Posts by Nate Amsden 2438 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Jun 2007
Unless you put it in context as to what market that pay is in.
$105k could practically be considered minimum wage living in the SF bay area anyway (having just left there on Monday).
Also helps to say what someone in IT that doesn't have "devops" might make in the same market.
I couldn't live off $105k today no way.
Lived in the bay area for 5 years(Just moved away yesterday) never once had the slightest interest in attending vmworld. I did attend one vmworld "party" last year(sponsored by 2 companies that I am a customer of), didn't know anybody so just stayed for about 30 minutes then went home. Waste of time.
Conferences have never had any value for me personally at least. HP Discover the past couple of years had it's moments, though outside of meeting with the storage folks whom I know the rest of the event had nothing of interest (not attending Discover this year).
Company more than happy to pay for conferences though none of them interest me.
I have been a loyal vmware customer for nearly 17 years now though. Just vcenter+enterprise plus (5.5U2) though(and vmware workstation). Maybe upgrade to vsphere 6 by end of 2018, no rush.
None of the other products are particularly exciting to me. None of the competition (e.g. openstack, public IaaS cloud etc) is interesting either.
United sent me notes they were putting this in place but I thought it was put in place a month ago. Haven't had to login again yet.
The one that was most scary to me was state farm. Asking me questions like what steet did i live on 30 years ago (i was a young kid, 25 years before I became a customer). The answers were multiple choice. These were records from their databases, they never asked me to setup questions they just asked based on what they knew about me already. Quite startling to me anyway.
I realize insurance companies have a lot of data but did not expect to extend that far back long before I had any accounts under my own name.
I would prefer more advertisers use it, since flash is click to run anyway, I hardly ever see it. Or if browsers would somehow make html5 animations and video etc click to run as well that could work too.
The only thing I can think of that I need flash for on a semi regular basis is Bank of America ShopSafe
https://www.bankofamerica.com/privacy/accounts-cards/shopsafe.go
it's funny people still think that ala carte services will end up costing less than bundling. As time goes on though more and more are realizing bundling is what saves money (few edge exceptions - e.g. if you are satisfied with the content that Netflix has to offer and just use that for example, though I read increasing comments on people who feel like they have to subscribe to a half dozen or more streaming services to get what they want and that services seem to be fragmenting more as time goes on).
I'm older school I guess. my Tivos have curated (to some degree) what I have been watching on cable TV for the past 16 years now, it's a system I am satisfied with at least. I probably "stream" less than 10 minutes of video a month (generally youtube), haven't streamed music since the late 90s.
I'd say get off my lawn but my apartment doesn't have one.
Would be kind of surprised a serious EMC shop would consider something like this regardless of what it can do.
I know I wouldn't ever put it inline between my systems and HPE 3PAR systems. Though for low end storage like LSI, or maybe HP P2000 type stuff then ok would consider it (but I wouldn't use those storage systems to begin with so once again it's out :) )
(the web client)
.NET client works fine. I hated the .NET client (as a linux user of 20 years) back when I first started using ESX over a decade ago, but this was more of a case of "be careful what you wish for", when the "improved" web client actually seems to be much worse than the existing thick client.
Maybe by the time I do another major upgrade in vsphere (thinking 2018) the web client might be usable.
Till then I use the .NET client on a XenApp (fundamentals) server.
as a vmware customer for the past 17 years (pre 1.0 back when it was a linux application for a workstation), and current ESXi 5.5 enterprise+ user I am still quite happy, I have kept an eye on KVM and openstack here and there but nothing to-date makes me even want to consider moving at this time (I thought I would of moved a couple of years ago).
As-is vmware keeps getting cheaper, as Intel piles more and more CPU cores into the sockets. My newest systems are all 18-core chips, my newer ones will be 22-core.
My nice 1 bedroom apartment (830 sq feet) in San Bruno(~15mi south of SF?) runs about $2900 now(around $2200 when I moved in originally). After living here for the past 5 years I am moving my shit to storage for a 3 month trip to Thailand then moving to Modesto, CA when I get back. I have been working 99% from home for a while now, and no reason to go to the office.
