* Posts by Diskcrash

76 publicly visible posts • joined 15 Apr 2010

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British snoops at GCHQ knew FBI was going to arrest Marcus Hutchins

Diskcrash

The reason to avoid trying him in the UK is that the penalties are lesser than in the US and the fact that the crime was committed in the US (allegedly). Also the fact that all British hackers seem to develop Asperger's with their mothers crying on the news that their baby will die if they go to the US makes it hard to take the UK judicial system as anything other than extremely lenient.

The US judicial system is much more adversarial in nature not to mention expensive with harsher penalties and less likely mitigation of sentencing than then UK system but it does have some checks and balances and frequently the innocent do go free. But not always but then prisons are every where only have innocent people in them if you talk to the prisoners.

VMware backs out of Virtustream business

Diskcrash

A lot of people are making a lot of fairly outrageous comments about the falling price of the VMware stock price and ignoring the main reason that it is dropping. With the Dell acquisition more VMware shares will be coming on the market. More shares impacts the demand and this impacts the price.

Isilon software on Dell hardware – could it really be true?

Diskcrash

Virtual isilon

Based on the presentation given it is a ESX based version of Isilon. There will be a free version without the premium features and a licensed version with all the features. No word on performance but it is likely to be limited as will capacity.

It looks interesting but is likely to be only suitable for limited situations.

Deja vMware: 'Virty biz to buy its parent EMC' rumor just won't die

Diskcrash

Stupid, greedy, short term speculators

These investors are not investors, they are looking for a way to take any money out of a business that isn't nailed down and then run.

Emc is making money, VMware is making money so what is the problem? Oh, if one or both load up on debt then the "investors" can fill their pockets and walk away leaving a company in a weaker position for the long term.

Capitalism is all well and good and basically better than the alternatives but that is no excuse to let the equivalent of Russian oligarchs pillage the markets.

Stupid idea.

Cops and spies should blame THEMSELVES for smartphone crypto 'problem' - Hyppönen

Diskcrash

Misdirection

The real underlying complaint that the snoopers and their government handlers have is not that stronger encryption protects the evil but that it protects the average. Terrorists, criminals and paedophiles know and use technology in ways to protect what they are up to and are not bothered by limits or restrictions put in place by the government or the manufacturers, since after all they are evil.

What the snoopers want to achieve is the second, third and beyond level of contacts. The mothers, the brothers and friends are who they want to snoop on and they want to cast their net wide in order to come up with as many possible links as possible. The fact that many innocent people may be looked at and even incorrectly associated is not their concern.

Current police and investigation powers are more than adequate to target specific individuals but this is not what they want, they want the ability to snoop on everyone and everything. Except themselves of course.

The ever increasingly shrill cries sounds less like reasoned concern and more like a child caught with their hand in the cookie jar. The criminal made me do it, no the terrorist made me do it, no wait, wait think about the children the paedos made me do it. Waaaaaaaaaaaa.

Mirror, mirror on the wall, who has the best TSM backend of all?

Diskcrash

Either solution will work and will work well but there is a lack in real comparison of the differences. An organisation will choose one over the other not only on performance but costs and other operational considerations.

The Isilon used 108 4TB drives running in a 3 node configuration that took up 12U of rack space.

The IBM used 348 2TB drives running in 6 trays that took up 24U of rack space.

But the size of drives really has no impact on throughput performance where as number of drives does. If the number of drives in the Isilon is tripled the performance is 2.4GB/s compared to IBM's 5.4GB/s which is closer but still gives the advantage to the IBM solution.

But Isilon does have have higher performing nodes that would narrow the gap and the performance difference is likely to be relatively small between the two solutions.

So the one would want consider things like the IBM solution is using InfiniBand where Isilon is using 10GbE. IBM uses its proprietary GPFS protocol while Isilon uses standard protocols like NFS, SMB, and HDFS. Again neither is necessarily better or more right than the other but each may be more suitable for specifics situations.

Personally, the raw single stream performance of GPFS is impressive but not always needed where as the linear scale out and ease of use with Isilon is impressive and probably more useful.

