Tonight, I will be participating in the NetApp Annual UNC-TV Pledge Night. Here is some more information about UNC-TV:
UNC-TV is North Carolina’s only statewide public broadcasting service that is made possible through unique partnerships, public investments and private support that makes up one third of it’s annual operating budget.
View: UNC-TV ONLINE, North Carolina’s State-Wide Television Network
How does $5 for free sound? TextPayMe is giving every new user $5 and for referring 36 people, you get a free Xbox 360. Chris Pirillo has already won 3 Xbox 360′s using this service. Sign up for free here. Basically the service allows you to send payments to people securely using your cell phone. You simply send a text message saying “pay 5 2065551234″ and it will call you back to verify and securely sends $5 to 206-555-1234. Very neat service – if nothing, you should sign up, try it and take the free $5.
Sign up for TextPayMe and get your free $5.
Thanks Friea for the information…
The BayLISA March General Meeting will be held March 16, 2006 at the NetApp HQ in Sunnyvale. This one is very interesting as two of the people from here in NetApp RTP will be describing their Kilo-Client 1000 Host Swarm. Basically, they have created “what is probably the world’s largest iSCSI-based diskless server farm (1,000 nodes).” Event Details:
IP Storage Today and Tomorrow
Speaker: David Dale, Network Appliance iSCSI Evangelist and Chair of the SNIA IP Storage Forum
This session will highlight the progress made with iSCSI over the past 3 years and how next-generation features such as multi-connection sessions and ErrorRecoverLevel>0 are pushing iSCSI into more demanding application environments. Dave will also talk about where you can expect to see iSCSI next. (hint: think departmental Linux and UNIX environments)
The Kilo-Client 1000 Host Swarm
Speakers: Gregg Ferguson, Laboratory Administrator, and David Brown, Engineering Support Manager, of the NetApp Engineering
Gregg and David from the NetApp RTP (Research Triangle Park) Engineering Laboratory will explain how they designed and built what is probably the world’s largest iSCSI-based diskless server farm (1,000 nodes). Alll server nodes boot from NetApp storage using iSCSI and can be rapidly rebooted to run various versions of Linux, Windows, or other operating systems. Because a single LUN is shared among many servers in this design, server provisioning is almost unlimited.
This session will describe the server farm in detail and discuss how particular technologies were chosen.
Friea also says that a video will be available after the event and details will be in the next Tech OnTap.
View: BayLISA March General Meeting
Working in NetApp Engineering, you don’t really get to see how your products are put to use. You know people are using your Filers to store data, but it’s always interesting to read customer studies. NetApp maintains an online library with a few of the studies…some of the customers include:
There are many more including AMD, Arizona State University, BMW, Ford Otosan, Krispy Kreme, etc. You can check out the full list at http://www.netapp.com/library/cs/fulllib/.
Today marked my one year anniversary of blogging…On February 16, 2005, I made a post called “BLOG LAUNCH!” where I announced I was changing the jbctech.com domain over to my personal blog.
Thank you all for your contributions and support!
So, over the last few days, I’ve had some issues with my convertible notebook. I’m not going to go into details other than I believe I have a bad hard disk…but in the troubleshooting process, I discovered a very cool utility called the “Virtual Floppy Drive.” Today, you will have a very difficult time finding a computer (notebook, really) that has an internal floppy…unless you specifically ordered it that way. Well, good news – the Virtual Floppy Drive will emulate any type of floppy media and create the appropriate drive A or drive B. It also has the ability to mount a floppy image. This is nice when you have that driver that requires a blank formatted floppy disk – simply load up the app, tell it to mount drive A as a 1.44mb floppy drive and away you go. I used it and then copied the contents of the new A drive to my USB drive. This is a great utility!
Download: Virtual Floppy Drive 2.1
This is a little old, but with my lack of updates last week it’s better late than never. A while back, I mentioned that I was part of the alpha testing of Riya. Riya is a face detection and recognition service – you upload your photos to their website and once you train it, it’s able to (pretty accurately) recognize those people in other photos that your friends and family have uploaded. It is still in very active development, but it works beautifully. Good news is that they’re coming up on their public Beta. Visit riya.com to get more details.
Riya appeared at DEMO ’06, and they ended up winning a Demo God award. The presentation, given by the Ojos, Inc. CEO Munjal Shah can be found here.
View Riya DEMO presentation
You can also find great things about Riya by visiting the blogs of Tara Hunt and Munjal Shah.
Last Wednesday, I decided to make the switch (back) to using a PC rather than a Mac. Although I really loved my PowerBook, it just didn’t make sense for my line of work. NetApp supplies Engineers with desktops, and I was using my PowerBook when I worked at home. However, I discovered it was difficult to analyze Fibre Channel traces since the Finisar software was for Windows. I went to Best Buy a couple of times and became interested in the Gateway Convertible Tablet PC. After a few days of thinking about it, I decided to go pick one up. So, there you have it…I’m back to using a Windows PC. I’m still not used to having a 14″ screen and a laptop that weighs over 6 pounds, but it’s nice to be able to install all the software I’ve been missing. I will still envy anyone who gets the new MacBook Pro…
My G4 PowerBook is currently for sale on eBay (ends on Feb 18).
For the past three days, I’ve been in an “In-depth SCSI class.” It covered material from Solution Technology in SCSI, Fibre Channel and iSCSI. Just thought you’d like to know…
