Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat » Stephen Foskett,...

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Its nice to see a blog entry on DMX… it is rare and commendable…

The SSD support and Virtual provisioning may now create new markets for DMX…Viedio Processing/Visual comuting(HPC like usage for transient storage) and shared storage services(for Hosted services/cloud computing)

I was managing DMX-3 when I was working large semiconductor company…Now I work for service provider…

Knowing the Perfomance and Security DMX offers…I think DMX may end up bieng deployed more aggressively in Shared storage/storage on demand offerings in Commercial Datacenters to augument I/O intensive workloads for customers…

One thing that would be nice to see is.. A Deeper integration between Clariion and Symmetrix families…for easier hybrid storage alloaction, management, migration and replication…

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I find it interesting that people are all on about 10Gig Ethernet or 8Gig Fibrechannel when most people don't use the 2Gig they already have.

True story - an engagement I was on a few months ago had the customer upgrading from an older environment, so, as such, we ran a baseline health-check on their san and found that even during peak utilization they were running at no more than 30% on each switch. This means that of the 2Gigabit they had available they were using, on average, six-tenths of a gig.

Of course they *HAD* to go 4Gig, which goes to show you that marketing trumps engineering any day of the week and twice on Sunday.

4Gig, 8Gig, 10Gig, it doesn't matter. What matters is utilization, distance/latency, and ASIC layout.

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What bothers me these days: I bought an exteral enclosure and a seagate 320GB disk to make a clone of my disk so it can be replaced by the new seagate disk. When working with Windows XP via Bootcamp the disk works just fine on both the left and the right USB port. But when I'm running OSX, it just doesn't work at all! I coudn't test it with the disk powered by both USB ports, because the cable is too short.

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Thanks for sharing because I have never heard of flyertalk.

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You read my mind completely. Couldn't have said it better. Hope the people over at apple read this.

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One comment I have on this is that Compellent's 'Free Space Recovery' agent only work on RDMs. I have a large deployment of microsoft IIS servers that run VMFS on a Compellent SAN. I created them with thin provisioning in mind, but as time goes by, and data is written/deleted to my various volumes…I lose that provisioning, and am currently unable to reclaim that space.

Now, I have read on a Datacore forum thread that when ESX writes to a VMFS volume, it does so plainly without altering data. I haven't verified this yet, but if it is indeed true, this could mean that zero detection could be of great benefit across various operating systems.

So does anyone know if using tool like 'sdelete' to write zeroes to free space on a VMFS disk would show up as zeroes in back-end storage?

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Nice article Stephen. Disclaimer - I am a NetApp employee and a former employee of EMC. Been there, done that.

Chuck makes an interesting point below - the ability for an admin to choose where on a set of spindles his data will reside is a nice thing to have for the most demanding workloads. But these workloads are comparatively few. In fact, my personal experience with installed DMX and CLARiiON arrays bears out this one bit of real world experience -

If you are going to need dedicated IO's that the outer tracks of a set of spindles will give you, then *most likely* the workload is high enough that the inner tracks will go unused because you cannot afford to throw any other application workload at the spindles.

Hence the cost is very high - but sometimes you do run into this need. But as a rule, it is not needed for the vast majority of applications… just a very few.

Any other conversation is pure FUD. Been there.

I will probably blog on the Low Art of FUD soon. Why ?? Because the IT community needs to know this - FUD wastes *your* time and energy - not mine. All vendors have a database of some sort full of razor sharp answers to any and all FUD. Especially the kind that Chuck tosses around. Vendor Olympics is about the customer tiring himself out - not exercising the vendor.

We do this for a living folks!

Cheers !

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If you are looking for a step by step troubleshooting example of iPhone 3G and Exchange ActiveSync, you can visit http://iphone-activesync.net/?page_id=16

“It cuts to the chase” Most people are missing the basics.

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When in landscape mode, in the list of songs in an album, the numbers are in order (does that make sense? =/ I mean it lists the songs by 1-2-3-4 etc).. wouldn't it make more sense to show the actual track number? (I'm not one to add all the songs of a particular album to my iPod)

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It looks like Brocade and Foundry have been been working very hard, preparing for this. There might be a tiger in the tank at Brocade after all. I like the way they seem ready to take the bull by the horns. In the months to come we'll see how much conviction they have to follow up on this acquisition.

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Hey Stephen,
Brian Henderson here from EMC. Just started blogging under http://powerwindows.wordpress.com/. Feel free to add me into this list.
My twitter username is bhendu

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I have a photo of the first MGA in north America. SER 10106 Also the first MGA to leave the factory. I was trying to load the photo onto Wika. and I found your name. (Stephen Foskett) I am not an IT and do not HTML very well at all. If you are interested I could email you the photo and load it on for knowledge and history sake. The owner is a freind of mine and I do have rights to the photo plus the permission to show it. This car is on ebay for sale at this time. The photo is not one that is on ebay , but a phto that I took.

