Storagebod's Blog

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.

Set the Wide Stripes Free

There have been a couple of articles recently on the HDS blogs about HDP; Hitachi Dynamic Provisioning is HDS' thin provisioning offering and like all of the thin-provisioning, it also offers wide-striping. I am not going to get into whether HDS' offering is chubby, skinny or just slightly overweight but what I am going to ask is...
if wide-striping is so foundational and so important to the storage industry and especially to improving my TCO as a end--user, why do I have to pay extra for it?

HDS and EMC are both extremely guilty in this regard, both Virtual Provisioning and Dynamic Provisioning cost me extra as an end-user to license. But this is the technology upon which all future block-based storage arrays will be built. If you guys want to improve the TCO and show that you are serious about reducing the complexity to manage your arrays, you will license for free. You will encourage the end-user to break free from the shackles of complexity and you will improve the image of Tier-1 storage in the enterprise.

I understand that you feel that you have to maintain the legacy architectures and designs that you have inflicted upon us in the past but it is time that you stopped enabling our mashochistic tendencies and it is time that you encouraged us to move away from the pain of the past. You can do this by removing the licensing costs for wide-striping; keeping the cost for thin-provisioning is just about acceptable but charging for this key simplifying technology is not!

And if one of you does it first; it's okay to copy! Really it is!! I can feel that we're going to be friends.

A Good Use of Storage...

Another indulgent end of year blog I'm afraid; I've got a few ideas for storage blogs for next year but at the moment, I'm still doing my 'best of...'

I've bought more music this year than I have done for many years; maybe it's guilt catching up with me after a few years when I downloaded an awful lot or maybe that this is just a bumper year for good music and there is more that I'm willing to pay for. From John Tavener's 'The Protecting Veil' to Fleet Foxes debut to Kylie's 'X' (which I know was last year); I seem to have pretty much all bases covered this year.

Jools Holland's 'Later...' has as always been a fantastic show to find new music and to rediscover old favourites; if you can manage to get hold of copies of his shows, I can strongly recommend that you do as he has a wonderfully catholic taste in music.

The stand-out album this year by miles is The Last Shadow Puppets 'Age of Understatement'; this Scott Walker/early Bowie influenced album seals Alex Turner's position as the song-writing giant of his generation. He manages to eclipse the two previous Artic Monkeys' albums with this collaboration with Miles Kane; a fine achievement for someone so young. The production at times is completely over the top and breathless but who cares; it just leaves you with a smile and who can ask for more?

And talking about smiles, how the hell did the next band ever happen? How did a preppie-looking band from NYC end up creating a Soukous-tinged album which just makes you grin. Should never have happened and it certainly shouldn't have worked! But hey, Vampire Weekend's eponymous debut is just the thing to lighten up the bus-ride to work.

Elbow's 'Seldom Seen Kid' deserves to be on the list for the beginning to 'Grounds for Divorce' alone but the whole album is equally good. A well-deserved Mercury award for one of most-underated British bands around.

But there's so much other good stuff around from the guilty pleasure of Katy Perry's 'I Kissed A Girl', The Streets' 'Everything is Borrowed', Kings of Leon's 'Only By the Night' (oh the joys of explaining what he is singing about to 7 year old...Sex on Fire indeed), Seasick Steve's 'I Started Out With Nothing' and even a good Oasis album.

And much, much more.....