Storagebod's Blog

Father Christmas Letters - The Last One

Dear Father Christmas,

                                yes I mean you, the real one who lives near the North Pole! I've got a few requests for you; Christmas is a time for a giving and I've got some ideas for some friends of mine

Chuck - A copy of December's Children by the Rolling Stones; you know the one, it's got a copy of 'Get Off of My Cloud' on it.

Val - I was thinking of something similar but sometimes I think he needs to lighten up, so I think a copy of this. He could join Charlie and Lola on a Cloud-hopping adventure.

Barry B - Perhaps a boxed set of The Fast Show or perhaps as a counter to his FAST aspirations, In Praise of Slow.

Barry W - Perhaps this would be good or considering he's a Master Inventor, this might be even better.

Mark - He could probably do with the afore mentioned In Praise of Slow but I know he'll never heed the advice; so as a media gadget head, this looks sweet.

Ian - Can you hide his passport for the next six months or so; only let him have it back for Le Mans and then hide it again. That and can you hire him an assistant! Or just a case of this.

Chris - get him a Synology 509+ for his virtual lab. I don't think he's getting on too well with his Drobo.

Dan - well, he doesn't get anything as he keeps forgetting my Jelly Beans! Or perhaps a copy of this, I think he'll need it soon. Or at least a real version of this.

Stephen and all my other fellow authors at Gestaltit - MBPs all round but can you wait till the middle of the year for the next refresh.

Marc - for the master of StorageRap, just something to help hone his skills or perhaps this but most of all a big giant star for his door...he is our very own Storage Star.

Sunshine - well I'd get her this because I know she likes him. But perhaps this would be more appropriate.

And for all my other friends, readers and twitters; a peaceful Christmas, a prosperous New Year and general health and happiness!

Best Regards,

Storagebod

Some Thoughts from a Hiring Manager

Okay, as regular readers or anyone following my tweetstream might have gathered, I've been recruiting for a new storage team. It's a whilst since I did any recruitment and a long time since I did technical interviews but as we're pretty much starting afresh, I get to do all the interesting things.

First observation, although it is still very much a buyer's market; I am still seeing sloppy CVs come through. Spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, poor formatting and just general not reading of the brief. People, your CV is your marketing fluff; spend time to get it right.

Secondly, if you get called to interview or even the technical screening interview; read the job description and read your CV. If the job description talks about NAS; please when I ask the question what does NAS stand for, don't let there be deafening silence. This is fundamental stuff! Of course, if you don't know; don't try to make shit up unless I ask you too!

Which brings me on to. thirdly, at times I will ask you to make shit up; I want to see how you handle not having enough information. This is the world I live in; most of the time, I'm winging it. We are doing things which people haven't tried before. Memorizing umpteen CLI options does not impress me, I've got Google for that. Talking through a problem and solving it, that's a real skill. If after a few years of experience, you've not got that; you're not for me.

Know what the company does, know what I do...before I go to an interview or meeting with a new person; I google them, see if they are in my Linked-In network etc, etc. I'll be googling you before I interview you; although I won't go near your Facebook page, I don't want to know what you look like when you're drunk! 

Anyway, I have my new guys starting soon. I'm really looking forward to starting the new team and getting it all going. But I do expect to have new roles in the future.

Thoughts on the Acadian Dream

So EMC, Cisco and VMware finally confirm their partnership and the formation of Acadia (that really ought to have an R in it!!); much rumoured and trailled by many over the past few months. Actually anything to do with Cisco seems to really struggle at keeping secret; more leaky than Cardiff on St David's Day.

So what does this mean to me as a customer and where's the value? Already a customer of EMC, Cisco and VMware; does this have value to me? Well, not at the moment as my infrastructure has a server component which is not Cisco. In fact, I wonder if the VMware value proposition might be damaged long-term if this is not played very carefully.

When EMC bought VMware; a lot of people were concerned whether EMC would turn out to be a good custodian but they did a much better job than I or anyone really thought they would. They just left VMware alone and let them carry on building partnerships with who-ever they wanted and allowed VMware to grow and develop.

In fact, of the possible suitors for VMware, EMC turned out to be ideal as they didn't have a server platform to push and there no real reason to make VMware work better on one company's server as opposed to some-one elses. Good job EMC!

But now this partnership could throw all this good work and custodianship up in the air. Ever since VMware became an independant company again and since the departure of Diane Greene; EMC's influence has been noticably growing or at least, as a customer, I feel that EMC and VMware work a lot closer than they have in the past. Actually conversations I have had suggest that this closeness is only the start and now we have this JV with Cisco.

So there is now potential for VMware to be tuned to work better on one server platform as opposed to another and this is worrying. Yes I get the 'one throat to choke' argument and I remember EMC railling against this argument when IBM used it!

