Considering Compellent: A Fresh Approach to Storage
Some time ago I went looking for a storage solution to replace and consolidate some of my aging DAS, I looked high and low, and one name rose unexpectedly up the list: Compellent. Squarely aimed at midrange cusomters looking for high-end functionality, anyone considering EMC CLARiiON, HP EVA, and HDS should give Compellent some attention. Compellent's tag line for some time has been "A storage solution every company can affrod and any ...
An Unexpectedly Long Pause…
Sorry I haven't posted anything in almost a week and a half. I've got plenty to post but haven't had the time. Getting up to speed at Joyent is taking significantly longer than expected. The upshot is that, as a result, I'm making some significant organizational improvements in the process... thats my hope anyway. In the desire to quickly catch up... I'll just blast through some things. DTrace is named Innovation of the Year by ...
Dear EMC: Stop calling me!!!
Remember the spam of the 90's? Telemarketing. Unsolicited phone calls. Apparently EMC thinks they need a comeback. Every single week I get a phone call from EMC asking if I've talked to someone and if I'd like to get in contact with EMC. Several times I've even talked to sales people and explained why I think EMC should die a horrible rotten stinking death. The calls that I get are on behalf of Miles King, Silicon Valley Sales ...
Why the world isn’t a better place
James Dickens recently posted a blog entry entitled Should this guy be canned?. The post points to Pradhap Devarajan's blog, who, if you didn't know, just so happens to be one of the guys behind the popular BeleniX Distribution of OpenSolaris. Here's what pisses me off... Pradhap created a little PERL script that gives you a more Linux like structure for the root user (home of /root, instead of Solaris standard /), makes a backup of your ...
Jeff Bonwick: New Sun Microsystems CTO for Storage
Things are changing at Sun and the future is looking bright as Sun starts to put its engineering muscle behind storage, an area of the business that was more about partnerships and rebadging than engineering brainpower. That's changing though, largely because of ZFS and that only makes it more interesting to see what I ran across today... Jeff Bonwick, Sun distinguished engineer and chief architect of ZFS, is speaking at 2006 Storage Develo...
A Time for Change: Joyent Bound
A change is due and my time has finally come. After several years at Homestead, I'm setting sails onward. Following Labor Day I'll be working for Joyent. The gig has a lot to offer, including the fact that I'll be working full time on putting OpenSolaris to work in production. That means that projects that are currently a sideline activity for me will become of full time importance and I'll be able to spend more time contributing in ...
Cheap Ass Storage: How Low Can You Go
I've been thinking a lot about low end storage tonight. I mean ultra-low end. It comes to mind for 2 reasons. First, I'm really sick of the "whitebox linux mafia", as I call them, bashing me over the head for prefering enterprise storage solutions. These are the folks that say NetApp or Sun sucks because they can build a 20TB storage box for the price of a ham sandwich and they generally talk about companies like HDS and EMC in the same ...
Mid-Week Diversions: Don’t Download This Song!
Tamarah found this and sent it my way... its so classic that I have to share it with everyone. From Wierd Al's forthcoming album "STRAIGHT OUTTA LYNWOOD", due Sept 26th: Listen to the single: "Don't Download This Song" Wierd Al, everyones favorite geek musician, has always been at the forefront but has also made empassioned pleas in the past for people to please actually buy the albums. For a great example check out the video included ...
ACL!… Bless You.
Access Control Lists, or ACL's, can also often abbreviated as PITA (if you don't know what that means, ask your local SA). I've largely ignored ACL's becaue they aren't used very often, around me anyway, and I just feel that they are often a big pain. Thankfully someone realizes my pain and things are getting much better thanks to NFSv4 ACL's and ZFS. So lets take a couple minutes to talk about ACL's, why they are a neccsiary evil, and ...
LinuxWorld SF 06: Closing Report
And so yet another LinuxWorld has come and gone. This year, for the first time, OpenSolaris was an official .Org booth and I had the honor of running the booth for the community. All in all it was a very good show. Attendance was lower this year than in any year gone past, at least based on what I saw. The talk of the show was about what wasn't there: Red Hat. Journalists were asking everyone they could find about what Red Hat's abscence ...