Name

The picture shows the name as ECO and not as Echo.

If it is there they will use it.

The problem is that no matter how much politicians promise not to use this against the "average" person it will end up being used that way. Forget about all the technical issues and costs associated with it the likelihood of it resulting in very much other than tracking porn sufers is going to be very low and would not justify the cost and expense of doing it. The result? Well gee we have this huge amount of data on everyone lets go dumpster diving and see what we can find. To have this large pool of data and not to go through it every way possible is not something that the government will be able to resist.

To say that this has potential for abuse is to understate it as it will be abused it is simply a question of when and by whom.

There is nothing about Theresa May that inspires confidence in her ability to look after anyone except herself.

New products

No need for a NDA just wait until EMC World in May since that is when EMC announces new products.

Sounds like something wicked this way comes.....

Meh

They haven't sold or even delivered the fastest storage system. They have delivered 36 of their okay storage systems that were bolted together by ORNL to get those figures. ORNL could have used almost anything to get there by that method.

Nice but nothing new

The Engenio products have always been reasonably solid and performed well for their cost so this is just a logical evolution from the previous generation. What they failed to do for many years while being sold to many different companies and still have not shown that they can do is provide much in the way of software and application integration or innovation and in that regards, NetApp and EMC provide a much richer feature set. Storage needs to evolve but so do the people making it and the Engenio group seem to be a one trick pony.

On site storage

I think this could be an interesting solution for people with Isilon or Atmos storage already from EMC but don't see it as a compelling reason to go out and buy either solution on its own. Or for people that intend on using a lot of storage for various projects.

In the end it will boil down to costs as much as security and having your corporate data on your own storage.

Country pumpkin

Well that is what you get when you have your data brought in by tractor. More seriously the issue is infrastructure and if you don't have it there is piddle that you can really do about other than hope someone else has developed a better set of pipes for you to switch too since until your provider spends the money to upgrade your networking and wiring you aren't going to get significant improvement. And with few customers in a geographic area getting the upgrades done is unlikely.

You might try and see if you have a cable TV service in your area as that can provide decent speed.

Not to rub salt in your wounds but just ran the BT diagnostics and I got back 37.2Mb/s as my tests results so BT can provide decent speed.

Good to know that if you drag things out long enough and hold your breath and threaten to hurt yourself that you can avoid taking responsibility for your actions.

Extradition is for people that committed crimes in other jurisdictions which is what this guy did. Funny how when it is someone in the UK doing the crime how sympathetic everyone is but when someone in another country does something in or to the UK how outraged everyone is especially if they evade extradition.

This guy is an admitted criminal who agreed to plead guilty but played on the gullibility of the English populace and press but no surprise considering how easy it is for criminals here to play the system.

VM Availability

The VM is generally available for the asking. They don't put it up where anyone can get it but you just have to ask your salesrep or TC and you can get it. It is a completely function version of the Isilon OneFS software with the only limitation being that you have a limited amount of disk space and can't add to it but it won't stop you with working with it. Be sure to ask for a set of evaluation licenses so that you can experiment with the software features too.

The only issue is that it is a VM and so its performance will be totally dependent upon the quality of hardware you run it on. I have run it under Fusion, Workstation and VMplayer. I believe it works with Xen but haven't tried it.

As the article says it is a pretty nice bit of software to play around with to get a feel for if it is something you might be interested in.

A better story would have been more complete

The Atmos user complains that he can't do some things that he considers to be basic without the assistance and guidance of EMC support by opening up a call. Fair enough it can be annoying to have to call support and open a call and have to go through the hassle of providing details to your question.

But, a better story would have been for him to have actually done that and then describe why and what was done and if the support requirement had any validity and what if anything could be done to make life for an Atmos user easier.

Right now the story is really little more than a whinge.

We can trust them if you have nothing to hide.........just look at China.

The security services keep saying that we have nothing to worry about if we have nothing to hide and that this can save lives.

Based in that premise then randomly abducting people off the street, strip searching, drugging and water boarding the could also save lives and we shouldn't worry about that if we have nothing to hide.

