Posts by mikeymac

LastPass to limit fans of free password manager to one device type only – computer or mobile – from next month

Discount link

Here's a link to the discount, for any interested: https://www.lastpass.com/buy/premium

Bixby users. Yes, both of you! Samsung's unloved voice assistant now works with its unloved DeX desktop mode

I was infuriated by my early encounters with Bixby. You'd hit that dang button, and everything would pause while the app tried to launch. Now, I just have the Bixby button mapped to a Flashlight app (which is a very common use case for it)

Samsung slows smartphone upgrade treadmill with promise to support three Android generations on Galaxies

Re: Um...

Given that the 2018-vintage Galaxy S9 has a 3.5mm headphone jack, and the 2020-vintage Galaxy S20 does NOT, I'd say the Galaxy S9 > GalaxyS20. YMMV

Excited about dual-screen laptops? Make your own with duct tape and the ThinkVision M14

Portable monitors rock

I carried around an AOC portable monitor for YEARS. In fact, I used it as my second monitor EVERYWHERE I went. Even at my office desk. Just an awesome way to work. Whether in the office, at home or in a Dunkin Donuts in Yonkers, I always had the exact same setup. Unfortunately, our latest work laptops have security features that prevents USB monitors from functioning, so that's the end of that. I would definitely recommend something like this to anyone on the go (can't vouch for this specific model).

Google age discrimination case: Supervisor called me 'grandpa', engineer claims

Sales guys always use that word, and it doesn't mean what they think it means. :D

A performant is an actor. Drives me nuts!

Aussies, Yanks may think they're big drinkers – but Brits easily booze them under the table

Re: Taxes are the snake oil of the lefites

It drove me nuts that they didn't tell us what percentage of the booze the top 10% of Brits consumed. >:(

Nutanix 'let chaos reign', groans CEO as shares tumble more than 20% amid dismal forecast

Re: Which is worse?

WYSIWYG650 is clearly a NetApp guy! El Reg should do a features comparison between NetApp HCI and Nutanix. It would be a hoot. :D

Holy planetesimal formation, Batman! Ultima Thule's no snowman – it's a friggin' pancake

Re: Relic?

Or, Ultima Thule could be one million or ten thousand years old. Do any of us have confidence that they really know?

Should the super-rich pay 70% tax rate above $10m? Here's Michael Dell's hot take for Davos

Re: Rich Tax Paradox

Plus, nobody paid 70% tax rate. Everyone forgets to mention that. The practical high-water mark was ~%42.

https://taxfoundation.org/taxes-rich-1950-not-high/

Thought black holes were donut-shaped? It turns out they're more like deadly fountains

Re: Interesting detail

Fellow traveler!

When selling security awareness training by email, probably a good shout not to hit 'reply all'

IBM did this for subscribers to their Storage Insights platform a few months back. Hilarity ensued!

When you play the game of storage arrays, you win or you – where are the visionaries?

Congrats, Infinidat!

As a customer, I can vouch for the rock-solid reliability and performance of the InfiniBox. It also continues to be the best customer support experience of my long career.

Price it. POC it. Purchase it.

Congratulations on your continued success!

This is a leader's square for storage leaders, IBM, Dell EMC and Scality tell wide-eyed Qumulo

Qumulo?

I'm a little baffled how Qumulo could crack the Leaders' quadrant. I'd expect them to be in the Visionaries quadrant, I think. I've met with them several times. Nice people, promising product, but as of this writing, they're missing enterprise-class features, particularly for those firms with strict security, auditing and data protection requirements. I don't doubt that those features will be coming down the pike someday, but they're simply not there now. Is it possible that Gartner only considers scalability and performance? Qumulo looks pretty solid as far as those two items go.

Anyway, congrats Qumulo! That's a big deal for a relatively recent start-up!

Ooof! Cisco Webex has been down for 7 hours – and counting

When it works, WebEx is still the best. So light and stream-lined. You hop on a Skype or GoToMeeting conference and you really find yourself missing WebEx. Goofy pop-up windows, circus-like color schemes..blech! But WebEx has been struggling with technical issues for the past year. Not sure what's going on there.

Excited Exagrid embarks express earnings expansion, experiences enterprise enlargement

Took a hard look at ExaGrid. Just couldn't see the benefit. At the time (2016), a full, non-deduplicated copy of all of the backup data had to sit in a "landing zone". They brag about it (faster restore!), but where are the SAVINGS, exactly? I'd have to buy petabytes of their disk to protect my environment. Interested to hear satisfied ExaGrid admins chime in. ***DISCLAIMER: All of this may have changed since 2016***

If you store your data, I tell you I'm your man: You flash some, lose some, all arrays to me

Re: The Afterlife

In his last few years, he switched from Jack & Coke to Vodka and OJ "to help keep his diabetes in check.". LOL

Hooo boy, Commvault, your activist investor is not a happy chappy

Commvault's a neat company. Their best trait is their aggressive compatibility with other companies' products. The one issue I see for them in the current environment is the declining cost of disk storage. They're at the point now where their licensing is more expensive per TB than the disk! What made sense when disk was $8 or $9/GB makes no sense at all when disk is $1/GB. This isn't Commvault's fault, but I think that they're going to need to figure out how to deal with it.