My CIO encouraged me to work 6 months out of the year in Thailand, I hadn't considered that before but will think about it, getting long term visa for there is difficult I am told though.
The team I support works in Seattle, the infrastructure I support is in Atlanta and Amsterdam, my manager is in New York, 3/4ths of my team is outside of California, so really no reason to stay(that wasn't the case 5 years ago).
I want to stay close to the bay area in case I want/need to come back, Modesto not too far away(about 100 miles). Rent around $1100/mo for a similar size/quality place out there.
Originally moved here to be close to my company(HQ is about 1 mile away), and for future career prospects, though I have decided I probably won't leave this company in the next year or two or three(or more), so little reason to endure the high cost of housing anymore.
The bay area offers nothing else of interest to me, and I don't want to move back to Seattle area either.
I thought I would end up building a new network down here (network in seattle is pretty big, was there for 10 years). But I am not a very social person, and being at just one company the whole time has limited my exposure to other folks, and I don't enjoy vendor events so I never go to them (or conferences). So that aspect of living here has been a bust (except for the folks that have left the company I am at over the past few years).
Seeing a bedroom costing $1300-$3k/mo in SF .. I don't have words for that. I downgraded to 830sq feet from 1000sq feet when I moved here, can't imagine being happy with something much smaller. My new apartment will be between 1000 sq feet and 1350 depending on which model is available when I move back, all for half or less than what I pay now.
Moving out next friday, yay.
For my examples all is included. Staff, datacenter, bandwidth etc.
Here is another example
http://www.techopsguys.com/2014/01/30/more-cloud-fail/
Startup was spending 25% of REVENUE ON CLOUD.
They moved out to tier 1 hardware 6 month ROI.
I was later told their CEO was so angry at amazon for robbing them (maybe they used other words ), that they were happy to tell others their story and how overpriced public cloud is.
This kind of stuff doesn't make news often(just not sexy to talk about) even though it's happening a lot. People move in, realize the mistake in a lot of cases and move out (or maybe they are stuck and die).
Because 95%+ of developers don't know how to operate shit. I speak as someone who has worked closely with developers(including 2 companies that used AWS for some time) for the past 16 years at a half dozen different companies(mostly startups).
Most of them are completely clueless when it comes to operating stuff. Many of them don't even care, they don't WANT to know they just want to code. Code quality is quite bad and generally is trending towards worse rather than better.
I remember one of my former co-workers told me a little thing that happened at his company this was probably 5 or 6 years ago, they were in amazon and the developer asked "can't you just turn on the "auto scaling" feature?" I could understand that coming from a non technical person but a developer? I don't have words.
A lot of orgs that use public clouds, especially IaaS (SaaS does make sense in a lot of cases), don't know any better. I mean they don't know that it is unusual to spend six figures a month on services. They don't know that they can cut their spend significantly by doing things in house. Of course you need the talent to do so.
One excuse I heard for using public cloud(the company wasn't using Amazon, but another smaller enterprise player I forgot the name, not one of the obvious ones). This is a billion dollar corp, spending more than $600,000/month with public cloud. They had regular performance problems and outages. But the management didn't care, they didn't want to have to "deal with servers and vendors". (even though they had to deal with their cloud vendor all the time). One of my friends worked there and proposed a plan to bring it in house with a 4 month ROI, management didn't care.
Last company I was at was paying at the peak over $400,000/mo to amazon, company imploded not long after I left. My current org hired me to move them out of amazon years ago, they launched their app and of course the costs exploded as they tend to do with cloud services, towards the end of our time in that cloud we were well over $100,000/mo, and I'd argue we have grown 8 fold or more since that time (with that growth all of the gear fits in roughly 4 cabinets). The savings were obviously huge, but savings aside the higher availability, better performance, more control, is not as easy to quantify as the raw $ savings from purchasing/etc alone.
My current engineering management had cloud experience in the past(Joyent I think), with similar results - spending upwards of $500,000/mo on services resulting in a plan to bring it all in house(and they did), so fortunately I haven't had to fight my butt fight in some time. Don't get me wrong though the list of SaaS services we use is long as hell, dozens of them(even some for Ops including stuff from Dyn, Neustar, LogicMonitor, Pagerduty, Duo security etc).