There are better more focused ways of catching criminals than snooping on everyone that uses the Internet for any and all reasons.

The writing was on the wall

One of the reasons if not the single biggest reason for LSI to dump its Engenio division to NetApp was their inability to keep IBM happy with the DS product range. The DS units from Engenio are solid, reliable and well performing systems with virtually no software integration. IBM constantly asked for and was promised numerous features and updates but LSI senior management thought they could deliver something for nothing and as a result frustrated a major OEM customer.

This move to a SVC fronted system is just the natural evolution of IBM moving away further. Sure they will continue to sell the Engenio systems as long as their is some profit there but they would rather bring that all in house.

It appears that NetApp is taking some steps to provide resources to refresh the product line and to better market it to OEMs but they seem ambivalent about the product at times.

Better late than never

NetApp seems a bit confused about their Virtual Storage Tiering which they keep calling a cache while you can probably stretch most definitions to suit it seems that something is either a Tier or not or is a cache or not though there is some overlap in functionality the basic operational goals for each product class are different.

But, I can save NetApp a lot of time just grab the EMC caching white papers since this solution of theirs with an external PCIe card sounds pretty familiar to theirs.

Not saying that they shouldn't do it or that they won't do a good job just that it isn't really very ground breaking.

UKBA the problem not the Iris scanners

The iris scanners worked great for me and even registration wasnt too bad until my registration expired and all the offices had been closed and no new registrations being taken and this was for at least 18 months until they officially announced the nd of the scanners. Hard to get the traffic if you refuse to open up to get users registered.

The workers at UKBA seem nice enough it's the politicians like Theresa (it's not my fault) May that need to be taken outside the border and left there.

Possibly

While the underlying concepts are similar I guess the issue would be does the Fusion-IO card in a Vblock configuration support the same functionality? The main functional difference I am thinking of is that as I understand it the EMC solution uses their card for reads and writes through it to the underlying block storage so that in the event of a failure that the data is stored and protected externally to the host and the card. If Fusion-IO supports this then either solution would be fine but if not then it comes back to the potential limitation of having your data on a PCI card inside a server that could fail at some point.

I suspect the reason EMC calls it VFcache is that is a good description of what it is doing.

The Fusion-IO products work well but I find the overall solution set from EMC to be compelling.

HDFS on Isilon

EMC announced some time ago that their Isilon clusters could provide native support for the Hadoop File System and in their presentation they showed the cluster replacing the name node of the Hadoop system but still using the hadoop compute nodes to do the compute but they would now be getting data off the cluster instead of from local disks. The idea being to remove the load times onto a Hadoop system and to reduce the capacity needed.

The big question though was why not simply replace all the compute nodes with the Isilon nodes too?

One has to think that building an Isilon based Hadoop cluster would be quite easy for EMC and assuming they could get the pricing right it could be a very interesting solution.

E series

NetApp says that the E-Series exceeded their target expectations but doesn't say what those were. Considering that the impetus for LSI to sell the division to NetApp was how badly they screwed up the relationship with IBM and the IBM DS sales were going to fall off a cliff, so it would be interesting to see if NetApp has been able to repair that. IBM still has the E-Series for sale in the middle and entry level area and they are nice solid systems if a bit simple in their feature set and integration.

For something that should be big news the release of Ontap 8.1 Cluster Mode is a bit a failure both as an actual release and as a marketing event. For a company that keeps saying it is an innovator in the storage market you don't see that much innovation actually making it out and 8.1 has virtually no innovation and comes with a lot of potential pitfalls.

Is NetApp a one trick pony that needs to be put to pasture? Quite possibly but they still have a lot of potential but like my nephew they seem to be wasting it. Shame really.

Close but not quite right

The financial analyst makes a good point but is basically wrong. Yes, I would agree that EMC is focused on NetApp and not too worried about FusionIO. But, I disagree that EMC is very worried about OnTap 8.1. It has some good points as far as software features are concerned and in consolidating some odd NetApp design choices but it still has very clunky under pinnings and can be a management mess.