HP says it will sue former Autonomy CFO Sushovan Hussein

Diskcrash

Due diligence is almost always a joke

I am no longer surprised or amazed when after an acquisition is completed to hear that there are problems. Years ago I worked for a small company that made some chips and adapters who was then acquired by a larger company. After it was completed I was in a meeting where their lead product manager explained that they wanted to use one of our chips in a new product. I listened to them and then explained that our chip didn't do that, couldn't do that and would never do that. The manager said but this is the only reason we bought your company. I told him oh well but thanks for converting all my stock options to cash.

The surest sign that a company is doomed? Being acquired by HP (where good companies go to die).

British Lords: Euro 'right to be forgotten' ruling 'unreasonable and unworkable'

Diskcrash

Idiots do idiotic things with idiotic thinking

The problem is quite simple. None of this has anything to do with Google. If a person feels that there is incorrect or out of date information about them on the internet then they go the people holding that information and have it removed. Once removed, guess what happens? The link disappears. Amazing isn't it?

The thought that by forcing google to remove the link to information that is legally available or at least has not been ruled otherwise is going to accomplish much is not well thought out.

The argument that Google makes it easy to find out embarrassing details is not a valid argument about why Google should change its searches.

Activist investor plans to de-federate EMC: report

Diskcrash

EMC's federation does resemble at times Dilbert's Battling Business Units (BBU) concept but the idea is an interesting one and not one that is always going to be easy to execute. The idea as espoused by the EMC earwigs....bigwigs, is to provide a stack that works together but one that does not mandate or require any specific layers allowing the customers to pick and choose which products or companies that they wish to use.

This means the various parts have to both cooperate and compete with each other which is always going to have some tension and occasional confusion or disaster. But, it seems like a worthwhile endeavour and personally I can see the value in each of the EMC federation partners having ties to one another that allows them to cooperate at a level that would be difficult if they were all spun apart.

In this case the parts do seem to both make sense and to be bigger than the sum of the parts.

I also doubt the long term value in these financial types that come in and want to pry, leverage, spin or restructure business for no other reason other than to maximise share holder value. Few if any have any real concern for the companies, the products, the employees or the customers involved and only want a return on their supposed investment.

Oh THOSE products, says Dell. Sure we'll sell them if you ask

Diskcrash

Re: it's all ODM stuff

No the powervault MD line is OEM'd from Enenio which LSI sold off to NetApp a couple of years ago. NetApp is milking the product line without putting much in to it in the way of actually updating it. It is pretty solid and reliable and performs well but has not had any feature enhancements so is a bit basic but it gets the job done.

Oracle muscles way into seat atop the benchmark with hefty ZFS filer

Diskcrash

Re: Headlines are but part of the story

Not to be too sarcastic here but HP uses HP, NetApp uses NetApp, IBM uses IBM, EMC uses EMC, Dell uses Dell, etc. So the only story would be if they didn't use it but such a claim still pretty much ignores any economics or operational factors that a customer who has a choice of what they can use would want to consider.

Flash biz and virtual database chum: Our tests show we bust spinning rust

Diskcrash

News Flash!

Formula One race car goes faster than white van.

While it is interesting in a very basic way it really doesn't tell anyone anything not already known. So on a cost per IO it wins hands down but I suspect on a cost per GB of capacity it loses badly since I am going to guess that to get 900K IOPs for $2 million that they probably purchased a lot of spinning rust. They say to support 26TB of database they only needed 1.5 TB of flash but I would love to find anyone silly enough to pay $2 million for a 26TB array as I have some property in Spain I would like to sell them.

It would be more interesting and even possibly useful if they compared their performance to a Violin or other flash system.

Snide hashtags, F1 cars, death by PowerPoint: I'm sick of EMC hypegasms

Diskcrash

Kool Aid for everyone

It is hard to blame a cat for attacking a mouse and so it is hard to blame a marketing department for a marketing campaign but having said that there is a bit of overkill to what is otherwise some interesting updates and improvements to their products. There does tend to be a climate around EMC of over enthusiastic self congratulation which can be a bit off putting and tedious at times but as long as they don't offer me a cup of their Kool-aid I can tolerate it.

