Month of December is shaping up to be a very eventful month, whereas normally you would expect things to wind down by holiday season. Nope, not for me. A storage product on Linux we have been working on for a long time is finally seeing the light of the day. We are very excited to release this cutting edge product to the market place. I have mostly worked in proprietary technologies- Microsoft, IBM, Novell, NetApp, EMC and so on. No wonder the move to the open source world of Linux was initially fraught with uncertainties, but actually turned out to be a pleasant experience. Most of my fears, of sitting through endless development cycle, marathon testing, rework , customer criticism etc turned out to be unfounded

I can’t believe how far open source movement has come in the last few years. Working on the Linux environment , all my apprehension about not finding the right tools, right documentation, turned out to be untrue. It is pretty well documented for the most part, albeit some projects which I really needed to draw inspiration from where abandoned in 2003, which left me scrambling for answers. Anyway, we survived through all this and now can stake our claim in the Linux’s world!!

of all the Linux variants, Ubuntu Linux had the best desktop experience, whereas SUSE Linux (SLES) and OES2 from Novell gave me a good taste of Server class Linux. Needless to say, the developer community has really pulled together very well and I see good future ahead for this Technology. In fact some of the hottest gadget of 2009 run on Linux- think Kindle, Tivo and so on.

Our new storage product leverages the web services architecture – SOA (Service Oriented Architecture), scales very well and virtualizes Tera Bytes and Tera Bytes of data… where is Peta Byte..bring it on

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Month of December is shaping up to be a very eventful month, whereas normally you would expect things to wind down by holiday season. Nope, not for me. A storage product on Linux we have been working on for a long time is finally seeing the light of the day. We are very excited to release this cutting edge product to the market place. I have mostly worked in proprietary technologies- Microsoft, IBM, Novell, NetApp, EMC and so on. No wonder the move to the open source world of Linux was initially fraught with uncertainties, but actually turned out to be a pleasant experience. Most of my fears, of sitting through endless development cycle, marathon testing, rework , customer criticism etc turned out to be unfounded

I can’t believe how far open source movement has come in the last few years. Working on the Linux environment , all my apprehension about not finding the right tools, right documentation, turned out to be untrue. It is pretty well documented for the most part, albeit some projects which I really needed to draw inspiration from where abandoned in 2003, which left me scrambling for answers. Anyway, we survived through all this and now can stake our claim in the Linux’s world!!

of all the Linux variants, Ubuntu Linux had the best desktop experience, whereas SUSE Linux (SLES) and OES2 from Novell gave me a good taste of Server class Linux. Needless to say, the developer community has really pulled together very well and I see good future ahead for this Technology. In fact some of the hottest gadget of 2009 run on Linux- think Kindle, Tivo and so on.

Our new storage product leverages the web services architecture – SOA (Service Oriented Architecture), scales very well and virtualizes Tera Bytes and Tera Bytes of data… where is Peta Byte..bring it on

Global namespace has been around for some time now but probably not used as widely as one would have hoped for. I think sooner or later the benefit of this approach will be evident to the end user and this will really take off. Microsoft has what is called DFS (Distributed File System) for a long time, at least since Windows 2000 and now we are up to Windows 2008 and this thing is still relatively unknown concept. Unix has a related concept of auto mount point. Global Namespace is being used notably for file virtualization. Here’s a nice article on the subject. Quoting the source directly here “File virtualization possesses these abilities. File virtualization decouples client access to files from the physical location of the files”. There you have it, in a nut shell file virtualization is all about adding an abstraction layer on top of the file system. As with other things in life, there is no one-size -fit-all solution in this area, different solutions have different trade offs. The solution from EMC- Rainfinity operates at the lower level Network Protocol utilizing concepts of v-lan whereas Brocaded FME is an in-band solution which uses DFS and probably some sort of network re-director to accomplish the same, same deal with file virtualization product from Attune Software. I have a feeling this area is going to heat up, given the deluge of data we are dealing with every where.

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Global namespace has been around for some time now but probably not used as widely as one would have hoped for. I think sooner or later the benefit of this approach will be evident to the end user and this will really take off. Microsoft has what is called DFS (Distributed File System) for a long time, at least since Windows 2000 and now we are up to Windows 2008 and this thing is still relatively unknown concept. Unix has a related concept of auto mount point. Global Namespace is being used notably for file virtualization. Here’s a nice article on the subject. Quoting the source directly here “File virtualization possesses these abilities. File virtualization decouples client access to files from the physical location of the files”. There you have it, in a nut shell file virtualization is all about adding an abstraction layer on top of the file system. As with other things in life, there is no one-size -fit-all solution in this area, different solutions have different trade offs. The solution from EMC- Rainfinity operates at the lower level Network Protocol utilizing concepts of v-lan whereas Brocaded FME is an in-band solution which uses DFS and probably some sort of network re-director to accomplish the same, same deal with file virtualization product from Attune Software. I have a feeling this area is going to heat up, given the deluge of data we are dealing with every where.