The Isilon boxes are not ideal for all performance workflows but in looking at the software and hardware choices that were made to build the system it would appear that there is a lot of room for improvement and I would expect that EMC is busy working on that. The trick being to keep the features, and performance while maintaing decent pricing and margins.

Acquiring Xtreme IO would seem to play into their vision of global storage domination more than really much of a direct concern for any single competitor. If they can wrap up all the bits and pieces in to a single coherent storage environment then they could quite easily push everyone to the margins.

The rich get richer

If everyone in the company had a say in the CEO's remuneration then maybe such eye watering excess could be acceptable but the simple fact of the matter is that payouts such as this is just the old boy club in action. The board sets the payout and the CEO picks the board and the same group of people move through the revolving doors with a wink wink and nudge nudge to one another.

Joe Tucci has with out any doubt done a very good job but this sort of money is really little more than organized embezzlement at the corporate level and is pretty much the norm in all areas of business though banking and finance are much worse.

I love it when people say you have to pay the best to get the best. Umm no you don't and for some companies they might have been better off with the second or third best.

If Joe had only received $200,000 which is still a major windfall and the remaining $8 million had been given to workers it would have had a much larger effect. If someone is already independently wealthy what is another $8 million to them? But if they had given $10,000 bonus payments to 800 employees the boost that this would have given to moral would have been much more than simply making a rich man richer.

All doomed to failure

All these plans and ideas are doomed to failure as long as countries such as Greece are allowed t participate in the Eurozone and not be held accountable for their failure to enforce basic monetary sanity.

If I give my daughter a credit card and keep paying it off every month there is no incentive for her to stop spending or to develop a budget. In Greece almost every tax payer under reports their income to the point of absurdity and the government turns a blind eye. Worse it has now become an accepted way of living any attempts to make people actually pay for their public transportation and infrastructure costs are seen as attempts to oppress their rights to not have to pay for anything.

It is all just good money being poured down a Greek sewer. Ireland, Italy, Spain and Portugal have some of the same issues but at least make an effort to run their countries properly.

Rape is rape and porn is porn

Unless one is a psychopath and there are actually very few of those harming or hurting someone regardless of why you are doing it is a pretty obvious action (i.e. the crying and bleeding and death) and can not be justified by anything other than self interest.

Pornography no more causes rape than a woman who dresses in shorts and a halter top. The potential rapist that reaches the point where they actually commit the crime knows they are doing wrong but have decided to go ahead anyway.

Does legal prostitution help or hurt the rate of sexual assaults in a country? Pornography is pretty much part and parcel of the same ideology. The people who are against sex for religious, moral, or personal reasons tend to lump it all together. Sex is bad hence any depiction or sexual activity is bad. The reality of course is much murkier because there are always people willing to take things to one extreme or the another either for personal pleasure or to make some money.

But there are fortunately a few absolutes such as No means NO.

Good but not good enough

The Pillar Axiom system is an interesting product and is fairly well executed but actually brings very little that is new to the table. If it had came to the market 10 years sooner it might have been able to build a market for itself. The building block and brick concept has been done by a number of other vendors and somewhat better. There is nothing wrong with the product but nothing that really makes it stand out either and in a dynamic market that is changing the way the current storage market is that isn't good enough.

This is readily apparent by the fact that only LPOD's Oracle was willing to take the company even at the bargain bin price of free. Even if Oracle dumps in sales resources and efforts the money they might get paid in two years will only soften the blow and not eliminate the investors from losing a good amount of money. Though fortunately Oracle can just squeeze their customers a bit more if they want.

The real question is does Pillar make any sense at all for Oracle and its product mix or will it simply be a distraction?

Large but out of the box

A lot of interesting comments about this solution and its design but the thing to remember in my opinion is this is how the Isilon equipment is designed to work. Yes 140 nodes is a lot of nodes and that is a lot of HDDs and SSDs but all they did was take 140 of their performance oriented nodes with SSDs installed and put them together which is their big selling point. You can start with 3 nodes and grow to 140.

