QWTJ LIVE- Mariah Carey’s Memoirs of an Imperfect Angel Review

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Real storage in a virtual world

VMware’s brand of server virtualization is the industry leader. VMworld 2011 has attracted a reported 20,000 people to a broiling Las Vegas.

But strolling the vendor expo it looks like a storage show. EMC and Isilon have booths up front, as do Coraid, Fusion-io and NetApp.

Emerging vendors like Tintri, Avere, Nexenta, Whiptail, Nimble Storage, Sanbolic, Nimbus, Virsto, Scale Computing, Pure Storage, StorSimple and Nutanix are also showing. And that’s hardly a complete list.

Obviously, VMware has a storage problem opportunity.

Storage is the hard part
VMware’s biggest selling point is VMotion: the ability to take a running app and migrate it to another physical server without shutting it down. Great for system maintenance and usage spikes.

But VMware’s weak spot has been moving the app’s data: an app isn’t good for much without its data.

Other issues include:

• VM storage. Virtual machines are large files - averaging 20-60GB each - and storing thousands of them chews up a lot of expensive enterprise capacity.
• VDI. Virtual Desktop Infrastructure is hot: give every employee or student a VM and they can grab any PC, boot their VM and have all their apps and data. But VDI boot storms kill most storage systems and keep users waiting far too long.
• The I/O blender. Storage systems have long relied on the observation that data is accessed in clumps. But when you have 25 VMs each accessing their own data, the clumps become a smear and traditional storage optimizations don’t work. Now what?
• Backup and deduplication. Over 90% of the bits in a VM are the same, so why store them over and over? And they have to be backed up.

The Storage Bits take
Virtualization schemes like VMware and Microsoft’s Hyper-V can’t reach their full potential without storage that is as flexible and performant as the VMs. But while one VM looks much the same as another, the user and application data are always unique.

VMware’s storage problem recapitulates computing’s earliest days: the CPUs were easy; it was the storage that held them back.

And so today’s 10Gig ports, flash and fast disk, dozens of gigabytes of DRAM, smart software and much ingenuity are working to solve the problems of a key enabling technology for the future of computing: real storage optimized for a virtual world.

Comments welcome, of course. I’ll be on the show floor today looking for the coolest stuff. Stay tuned.

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An early look at Windows Server 8 – Can you say Cloud?

Well, maybe everybody is saying “cloud” these days, but my first impression of Microsoft Windows Server 8 (not the final name) is that Microsoft has been listening very closely to what customers want from an OS that can support both public and private enterprise cloud implementations. And most importantly, the things that they have built into WS8 for “clouds” also look like they make life easier for plain old enterprise IT.

Microsoft appears to have focused its efforts on several key themes, all of which benefit legacy IT architectures as well as emerging clouds:

• Management, migration and recovery of VMs in a multi-system domain – Major improvements in Hyper-V and management capabilities mean that I&O groups can easily build multi-system clusters of WS8 servers, and easily migrate VMs across system boundaries. Muplitle systems can be clustered with Fibre Channel, making it easier to implement high-performance clusters.
• Multi-tenancy – A host of features, primarily around management and role-based delegation that make it easier and more secure to implement multi-tenant VM clouds.
• Recovery and resiliency – Microsoft claims that they can failover VMs from one machine to another in 25 seconds, a very impressive number indeed. While vendor performance claims are always like EPA mileage – you are guaranteed never to exceed this number – this is an impressive claim and a major capability, with major implications for HA architecture in any data center.

In addition to these base features, WS8 will also add a number of features that are oriented toward the cloud to cloud interface but will also benefit conventional IT architectures such as:

• Asynchronous replication of the VHD files
• Multi-cluster VHD synchronization
• Differential copies of VM to conserver storage space, along with major improvements in storage management, including increased ability to scale file systems on the fly.
• Integrated multi-system patching.
• Improved scripting and automation.
• Deeply embedded capabilities to scan and classify data for security assessment and policy-based actions. The OS will come with a library of common patterns (phone numbers, social security numbers, addresses, etc), and will have a regular expression tool to add custom patterns.

The list of detailed features goes on and on, far too many to itemize here, but the underlying pattern is clear – Microsoft has srelly listened to customers over the last four years, and the result is an OS platform that should offer major benefits to both conventional data centers as well as providing a foundation for a transition to cloud-based architecture. Microsoft has grasped the fundamental truth about the transition to cloud – that it will be a gradual migration, and clouds and legacy IT will have to co-exist and interoperate for a long time, probably forever.

I’m sure there will be bugs, required SPs, and the occasional horror story, but this looks like a radical refactoring of OS capabilities and a major jump in capabilities for just about any I&O group.