This 'Bod is going to be watching developments very carefully; it's worrying when Microsoft could hold up their hypervisor as an example of infrastructure neutrality and whisper ever so quietly but insistently, 'How neutral is VMware, think of the risk of being locked into their hardware and software...they are no more open than us!'

If VMware take the compelling route of adding value to the partnership by tuning their software to run better on EMC/Cisco kit; their value to me, even as an existing EMC/Cisco customer is a lot less. I look to the hypervisor to give me infrastructure neutrality and common capability; I hope VMware maintain this ethos.

I'd be very sad to see this change; I've been a customer of VMware and I mean *me* personally since VMware Workstation version 1 when they made the sensible decision to release a hobbyist/student license at a decent price.

Not a Cloud Post!

Currently I have a whole bunch of blog posts half-written but at the moment inspiration seems to have gone a bit south. So I thought I would post on something completely different although it'll probably mutate into something familiar.

Now anyone who watches my twitter feed will probably have seen a few tweets on Spotify, the streaming music service available in some countries in Europe and coming soon I believe to the States. Although not the only streaming service available; it is in my opinion one of the best, it has a great selection of music covering all genres (I recently discovered that it has a growing classical selection) and it has great clients available for Mac and Windows but no Linux at the moment.

It also has two great mobile clients, one for Android and one for iPhone. If you want to use the mobile client, you must pay for the premium service but if you are happy with your music being interupted by adverts every now and then, the desktop version is free.

Now Spotify and services like it in many ways embody what to me is the real beauty of the Cloud model; a service which can be accessed anywhere from many devices but at the end of the day, the end product is the same, music streamed to my ears.

But this post isn't about Cloud, it came about after a brief MSN chat with a good friend of mine who specialises in all things Web 2.0 and especially getting useful information from the Internet; he's been training librarians and all kinds of other people how to use the Internet for years. And he mentioned that he had recently given a talk on how things like Spotify change things; it breaks the link between the physical instantention of the artifact and moves it completely into a virtual world and in doing so, it changes certain value assumptions.

Spotify for example has millions of tracks, now they are all searchable and I can just search for an artist and play their content; certainly, that's often how I use it but it also has the concept of playlists and publically shareable play-lists and it is these which will become more and more treasured and valuable.

Of course, it would be really useful if I could take Spotify playlist and then point it at another service such as Sky Songs and if playlists were portable. Or even take my iTunes database and point that at Spotify. I guess what we are talking about is portable metadata formats or at least gateways between services, in the Cloud or perhaps just stored locally.

Oh heck, this was a Cloud post anyway! We need to ensure that when we are building services or consuming services that in order to truly leverage the power of the Cloud, that we think about portability and flexiliblity. My playlists are currently locked into Spotify (and iTunes) but I am actively thinking about how I get round this and build a truly portable store; we need to think about this in our work lives as well.

Work in the Sky, not Clouds

Okay, I very rarely blatantly refer to the company I work for; I don't hide it but I try not to talk too specifically about Sky. But I can't really avoid it this time as we've got a couple of storage analyst positions available. These are fairly unusual in that they are on the Broadcast side of the company and oh yes, there currently is not strictly a Broadcast Storage Support team; there's me doing it as an ad-hoc role.

So this is the chance to get in and actually try to do things right; it's a greenfield role and we get to work on defining our own processes and procedures. There's no legacy SAN, no legacy back-up and no legacy apps; in fact there's not a lot at present. There's a few packing cases and empty racks (and a building site).

You'll probably look at the list of skills and think WTF! But don't worry, there is probably about a dozen people in the country with the exact skills we are looking for in the UK, so we accept that we are going to have to train people. This is about attitude and wanting to get things done!

No you won't get virtualisation, you won't get deduplication and you won't get Cloud but all the skills you pick up will be relevant to all of these. You'll get the chance to build a system which will potentially redefine the core business workflow in Sky and you'll get to play with and see some cool stuff. Hell, we might even pay you to do it.

And you'll get to work with me...so it's not perfect!

Happy Blog Day

This blog is now a year old; who'd have thought it!!

It seems to have become part of the fabric of the many storage bloggers and it's certainly become part of the fabric of my life. I started the blog as a counter to many of the vendor blogs I see out there; trashing each other products but often not in a useful way.

I wanted to represent the customer's view; especially the larger customers, those with multiple arrays and multiple petabytes of data; those who have to struggle with management tools which didn't (and still don't) scale; those who have to deal with application architects who have no idea about what their applications do; those who don't have time to tune each individual LUN etc. 

I hope I have done so; I certainly feel that I've had some success and I know that some vendors are taking notice. I wish I was a 'Force for Change' but I think I probably more a 'Little Nudge for Change' but that is all good!

I like to thank my many readers and commentors; I like to thank all those who have linked to my blog either in posts or part of your blog-rolls. It's really quite odd when people in the industry who I have admired and read for years start linking and quoting me but hey, it's very cool.