Anyone can hobble together two systems or three or more to hit specific performance levels but in this case all Isilon did was take their normal system and grow it to the logical if rather expensive conclusion and see what it could do.

And they did this with an file system that presented all of that storage as a single name space.

Not practical for everyone but then neither is a Ferrari or Lambo even though we might all wish we could afford one.

Clever purchase

Dell has a number of products where this technology could be very useful and even if they don't use it to the full extent one assumes that there is a patent portfolio that will come along with it that would protect them and could be used to control competitors.

It isn't that hard to fix.

Why is it that the first thought is to edit the books that get uploaded as opposed to vetting the uploaders? There are not that many people that want to publish original works or have the right to upload works of others so all Amazon has to do is to require that any uploader provide accurate and confirmed details about themselves and then if they do this it is easy enough to cut them off and remove their works.

If you say this is as bad as censorship it isn't since they can still freely publish their works in many other venues or they could use a publishing front to accomplish what they want. The point is to put in some accountability as what makes it worthwhile now is that gormless jerks can upload at will without any serious controls.

Don't see the attraction with a Blackberry

I recently changed companies from one that used Windows Mobile (yuck) to one that uses Blackberries and while the Blackberry isn't bad as a phone or to do email it just plain sucks in comparison to an iPhone or an Android based one even WM7 is to be preferred.

Their new Playbook looks interesting but its main advantage seems to be to make the Blackberry more useable and without a Blackberry a tablet less useful so it does not look like a winner.

I don't want to see them simply copy the competition but they can't go their own way much longer.

And they are getting paid how much for this?

Most businesses succeed not because of their top leadership but in spite of it and this just goes to show that none of them are worth the amounts of money they typically get paid. They aren't even competent enough to bribe a sex hound like Hurd well enough to avoid future problems. And Oracle letting Hurd do this is just stupid on their part when they could quite easily have slowly strangled the HP releases by reducing the number of people working on it and increasing support costs due to "low volumes".

But hey no surprise that Hurd thinks with his penis is there? But, at least it gives me something to chuckle over while I have my morning cup of coffee.

More a sales effort than a discussion by Permabit

Permabit's main response to the Isilon comments is that they disagree in regards to how their solution handles dedupe in large data environments and not in general terms which is more the point of the Isilon comments. Permabit seems more interested in touting their patented technology than actually answering questions or providing informative details.

Permabit's Albiero is an interesting product in that it basically is a standalone system that scours the data for duplicates as a side process so by not being a part of the data stream does not impact performance seems clever enough but much of the rest of it seems to be mostly marketing PR at the moment.

Short sighted business practices

I suspect that NetApp's decision to not take the European Engenio staff is due to the EU employment rules where basically if NetApp takes one employee they have to take them all and at their existing terms and conditions. Oddly a rule designed to protect employment seems to be a reason for doing the exact opposite. In the UK the rule is awkwardly called TUPE. I wouldn't be surprised if NetApp isn't held to account for this to some extent since the wording in the regulation implies that taking the business as a going concern requires them to take the employees so unless NetApp plans to no longer do business in the EU they would seem to be in violation of these regulations.

But set aside the regulator aspect of this. Set aside the fact that a company who fails to show loyalty to employees shouldn't expect it in return. Just look to the ongoing business being done in the EU and one has to wonder if those OEM business, distributors, vars, business partners and customers are going to have second thoughts about how valued they and their business is to NetApp. I have heard that NetApp is taking 960 employees in the US and the 50 or so in the EU comes to a pretty small number especially if you consider that at least half of them are extremely valuable to the ongoing operations of the company. This means that for a very small 15 to 25 employees NetApp has decided that it is easier, cheaper and better to basically throw everything out the door and into the bin.

In the long run NetApp is bound to manage the situation but it really is one that was done thoughtlessly and needlessly and what ever money or effort NetApp thinks they are going to save is bound to prove to be a false economy.

The good news is that the competition for NetApp is going to get some very good and now highly motivated new employees.