Are the improvements revolutionary and game changing? Not really. Are they significant? Yes, especially to EMC customers. The big news would have been if EMC hadn't refreshed the VNX range. More for less is probably a bit boring for the marketing department but for customers that is what they are looking for.

It is a bit interesting or a least of note that almost all of the interesting storage news has been from startups so nice to see one of the larger players at least making an effort.

Marc Andreessen, Pat Gelsinger in verbal VMworld brawl

Diskcrash

The cloud is inherently insecure

Sorry, but I have to totally disagree Andreesen. Security is entirely dependent upon the people you employ to protect you or your data and with the cloud you have outsourced your data and your security and not only do you not know what you are really getting you don't know what you are not getting either. Try to run a physical security audit on AWS or ECS and see how far you get.

Encryption is going to help and should become standard but again it is only as good as the people used to deploy it and in the cloud they could be anyone.

Does the RSPCA have your gun licence or car registration? NOBODY knows

Diskcrash

Re-enforcing behaviour

The RSPCA pursues criminal enforcement to generate press and donations which then generates more criminal prosecutions to get more press and donations. This is effectively crack cocaine for charity organisations. There is nothing to indicate a dramatic rise in cruelty to animals that requires this level of malicious prosecution.

Break the circle and stop donating and supporting the RSPCA and instead help out the local shelter or wildlife group then at least your money will go where you intended instead of into the pockets of lawyers and executives of the RSPCA.

Sources mutter of 'disarray' among EMC's quadruple object products

Diskcrash

Shareholder value?

Where ever that quote about people not respecting shareholder value came from the person is a loon. No one in any company below board or C level ever thinks about share holder value other than for their own personal options or stock purchases. Most employees are salaried or compensated on performance which is normally targeted to specific sales and revenue goals. Only the top people are targeted on share price which is not necessarily a good thing.

Having dealt with salespeople from EMC and in the various departments there doesn't seem to be that much confusion over what products can do what but there is certainly some competition between them to get deals closed. Looking at last quarter's results for EMC it is easy to see that the Isilon product line is growing quite well especially in comparison to some other products that EMC has and this is bound to be a cause of concern even if the deals lost are ones that were never winnable.

Go to IBM and ask a DS sales rep if he would be happy to swap out for an XIV or the other way around and I suspect you will see the same behavior. You certainly see it at Dell and HP.

And as far as a having a single unifying vision well NetApp supposedly has that and see how well that has worked for them. Give me a good product that does the job for a decent price any time over something that has had added functionality welded to the side of it.

Business is slow. Here's a good idea, let's compete with customers

Diskcrash

Dell is a better example

The AWS reference has some relevance but I think a better example is Dell. Dell resold storage equipment from EMC and others and networking equipment from various vendors including Cisco but they decided to acquire the ability to make their own label equipment to go into those spaces and in effect started to compete with their vendors (or so called partners). Now EMC and Cisco compete pretty much against Dell and this is likely to only become a more common situation.

Service providers don't really care about much other than cost. They sell features and capabilities but they are extremely cost focused and in the cloud world where the services provided are abstracted behind APIs the underlying hardware becomes less and less relevant including the expensive software enhancements that vendors provide that also helps the vendor's margins. It is a bit analogous more with the Auto companies in that they really don't care what brand fuel you use and as a result the only real differentiator is their cost and convenience.

Storage companies that don't look to own the data interface layers are ceding control of their future to their competitors and partners which is a good way to find yourself out of business.

Microsoft caves on Xbox One DRM and used-game controls

Diskcrash

Crazy DRM

The need to check via an internet connection every 24 hours to see if your game was valid basically meant that you didn't really own the game and if for some reason there was a disagreement with Microsoft or your ISP that game you paid $$$ to own becomes useless.

There is no way in the world I would ever buy a game with this sort of restriction or the console it ran on. So good choice to remove this on Microsoft's part.