I'll also say many ops people are shit too, run of the mill IT staff have been bad forever probably (few exceptions I'm sure).
Operating in a public cloud, especially one as limiting as AWS is requires talent(to do it right), I argue more talent than is needed to do things in house. There are a lot of "features" that you don't realize you get up front.
It certainly can work, if you put enough effort into it, or if you just live with the unreliable nature of the platform(along with costs etc).
Amazon tries to recruit me at least twice a year, along with netflix and I don't try to keep track how many service providers and cloud companies and other companies etc. I'm happy where I am at though.
Looking forward to tonight, HooterPalooza 2016, hooters bikini contest in Fremont, CA doors open at 5PM.
of how firefox will be better once it embraces chrome? I am one of the ones who is on firefox but has been dragged kicking and screaming the past few years as firefox slowly goes down the tubes. What does copying chrome give them ? At that point really what is the reason a user would pick firefox over chrome if firefox is just trying to be chrome?
Firefox seems to actively try to remove more and more functionality that I (and many others) like that differentiate it from other browsers. It's been quite sad to see.
(Phoenix 0.3 I believe was my first exposure to what eventually became firefox, still my primary browser though I use an older ESR release with the various hacks to make it behave mostly like it used to many years ago - it's also the browser I use 99.99% of the time on mobile too - my mobile usage is more casual and obviously mobile firefox is pretty crippled feature wise compared to desktop)
Firefox saying it was removing the feature that allows me to selectively accept cookies on a per website basis was another recent example, my firefox cookie database has probably 15,000 sites in it and has been built up over the past decade. I don't use any ad blockers on my desktop firefox though I do on mobile since I don't have that feature on mobile - also I can disable cookies globally with a click of a button with the prefbar firefox plugin that I have used for a decade as well, another thing I can't do easily on mobile - disabling cookies entirely is mostly useful for gaming sites that are just overloaded with cookies).
Every situation is unique of course. I was a customer of Exanet several years ago, just one clustered system (with 3PAR back end storage, was not going to use Exanet back end storage).
Exanet went bust, Dell acquired the assets and the key employees. Dell instructed the employees to NOT help any existing customers because of liability reasons. There was no support.
We had an issue with our 3PAR a few months later, and needed Exanet help to get back online, there was no support. I ended up getting the situation resolved by working with a 3rd party (who hired the support person from Exanet who supported us). The hardware was IBM xSeries, and the 3rdparty had a copy of all the software, but it was quite a scramble to get it back and running again. At the end of the day took about 3 days to get the system back online and another 5 days to recover stuff after that.
We later replaced the Exanet with a NetApp V-Series, I left the company before the solution got implemented. On paper the solution was faster than what we had with Exanet. What I heard the following year the company had major performance issues with V-series, and NetApp regional sales reps in that area were real assholes(my VAR at the time literally got yelled at by NetApp reps because he "only" sold us a V-series, and not a full NetApp Array - that rep is not with NetApp anymore, he made a KILLING at NetApp serving another company I used to work at(that had over 100 netapp arrays at one point) so he was more or less untouchable for a while). So the management at the company kicked NetApp out, and went with another solution. Not sure what happened after that.
6 years later I wish I still had Exanet, every NAS solution I've tried since has not been as good, which is kind of depressing. Dell has Exanet as an offering of course (forgot the name of the product assuming they still have it), though they only support certain Dell storage. Our data set is so small(1-2TB depending on if dedupe and/or file system compression is available) it doesn't make a lot of sense to buy dedicated tier 1 NAS(front+back end), but maybe we will have to do it eventually.
Personally I am more concerned about the technology than the stability of the business. Normally the quality of the technology will turn me off before I even get to consider the stability of the business these days.
With too much time on their hands.
To the prev poster this is for modems. Can't re flash them normally. My modem(motorolla) is not the model listed but am sure ia affected. It is basically a layer 2 bridge with a management ip (on a different subnet than my internal subnet but still reachable). My "router " is a soekris box running openbsd.
Though there are probably routers with the same or similar code on them.
