Posts by Chris Tyler

Ethernet storage protocol choices

iSCSI vs AOE

iSCSI has higher overhead and is routable. AoE has lower overhead and is not.

This means that iSCSI can be used in some interesting ways, such as remote SANs (for disaster recovery) and RAID-1 simultaneous writes to local and remote storage (online backup).

AoE provides lower-cost, perhaps slightly higher-performance solutions for a pure local SAN context.

For most purposes that I can see, FCoE is a non-starter except in a shop that has a lot invested in FC.

OpenOffice gets Ubuntu-media friendly

Linux-friendly

Not sure why this is called "Ubuntu-friendly" when the switch to gstreamer makes this friendlier to almost any Linux distro (?).

Sun boosts OpenSolaris on Atom

Who cares? (Or, Why not share and win?)

The question I've never seen answered about OpenSolaris is this: Who cares?

Sun and open source are uneasy companions. There are a few features present in OpenSolaris that aren't present in Linux (or *BSD, for that matter), but these features aren't sufficient to overcome concerns about the sustainability of the OpenSolaris effort, considering the small size of the community and the strong control exerted by Sun.

A vibrant community is essential to the commercial acceptance of an open source software solution, because it ensures competition between support providers; aids in expansion of hardware support, software compatibility, and testing; and bodes well for long-term support.

It would be better for Sun to license technologies such as ZFS in such a way that they could be incorporated into other open source kernels, and leverage the large and diverse developer and support communities around those kernels.