NSA Prism: Why I'm boycotting US cloud tech - and you should too

Diskcrash

Great quotes

The quotes in the article are all perfect for the desired sentiment.

The issue is really quite simple can you still be called the good guys if you do bad things? Yes, bad guys do bad things that is why they are the bad guys but this does not mean that in order for the good guys to triumph that they should fall to the same level or use the same or even worse tactics.

The logic behind the UK snooper's bill and the equivalent ones in the USA are that it is better to loose a bit of freedom to allow the good guys to catch the bad guys because obviously the innocent have nothing to fear. Other than the good guys throwing them in jail without due cause or the right to defend themselves.

Anyway, good article, good points and we need to call these people on their actions.

SMART brings out 2.5-in, 2 terabyte block-o-Flash to rival sTec

Diskcrash

Name

The picture shows the name as ECO and not as Echo.

Nick Clegg: Snooper's Charter 'isn't going to happen'

Diskcrash

If it is there they will use it.

The problem is that no matter how much politicians promise not to use this against the "average" person it will end up being used that way. Forget about all the technical issues and costs associated with it the likelihood of it resulting in very much other than tracking porn sufers is going to be very low and would not justify the cost and expense of doing it. The result? Well gee we have this huge amount of data on everyone lets go dumpster diving and see what we can find. To have this large pool of data and not to go through it every way possible is not something that the government will be able to resist.

To say that this has potential for abuse is to understate it as it will be abused it is simply a question of when and by whom.

There is nothing about Theresa May that inspires confidence in her ability to look after anyone except herself.

EMC announces record revenues: But hey, Joe, where're the profits?

Diskcrash

New products

No need for a NDA just wait until EMC World in May since that is when EMC announces new products.

Sounds like something wicked this way comes.....

'Fastest storage in the WORLD' plugged into mighty boffinry Cray

Diskcrash

Meh

They haven't sold or even delivered the fastest storage system. They have delivered 36 of their okay storage systems that were bolted together by ORNL to get those figures. ORNL could have used almost anything to get there by that method.

NetApp modifies benchmark system and - shock - comes out TOP

Diskcrash

Nice but nothing new

The Engenio products have always been reasonably solid and performed well for their cost so this is just a logical evolution from the previous generation. What they failed to do for many years while being sold to many different companies and still have not shown that they can do is provide much in the way of software and application integration or innovation and in that regards, NetApp and EMC provide a much richer feature set. Storage needs to evolve but so do the people making it and the Engenio group seem to be a one trick pony.

UK web snoop charter: Just how much extra info do spooks need?

Diskcrash

Fantastic

Then you won't have an issue with police randomly grabbing people off the street, stripping them, filling them with drugs and interrogating them to see if they might be up to something since after all they might find someone is a bad person and isn't that worth the effort and if you have nothing to hide then what is a strip search and drug interrogation between friends.

And while we are on the subject of doing what it takes to protect us since we already have CCTV in the city centres we should put microphones on them all and record all conversations since bad people might be out for a kebab and we need to know what they are up to. This really wouldn't be any different than the government recording all phone calls and running them through word recognition software to find bad guys. And once we have the city centres covered obviously the bad men (and women don't want to be sexist) will move off to other areas so we need to put cameras and microphones in all public transportation and heck why not mandate that all businesses use CCTV with microphones in the work place as it will help not only prevent terrorist attacks and pedo user groups they can find out who has been nicking the office supplies.

The good guys will always have it tougher than the bad guys and that is the way it should be. The good guys do the right thing at the right time and in the right way. You will never overcome the bad guys by being badder than them all you will do is make more bad guys.

The insidious thing about electronic snooping is that it is so easy and fast to do that it doesn't feel like snooping to the snoopers where as actually getting out and following people and doing investigations into suspects and their activities becomes readily obvious that it is snooping and requires some level of justification other than "just to be safe we thought we would look in his underwear drawers".

People may not have a right to absolute privacy but the government definitely does not have nor does it need a right to know what its citizens are up to without some control on them.