If you are saying FlashSystem can virtualize other systems is that not what SVC does? I thought SVC was also available as a standalone product as well so if you really want SVC you don't have to buy Flashsystem (I think SVC also is included in some form in Storewize storage too ?)
But the most obvious question to me is - is there a reason to buy these products unless you are already an 'IBM shop'.
To me the answer has always been no. In the earlier days of TMS the cost was always too high for companies I have worked for, in the more recent years the competition is more than good enough for most workloads. So what can IBM's flashsystem do that others can't? The article didn't say. I assume it doesn't do it for the fraction of the cost of the competition.
I suppose if you are in the market for the absolutely fastest network based flash w/no software features then someone should consider IBM Flashsystem(without SVC of course). Though the relative market for that is quite small. And even then with no software features there is probably more reason to consider one of the newer NVMx based flash systems since they don't have software either.
The only other market opportunity I see for IBM really is IBM shops.
Can't imagine anyone wanting to pay a hefty premium for supermicro. The software is so expensive to run on top of it, it's a no brainer to spend an extra 30% to get better quality hardware. Or just qualify a range of hardware platforms and let the customer use whatever they want.
For me - I want HP servers with iLO 4 advanced, Advanced ECC memory as a bare minimum for my systems which run 384GB of memory each.
The last "lights out" management firmware update I ran on a supermicro system(2 years ago) required me to reset the firmware to defaults meaning losing all connectivity to the management device, was another reminder to me on the pains of dealing with supermicro (earlier pains included having to remove individual memory modules to try to trace which one was causing system crashes, so pointless frustrating). Oh and the general firmware updates(which often required booting to DOS still) that they do give, rarely had I ever seen release notes and they often say "don't apply unless support tells you to".
Maybe things have changed with them in recent years but not holding my breath. HP Proliant works great, love the "Proliant Service packs" where I can update all of the firmware in the system with one simple process and when I engage support I can just tell them "running service pack X" so they know exactly what all of my firmware versions are. The iLO 4 email alerts for various things is really helpful too. It's the small things that make operating the systems so much more pleasant than the white box stuff.
only because they have GOBS of memory I am sure. I had a VAR come to me a few years ago (after EMC dropped some cupcakes on our CIO). Said they could sell me an array with a TERABYTE of cache (at this point for some reason they shifted from selling EMC to selling HDS). I sort of laughed, I said yeah I know you can, but we can't afford it so why bring it up.
Looks like their high end box has up to 4.5TB of memory and up to 36TB of flash cache (not sure if that is a read or read/write cache)
For HP 3PAR (what I know best of course) their high end system has up to 3.5TB of memory and up to 48TB of flash cache(read cache on that system). "Only" six nines of availability there (though they also commit to 6 nines on any 4-controller 3PAR system).
I do realize the extra 9 is not a trivial amount of extra availability. Not sure what level of availability HP may commit to if you throw in peer persistence between two arrays(automatic/transparent failover without any external boxes or complexity).
I guess you didn't get the memo - if it's not reliable for you, then you are using it wrong.
Using amazon cloud was the most frustrating and painful part of my career I think. I am happy I haven't had to touch it in several years now.
The company I was at at the time had very high level connections to amazon cloud, I even had a meeting with the chief Andy over there along with his "chief scientist"(forgot the name). Only one meeting though my CTO said I was kind of rude so he didn't want to bring me back. My manager knew I was being polite and holding back a lot though. They basically gave us the same story they had given the company on several previous meetings ("yeah we know, we're trying to fix that.." -- but they never fixed it).
Andy even personally tried to get me fired for writing this blog post years ago:
http://www.techopsguys.com/2010/10/06/amazon-ec2-not-your-fathers-enterprise-cloud/
(my boss at the time read the post and said he had no problem with it. Andy called my CEO, CEO called my CTO, CTO called me I ended up taking the post down for a few years until the company imploded, company was polite enough to threaten me again about the blog post when I left the company eventually)
I loved the look on my boss's face at the time (himself having worked at amazon for about 10 years before) -- the company was spending (on paper, I say on paper because I am not sure how much the company actually paid in money, I think amazon forgave much of the bills due to relationships) roughly $450,000/month hosting shit there. Everyone at the company hated it. So my boss reached out to them (this was back in late 2010) asking if they could come out on site to assist us because clearly we were doing something wrong. Both companies were HQ'd in Seattle, so not like it was far to travel.