I'd also like to thank Stephen Foskett for asking me to be part of the Gestalt IT team; that was a great honour and I look forward to collaborating on more posts with you guys!

Obviously I intend to carry on with the blog; calling FUD when I see it, hopefully talking about some of the cool stuff I'm currently involved in and generally supporting the customer point of view. And I keep meaning to do some more personal stuff; perhaps some book reviews and more about my home data centre.

And if you are ever in London; give us a shout, I'm always happy to have a beer...

Sanitation

As we build ever larger storage estates and generate ever increasing amounts of data; I realised yesterday that a project that I am currently involved planning of the implementation has no migration path out of. The decision that we have made is pretty much final, this is it; once this ball starts rolling, it doesn't stop and once it's built; it'll take the rest of my career to migrate out of.

And boy is that a scarey thought; this is a bet your house moment! I'm wondering how may people are actually heading down that route, making decisions which are going to have to be lived with for a lifetime.

I think that we've spent 40-50 years building open-sewers and I think we are going to spend the next 5 years building a sewer-system which will stand the test of time and will have to because digging them all up again is just going to be too hard. 

Information Haze

Chuck riffs off Zilla to talk about a personal cloud and what it may look like; at the moment so much of our personal informaton is dispersed across a variety of places, we do not have a cloud it's more like a mist or a general haze.

It's not just content such as photos, mp3s, blogs etc; it's also meta-data such as Amazon wish-lists, eBay purchase records, grocery shopping lists, my Linked-In contacts...information which describes our everyday lives, what we do and who we are.

I am in the process of scanning in the barcodes of all the books in our personal library and uploading them to LibraryThing; once those are in, you will probably be able to tell quite a lot about me. It might tell you more about me than my medical records but I probably don't mind you looking at what books I read but I would really object to my medical records becoming part of the public record.

What I need is a tool to help me manage all this information about myself. Some of which I am happy to be public knowledge, some which should always remain private.

Personal Information Management is a massively untapped area; how do we define the taxonomy of a life? And who are we going to trust to store this information, how are we going to ensure portability? These are complex things and I wonder who is going to solve them.

Living in the Cloud

I'm a big fan of Dropbox in general and use it extensively to share files between my various machines; it's especially useful when I'm at work with my MacBook and I need documents from the desktop at home.

But there is one issue which is irritating; that is no selective sync and I really didn't want to sync my whole personal Dropbox with my work laptop; actually, my work laptop's hard drive is so small that my Dropbox account would fill it.

I recently P2Ved my work-laptop so that I could run a virtual instance of it at home on my big desktop and my MacBook; makes working at home much more comfortable and I don't actually have to lug my work-laptop around any more but this gave me an issue. I keep all my work-documents on my laptop and I didn't want to have to rely on flash-drives to carry my documents around on.

After a bit of googling and a plea on Twitter; I got my solution. Set-up a second free Dropbox account and share a folder between that and my personal account; it works great. So I now have all my documents in sync without having to lug my clunky work-laptop around.

And then the Twitter document leak story broke; how to cope with security in the cloud? Oh, easy; I just used TrueCrypt to create an encrypted file-container to store my documents in and moved that to my Dropbox folder. TrueCrypt is a great piece of free software, if you haven't got a copy; you should have!

I still wish that Dropbox had selective sync but with a tiny bit of fiddling about, I have a secure and robust way of sharing my stuff. This cloud stuff is great and with a little bit of thought; you can ensure that your files are safe.

Of course, you should also be ensuring you use strong passwords to try and prevent people gaining access to your accounts but people like Google could make life tougher for the hackers and certainly make password reclaim a lot more secure.

Six Months On...

It's just over six months into the blog and although my posting rate has dropped a little; the passion for doing this doesn't seem to be diminishing. A few people have asked why do this; I'm not paid, I'm not promoting any particular product and just why spend time doing it? Indeed, where do I find the time.

Firstly, I do have a product to sell and that's me! I am hoping that when I decide to move on, there might be some kind of market awareness for the 'Storagebod' brand. I am sure I am not the only person who looks at their blog as a sales-window for themselves. Personal branding is an interesting phenomena and we can all have a strong brand in our own niche.

Secondly, I get to put my views across to some senior people in the industry and I've probably spent more virtual time with senior players in the storage industry than most CIOs. I may not have any real influence but at least I know my views are getting read, they even respond to my emails.

It is fascinating sometimes going through the accesses and working out where they are coming from. It is gratifying when the links are coming from an internal website and it lets me believe that the vendors are interested in what their users are saying.

Thirdly, I am passionate about the IT industry and to steal EMC's buzz-phrase, the 'Information Infrastructure' especially and this blog lets me express my passion.

As for time, most of my blog entries are mentally composed on the journey to and from work.  TSA has now ruined this by advocating audio-books but I suspect even those might generate some more ideas. Although I am not sure what comparisons I can draw between the Storage Industry and 'Paul of Dune' which I am currently listening too!