I wish them well, because it's pretty amazing software!

You bet your DRaaS: Infinidat squeezes out new backup, array and cloud compute products

10 out of 10 Anonymous Cowards HATE Infinidat!

Windows 10 to force you to use Edge, even if it isn't default browser

Re: Fucking idiots

Apple users are Apple users. They do what their told! (and they like it!).

Dell results: Well done, ice cream for everyone! Er, not you, storage

Re: Traditional storage

Boy, I disagree. All-Flash is still a huge waste of money for Petabyte installations.

Why two scale-out NAS, IBM? One's a pickup, the other's a juggernaut

Re: Clear as Mud

Don't worry, Chris, I'm sure they'll completely revamp it AGAIN in the next year or two. ;-)

Infinidat techie: Let me tell you a thing or two about ruler-format SSDs

Re: More dinosaurs

If you can get 99.99999% availability, and sub-millisecond response time from an array that is ~10% Flash, ~90% spinning disk, all while saving a bundle of loot, WHY WOULDN'T YA?

Price it. POC it. Purchase it.

In 2018, how are the big storage 8 handling the industry's challenges?

Re: Arghhhh!

I'm holding you guys to that! Mr. Potts came to town last night and did us a big favor free of charge! Thank you for the incredible customer support!

Arghhhh!

"HPE might decide its top-end array strategy is flawed with both the XP (OEM'd from Hitachi) and 3PAR systems ill-suited for the future, and decide to look to buy better tech. Who else but Infinidat is there?

The next 12 months could be very interesting for InfiniDat."

This is my nightmare scenario right here. May it never happen!

Spectre and Meltdown fixes: How will they affect storage?

Infinidat customer checking in...

After an initial assessment, Infinidat is saying that there is no increased security risk for their systems.

Here's hoping that's true! :D

Infinidat adds sync, async replication and bans noisy neighbours

I can see the image, but it isn't REALLY what the caption suggests. It's showing a view of InfiniMetrics (the Infinidat performance monitoring package), not the actual Infinidat management GUI.

IBM wheels out upgraded FlashSystem: Now breathe in and squeeeeze

We run three Flash 900 systems at my firm. Very dependable and high-performing. My only gripe has been the high price. This new line is supposed to reduce the price per GB considerably. Time will tell!

Big iron storage supplier Infinidat blags more o' that sweet VC cash

Re: Customer review - storage architect perspective

@zbmwzm3 - $200/TB piques my interest! (as long as it's not based on an overly optimistic data reduction ratio). ;-)

Re: Customer review - storage architect perspective

"People ask about cost - I can't tell you specifics, but I can give you ratios. Compared to my OVERALL EMC average cost per TB, InfiniDat was half the price. When compression was enabled, I was realizing 2:1 compression on ingress data, moving my price to 1/4 that of EMC."

This is the big story here. PRICE it. POC it. PURCHASE it.

You say: "I have been to greater than 300 customers in the EXACT same area that are running Nimble (one of which is of the above couple running Infinidat by the way, but needed an ultra-low latency platform so they bought a Nimble AFA)."

As I look through this thread, I think I'm the only contributor who actually owns Infinidat systems. I can assure you that we did not buy Nimble (though their analytics are pretty awesome!). :D Apologies if I misunderstood your post!

Re: Go Infinidat!

@zbmwzm3 - Unfortunately, I don't think I'm permitted to say. I always tell the Infinidat guys to brag about the price, but, for reasons that I can't divine, they seem reluctant to do so. You should have one quoted for you. You'll be gobsmacked! When you take price, performance, reliability and customer support into account, you simply can't beat Infinidat.

On a 1PB F6230, we're averaging <1ms on reads, and ~.35ms on writes. I don't know if we'd see better performance from an AFA from one of the MegaCorps, but it's more than fast enough for my use case, and I KNOW it's cheaper than the other options.

Good luck!

Re: Go Infinidat!

Thanks for the reassurance, Brian! We're working on procuring a pair of F4000 systems for backup and recovery, so my fear of your acquisition hasn't stopped us from moving forward. ;)

Go Infinidat!

I'm bullish on Infinidat.

We have two of their F6000 systems, and couldn't be more pleased. Cheap, fast, uber-reliable and the best customer support experience I've ever had. It's been a game-changer for us.

My only fear is opening El Reg some Wednesday morning and reading something like: "HPE Gobbles Up Dense Disk Dealer Infinidat for 2.2B". *chills*

Infinidat benchmarking beatdown: Glugging slimfastq? Not us!

Performance and Price

I'm an Infinidat customer.

We own two F6230s, and are looking at picking up a few more.

I don't actually know (or care) if an Infinidat F6230 is faster than an all-flash VMAX. With our workload, ALL writes are sub-millisecond, and average reads are below a millisecond.

They are faster than any other large-scale storage systems we have ever owned.

Price is the compelling story for us. A fully loaded Infinibox F6230 is a fraction of the cost of a VMAX. Infinidat doesn't emphasize this in their public statements enough, IMO. They need to start bragging about the pricing. I challenge anyone interested in testing the waters to apply for a quote. You'll be gob-smacked!