They basically told us to fuck off, that was not their model.
I think things have changed since but I mean take pretty much any other big company, HP, IBM, Oracle, MS whomever. If you are spending anywhere remotely resembling that amount they'll fall over backwards to come out on site to help the customer. Amazon didn't give a shit.
The company imploded maybe a year later.
Current company launched in amazon in late 2011 and moved out in 2012, same manager hired me at both companies, I was hired with the intent to move us out. The manager worked hard on cost modeling prior to app launch(he himself had probably 2 and a half years of amazon cloud experience and the ops guy he was working with was similar). Within a week of app launch all of those models were thrown away and costs exploded. By the time we moved out we were up to around $120k/mo spend with them. We've probably grown 8X since that time.
Fortunately the management I've had at current company is cloud aware and I don't have to fight that fight.
As shitty as the last company was, without being there I wouldn't of met the people that landed me at my current gig (in bay area instead of Seattle), where I've had a pretty happy life for the past 5 years at a stable growing company. So the last company did serve some purpose.
My own story is about 10 years ago I knew very little about storage. When I looked at an array I saw it did RAID, had redundant controllers, had fibre channel connectivity, and that's about it. I didn't understand the differences much beyond that. My background before was mostly servers, and some networking. I had dabbled a bit(very little bit) at one company, mostly following directions from the formal storage admin (this was about 12 years ago). I saw them planning the data layouts in excel and visio at the time. I thought to myself "I don't want to do storage, pain in the ass".
Then I came across 3PAR and well I suppose the rest is history. I have learned a lot about storage in the past decade, and things run pretty well. Managed 3PAR systems across 4 different companies over the past 10 years, currently have 4 arrays at two data centers. I would never call myself a storage admin, though I do do storage admin related things I suppose (nobody else in the companies I have worked at did storage stuff). The thing I perhaps learned that is the most important lesson is that features or performance alone is only a small part of the equation when it comes to storage. I've certainly had issues here and there with 3PAR in my years using them and so am MUCH more conservative with storage management today than when I started. I have had multiple people at HP(and 3PAR before) tell me that they have never known someone who operates 3PAR arrays as well as I do. I may not of ever become a 3PAR person if it wasn't for NetApp refusing to lend a system to do an evaluation 10 years ago.
Storage still makes up a very small % of my time, networking generally even less(switches especially, hardly ever touch them, I am the primary SME for switching, load balancing, firewalls, VPNs, storage, vmware, servers etc at my company ~$300M annual revenue). I realize I do a lot of different things, more than most people in my field(I've never met anyone else like me but I have not tried to either). So I am probably more of an edge case (or extreme edge case) rather than a run of the mill systems person.
(system admin/engineer/etc for roughly 20 years now)
That place where people store their content is exactly what the article is referring to. That requires massive amounts of servers and storage to handle everything. Obviously at even a smaller scale it is cheaper to "do it yourself" than to use a public cloud provider. Apple would save a lot by doing more themselves.
Just like Dropbox recently announced they had(or were going to) pull out of public cloud. Drop box I read at one point had more than 10,000 servers in data centers but still used public cloud never understood why, but whatever they wokeup eventually and saw the value. I suspect dropbox management started off exclusively in a cloud provider, performance pains hit them and they moved their performance sensitive stuff onto their own gear, and were too lazy to do the rest, until the costs got too high.
Apple has no need(at this time) to get into the public cloud space to offer VMs and other things to customers. Their cloud is for their devices.
Though in several years time it would not surprise me if they did get into it, after they have built up enough, it is a natural progression. It's what spawned amazon and google and microsoft's clouds after all. You build up enough internal resources and talent(because you must have it to run your own stuff anyway) and it doesn't take much more effort to offer it to the public.
The article I read on el reg I believe stated Apple will be cutting $600 million checks to google (per year) for use of it's cloud. You can do a lot with that kind of cash. Back when apple was swimming in massive growth that kind of money didn't matter, now the bean counters are counting beans more carefully and it matters more now and even more so in the future.
