I have been waiting for this for quite some time now. The popular application, Google Earth is now available on a Mac OS X 10.4 and up. If you own a PC and haven’t tried this out, then I highly recommend you follow the link at the bottom and install this app! What is Google Earth? Google describes it as a “3D interface to the planet.”
Want to know more about a specific location? Dive right in — Google Earth combines satellite imagery, maps and the power of Google Search to put the world’s geographic information at your fingertips.
Download: Google Earth – Home
The famous Microsoft blogger Robert Scoble has a book out with co-author Shel Israel called Naked Conversations: How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers. Although I haven’t read the book yet, Chris Pirillo has a very short and humorous review of it over on his site. Head on over to his blog and check it out…
View: Naked Conversations (Chris Pirillo)
Over on lightning-alley.com, Richard discovered that the 802.11n wireless draft was approved today. This means it will only be a matter of time before we’re all using 802.11n at a mere 600Mbps. Today, 802.11g is the fastest wireless technology at 54Mbps. It’s amazing how technology keeps advancing!
A few years ago, when I started working for IBM as a Co-op (Intern), I discovered this whole new world of enterprise storage. I just saw on my acceptance letter…”SAN TEST.” My first reaction was “What is SAN?” My next reaction was “What does test involve?” I honestly had no idea (being a college student) that companies thoroughly tested products….as crazy as that may sound. But, as a consumer, do you really think about those kinds of things? No. Most of us just buy a product and don’t even think about the kind of work that went into that product to get it into the state that it is when it hits the market. Because believe it or not…programmers aren’t perfect either. 
So, what does SAN Testing include? There is entirely too much to even begin to describe. The problem is that any little tweak could cause a number of other things to break. At IBM, I was testing fibre channel switches…so, if a vendor released a new firmware or driver update for A switch, we would test it with pretty much ALL of the IBM storage/server products to make sure that the change didn’t affect the full operation of the SAN. Just take a second and think about the number of combinations involved in that. Not only that, but I wasn’t the only one testing…there were many many groups testing…so things really get tested thoroughly. Now, testing eliminates a lot of problems, but there are just some instances/scenarios that we can’t simulate and bugs do appear. But, the idea is to keep those to an absolute minimum and try to get those resolved ASAP..again without breaking anthing else. Now, my job is strictly with Windows. Instead of focusing on the switch firmware/driver, we (more so) focus on the HBA (Host Bus Adapter) firmware and Windows driver. With our storage, I do various driver installations, upgrading/downgrading HBA firmware levels, link speed negotiation with the switch, basic LUN provisioning, basic I/O (making sure we are able to read and write data to the disk without ANY errors), fault injection (performing cluster failover/failbacks, panics, reboots, high I/O load, etc. to make sure host is not affected AT ALL), SAN Booting, and various timeout value tests. The timeout value tests are important because they affect the way everything would behave in the event of a failure. If any of you readers out there made it to this point and have any questions or comments about SAN Testing, feel free to post a reply or a message in the forum…I’d be happy to make an attempt to answer your question.
Last night, the January 2006 edition of Tech OnTap was released. Althought I haven’t had time today to review the whole thing, it looks like there is some great stuff in there. If you haven’t already done so, be sure to sign up to receive the latest editions in your inbox. To give you a preview, here are this edition’s highlights:
- NetApp Vision of the Grid.
- SQL Server 2005 Benchmark
- NFSv4 Benefits and Misconceptions
- Free Monitoring Tool: ToasterView
- Special Access: Online Launch Event
- Six Predictions for 2006
There is also a great article in there describing the new TPC-C (Transaction Processing Performance Council) record that Netapp, IBM and Microsoft jointly achieved. This performance group benchmarked the fastest TPC-C performance number ever for a 16-way, Xeon based server: 492,307 tpmC. This setup cost $3,138,060! Click here for the published document from TPC.
There’s a ton of other stuff in this month’s edition…be sure to check it out!
