Web/Tech

EMC's announcement of Decho is a good start of what I was trying to articulate here; I hope this is the beginning of services which will allow us all to manage our Digital Lives more easily. I had a suspicion that we were going to see something along these lines and I am expecting more especially in light of the Atmos announcements last week; I'm working on another blog post about Atmos and some thoughts on that. It's just Mozy today but hopefully we're going to see more than just online back-up services.

I wonder what level of integration we are going to see with other online services; for example, wouldn't it be cool when we purchase something from iTunes for it not only to be downloaded to our home-system but for it to move to our digital vault as well? When we take a picture, perhaps with an Eye-Fi enabled card for it to get automagically uploaded to our digital vault? Is it only me or are not the possbilities for this sort of service fantastic? That's the digital Echo…

And the digital bounce; well, I want to be able to bounce between formats depending on the device I'm accessing the data from. So that the presentation of the asset becomes transparent to me.

Also, I think we are witnessing something very interesting with EMC and the direction it is taking. The ambition in moving beyond it's traditional boundaries/markets and what it acquires next….eyes too big for its belly? We'll see.

p.s 'Zilla, I didn't answer your little teaser because someone had already hinted. But I'm enjoiyng your little teaser campaigns, you're wasted…….in your job! A role in marketing surely beckons!

A Tweet came up recently from someone bemoaning that they now live their life on record whereas they used to live their life on play.

Instead of listening to answer-phone messages and deleting them, they now find themselves archiving and organising emails.

Instead of listening to CDs, they find themselves tagging and organising their MP3s.

Instead of taking pictures, they find themselves tagging, retouching and organising their photos.

I guess that we are all like that now; constantly indexing, organising and then archiving the minutea of everyday life. I've lost count of the number of times I've retagged my MP3 collection, iTunes is re-importing them now after I lost a hard-disk. Will I ever find time to listen to them all? I doubt it, at the last count, I had over 56 days of music to listen to but I like to have it all to hand just in case.

If only I had a way of putting it all into store and then just recalling it when I need it; if only I had a home ILM system which would allow me to securely and reliably save my important data. I really don't want to have to re-encode all my CDs (I own a great deal of the music I have, I'm not perfect but if I like something, I try to buy it).

At the moment, I'm sitting typing this on a PC which has over two terabytes of storage on it and probably another two terabytes or so on various 'NAS appliances'. How do I back-up? Well, all my important stuff is replicated but if the house burns down…well, most of my photos are stored on external storage providers because I simply can't replace them but the rest of my digital life? Some of my emails are on gmail (backed-up to home).

But my music? My DVDs? Various failed projects? Half written articles…I need to get some of this offsite at some point. I've wasted hours, probably days re-installing operating systems and applications; so I'm actually now backing up the primary disks so that I can quickly re-build my brain.

And at least I'm actually technically capable of at least attempting to stitch together all the various applications which go towards building a half decent home-backup solution. But perhaps 'the Cloud' will come to rescue us; if you look at where Centera came from all those years ago before EMC bought it and turned it into a corporate archiving solution.

Hey guys, perhaps it is nearly time to re-launch something like a managed Centera solution aimed at the home market; people are beginning to have enough bandwidth to use something like this as a service. Like Mozy on steroids!! But it's got to integrate with iTunes, Lightroom, Office, Outlook, Gmail; it's got to be able to stream to my mobile devices and transcode on the fly.

Now that'd be a product!!! Forget about all this corporate bollocks!!!

Zilla recently tweeted this

'Well since HP bought StorageWorks and OEM the XP and IBM OEM a lot of stuff. I want to know which one trick pony is innovative?'

Last week at EMC Customer Council I was already thinking, what really innovative stuff have I seen from anyone in the past year( and was mentally composing a blog entry)? And to be brutally frank, absolutely nothing! I've seen stuff which I think is neat, examples include

• Compellent's automated storage tiering – but that just builds on age-old ILM concepts. It's not innovative!
• LSI's DPM Storage Virtualisation Device has some neat Snap technology allowing Snaps to be taken across array boundary's and mounted a la FlexClones. It's just building on fairly well understood Snap technologies. It's not innovative!
• 3PAR's latest iteration of it's thin provisioning allowing thick-to-thin. Logical progression of Thin Provisioning. It's not innovative!
• Dudupe – lets be honest, just compression techniques taken a stage further. Single instancing for instance has been around for ages. It's not innovative!
• FCoE – not innovative!

There's not a lot of innovation around at the moment. Pretty neat but not clever.

In the wider IT market? I see a lot of recreation of old mainframe technologies making their way into the virtualisation technologies that are now so much in vogue.

Even in the home market, I'm not seeing innovation at the moment. Progression, yep; evolution, yep but innovation? No, not really. Let's face it, most of the desktop paradigms even today are simply evolution from the work that Xerox did all those years ago.

So does it matter? Are we just going to see the refinement of existing technologies for the time being? Or is something truly innovative going to come along? I certainly hope so! It's going to get awfully boring if we don't.

P.S Obviously was thinking along the same lines as Chris Evans; although I'm looking at the industry in general and not just EMC. In fact I seem to be stealing a lot of Chris' topics at the moment!! Perhaps we're the same person, I hope not!!

The title is a little unfair and Kostadis is doing a good job in his blog explaining a bit more about WAFL and why he feels it is not a file-system.

It's interesting to see where he goes with this, in his first exposition, I was beginning to worry that he was going to claim that it was not a file system because it was missing some operations that a file-system should have; so WAFL is just a partially implemented file-system. And to a certain extent, I think that is the case.

I would like to see some more detail how it is implemented at the OnTap level i.e how does WAFL become a file-system which allows the heads to store files; how a LUN is encapsulated with in WAFL etc.

But it is good to see NetApp beginning to address or at least talk about what people feel is a weakness in their array implementation.