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Great point! The portrait mode song lists are ALWAYS album-only, a point that can easily be missed. I think I'll add this up above!

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Thanks for the detailed comment, Chad! And for your excellent blog (if you don't already read Chad's Virtual Geek, you should! http://virtualgeek.typepad.com)

I'm concerned that people think the value of virtualization begins and ends with infrastructure savings (”condensation”) and thus are missing out on the real value - transforming the open systems data center!

Stephen

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Steve, now you're thinking about this the way I do (and many of my EMC compatriots do). The CapEx savings of virtualization, consolidation and efficiency (in all it's tier/archive/dedupe/power) forms is important, but you're right - it IS the sideshow.

It is, however the core prerequisite for the next step in datacenter transformation - you get the macro benefit in the “majority virtualized” state, otherwise processes and management models are dominated by the non-virtualized use cases.

With our key strategic partneres, we're trying to work on this problem at every layer. It is a BIG problem, but the transformative possibility (in my opinion at least) is huge. It's going to take us a while, and not every piece of the puzzle is solved - but every step on the journey can have a customer pay-off. Look at our actions, innovations, acquisitions, launches and partnerships through this lens, and you've got it.

If we do our job right - it would give more opportunity for IT to focus on the things that provide core value to the business - but without the forced secondary effects outsourcing did (and wihch made it untenable for many)

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I hate the portrait mode song list. Because if you are crazy enough to click on a song there while you are in shuffle, it will then continue to shuffle the tunes from that album, not the library. Grrrr…

Oh wait another confusing one. Getting the mobile appstore content off your touch if you manage manually. You have to click on the menu in itunes. Huh?

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Ugh - lots of typos this morning. Sorry about that, rushed on the EVDO.

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Nice to hear from you again, Joe!

You're right about these extras (and the Ad-Hoc problem, which bugs me on every WiFi device I have!)

I'm meaning to write a post about all the things that are wrong specifically with the iPod in the iPhone/Touch… Gotta add this!

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Oh yeah, and on the 802.11 — why does the ipod touch/ihone *not* differentiate between ad-hoc (computer-to-computer) and infrsatructure (AP) networks? Very abusable vector for hijacking traffic.

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Things you missed that have been bugging me:

OS v1.x of music.app allowed one to listen to the audio track of a video podcast (like when I'm walking on the part of my commute). Now you get 'helpfully redirected' to the video viewer. Not a big deal for iphone, but ipod touch users with smaller batteries get hosed. The versions keep changing how repeat works/defaults on the podcasts as well; one is forced to catch the end if you are not listening to the most recent first. Agreed on the scrubber bar - lousy to go forward/back since there is no since of scale; allowing us to scale the scrubber bar would be great. Streaming URLs please! Most of the third party apps have issues on this or that stream.

Calendar: great that you can finally select from multiple calendars when creating an event on the device, but te improvement is only half-hearted since you still cannot edit an event and change in what calendar you have. Weakness on making iphone/ipod touch a standalone device.

Spreaking of calendar usage - mail.app still doesn't process .ics attachements. How ridiculous is that? I would expect to have to complain that we're forced to calendar.app instead of gcal or anything of our choose. I didn't expect that the feature would be totally lacking!

And yeah, the default notes.app is weak; great I can mail the note stright from the application, but why can't i save a mail message as a new note?

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We are using Adaptec 1420S with SATA-disks that are not seen during installation of ESX 3.5 upd 3. Connecting directly to SATA-plugs on motherboard we have problems with Storage - no storage available.

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This is a really, really, REALLY good idea. Seriously, Wayne, I wish I'd thought of it! It's especially useful for all the “Linksys”, “Default”, “Wireless”, etc SSIDs out there. And the thing CAN tell the difference between networks using the MAC address - that's what the Skyhook location stuff in (Google) Maps already does!

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I'd like to see a model with an improved camera that includes auto focus

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How about allowing me to selectively set a wi-fi connection to prompt before connecting. I know that I can do this globally however whenever I'm connected to a public access point with a SSID like “linksys” — I should be able to tag that connection to NOT automatically connect.

My home and work access points are uniquely named. I want them to allows connect.

If Apple isn't sure how to implement this - look at how BlackBerry does it.

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I also want to say thanks to the Storage Magazine folks for their role in this business. Especially Mark Schlack - who stood out from so many other editors for having class and perspective. A real pro, that one.

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