Posts by SuperFrog

UK rethinks offshoring ban for £8M online procurement system

Corruption is not the same as supidity.

This is a problem across governments.

We have this problem in the states too. When a government needs a service, and it's usually a custom solution btw, there isn't the people in house that can build the service. Therefore the default is to hire an integrator to provide the entire solution. People, process, compute, management everything. It reduces risk for the government, usually. Post Scandal was a different beast.

The real crime imo, is the lack of internal resources to understand the deliverable, manage the project, and design what is needed. Government will never have all the in house talent to build, it's too complicated. But government should be able to staff, and understand what they can do "off the shelf" vs. something bespoke. I have several examples but I probably shouldn't share publicly.

Firefox now defaults to DNS-over-HTTPS for US netizens and some are dischuffed about this

Re: Good and bad

I get this in one sense that the OS should be the ultimate arbitrator of what happens on the system. You want to 'know everything' that goes on in a modern OS preventing data leaks etc.

But we have had many applications that have gone around system configs. I'm thinking my VPN application here changes my network settings to make VPN work. What about Outlook and O365 probably does some things that make that service work. I think Cisco even sells this service for OpenDNS. I don't think this is really a big deal really.

Fed-up air safety bods ban A350 pilots from enjoying cockpit coffees

Whisky and porridge, must have been over Scotland? (Couldn't help it)

It's good to talk: Union says IBM failed to consult system support techies as Scottish Power contract nears end

Outsourcing is a game for two

I've never seen outsourcing work well. Most companies that hire outsourcers don't have enough expertise to manage the contracts. I also feel that with insourced employees there is a sense of ownership and I can manage a shop with less people than I would need with a contractor. One thing that has worked for us is direct contracting. So instead of outsourcing an entire team, you contract for overnight work, or for a special need like storage networking. Just makes more sense.

It's Orphan Data in Backup Hell: No, it's not a Netflix series about storage admins...

Enter Mickey Mouse..

Dell/EMC is pushing VMware for these types of issues for persistent storage. We have already started down the VMware route to containers and my gut tells me that this will likely be a popular option. I'm sure the open source crowd won't like it but business likes the tools there comfortable with.

What concerns me is that if each container vendor has a different implementation that could cause problems. What's worse, VMware themselves has multiple answers to the same problem, VIC, vSphere Storage for Kubernetes, others i believe, that basically answer the same problem. It will take some time to iron some of this out.

Not LibreOffice too? Beloved open-source suite latest to fall victim to the curse of Catalina

I'm in this camp.

I don't like Apple's (lack of) commitment to software quality. From what I have read Apple's software teams are struggling with what Management wants vs what they really can achieve.

Steve wouldn't stand for it BTW, excellence was his expectation. I think there is something to be learned from that.

Hard to imagine Google, Facebook building AI without (checks notes) Dell EMC's Data Science Provisioning Portal

Call Now!

Discounts now available!

Brocade undone: Broadcom's acquisition completes

Re: Was buying FibreChannel a good deal?

Incompetent is way overboard in my mind.

I do architect storage networks but there is a reason for FC to exist.

Right now I see a lot of growth with NVMe-oF. Not just replacement installs but additions to hyper-converged platforms like Nutanix and Simplivity as these companies are finding that the internal storage is not enough and external storage is more cost effective and more flexible.

Not every business wants, needs or is in a position to do hyper-convergence. In one example, a hospital I recently worked with, you have regulatory challenges with respect to where data is stored. In a large bank, with zettabytes of storage, having a dedicated FC network makes sense. Some OS's don't work on hyper-converged platforms. If your a typical small to mid-size enterprise, it may or may not depending on the business.

To be fair, the cloud is eating a lot of storage growth and in my mind that is hyper-convergence problem. Workloads that a company would usually put on them are good candidates for putting that on a public cloud. Other workloads that you would keep on premises, most companies are doing some sort of array.

Amazon’s Snowball snowballs as Google's clone gets real and IBM's comes to Europe

Why?

I'm still not sure of the why?

The only way I see this being effective is if you are a company "moving to the cloud" en masse. I don't know too many companies doing that kind of work.

Re: Snowmobile

An "merican" truck nonetheless.

