* Posts by Martin0641

21 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Mar 2014

The shifting SANs of enterprise IT: You may have been burned in the past, but live migration is and will be your friend

Martin0641

Please define SAN

Do you mean some nonsense dedicated fiber channel crap or just iSCSI and NVMEof?

Because with 400Gbit E NICs around the corner I'm not doubling up on legacy SANs with their WWNs etc.

Oracle takes its gripes about Pentagon's JEDI contract to federal court

Martin0641

Re: Conflicted

Certain things, insurance, Military, etc - are best done as a single entity instead of competing entities.

Clouds are one of those things. I don't want to work on AWS and iCloud, and Azure, and OpenStack all because the wind blew a different way for a certain customer.

Huawei spied, US federal jury finds

Martin0641

Well

"good artists borrow, great artists steal.”

Idiot millennials are saving credit card PINs on their mobile phones

Martin0641

Fails the Smell Test

Who bothers to store a 4 digit pin?

BTW I do one worse, I store my passwords in my Google drive and synch it to all my devices.

Good luck guessing your way through the AES 256 encryption by the way.

French publishers join Swedish 'Block Party' to pester ad refuseniks

Martin0641

Sensible Alternative

I use Google Contribute because I'd rather directly pay for content than be advertised to. What is annoying is when sites don't sign up for this service and then complain that my blocking their ads is so horrible as if there were no alternative available to generate money from me...I'll pay directly thank you very much.

Hillary Clinton private email server probe winding up – reports

Martin0641

Re: @Doug ... @ AlexS

Obama is not the reason for Trump, the GOP created this mess. The South used to be a staunch Democratic stronghold, but the Dem's support of the civil rights movement in the 60's and the end of segregation turned them to the GOP who before was mostly northern rich people. Once this happened, the GOP had a large population of easily controlled religious dimwits that could be whipped into a fury over wedge social-conservative issues like abortion and gay marriage while the rich people gave themselves the tax cuts they wanted in the first place.

So now, the GOP base who has been constantly lied to by the GOP leadership is revolting, because the base has not seen their economic position improve after years of support, and all the social issues they asked for have not gone their way. So they are going to elect someone who says what they want to hear while ignoring the fact that Drumph is a billionaire. It's quite funny.

Why NetApp shouldn’t buy Solidfire

Martin0641

El Reg should be ashamed for this piece of non journalism.

Sysadmins can forget PC management skills, says Microsoft

Martin0641

Interesting

I saw the article and thought just the opposite. If you work in any tight security field, be it government or finance or classified areas, all this noise about apps and sharing and wireless and cloud is beyond useless, since there is no link to the internet and any wireless tech is strictly forbidden.

I need developers writing code on their properly configured, baseline configured, Locked down workstation. When I run wireshark I see all the little apps waste time trying to dial home, which will never work, and usually can't be turned off. How I enjoy not using the app store and not signing in with a MS account...

Should all Europeans be able to watch Estonian football? Consultation launched

Martin0641

The future must be really annoying for business people...

This strikes me as the ultimate non problem from a technology standpoint. Globally, we all have accounts with companies that offer logins capable of utilizing federated trusts, such as Facebook and Google. There is no reason I cannot pay Google $20 per month to give me an ad free experience and also compensate the sites and providers I visit so they are taken care of financially. I already do this with Google contributer.

This can simply be extended to other forms of media. If I pay Google $300 per month for an unlimited package, they can just let me watch, listen, stream, and play anything I damn well please anywhere, anytime and directly compensate the provider of said content upon consumption.

By using currency exchange rates and numbers on median wealth in different nations, we can adjust for relative costs... because digital goods aren't like physical good, they can be replicated at no cost. So I should be able to watch a Bollywood comedy and they should be able to get my credited from my account, with one interface and login. Geo blocking and blackouts are absurd in 2015, I'm never going to "the game" because the view is better in my house and the beer is cheaper. Let media compete globally, and fund creators directly, and be amazed at how much better that works.

UK.gov: Size matters, and we like it SMALL but MORE

Martin0641

Commentators sounds like a lovely potatoe based snack.

I'm curious about what they mean by procurement. Here in the U.S. procurement is the purchase of equipment, the reason we buy Cisco and Juniper is partially driven by the knowledge that we can hire people familiar with those vendors as much as it is about the hardware itself and that it is built by U.S. companies which matters to the intelligence community.

But the comments sound like they are talking about awarding contacts to subs instead of primes. Lockheed Martin is a prime, they get awarded large contracts, but when they bid or after they win they usually have several subcontractors to try and fill all the slots.

We have a 3% requirement for SMBs, such as women owned, veteran owned, native American owned etc.

So, they want to award contacts to smalls at that large a rate?

Ofcom: We need 5G spectrum planning for the future’s ultramobes

Martin0641

Re: we had 2g, then we had 3g

Here ya go

https://tasel.wordpress.com/2012/03/13/lte-hsdpa-dc-hsdpa-explain-this-alphbet-soup-of-4g-to-me/

Pure's mass disk drive killer lays out plans for flash hegemony

Martin0641

Yo Coz...

When am I getting my VVOLs mang? I'm tired of these RDMs.

If flash storage achieves FaME, will it live forever?

Martin0641

I'm not really seeing the innovation here...

I'm all for bigger, better, faster and more...but it seems like a really long way to describe the difference between CPU registers, L1, L2, L3, L4 cache, then ram...but instead of then traversing the IO stack to network or SAS or PCIe you just extend the address space to NAND interfaces if available and then go to disk or nas if there is a cache miss.