EMC fires anti-Dropbox torpedo to sink off-site biz clouds

Diskcrash

On site storage

I think this could be an interesting solution for people with Isilon or Atmos storage already from EMC but don't see it as a compelling reason to go out and buy either solution on its own. Or for people that intend on using a lot of storage for various projects.

In the end it will boil down to costs as much as security and having your corporate data on your own storage.

Is this possibly the worst broadband in the world?

Diskcrash

Country pumpkin

Well that is what you get when you have your data brought in by tractor. More seriously the issue is infrastructure and if you don't have it there is piddle that you can really do about other than hope someone else has developed a better set of pipes for you to switch too since until your provider spends the money to upgrade your networking and wiring you aren't going to get significant improvement. And with few customers in a geographic area getting the upgrades done is unlikely.

You might try and see if you have a cable TV service in your area as that can provide decent speed.

Not to rub salt in your wounds but just ran the BT diagnostics and I got back 37.2Mb/s as my tests results so BT can provide decent speed.

Yo, storage geeks: Fancy a bit of scale-out fun time?

Diskcrash

Re: Interfacing

My personal experience is yes. As far as I can tell the VM is fully featured and works identically to a real Isilon node or cluster. The main issue is to test out any licensed features just as on a real cluster you will need a license key but my Isilon contact was quite happy to give me a set of license keys for me to test snapshots, replication and other features.

If you want to kick the tires and see if it works in your environment or with your application I think it is a great tool to get.

Diskcrash

VM Availability

The VM is generally available for the asking. They don't put it up where anyone can get it but you just have to ask your salesrep or TC and you can get it. It is a completely function version of the Isilon OneFS software with the only limitation being that you have a limited amount of disk space and can't add to it but it won't stop you with working with it. Be sure to ask for a set of evaluation licenses so that you can experiment with the software features too.

The only issue is that it is a VM and so its performance will be totally dependent upon the quality of hardware you run it on. I have run it under Fusion, Workstation and VMplayer. I believe it works with Xen but haven't tried it.

As the article says it is a pretty nice bit of software to play around with to get a feel for if it is something you might be interested in.

Pentagon hacker McKinnon will NOT be prosecuted in the UK

Diskcrash

Standards of Proof

There seems to be a general misconception of what extradition is and what a trial is. With extradition the purpose is to show sufficient cause that someone has committed a crime in their jurisdiction and that they would like that person sent there for trial. The trial is where the proof is presented and contested.

What most people seem to be saying here is that wait you can't extradite me until you show me all the evidence and show that I am guilty based on the laws of my country of residence and that is simply not how it works.

In this case the US stated that they had a case and it was accepted by the UK based on the terms of the extradition treaty between the two countries (the fact that the treaty may be one sided is an entirely separate issue) but the defendant then proceed to use every trick and manoeuvre in the book to avoid his extradition. The majority of this being using the public to make it politically unacceptable for him to be extradited regardless of his guilt or innocence which is really just a mockery of the laws.

Personally, I think the case against McKinnon was likely to be provable but that the punishment was likely to be excessive. But that is neither here nor there in regards to how the process should work and in this case he has escaped responsibility for his actions not because of legal reasons but simply because he got enough people to feel sorry for him.

Well as long as he doesn't leave the UK he should be fine.

Diskcrash

Good to know that if you drag things out long enough and hold your breath and threaten to hurt yourself that you can avoid taking responsibility for your actions.

Extradition is for people that committed crimes in other jurisdictions which is what this guy did. Funny how when it is someone in the UK doing the crime how sympathetic everyone is but when someone in another country does something in or to the UK how outraged everyone is especially if they evade extradition.

This guy is an admitted criminal who agreed to plead guilty but played on the gullibility of the English populace and press but no surprise considering how easy it is for criminals here to play the system.

Private cloud user in dialogue with Atmos, el Reg facilitating

Diskcrash

A better story would have been more complete

The Atmos user complains that he can't do some things that he considers to be basic without the assistance and guidance of EMC support by opening up a call. Fair enough it can be annoying to have to call support and open a call and have to go through the hassle of providing details to your question.

