parts of it to be retained. Contracting in the 1990s was a scam. So, your partner gets half the dividends? Laugh. You buy a motorbike on the company and sell it back to yourself at half cost within a year? Laugh. Your business LCD projector is 99% used for watching DVDs? Laugh. All a big long laugh... all the way to the bank. I do not doubt that contractors need allowances but the ability to pay dividends on 90% income... and claim every damn thing and then some? No way. As stated elsewhere, the bad guys spoiled it for the good guys. Problem is, ALL the contractors I knew were the bad guys and some still are.

Big Jim?

Is that *the * Jim Dawson quoted here? Big Jim of StorageNetworks and 3PAR fame? If so, well done Jim!

Agreed - VTL is not a big deal

7 years ago VTL was a big deal because you wanted a Virtual Tape Library to 'pretend' to be a real one. You got performance improvements, replication, etc, and most importantly easy integration because this disk thingy looked & smelt like a tape library. Heck, it even came with tape library personalities. Fast forward 7 years and all the decent backup products support IP or FC attached disk pools. Thus, you don't need all that tape library emulation and even if you DO want a real tape (long term archive, etc) you can easily duplicate from your disk pool to tape. So, NTAP has a pretty good de-duper on it's IP storage and thus you could argue that neither it (nor anyone else) really needs VTL.

Now, the problem I see is that NTAP has a post process engine in its primary filesystem and DataDomain has real time in its secondary filesystem. RT is a much easier sell these days, now that performance is good. But Sun's expected release of RT de-dupe in AmberRoad is a big deal to DataDomain and NTAP: it'll be the first RT de-dupe in a primary filesystem. Lets see how they respond to that.

The de-dupe market is certainly hotting up, but forget the VTL end of it. It's the fag end.

Nice product in need of a sugar daddy

I've always liked 3PAR: great engineering, great functionality, good company ethos. The only downside was pricing. So, out this nice chunk of block technology into HP (please not Dell!) or Cisco and you will have the right distribution network driving higher volume, lower cost of sale, and ultimately lower overall unit cost. I can't see why HP under DaveD wouldn't want to do this.

JL

No surprises here...

No surprises here, except that HP enterprise storage sales have not declined even further. Why on earth would anyone buy EVA SAN or PolyServe NAS unless locked in to it? It's been under invested for years and is now generations behind CLARiiON, 3PAR and NetApp. If Donatelli wants to turn around his storage business then making EVA competitive must be his #1 priority... or maybe he'll ditch it as a bad lot and jump for 3PAR? This would be a tragedy in my opinion: it's not a bad product and comes from a great lineage, but simply does not cut it in todays highly competitive mid-range space.

@ Psymon & Drobo RAID

Psymon - Drobo is actually pretty smart. If does not require same sized spindles. Instead, it uses an extent based RAID. As long as each extent is replicated off disk then you are OK. Thus, you can protect one 1TB drive with 2x500GB, etc. Believe me, the concept is smart. So smart that I bought one early this year. It's downfall is the code quality and support. It scared the crap out of me. I had a failing disk but it didn't tell me which disk was going bad. It just went off line for about 18 hours 'rebuilding' (which it is not supposed to do) and then came back fine showing all disks good. It did this a couple more times. The logs are not customer readable (WTF!?) so you raise a support case and wait 2 weeks for an answer. Meanwhile, you are exposed to a total data loss scenario while they work out disk disk is bad. No thanks! I sold the lot on ebay and built my own with external firewire 2TB disks.

The problem with most of these home NAS boxes is that the code fails more often than the disks. If EMC or NTAP put their CLARiiON or FAS code into a tiny home device I'd jump at it, but this low end code from QNAP, Thecus, etc, isn't stable enough and I'd rather use a scheduled mirror process (I use ChronoSync on my Mac server between two external 2TB drives) than blindly trust someone elses crappy code.

JL

FC vs NFS

I think the days of the fat FC array are coming to an end. FCoE is a stepping stone to using NFS pretty much everywhere in the distributed space. Why bother with all that extra FC complexity & cost when you can run directly over NFS for the vast majority of applications? 10GbE and DCE gives you the bandwidth and and low latency... IP networks can be designed every bit as reliable as FC and you don't get that hideous interoperability mess that FC forces on you. So, who needs FC except for non-virtualised Windows apps? It's all going IP & NFS folks.

Funny

For all those who think Drobo Mk2 is great because its not dumped on you yet / you've only had it for 2 days and love the cool look / read some reviews on line and trust them: listen to those who have been through the pain, been scarred, lost data, found other better solutions.

By the way, Drobo Mk1 appears to be less of a problem, based on the online material I have read / personal experience.