Micron: Hot DRAM, we're still shifting piles of kit, but somebody's missing our XPoint

Array vendors lined up yet?

Wait until Dell (ahem, EMC) starts making it a must have. Soon says the salesperson, soon...

Test Systems Better, IBM tells UK IT meltdown bank TSB

IBM??

I have actually had some good experiences with IBM et al. The trick is someone actually needs to know what they want if they can understand their head from arse.

The other issue I see is I'm not sure why IBM continues to take on these types of jobs as this isn't the first one botched. You start a project and you find through the discovery process that this thing is going south on you. As a PM you pull the project and rescope. Not wait until the explosion to find out you can't make it work.

UK's first transatlantic F-35 delivery flight delayed by weather

Houston, we have a solution.

Since these things are built in Fort Worth Texas. It's not too much a trouble to send them to Houston. Scholes Airport is next to the water and is available for staging. If these are the B model any boat with a helicopter pad could take them onboard.

None of my flash rivals NVMe: Analyst spills tea on who's who in fabric-access NVMe arrays

Re: NVMe and NVMeoF

I left EMC just before the merger. The client I was working for was worried that Mickey Dell would waste no time cutting their R&D. That seems to have been sage advise. Even (Yikes!) IBM's spectrum seems to be kicking their butt minus the stupid pricing. Pure is still giving them fits too. Though there does seem to be the definitive pure camp and the (over my dead body and God sends me to hell) not-pure camp.

Samba settings SNAFU lets any user change admin passwords

Samba settings SNAFU lets any user change admin passwords

Someone is on the eh, bean, eh?

Ohhhh-klahoma! Where Verizon's sweeping legacy down the drain

Re: I need a translation

That's the plan from Big Red. Slap a bunch of names on trivial stuff and hope everyone is too stupid to notice.

Arm emits designs to add iSIM tech to Internet of Stuff

Softbank Duh?

No coincidence that Softbank and Sprint own ARM?

Some "ARM" twisting going on?

Dell's losses widen in first post-EMC quarter, but nobody's worried

What's Really New?

I don't see anything in the HW space that's really new. Different takes on the same theme. Why spend dev cash on HW when you can do cloudy stuff and really make money. It's also an easier sell to (un)informed CIO dumpster diver.

Pure Storage's coming high-end array: We have the details

Useable isn't just a myth.

Disclaimer: EMC Customer

The problem with "usable" capacity is every workload is different. When we do RMAN dumps to our XtremIo we only get about 2:1 at best as it's already compressed. When we run our oracle DB's we get more of a 3-4:1 compression rate. So I don't think there is a meaningful way to test a compression/duplication workload. Maybe someone can come up with a testbed?

I know our EMC rep has been bantering about some patent case Pure lost to EMC. (Were about to buy a new array) I wonder if that has anything to do with the missing reduction ticker??

Microsoft's 'Gemini' project will be the Windows Blue of Office

I know I'm the oddball.

I actually miss the formatting palette for the mac version prior to 2010. The Ribbon is ok but I miss the screen real-estate that the floating palette allowed me. Had to get a damn bigger screen!

Storage glitches fell Australian supercomputers

Must be Dell Hell.

I deal in the mess of Compellent daily. The pay is good tho.

HP finally decides the future of the PC: It's a printer accessory

Will someone at HP please grow up?

Is EMC developing storage super-stack?

Yes, NetApp has something to do with it.

More than NetApp though... EMC knew it had a management problem, and not one that is easy to solve. You have three different platforms running three different O/S. Flare/Win Server, DART/Linux, and Enginuity/other. That's a lot to manage for any shop! By using Unisphere and modular components things are finally headed in the right direction.

I don't see Enginuity and FLARE merging anytime soon. Yes there on the same H/W, but the software is very different. Think about it this way... Enginuity is very lightweight, about 1/4 of FLARE. It also contains a static bin file. So when data is sent to the VMAX, the bin logic knows what to do with the data immediately. With FLARE, it has to go through layers of management. Speed through simplicity vs. Simplicity of management. It's a choice.

That's not to say they can't 'borrow' from each other. In fact they have! (Access Logix comes to mind) However, the two will remain discrete and separate.