Sounds like the OS and hardware vendors should just bake that into the system as a teir, no need to hack or trick anything. The capability didn't exist before, so it wasn't integrated. Now it is, so let's just extend the protocols and standards and keep on trucking...

Get ready for the El Reg Storage Winners-n-Losers super chart

Martin0641

Where is Pure Storage?

I just bought a FA-405 and a FA-450, and thus far the experience, performance, and simplicity place it far over EMC, NetApp, and Dell.

ONTAP isn't putting NetApp ONTOP

Martin0641

I just bought a Pure FA-450 and a FA-405...

And I can say firsthand that the out of box experience is vastly superior to both EMC and NetApp.

They seriously packed a 6 in 1 screwdriver into the kit so I would have everything I needed to get it up and running, and the system was up within 15 minutes of finishing the HW install, provisioning iSCSI with full dedupe and compression running by default - no RAID quibbling or setup required.

Its because of products like this, and their soon to be announced next-gen all flash scale out product that people will wet their pants for (I've seen it) that companies like EMC and NetApp are having a hard time, you don't need 50,000 employees to make these things (EMC just fired about 10k people and thus are down from 60k employees).

Those companies are paying for buildings, parking lots, and more than one crusty behind the times engineers. They didn't stay hungry, efficient, and lean - they went big, went corporate, and went home.

I've seen the X-Brick...guess what...its 550k for 11.5TB RAW and puts out ~960MBps with 4k sectors...I got them to max it out with I believe 64k sectors and it hit 1160MBps. Mind=Blown on that one, my FA-405 was under 100k and blows the doors off it. Sure you can chain more than one X-Brick together, apparently you can stack like 32 of them...at a cost of like 16 million dollars....

This is a car and horse buggy situation.

Two things happened. One, technology marched, it always does. Two, the C level asshats at EMC and NetApp decided to see how long they could milk selling people racks and racks of disks because the margin was higher than selling them 10U of flash. They literally created their own competition because the market saw, and had time, to create whole companies to exploit the intentional market gaps left open by those two companies as they tried to convince everyone to buy their old crap. Its their fault that the tech isint as seasoned and widespread as it could be, they simply didn't want to cannibalize their own market segments just because the tech advanced. That would be real engineering work advancing & customizing and shrinking their footprint, but they want to sell you expensive widgets with shiney nameplates on them.

You can either tell customers that the 5 million dollar array they just bought can be matched by a new product at 1/8th the cost or you can pretend that tech does not exist and keep selling high priced junk. They would rather sell you a rack of metal struggling to give you 100k sustained IOPS than admit that a single SSD can give over 100k IOPS, and a fusion IO card can give over 5 million, so just buy this synology rather than our array because as a business you likely don't even need that level of performance and thus tech has commoditzed our lower performance their simply by advancing.

Do you or do you not think that some young internal engineer came up to them and said: if I put all flash in a VNX it outperforms the VMAX, what do you think? I think that PowerPoint went to marketing and finance and it was DOA. No way were going to offer something at 1/8th the price with 8x performance...bad business.

I'm going to reward forward pushing tech companies with my purchasing powers, not entrenched interests. Companies like Pure are the reason that job titles such as SAN Engineer are dissapearing or having their scope GREATLY expanded because the field is evolving, we no longer need a dedicated person to keep the magic working at the smaller scales - tech has advanced...teir 3 admins can handle most of those duties now. People who get excited over big iron spinning disks remind me of my audiophile uncles that squeel over oxygen free pure copper audio cables - fangirling at the what was cool when they were coming up and failing to keep with what makes the most sense based on what we as a species are capable of...now.

FROSTY MISTRESS of the Outer System: Pluto yields to probe snapper

Martin0641

Re: Billion

Well since the founding fathers invented science as they rode velociraptors to work, their billion is the real billion and all pretenders to the throne are silly people.

Google: What this planet needs is INTERNET FROM SPAAACE

Martin0641

Re: Good stuff

Its always the anonymous coward spouting dystopian gloom and doom. Cynicism is not new nor is it helpful in this circumstance.

Dell muscles into all-flash for small biz with $35k 4TB array

Martin0641

Without Compression and DeDuplication....

It's a conversational non-starter...

Emma Watson should 'shut up, all this abuse is her own fault'

Martin0641

MRA

Is just the system responding to feminists, because humanism is the proper path, and the better things get for any historically abused subgroup the less valid their cheer leading for a particular subset will become. Might as well start on the egalitarian path before it becomes cool.

NetApp's running with the big dogs: All-flash FlashRay hits the street

Martin0641

They can keep it

Using SSDs and RAIDing them together is NOT how you are supposed to use NAND. There is a reason Skyera put their NAND directly on chips accessible by a PCIE bus, giving them bit level access to each cell without a SATA/SAS obfuscation layer slowing everything down.

I have two SkyHawks, it takes about 5 minutes to get them setup and into the GUI from the box, and the performance blows this "new" offering out of the water without even upgrading to the SkyEagle or the SkyCondor which is on the way.

Hey, Nimbus Data. What you doin' with those 4TB flash slabs? Making a 96TB box? We KNEW it!

Martin0641

I'll Stick With This...

Skyera blows them out of the water, 20GBps compressed and deduped in capacities up to 250TB with 500TB in Q4 at 5m iops per 1u unit a single name space and 800 watts.

Mine arrives in June, the beta units we evaluated all performed above spec, and besides: using SSDs in a raid is a stupid way to handle flash memory, blocking block level access to flash by putting it being an unnecessary sata or sas interface that harms write amplification ability.