April Fools

Yep it is likely an April Fools gag but obviously one that has a lot of people interested in it being true. Even though the cost would increase to support and build such a design would go up it would certainly reduce the lead that SSDs have over HDDs in performance and help Seagate keep up their market share and volume.

Nice product think I might get one now

Stupid companies constantly trying to take advantage of consumers and not realizing that they just end up making things worse for themselves. I hadn't noticed this product but now that it has been brought to my attention I will give it serious consideration.

Incorrect comparison really

The comparison really doesn't work since with a train versus a plane the comparison is really about which is faster and or cheaper to effectively do the same thing where as with disk and tape they really are not the same thing.

I would suggest that people really need both. With disk based backups the primary concern is and should be for quick and easy restoration of data or even individual files. With tape backup the purpose is no longer so much to restore data but to have multiple archival copies of data to choose from and to also comply with various data retention laws around the world. Archival with disks can be done but it really is not the best use for them for numerous reasons including cost and long term reliability.

A more appropriate comparison would be to say a disk drive is a lorry (truck) and that tape is a warehouse. They both can store things but while a lorry is mobile the cost per square foot of storage is prohibitive when compared with the costs of a fixed structure such as a warehouse. A warehouse is inconvenient in that it can't move and is generally not where you want it to be when you need it but it does store lots of stuff efficiently.

The real underlying question again is why choose only one?

Please NO!

Sun's acquisition of StorageTek was one step back from the customers but Sun's acquisition by Oracle has been ten steps and a jump back from customers. Oracle customers are not generally well treated by Oracle support. Things such as moving virtually all content including supposedly free or publicly available products behind the no-contract-no-access firewall of Oracle is just one of the annoyances of having any Oracle/Sun products in your data center.

But, this fantasy does make sense in that Oracle was foolish to let NetApp get Engenio away from LSI for that price as their storage portfolio is a mess. Acquiring all of NetApp would be a lot more harder and expensive but certainly makes sense in that it solves most of their storage issues.

I like the NetApp kit and I like the Engenio kit. Please don't make me go back to EMC which is what would happen if Oracle got a hold of them.

LSI Fails and bails

This is a sad admission on the part of LSI management that they didn't have a clue as how to manage the Engenio business and move it forward. As a shareholder of LSI I would wonder why they are selling a $750 million dollar revenue stream for only $480 million well actually I have a pretty good idea that it is because they have hit the peak and expect a dramatic fall off in revenue for the future.

The LSI PR release indicates that LSI will be keeping the OnStor product which they had just transitioned from custom silicon to an Intel appliance but keeping it is probably more that NetApp didn't feel the need for that and less that LSI has any plans (or clue) on what to do with it. The LSI controllers have also been moving to the use of Intel processors so putting NetApp IP on top of them should be relatively straight forward.

In addition to Tom Georgens being a former Engenio boss NetApp recently had started to OEM disk enclosures from LSI so bringing that in house brings them more control and direction plus as mentioned in the article the Engenio controllers out perform the FAS controllers in SAN with block level work.

For the LSI OEM partners it would seem that Oracle is least effected and IBM has recently shifted their focus to their Storwize v7000 product range so while the Engenio products are big part of the IBM portfolio they seem well placed to weather it. For NCR and Terradata they are probably happy enough to continue to OEM from NetApp instead. Dell too can probably drop the MD Powervault line but it is a big seller and has good profit margin so they won't be in a hurry lose it.

All in all it will be interesting to see how the business works itself out but for most of the LSI OEM partners NetApp shouldn't be too difficult to work with assuming that NetApp wants to continue the OEM business line.

Apple's walled garden is getting spikes on the wall

I love much of what Apple does with the design and work with they computers and other electronic products but they have always felt too restrictive to me and every time I start to weaken and seriously consider purchasing one they go and do something like this.

Even with its moronic lack of expandability and brain dead port expansion components the iPaddle was starting to suck me in but this will just kill it for me. Do you think that content publishers will be satisfied with a 30% loss in revenue or do you think they will either raise their prices to compensate for it or move to another platform (Android perhaps). Either way the people that ultimately get hurt and pay the price are Apple customers who from the start are paying a premium.