But, a better story would have been for him to have actually done that and then describe why and what was done and if the support requirement had any validity and what if anything could be done to make life for an Atmos user easier.

Right now the story is really little more than a whinge.

My name is Trevor, and I'm ... an IT consultant

Diskcrash

Re: The US work thingy......

Meant now defunct.

Diskcrash

Re: The US work thingy......

A number of years ago when first starting out I flew into Canada to visit a non-defunct but then large worldwide software company for meetings but being new this when the Canadian official asked me the purpose of my trip I said WORK instead of business.

2 hours later after being locked in a windowless room they agreed to contact the customer who had to send out their HR manager to free me from the airpot and get me into my meeting.

Never ever, ever use the word work when visiting any country, meetings, business, getting drunk, anything but the word work.

DC

Snooper's-charter plans are just misunderstood, sniffles tearful May

Diskcrash

We can trust them if you have nothing to hide.........just look at China.

The security services keep saying that we have nothing to worry about if we have nothing to hide and that this can save lives.

Based in that premise then randomly abducting people off the street, strip searching, drugging and water boarding the could also save lives and we shouldn't worry about that if we have nothing to hide.

There are better more focused ways of catching criminals than snooping on everyone that uses the Internet for any and all reasons.

REVEALED: IBM's new DS3000-killing Storwise storage beast

Diskcrash

The writing was on the wall

One of the reasons if not the single biggest reason for LSI to dump its Engenio division to NetApp was their inability to keep IBM happy with the DS product range. The DS units from Engenio are solid, reliable and well performing systems with virtually no software integration. IBM constantly asked for and was promised numerous features and updates but LSI senior management thought they could deliver something for nothing and as a result frustrated a major OEM customer.

This move to a SVC fronted system is just the natural evolution of IBM moving away further. Sure they will continue to sell the Engenio systems as long as their is some profit there but they would rather bring that all in house.

It appears that NetApp is taking some steps to provide resources to refresh the product line and to better market it to OEMs but they seem ambivalent about the product at times.

Non-volatile memory: It's nothing to SNIA at - NetApp

Diskcrash

Better late than never

NetApp seems a bit confused about their Virtual Storage Tiering which they keep calling a cache while you can probably stretch most definitions to suit it seems that something is either a Tier or not or is a cache or not though there is some overlap in functionality the basic operational goals for each product class are different.

But, I can save NetApp a lot of time just grab the EMC caching white papers since this solution of theirs with an external PCIe card sounds pretty familiar to theirs.

Not saying that they shouldn't do it or that they won't do a good job just that it isn't really very ground breaking.

Border Agency comes out with another e-Borders deadline

Diskcrash

UKBA the problem not the Iris scanners

The iris scanners worked great for me and even registration wasnt too bad until my registration expired and all the offices had been closed and no new registrations being taken and this was for at least 18 months until they officially announced the nd of the scanners. Hard to get the traffic if you refuse to open up to get users registered.

The workers at UKBA seem nice enough it's the politicians like Theresa (it's not my fault) May that need to be taken outside the border and left there.

Cisco, Fusion-io's blade lovechild in EMC flash face-off

Diskcrash

Possibly

While the underlying concepts are similar I guess the issue would be does the Fusion-IO card in a Vblock configuration support the same functionality? The main functional difference I am thinking of is that as I understand it the EMC solution uses their card for reads and writes through it to the underlying block storage so that in the event of a failure that the data is stored and protected externally to the host and the card. If Fusion-IO supports this then either solution would be fine but if not then it comes back to the potential limitation of having your data on a PCI card inside a server that could fail at some point.

I suspect the reason EMC calls it VFcache is that is a good description of what it is doing.

The Fusion-IO products work well but I find the overall solution set from EMC to be compelling.

