Friday Storage and Technology Reading
Posted by: Beth Pariseau
Around the water cooler
My Google Reader isn’t quite as busy as Robert Scoble’s, but it gets a decent workout each week. Between that, the wires and all the different pitches I get - not to mention the interesting stories I come across that are more general IT than storage-specific - I usually end up with a backlog. Every so often, I’ll clear out that backlog with a link dump. Here’s one for this week:
NetApp’s Simple Steve on how to recover corrupted photos. [Simple Steve: Photo Recovery]
The Storage Anarchist, who already broke the arrival of IBM’s XIV array, keeps pounding away at IBM. [The Storage Anarchist: How much does a free XIV array really cost?]
In case you haven’t heard, former Dell/Equallogic evangelist Marc Farley has signed on with 3PAR. One of his first vids for the 3PAR blog features mad props for the above mentioned Storage Anarchist, with low-tech farm animals in the background. [StorageRap: Props to Anarchist for Blogging Coup]
Server virtualization tangent time: Chris Wolf breaks down Microsoft’s new Hyper-V licensing.
Back to storage (well, sort of). Another really enjoyable post from Steve Duplessie, with humorous anecdote about his “militaristic” attempts to recycle, how his town has thwarted them, and how it all ties in with green IT. [Steve's IT Rants: Hybrid IT]
Okay, back to storage: Curtis Preston offers his advice for home data protection. [Backup Central: Friends & Family Computer Recommendations]
While EMC’s Anarchist keeps IBM busy, another EMC’er picks on NetApp’s VTL. [The Backup Blog: NetApp's VTL is "Dangerous"]
Amazon adds more cloud storage, this time for its EC2 platform. [TechCrunchIT]
When I got to college, all I got was a POP email account and some spectacularly crappy dining hall food. Kids these days are getting iPhones and iPod Touches. Also, I just said “kids these days”, meaning I’m officially old. Thanks a lot, New York Times. [NYT Technology: Welcome, Freshmen. Have an iPod]
The San Jose Mercury News has an employee’s-eye look at the Agami shutdown. [Promising start-up abruptly shuts down]
Finally, if you only check out one item from this list, make it this one. A new blog called Where is Bob? Tales of an Absentee Manager, is one I recommend bookmarking for anyone who works in IT. It’s kind of like the IT blog equivalent of Office Space, and even involves storage-related hilarity(yes, you read that correctly):
I could see sweat forming on Marek’s forehead. I marveled at his self control, and wondered whether he was practicing zen meditation when he wasn’t hacking into the Pentagon.
“Bob.” He was speaking slowly, enunciating every syllable. “Do you know the meaning of words, back-up and eve-ry-thing?”
“What?” Bob was laughing, he was clearly in good spirits, and Marek’s accent often amused him.
“Backup. Everything.” Marek repeated even slower. I saw a few blood vessels rupture, and his left eye began to twitch violently. I knew that I had to intervene.
“Now look, Bob. What you are asking just doesn’t make sense,” I said. “You can’t have a backup of everything. You need a backup of a particular thing at a particular time.”
“I need a backup of all our servers for all time.” So, he knew that we had servers. I underestimated Bob. But he clearly didn’t understand the passage of time, so perhaps I still had an advantage.
“That’s impossible, Bob. Can’t be done.” It was one of those times when you begin regretting what you said before you even finish saying it.
“Can’t be done!” He didn’t say it like a question, and I knew what was coming. “You are one of those people who say NO all the time. No, we can’t write our own operating system! No, we can’t have a backup of everything! People hate that! You impede progress!”
“Ok, we’ll do it.” Marek gave me a classic crazy-girl-what-are-you-doing look. “Come back next Wednesday.”[...]
When Bob returned to work on Thursday, he forgot about his outlandish backup request, and left us alone. Unfortunately, Bob forgot to mention that we were in violation of a university mandate to have redundant copies of our backups stored in an off-site location. He received the notice about our lack of compliance along with a detailed write-up of the policy. He compressed the forty page document into three incongruous words - backup of everything. So, when we learned about the violation, Marek and I had to postpone all our other projects and commitments, and scramble to make duplicates of critical backups to be sent off site along with other disaster recovery tools and documents. [Where is Bob? Welcome Party for Dave, Part I]
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