In my mind at least the biggest challenge to doing it yourself and not going to a cloud provider for services is getting the right talent to do it. People like me are rare, and most companies aren't willing to recognize the value provided by doing stuff on your own. The non tech types that have not experienced cloud usage don't know any different. They can't understand why for example investing $5M in doing it yourself can save you $30M from using a public cloud. The math is often so simple they can't compute it, and don't believe it. Which is unfortunate.
The coming tech implosion will be interesting to see how it affects cloud adoption.
the 3PAR numbers specifically refer to the 7450, when they have at least the 8450, 20850, and 20450 as all flash options as well(possibly others too those are the biggies though). I would not think anyone would buy 7450 after the 8450 came out there is no point.
But perhaps that is just a typo and implies HP 3PAR all flash in general rather than that specific product SKU.
Obviously one might expect HP's performance in the market to do even better once they get inline compression out the door. Maybe this year(as in out and stable and bulletproof)...? Every time I ask it sounds like it's not far away but I've been asking for a long time now.
kind of funny you say that since XenApp is the main thing I use when I VPN in from my phone. Just to play around a few months ago when I was installing some new HP gear I was curious if I could actually install vSphere while sitting at a bar having some drinks with my phone.
Combining ILO Advanced w/boot from ISO, my Galaxy note 3 with stylus, XenApp fundamentals (small 5 user license or something that we use for operational related apps) I was able to power up the new HP server, and install ESXi on it from my phone. It felt pretty cool at the time. Also have used XenApp over mobile to briefly look and make changes to our Netscalers via web UI. Last time I had to do that was maybe 2 or 3 years ago.
Anything more serious and I need my laptop. I haven't even bothered to try to get ssh working on my phone, and OpenVPN to my personal colo? tried it once, gave up pretty quick when the app wanted the configuration in some kind of format I had never heard of before.
My org uses Duo two factor for 2nd factor, can link a phone, or other device, or register a phone number and it will call you. Lots of options, very simple to use. It may be the only SaaS offering that I could not see a way to host in house (mainly to do phone calls, about 10% of the user base relies on call backs for 2nd factor, many of them international).
What is a cloud strategy ? vmware is more of a technology company, providing technology that can and does power several private and some public clouds. Do people think they should change and become a public cloud provider / service provider ? I think they thought about it but in general it sounds like a bad idea (HP tried it, Dell thought about it, IBM is fussing about trying it, etc).
For me I suppose as a SMB (~$300M/year in SaaS revenue give or take) all I really care about is the hypervisor (5.5U2 is what I am on, maybe 1 or 2 years until I consider trying 6).
Don't care about SDN, VSAN, NSX, not sure what VCAC is, but probably something else I don't care about. You can google "techopsguys sdn" and see the first result for my in depth ripping apart of the SDN hype from a couple of years ago. I'm sure it's great for service providers, but not everyone needs it.
vSphere's last big release that I got excited about was 4.0 (mainly for 64 bit support). Every release since has been ok, but no rush to adopt. The only reason I jumped from 4.1 to 5.5 was 4.1 no longer had support. It was doing everything I needed at the time, and I had no bugs or problems with the product.
(Another reason is newer hardware support). I held out a long time on 4.1 because of the vRAM tax stuff that happened early on with 5.x.
From a hypervisor perspective at least compare "what's new" in 4.0 to any newer version and 4.0 seems to dwarf the newer versions every time (last I checked anyway)
https://www.vmware.com/support/vsphere4/doc/vsp_40_new_feat.html
5.5U2 works fine(I had some issues with VMs hanging on 5.5U1 I think it was but that went away on it's own), I read of issues on 5.5U3 so had held off on upgrading to that, but probably will at some point I am sure. If only my HP DL380Gen9 systems could reboot in less than 1-2 hours and reboot on the first try I would be more inclined perhaps to patch sooner (http://h20564.www2.hpe.com/hpsc/doc/public/display?docId=emr_na-c04822613&sp4ts.oid=7500984).
I love vSphere don't get me wrong, it is a very solid piece of code in my experience, vmware quality in general has been very high which keeps me a loyal customer.