EMC denies big server biz plans ... but IS building servers

Diskcrash

HDFS on Isilon

EMC announced some time ago that their Isilon clusters could provide native support for the Hadoop File System and in their presentation they showed the cluster replacing the name node of the Hadoop system but still using the hadoop compute nodes to do the compute but they would now be getting data off the cluster instead of from local disks. The idea being to remove the load times onto a Hadoop system and to reduce the capacity needed.

The big question though was why not simply replace all the compute nodes with the Isilon nodes too?

One has to think that building an Isilon based Hadoop cluster would be quite easy for EMC and assuming they could get the pricing right it could be a very interesting solution.

NetApp streaks ahead, avoids trip-up by bum flash leg

Diskcrash

E series

NetApp says that the E-Series exceeded their target expectations but doesn't say what those were. Considering that the impetus for LSI to sell the division to NetApp was how badly they screwed up the relationship with IBM and the IBM DS sales were going to fall off a cliff, so it would be interesting to see if NetApp has been able to repair that. IBM still has the E-Series for sale in the middle and entry level area and they are nice solid systems if a bit simple in their feature set and integration.

For something that should be big news the release of Ontap 8.1 Cluster Mode is a bit a failure both as an actual release and as a marketing event. For a company that keeps saying it is an innovator in the storage market you don't see that much innovation actually making it out and 8.1 has virtually no innovation and comes with a lot of potential pitfalls.

Is NetApp a one trick pony that needs to be put to pasture? Quite possibly but they still have a lot of potential but like my nephew they seem to be wasting it. Shame really.

Diskcrash

Re: Why do you keep bringing up flash drives outside of the array?

Because it is what customers are demanding and where performance is best added and ignoring this is a quick way to lose those customers?

If you look at flash outside of a HDD based storage array as just an SSD then you are being a bit simplistic and most of the higher end products have ways to protect the data and the user with some better than others. EMC's VFCache does this by doing all writes as write through to the external storage which means that it doesn't improve write performance but neither does it reduce data reliability and you still get accelerated read performance which in most work flows is 80 to 90 percent of the traffic.

Not too shabby. For a small amount you get to boost your performance dramatically and don't reduce your reliability.

So why wouldn't you talk about flash outside of the array? Unless you don't have it as a product.....

Did EMC buy Xtremio to fend off NetApp

Diskcrash

Close but not quite right

The financial analyst makes a good point but is basically wrong. Yes, I would agree that EMC is focused on NetApp and not too worried about FusionIO. But, I disagree that EMC is very worried about OnTap 8.1. It has some good points as far as software features are concerned and in consolidating some odd NetApp design choices but it still has very clunky under pinnings and can be a management mess.

The Isilon boxes are not ideal for all performance workflows but in looking at the software and hardware choices that were made to build the system it would appear that there is a lot of room for improvement and I would expect that EMC is busy working on that. The trick being to keep the features, and performance while maintaing decent pricing and margins.

Acquiring Xtreme IO would seem to play into their vision of global storage domination more than really much of a direct concern for any single competitor. If they can wrap up all the bits and pieces in to a single coherent storage environment then they could quite easily push everyone to the margins.

EMC boss Tucci in lucky escape from poverty

Diskcrash

The rich get richer

If everyone in the company had a say in the CEO's remuneration then maybe such eye watering excess could be acceptable but the simple fact of the matter is that payouts such as this is just the old boy club in action. The board sets the payout and the CEO picks the board and the same group of people move through the revolving doors with a wink wink and nudge nudge to one another.

Joe Tucci has with out any doubt done a very good job but this sort of money is really little more than organized embezzlement at the corporate level and is pretty much the norm in all areas of business though banking and finance are much worse.

I love it when people say you have to pay the best to get the best. Umm no you don't and for some companies they might have been better off with the second or third best.

If Joe had only received $200,000 which is still a major windfall and the remaining $8 million had been given to workers it would have had a much larger effect. If someone is already independently wealthy what is another $8 million to them? But if they had given $10,000 bonus payments to 800 employees the boost that this would have given to moral would have been much more than simply making a rich man richer.