Call me a geek, but I think SAN (Storage Area Network) Booting is probably one of the coolest things there is. I’ve been working with it a lot lately, and the more I work with it, the more I like it…especially on NetApp storage! For those of you not familiar with SAN’s, it’s basically booting your computer off of a NetApp filer. That’s right….no hard drive is needed in your computer. What’s so cool about that? Think about it…you can load an operating system on a NetApp filer in Germany and boot off of it in the USA over iSCSI. Now, you probably wouldn’t want to do that, because the speed would be terrible right now…but the fact that you can is amazing. What’s even cooler is being able to use ndmp, Snapshots, etc. on the filer to further the reliability, scalability, etc.. If you boot off of the filer, all of your data is constantly backed up via NetApp Snapshot Technology. With Snapshots, you can backup and restore all of your data in an emergency situation in seconds. Seriously, Snapshots typically take less than one second to create and can be scheduled. What about ndmp? Well, I’ve been doing some experimenting…I have 2 clustered filers, one running Data ONTAP 7.0.3, and the other cluster runs Data ONTAP 7.1rc4. Well, after I boot off of the cluster running 7.0.3…what if I want to boot off of the other cluster? I simply ran ‘ndmpcopy -sa user:pwd -da user:pwd /vol/vol1 filer2:/vol/vol1′ and all of my data was copied to the other cluster in 2 minutes. Then, I just changed the HBA settings to see the other filer, and bam….booted Windows Server 2003 from the other cluster.
Jim Gray, a Distinguished Engineer for the Microsoft Bay Area Research Center recently gave a talk at the 4th Usenix Conference on File and Storage Technologies (FAST). There are some interesting things covered in this talk, such as disk reliability, indexing, file system versus database formats, computation and memory, file system structure, parallel file systems, etc.
View: FAST ’05 Technical Sessions (Slides and MP3 audio)
I know this isn’t “tech” related….but for those of you who’ve been around here for a few years know that I used to have a game hosted on here called Legend of the Green Dragon (LoGD). It is a PHP/SQL based version of the popular Bulletin Board System (BBS) game, Legend of the Red Dragon by Seth Able Robinson. Well, I have just put the game back online….and there are a TON of new features! I’ve also added a discussion forum for LoGD to the forums. Go check it out…and if you have any questions/comments/suggestions, feel free to post them to the forums or send us an email.
http://www.jbctech.com/game
This is a little late, but January 3rd was my three month anniversary with Network Appliance. I must say, it’s went by fast and I’ve enjoyed every minute here. NetApp has such a fast-paced work environment, that I’ve been busy working on something constantly since day one (That’s a good thing). But, as I begin to learn more about our products, I understand why we have been and are continuing to be so successful. Our storage is SIMPLE, and that’s our motto “Simplifying Data Management.” Our other one is “Fast, Simple, Reliable.” And that’s exactly what I have seen over the past few months. NetApp really strives to make these things as easy to operate as a toaster. That was the vision of one of the founders, Dave Hitz. That’s also why we’re named Network Appliance, their vision was to make an appliance. You plug it in, and run with it. I must say, that’s exactly what I’ve seen. The idea is that no matter what storage appliance you buy…if someone is trained on one, they can work on all of them without any further training. Now, we do release new versions of Data ONTAP that include more features, but the core features will always remain the same across all of our product lines. For instance, creating a LUN would still be ‘lun create -s -t /vol/volx/xxx’ and removing a lun would still be ‘lun destroy /vol/volx/xxx’. And, of course if you ever get stuck, typing the command alone gets you help (ie ‘lun create’, ‘lun destroy’, or simply just ‘lun’). All of the commands are that way! Anyway, the moral of the story is, in the words of Steve Ballmer, ‘I love this company!’ …everyone works hard to ensure the highest quality product with the most simplicity. As an employee, they have treated me extremely well, and I look forward to my future with NetApp.
Steve Jobs also announced that both Intel and Apple are ready to begin shipping the Intel powered Macs. They begin taking orders today. One thing that caught my attention was that the PowerBook has been redesigned and renamed to the MacBook Pro. It includes a built-in iSight, the Intel Core Duo processor (2 processors in 1) with speeds up to 4X faster, and a magnetic power adapter cleverly named MagSafe. The price tag is a little steep at $1999, but as always with Apple, the quality of the product won’t let you down. They begin shipping in February.
View: Apple – MacBook Pro