I’m not generally this bullish on new products, particularly in advance of really seeing them in customer hands with some time under their belts, but this feels very good. My net take – a major upgrade and a must evaluate for not only current Windows Server users but for anyone needing a scalable and manageable platform for cloud development.

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A Black Friday Adventure To Remember

My Black Friday Adventure was one of the best times I have had this
year. I shopped until I was absolutely about to pass out. The best
deals I found were at Walmart. Walmart had some really great savings.
One of the things I needed most where towels. I racked up on their
1.33 cent towels. I could not believe they were selling them so cheap.
The toys I found were not really that great, but I as able to get a
few items that I was looking to purchase. One of the hottest items was
the Toy Story 3 Buzzlight year doll. I purchased that and all of the
other characters in the movie for 12 dollars. Someone is going to be a
happy camper this year. I figured I would get the whole set since they
were so cheap. After my sister and I got home, because we always shop
together on Black Friday. We collapsed on the couch and watched
satellite television from expertsatellite.com.
That is our Black Friday annual tradition, and then we heat up the
leftovers from Thanksgiving.
But it seems like this year was one of the best times we have had in a
long time.

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Personel TNI Bantu Petani di Magelang Basmi Tikus

Metrotvnews.com, Magelang: Kekeringan dan cuaca
ekstrem diperkirakan ikut memicu ledakan populasi tikus di Magelang,
Jawa Tengah. Akibat tikus-tikus itu, banyak petani yang merugi hingga
ratusan juta rupiah. Untuk mengurangi jumlah kerugian petani, Jumat
(23/9), dilakukan pembasmian massal atau gropyokan terhadap tikus
sawah.

Gropyokan dilakukan ratusan petani di Desa Prajeksari,
Kabupaten Magelang. Tak hanya warga. Sejumlah anggota TNI dari Kodim
0705 Magelang juga turut diterjunkan. Ratusan tikus pun berhasil
dimatikan. Hampir 20 hektare lahan pertanian di Desa Prajeksari,
diserang hewan pengerat itu.(DSY)

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Adobe adding security, privacy goodies to Flash Player 11

Battling to cope with the hacker bullseye on its back, Adobe plans to add new security and privacy features to the next iteration of its ubiquitous Flash Player, including  support for SSL socket connections and the introduction of 64-bit ASLR (Address Space Layout Randomization).

Adobe said the new Flash Player 11, expected in early October, will include the SSL socket connection support to make it easier for developers to protect the data they stream over the Flash Player raw socket connections.

[ Adobe to rush out Flash Player patch to thwart zero-day attacks ]

Flash Player 11 will also include a secure random number generator.

Adobe’s Platform Security Strategist Peleus Uhley explains:

Flash Player previously provided a basic, random number generator through Math.random. This was good enough for games and other lighter-weight use cases, but it didn’t meet the complete cryptographic standards for random number generation. The new random number generator API hooks the cryptographic provider of the host device, such as the CryptGenRandom function in Microsoft CAPI on Windows, for generating the random number. The native OS cryptographic providers have better sources of entropy and have been peer reviewed by industry experts.

[ Adobe admits to 80 'code changes' in Flash Player patch ]

The company is also adding 64-bit support in Flash Player 11, a move that Uhley says will bring some security side-benefits.

If you are using a 64-bit browser that supports address space layout randomization (ASLR) in conjunction with the 64-bit version of Flash Player, you will be protected by 64-bit ASLR. Traditional 32-bit ASLR only has a small number of bits available in the memory address for randomizing locations. Memory addresses based on 64-bit registers have a wider range of free bits for randomization, increasing the effectiveness of ASLR.

On the privacy side, Adobe is adding a private browsing mode to allow users to stay incognito while viewing Flash files.   A mobile control panel is also being added to Android devices to easier for users to manage their Flash Player privacy settings on their Android devices.

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Capture your life with Evernote on the BlackBerry PlayBook

One reason I bought myself a BlackBerry PlayBook at launch, before I even had my own BB smartphone, was that I thought the device had lots of potential. It is taking some time to realize all of that potential, but application developers are making it better with some great apps. As posted on CrackBerry.com Evernote is now available for the BlackBerry PlayBook and can be download from BlackBerry App World. Evernote is an application and service that lets you capture, store, and search for just about anything you can think of in one central repository and I use it on all of my mobile devices.

I don’t yet see the news of the release up on the Evernote site, but will get the software loaded up on my PlayBook soon and give it a spin. From the screenshots on CrackBerry.com it looks like you will be able to create notes that are text based, have audio, have pictures integrated and attachment support. I can’t get enough of Evernote and the software because so much more useful when it is available everywhere for you to capture your thoughts and daily life.

UPDATE: You can now read about Evernote for the PlayBook on the Evernote blog, Noteworthy.

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