I think part of that quality is because I don't leverage close to all of the abilities of the platform, things that seem to have a history of being more buggy (I don't use them because they are more buggy I don't use them because I don't need them).
It literally took about 7 years until I saw my first Purple Screen of Death on vSphere (hardware failure).
workstation has been a pretty mature product for a decade or more. The only reason for upgrades for me is so it works on newer guest and host OSs, which doesn't seem to be that much work.
I keep an archive of most of my vmware workstation versions just to see how it's grown over time, my oldest one:
9.3M Nov 4 2001 VMwareWorkstation-3.0.0-1455.tar.gz
and before that I guess it wasn't called workstation yet
5.9M Jan 12 2001 VMware-2.0.3-799.tar.gz
The latest version of workstation 12 pro for linux is 355MB (build 3,272,444)
more than 3.2 million builds of workstation between 2.0.3 and 12 pro.
The only reason I upgraded to 12 pro from 10 was it was a good sale, black friday I think it was(saw the link to it on el reg).
(vmware customer since 1999, though I seem to have misplaced my vmware 1.0.2 for linux CD at this point, makes me want to go look for it again now...)
Interesting how they (or maybe just you) chose to use a 2.9:1 reduction number. That seems much lower than what most folks (and even Pure themselves?) use.
My own 3PAR 7450 AFA gets between 1.5:1 and 1.7:1 dedupe at the moment depending on the data set. Used to be in the 1.8-2.0:1 range. 3PAR doesn't have data compression yet though. They first announced data compression at an event I was at in 2013, though taking a lot longer than I had hoped to get it out the door.
of the lazy/broken development model. It took me probably less than 5 minutes to determine NPM was a raging pile of shit when a developer first introduced it to me what seems like 3 years ago now. The fact that the things seem to be constantly breaking and needing bleeding edge versions is bad enough, the auto dependency stuff is of course terrible as well.
My org's latest foray into npm involved having to build a new version of GCC in order to even get the newer NPM shit to even compile(new compiler needed other libs too that broke shit so we had to build a new dedicated VM with the upgraded stuff to isolate it).
[update] Meanwhile my org is also working on our first major PHP upgrade in --- four years. PHP has been very stable as well. Security updates come from Ubuntu even though "upstream" has long abandoned the version of PHP we have I believe.
At least with the most common Perl libraries(and others come to mind too) they are included in many of the larger Linux distributions by default, no need to go to 3rd parties to get many things. My Ubuntu sytsems here seem to have 2,700 perl libraries in the repos. They are pretty stable too, perl 5 is stable and mature at least.
Trying to include NPM stuff in distros is almost a wasted effort because the package is obsolete after 5 minutes.
I first encountered this broken development model about 10 years ago with my first introduction to supporting a ruby on rails app, and it really seems things have just gone downhill since that time.
It gets worse as the newer developers are raised on this culture and don't know any different.
Meanwhile the non technical marketing people have a field day inserting dozens of 3rd party javascript resources into the websites making them slow down quite a bit and even have errors. I had one guy a few years ago link a popup on the production homepage to some code running on an internal-only QA server, then he took off for a vacation within 30 minutes ("it worked in the office - because the office has a VPN to the QA environments" -- what you didn't think seeing "QA" in the hostname meant that the production front page should be pointed at it?)
I'm past the anger, past the tears, I just laugh now. And I give responsibility for this stuff to other people, less stress in my life.
(been working with/supporting developers for the past 16 years now)
Pure doesn't do scale out does it ? Or do you mean operate multiple independent silos of storage ?
e.g. with the 3PAR 20k series you can start with 2 controllers, scale up to 8 controllers, and scale out to 4 arrays with their federation tech (up to roughly 16PB of SSD storage and 14TB of write cache(or mix in some spinning rust if you like too, 3PAR doesn't care, the 20k goes to 6PB raw capacity with disks or run hybrid, it's so flexible!), I'm sure that will go up more once the 8TB SSDs come out for them).
Having a petabyte of storage behind what I assume is 2 controllers for Pure(active/passive still?), doesn't seem like a solution I'd want to risk using. I'm sure they have some good products, just not something I'm interested in using.
