Posts by Stephen McLaughlin 71 publicly visible posts • joined 20 Oct 2014
Having worked with many, many H1B visas over the years, can say the vast majority have impressive diplomas that are essentially paid for. One Unix admin had an impressive resume with tons of education/experience. First day working with him, he asked what a symbolic link was.. jeez..
The major ISPs in the present monopolist structure are licking their chops every time they hear proposed government funding for enhancing/improving broadband to consumers. The money ends up in their pockets whilst laying out new lines to more homes, so a win-win for them. They get paid huge sums to increase their customer base.
What the government should be looking at is opening up the markets for competition and removing the rules and regulations that created the present monopolist structure in the first place. It's almost impossible for an new ISP to enter a market that already has an established monopoly provider. And with more competition, coverage would expand and improve greatly. Then it would be a win-win for the consumer.
If they have older inventory that needs to move, this is a good strategy. It will be very difficult to keep going at their 200% growth rate for a prolonged period and new customers are the key. I've been impressed with their flash arrays and think once they get in more data centers other IT folks will be impressed as well. They really offer a more affordable solution to EMC.
The EMC folks I work with are not happy at all being purchased by Dell. It's reminiscent of Compaq acquiring DEC. I think most people in IT view EMC as a premium product and Dell as low-end PC and Server company not really focused on quality but rather high-volume sales to make profit margins. I wonder where this puts the EMC-Cisco relationship. EMC has been pushing Cisco blades now for a while and customers seem content.
"But: a) Carly pushed the Compaq/HP merger to begin with -- it's not like it had already happened, was in progress, or was planned when she took over. Quite a few didn't consider it to be that good of a deal. And honestly, HP wasted the DEC Alpha (along with their own PA-RISC), so really I'm not sure they did gain that much from it."
Lot of HP mistakes during that era but trying to force everyone from PA-RISC to Itanium was *huge* risk that backfired. The shop I was in at the time had a lot of HP-UX boxes running Oracle and HP was telling us the move was going to be seamless but no one believed. They ended up migrating that environment to Solaris servers. It's rare to see an HP-UX server anymore. Sad because I really liked the Operating System.
I'm surprised to see the XIV so bad in performance, price yes, but not performance. There's a huge overhead with the entire Array RAID1+0. Plus, most installations I've seen max out the flash front end. But I've seen XIV blow the doors off similar competition up to and around the 100k IOPS target.
I've yet to see much real interest in FCoE, whereas ISCSI does have a lot of adopters. One thing that will hurt the sale of Fiber HBAs is VM clusters as they share fewer ports, unlike stand-alone servers, and require fewer cards. Also with more edge switch designs, they free up quite a bit of real estate in the core enterprise switches. From my experience, FC overall seems still to the default choice for enterprise datacenters.
Having stayed at several Marriott hotels throughout the U.S., I can say in general the nicer the hotel is, the fewer services you will receive for free. In addition to wifi, there's breakfast, parking, local calls, and essentially no television channels to chose from. As a business traveler though, I was able to expense these costs. But now attempting to block hotspots is going over the top.
"Specifically, the cable companies (net neutrality), "
Obama seems to flip-flop in this issue. When he was in candidate mode, he was all for Net Neutrality. Seemingly unhappy with his previous ex-lobbyist selections for FCC chairmen, due to their of their support for Net Neutrality, he appointed Tom Wheeler. This selection made the telecoms very happy. Washington, DC, has long had a revolving door through which government officials exit to become lobbyists, and lobbyists enter to become government officials, but this Wheeler's selection was over the top.
Now another 180 and Obama is back on the side of Net Neutrality. Go figure. By the way, this John Oliver FCC segment is a must watch if you haven't yet seen it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpbOEoRrHyU
We recently purchased several Pure Storage FA-450s for a VDI deployment and couldn't be happier with them. The cost was much less expansive than traditional SAN vendors, setup and management is very straightforward, and performance is as advertised. Since this is the trend for storage, nice to see so many competitors vying for the same space.
"The little foibles such as the Rule of 17, Hypers, Metas, and BCVs vs Clones all added to the mystique and complexity and led to many storage admins believing that we were some kind of mythical priesthood."
Having managed Symmetrix since the 8830's I'm very familiar with this strange language. Customers are ordering a lot more VNX and smaller arrays lately so maybe this is the end of the Symmetrix line. I know one product that won't be missed, although no longer in use, is ECC, especially the combination of ECC6x and StorageScope.
I think IBM would have been better off had they embraced Oracle on Open Systems when the p4-690s were introduced. At the time our datacenter had loads of Sun E10Ks and we were looking to do a tech refresh. The performance numbers on the p4-690 in testing were amazing, they blew the doors off the Sun E25K servers. However, though Oracle did run on the IBMs, it was very, very buggy. IBM was staunchly behind DB2. So we upgraded everything to Sun E25Ks. Wonders what if IBM pushed Oracle instead of DB2 on Open Systems, how things might be different today.
I like IBM Storage so hope this isn't a long-term downward trend. I would say by far the easiest to manage from a SAN admin perspective. There is overhead (SVC) cost, but the flexibility is amazing. You can migrate storage from one DS8xxx unit to another with just a few mouse clicks and it's completely done in the background with the user community unaware.
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