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

Big Blue is announcing more then 30 new or upgraded products or services that are the result of a $2 billion investment. A CNET article by Reuters, . Published on September 7, 2008 9:45 PM PDT.

read more | digg story
I have believed for sometime now that storage market will stay healthy for the foreseeable future no matter what happens to the broader economy in general and IT in particular in the short term. IBM has recognized the bullish future in storage market and is pitching new solutions focusing on virtualization, deduplication and solid state drives. Cool, isn’t it! I thought so, all these are amazing technologies designed to cut storage cost, and energy footprint of the data centers. The article also talks about EMC coming up with wholesome solutions, covering hardware, software and services around it. I think NetApp is also eyeing the same market, with increasing focus on virtualization and services offering to the enterprise client. This market is getting interesting by the day, and I think the pie is big enough for many players to survive, will see! As a storage experts, anything positive on this industry is really good news for us!

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Big Blue is announcing more then 30 new or upgraded products or services that are the result of a $2 billion investment. A CNET article by Reuters, . Published on September 7, 2008 9:45 PM PDT.

read more | digg story
I have believed for sometime now that storage market will stay healthy for the foreseeable future no matter what happens to the broader economy in general and IT in particular in the short term. IBM has recognized the bullish future in storage market and is pitching new solutions focusing on virtualization, deduplication and solid state drives. Cool, isn’t it! I thought so, all these are amazing technologies designed to cut storage cost, and energy footprint of the data centers. The article also talks about EMC coming up with wholesome solutions, covering hardware, software and services around it. I think NetApp is also eyeing the same market, with increasing focus on virtualization and services offering to the enterprise client. This market is getting interesting by the day, and I think the pie is big enough for many players to survive, will see! As a storage experts, anything positive on this industry is really good news for us!

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.

NAS and SAN have been two competing technologies in enterprise storage, although sometime they compliment each other. Enterprises today use one or both of the technologies depending on their unique situation. The SAN is a block level abstraction of physical storage whereas the NAS is at file level. As these technologies have gained momentum so has software required to manage these devices. In a different blog I covered some of the tools available to manage SAN volumes, this post is meant for discussing some of the tools available for manging NAS. This article is pretty recent ( August 2007) and talks about the different tools from different vendors.Notice the presence of Microsoft’s Windows Storage Server 2003 R2 in the article. I have seen this technology being used at some our clients, a good attempt by Microsoft to enter into this market, but I think the effort falls short and leaves leaves much to be desired. For starter, virtualization support in EMC’s Celerra Manager is much advanced compared to Microsoft Storage Server. We have liked EMC Celerra for various other reasons and have in our technology roadmap development of a middleware between Windows 2003/2008 Servers and Cellera.

>NAS and SAN have been two competing technologies in enterprise storage, although sometime they compliment each other. Enterprises today use one or both of the technologies depending on their unique situation. The SAN is a block level abstraction of physical storage whereas the NAS is at file level. As these technologies have gained momentum so has software required to manage these devices. In a different blog I covered some of the tools available to manage SAN volumes, this post is meant for discussing some of the tools available for manging NAS. This article is pretty recent ( August 2007) and talks about the different tools from different vendors.Notice the presence of Microsoft’s Windows Storage Server 2003 R2 in the article. I have seen this technology being used at some our clients, a good attempt by Microsoft to enter into this market, but I think the effort falls short and leaves leaves much to be desired. For starter, virtualization support in EMC’s Celerra Manager is much advanced compared to Microsoft Storage Server. We have liked EMC Celerra for various other reasons and have in our technology roadmap development of a middleware between Windows 2003/2008 Servers and Cellera.

I have been using virtualization software from VMware for quite some time. Come Longhorn aka Windows Server 2008, this is set to become standard feature of the server OS. I think for just something like $39 Hyper-V (virtualization technology offered by Microsoft) can be added to the Windows Server 2008. With this kind of pricing, virtualization is set to explode. The benefits are immense- increased server utilization, portability, consolidation etc etc. A software development company like ours can benefit by creating different test environment within the same machine, thereby helping us save time and money.Currently less that 10% of the servers use virtualization, this number is set to go up to 60-70%, if the analysts are to be believed. I think capacity utilization is the biggest benefit virtualization gives us and would be the primary driver for adaptation by the enterprise customer. An increased utilization translates into lower TCO( Total Cost of Ownership), in terms of lower data center electricity bill, lower hardware cost, maintenance cost etc.

if virtualization has all benefits, why is it still not mainstream. I think some of the challenges need to be overcome- steep learning curve , it is almost like a paradigm shift. To help ease the transition, Microsoft has apparently bundled virtualization management tool. And as and when new tools around virtualization gets released by other software vendors, more and more people will see the value in it and hopefully this trend will catch on like fire.

>
I have been using virtualization software from VMware for quite some time. Come Longhorn aka Windows Server 2008, this is set to become standard feature of the server OS. I think for just something like $39 Hyper-V (virtualization technology offered by Microsoft) can be added to the Windows Server 2008. With this kind of pricing, virtualization is set to explode. The benefits are immense- increased server utilization, portability, consolidation etc etc. A software development company like ours can benefit by creating different test environment within the same machine, thereby helping us save time and money.Currently less that 10% of the servers use virtualization, this number is set to go up to 60-70%, if the analysts are to be believed. I think capacity utilization is the biggest benefit virtualization gives us and would be the primary driver for adaptation by the enterprise customer. An increased utilization translates into lower TCO( Total Cost of Ownership), in terms of lower data center electricity bill, lower hardware cost, maintenance cost etc.

if virtualization has all benefits, why is it still not mainstream. I think some of the challenges need to be overcome- steep learning curve , it is almost like a paradigm shift. To help ease the transition, Microsoft has apparently bundled virtualization management tool. And as and when new tools around virtualization gets released by other software vendors, more and more people will see the value in it and hopefully this trend will catch on like fire.