So all of the HDS VSP customers etc are running nothing but things like hadoop on their storage systems?
Makes no sense to me.
None of my VM hosts have storage at all, they even boot from SAN.
I would think in most cases things like Hadoop would be using local storage, I'm not in the hadoop realm but have only personally head of one company that used network storage for hadoop over the years(ironically enough it was HDS storage, with BlueArc I think).
I was at a company once where we had JMS queues backed by an oracle DB (weblogic). Had queue issues outage 24h+. The end solution was to truncate the tables with the queue data. I still remember to this day backnin 2004 the oracle dba saying along the lines of "I'm not truncating shit until you get the company president on the conference call to approve". The VP wasn't enough. The president approved and things got back to normal until the next outage at which point we were more comfortable truncating those tables. So many bugs in weblogic jms back then (haven't used it since that job)
Back when HP had WebOS (before they killed it) I felt HP needed to invest about $5B in order to make it into a real contender for mobile market share(not long after they went and spent $10B+ on Autonomy), a lot of that was good apps. HP paid several developers if I recall right to develop for WebOS for a while at least. Obviously the OS needed work as well, it was sad to see it's decline, I felt constantly that no matter what HP (or Palm just prior) was doing the OS was falling further and further behind every day.
MS obviously has more skin in the game than HP ever did, and I suspect it would take closer to $10B of investment today to bring windows phone to a competitive space. They obviously have the cash. I guess the investment community doesn't want them to use it in this way though.
If I were dictator of MS I would invest in say 100 different startups around the world folks developing applications, fund them to make the cool and unique things for windows phone. Invest at least $20 million in each of the 100 companies. Get some diversity of development going on.
Or do something else equally dramatic, commit to supporting a given OS version for 5+ years without major upgrades being required. Maybe they will try this for windows 10 but I suspect they may be trying to pull a "OS X" with Windows 10 having 10 being a somewhat generic number and piling in both major and minor changes along the way. Microsoft's phone platforms seem to be the worst of the worst as regards to MS quickly abandoning all support for them. I'm partially referring to OS level patches etc but more so for apps. Even though most Android devices are unsupported OS patch wise from their manufacturers quite quickly, the apps themselves continue to work, I suspect a large portion of apps still work fine on Android 3 even today. And apps that maybe were built for say Android 3 a lot of which probably still work fine on 4, or even 5. Some exceptions and bugs of course.
I'm not a fan of MS so part of me is happy to see them not do "whatever it takes" to win. I'm happy with Android 4.4.4. (no I don't want android 5 or 6, or IOS or anything else).
One thing I have wondered though, haven't tried to look it up, is where was WebOS market share at the time say HP bought Palm, vs where is Windows phone market share today. Obviously the market is much bigger today but the % numbers have me curious.
el reg signed up a bunch of bloggers to post more articles on the site. They reached out to me about 12-18 months ago but I wasn't interested(lost interest in writing such articles not much in tech inspires me these days, I used to blog more in a week than I have in the past year now). I wrote a few hundred articles many in depth on my personal blog over a 3-4 year time span.
Trevor is another one of the folks they signed up, though not sure if he was a blogger or not.
Violin was dead when HP bought 3par and went with that for their flash and killed their OEM agreement with violin.
Strangely enough some 3rd party contacted me recently about what i thought of violin. They claimed to think I looked into violin in the past when i have not.
Seemed like some sort of market research. For sure wasn't a sales pitch
$150k a year isn't much in SF for household income at least. Maybe $150k a year if a couple and both are working.
I'm moving away from the bay area in the next couple of months(going to Modesto). Get a bigger, apartment (about the same kind of quality I have now), for half the cost(I pay $3k/mo for rent now very nice apartment around 830 sq feet, new place is over 1,200 sq feet for half). I know SF is much more. I work from home 99% of the time anyway, and my position is stable with my company, my company isn't going anywhere anytime soon so I don't need to be here right now, but I want to be close by in case I change my mind.
I moved here 5 years ago to be near the tech scene(was in Seattle area previous 10 years, the state of tech up there gives me no reason to return at this time), still glad I made the move but now time to shift a bit east.
as for the tech startups etc -- burn baby burn.
- ops guy myself
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