What is next? Apple telling their customers that they can only get software for their Mac or Mac Book from iTunes also?

Sorry but I will not give my money to people who feel that they can treat me like an idiot and expect me to say thank you for the experience. I mean seriously what rational in the world can justify the lack of an memory card slot on an iPad at the price that it is selling for other than a desire to control the customer and restrict their choices?

LSI connection disconnected

HP has started to inform customers that they will no longer be selling SVSP as all that functionality will be provided via other products because of their recent acquisition. They will continue to support customers that have purchased SVSP but the last thing I heard was that the last sales of this were done in December 2010.

It makes sense for them as a company but you have to wonder how the people that purchased SVSP feel about it.

It's not the size but how you use it that matters

The argument that there is no long term need for 2.5-inch drives is interesting but potentially one could argue that there is no long term need for 3.5-inch drives.

There is no inherent technical difference between a 3.5-inch and 2.5-inch disk drive as they use the same media and mechanical design and this shows in the fact that performance numbers are pretty comparable between the two form factors assuming similar rotational speeds. The biggest issue is power and since with a 2.5-inch platter you have less platter and as a result less physical mass that need to be moved and additionally with the smaller form factor you generally have fewer platters it quickly becomes obvious why a 2.5-inch drive consumes about half the power of a 3.5-inch one.

Right now there is a 3x to 4x capacity difference between a 3.5-inch disk drive and a 2.5-inch drive (600GB vs 2TB). But this ignores the fact that due to the smaller form factor you can fit twice the number of 2.5-inch drives in the same space as a 3.5-inch drive. This brings it closer to 1..2TB to 2TB in the same amount of rack space with an overall power and cooling footprint that is similar but with an idle and active power/cooling rating that will be lower with 2.5-inch compared to 3.5-inch drives.

And with 2x spindles you get 2x interface connections, 2x queues, 2x read/write mechanisms, and potentially 2x the IOPs and MB/s.

The smaller sized drives even means that when a disk drive does fail you have less data to recover and recovery times are reduced. This all should stay relative with the release this year of 900GB 2.5-inch drives and 3TB 3.5-inch drives.

One could reasonably argue that outside of large media repositories and virtual tape libraries that the larger 3.5-inch disk drives may no longer be relevant.

An interesting comment is that HDDs fail more than SSDs because they are mechanical in nature and I would say that this has not been definitely shown to be the case as of yet. A recent story posted here on the The Register reported that analysis of one reseller's return rates showed that SSD return rates were about the same as that of HDD. Part of this of course is attributable to the relative maturities of the two technologies and SSD reliability is bound to improve.

My personal experience with HDD failures especially in enterprise level storage arrays is that frequently the disk that has been failed by the array is actually still quite serviceable and I have redeployed many of them to other less demanding situations without any issues. I suspect that the main reason for the high failure rate in storage arrays is that in a raid stripe or volume group that one slow drive can effect the performance of the other drives and storage vendors will fail these drives for performance balancing reasons.

Another point to keep in mind with the use of SSDs is that currently due to their considerably higher cost there is a tendency to employ them as single disks without any RAID level assigned to them making them effectively RAID-0 or to employ them for the most demanding business critical environments. This means that when a SSD does fail it is likely to have a higher than average impact to operations so one needs to put in place proper expectations and recovery plans when using SSDs.

This is actually a pretty good time for storage administrators as there are plenty of choices and options to meet all kinds of requirements. The hard part is that they need to determine, the capacity, performance and cost requirements to be able to make an optimum decision in what they purchase and where they deploy it.

Vendor lock in

These sort of partner stacks sound all well and fine but ultimately they tie you in and restrict your options. The Cisco blade servers just seem pricey at this time compared to what I can get from both HP and IBM and while I have and like the EMC storage it isn't always my first choice. VMware right now is the top dog but Hyper-V has improved dramatically and Xen is proving to work well in some of my situations.

It feels like there is a premium being charged with this idea and personally I can't justify paying a premium and getting locked into a fixed set of hardware and software.