Four illegal ways to sort out the Euro finance crisis

Diskcrash

All doomed to failure

All these plans and ideas are doomed to failure as long as countries such as Greece are allowed t participate in the Eurozone and not be held accountable for their failure to enforce basic monetary sanity.

If I give my daughter a credit card and keep paying it off every month there is no incentive for her to stop spending or to develop a budget. In Greece almost every tax payer under reports their income to the point of absurdity and the government turns a blind eye. Worse it has now become an accepted way of living any attempts to make people actually pay for their public transportation and infrastructure costs are seen as attempts to oppress their rights to not have to pay for anything.

It is all just good money being poured down a Greek sewer. Ireland, Italy, Spain and Portugal have some of the same issues but at least make an effort to run their countries properly.

The freakonomics of smut: Does it actually cause rape?

Diskcrash

Rape is rape and porn is porn

Unless one is a psychopath and there are actually very few of those harming or hurting someone regardless of why you are doing it is a pretty obvious action (i.e. the crying and bleeding and death) and can not be justified by anything other than self interest.

Pornography no more causes rape than a woman who dresses in shorts and a halter top. The potential rapist that reaches the point where they actually commit the crime knows they are doing wrong but have decided to go ahead anyway.

Does legal prostitution help or hurt the rate of sexual assaults in a country? Pornography is pretty much part and parcel of the same ideology. The people who are against sex for religious, moral, or personal reasons tend to lump it all together. Sex is bad hence any depiction or sexual activity is bad. The reality of course is much murkier because there are always people willing to take things to one extreme or the another either for personal pleasure or to make some money.

But there are fortunately a few absolutes such as No means NO.

How that Oracle and Pillar earn-out really works

Diskcrash

Good but not good enough

The Pillar Axiom system is an interesting product and is fairly well executed but actually brings very little that is new to the table. If it had came to the market 10 years sooner it might have been able to build a market for itself. The building block and brick concept has been done by a number of other vendors and somewhat better. There is nothing wrong with the product but nothing that really makes it stand out either and in a dynamic market that is changing the way the current storage market is that isn't good enough.

This is readily apparent by the fact that only LPOD's Oracle was willing to take the company even at the bargain bin price of free. Even if Oracle dumps in sales resources and efforts the money they might get paid in two years will only soften the blow and not eliminate the investors from losing a good amount of money. Though fortunately Oracle can just squeeze their customers a bit more if they want.

The real question is does Pillar make any sense at all for Oracle and its product mix or will it simply be a distraction?

EMC regains SPEC filer crown

Diskcrash

Large but out of the box

A lot of interesting comments about this solution and its design but the thing to remember in my opinion is this is how the Isilon equipment is designed to work. Yes 140 nodes is a lot of nodes and that is a lot of HDDs and SSDs but all they did was take 140 of their performance oriented nodes with SSDs installed and put them together which is their big selling point. You can start with 3 nodes and grow to 140.

Anyone can hobble together two systems or three or more to hit specific performance levels but in this case all Isilon did was take their normal system and grow it to the logical if rather expensive conclusion and see what it could do.

And they did this with an file system that presented all of that storage as a single name space.

Not practical for everyone but then neither is a Ferrari or Lambo even though we might all wish we could afford one.

Dell snaps up RNA Networks

Diskcrash

Clever purchase

Dell has a number of products where this technology could be very useful and even if they don't use it to the full extent one assumes that there is a patent portfolio that will come along with it that would protect them and could be used to control competitors.

Kindle Store awash with auto-generated crap 'books'

Diskcrash

It isn't that hard to fix.

Why is it that the first thought is to edit the books that get uploaded as opposed to vetting the uploaders? There are not that many people that want to publish original works or have the right to upload works of others so all Amazon has to do is to require that any uploader provide accurate and confirmed details about themselves and then if they do this it is easy enough to cut them off and remove their works.

If you say this is as bad as censorship it isn't since they can still freely publish their works in many other venues or they could use a publishing front to accomplish what they want. The point is to put in some accountability as what makes it worthwhile now is that gormless jerks can upload at will without any serious controls.

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