Storage

Apple, probably because they don't offer SCSI Attached Storage (SAS) hard drives as standard or add-on option for their machines, neglected to mention that the RAID card they are selling for their MacPros is also a SAS RAID card(!)

One of the more tedious tasks of IT is retrieving archived data. Here's one company that claims to make the effort a snap.

This support pilot fish works under contract to a big company, and usually when software needs to be installed it can be done over the network. But some actually require disks.

The first time this pilot fish does some work for a friend-of-a-friend, he's asked to reinstall Windows on a PC using the customer's recovery disks. Once that's done, the user has a question.

My 40-minute interview with futurist, inventor, and author Ray Kurzweil was too long to print in its entirety in the The Grill, so I'm publishing the additional segments on my blog. Earlier I posted Kurzweil's comments about the exponential growth of computing power. Below are some of his thoughts on portable computing, virtual reality and virtual worlds, storage standards, biomedical advances, immortality, and narrow vs. strong AI:

Few would question the spectacular results of the EMC/Dell reseller partnership over the past five years. Dell's manufacturing and reselling of EMC's entry-level AX-series and midrange Clarrion arrays has represented more and more of EMC's bottom line, as well as growing Dell's share of the external disk array market. But Dell's announcement this week that it will buyout iSCSI vendor EqualLogic, could place the two companies in divorce court as EqualLogic's disk arrays compete directly with EMC's lower-end boxes.

The recent California fires remind us of the value of storing important (or even just sentimental) data in a secure location. Yes, important personal documents and valuables like jewelry and even cash require physical storage (say, a safe or a bank safe deposit box), but this USA Today.com article, reminded me of the value of our digitized data. And it goes way beyond your iTunes music collection - although, I'll admit, mine is dear to me. Online data backup is easier to use than ever and the amount of data you can store is virtually (pun intended) unlimited.

In today's episode of the podcast, the debate over the SMI-S storage management standard continues, with Lucas filling us in on some of the reaction at SNW Dallas. Also, what's the coolest thing about the new Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard operating system? Quite possibly its backup utility, Time Machine.

Panicky managing director comes running into IT manager pilot fish's office. "I need your help teaching me how to burn a CD on my computer," managing director howls, "but I haven't got time to learn!"

The Ultimate Fix: Reformat That Drive!
Secretary's PC won't boot up, and the reason is clear from the error message: a memory fault due to bad RAM. "Since these cheap units were recently purchased from a local vendor, I recommended that she have the vendor pick it up and replace the memory," says a pilot fish on the scene. But a day later, fish notices the problem PC is still sitting idle on the secretary's desk.

This sysadmin pilot fish has a full plate: 12 new laptops to set up as replacements for older computers, three new hires starting, an office expansion to coordinate cabling and phones for, and next year's hardware budget that's due tomorrow.

"When I come in today, I am stopped by a secretary who tells me that her boss's laptop hard drive is dead and he wants to know if I can set up his new laptop for tomorrow," says fish.

Fish drops everything and goes to work setting up the exec's new machine. That means deleting the old computer account from the network, so fish can set up a new one with the same name.

It's Wednesday's IT Blogwatch: in which the Nobel Prize people recognize the scientists that helped make tiny hard disks storing loads of... stuff (yes, that is a technical term). Not to mention incomprehensible Dylan interviews...

Niklas Pollard eschews umlauts:

France's Albert Fert and Germany's Peter Gruenberg won the 2007 Nobel Prize for physics on Tuesday for discoveries allowing the miniaturization of hard disks in electronic devices from laptops to iPods. The 10 million Swedish crown ($1.54 million) prize, awarded by The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, recognized the discovery by Fert, 69, and Gruenberg, 68, of giant magnetoresistance, which has helped revolutionize computer data storage and retrieval.
...
The two scientists' work made it possible to produce technology capable of converting tiny magnetic changes into differences in electrical resistance. Harnessing these tiny magnetic changes -- dubbed spintronics -- made it possible to pack much more data onto hard disks ... Fert and Gruenberg made their discovery independently of each other ... As Nobel physics laureates, Fert and Gruenberg join the ranks of some of the greatest names in science, such as Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, Niels Bohr and Wilhelm Rontgen, who won the first prize in 1901 for his discovery of X-rays.

...Read more

Woof! It's Tuesday's IT Blogwatch: in which IBM and Google help teach students how to use cloud computing paradigms. Not to mention making a Theremin...

Grant Gross reports:

Google Inc. and IBM have teamed up to offer a curriculum and support for software development on large-scale distributed computing systems, with six universities signing up so far. The program is designed to help students and researchers get experience working on Internet-scale applications ... [using] the relatively new form of parallel computing, sometimes called cloud computing, [which] hasn't yet caught on in university settings ... techniques that take computational tasks and break them into hundreds or thousands of smaller pieces to run across many servers at the same time [which] allow Web applications such as search, social networking and mobile commerce to run quickly ... A cloud is a collection of machines that can serve as a host for a variety of applications, including interactive Web 2.0 applications. Clouds support a broader set of applications than do traditional computing grids, because they allow various kinds of middleware to be hosted on virtual machines distributed across the cloud.

...Read more

University faculty member is having chronic trouble with his iMac. "He swung by my office to tell me he was having problems with his hard drive," says a support pilot fish. "He couldn't find his files after a drive swap, and he had lecture notes and PowerPoint files he really needed."

Fish heads down to the user's office, and the user points to a tiny aluminum drive bracket assembly that he says he removed from his office mate's identical iMac.

"That's her drive," user says. "I swapped the drives, but my files aren't here -- hers are. I already put my old system in the salvage bin next door, because I was so tired of messing with it. All I needed to keep was the hard drive, right?"

We hear all the time about how enterprise storage needs are growing. In a recent EMC-sponsored report, IDC came up with some interesting figures that projected strong growth through 2010. According to the report, storage needs will reach 988 exabytes that year, while capacity will total about 600 exabytes.

While it's easy to dismiss such projections as part of an industry FUD campaign, make no mistake: The storage crunch is real. Anecdotally, Computerworld editors regularly hear from storage professionals who say that they are in a tough spot. They need more storage capacity, but in many cases they are unable to budget and plan for long-term growth. One solution many IT shops turn to as available supply decreases is to buy more network-attached storage and hook it up to the LAN.