Starting July 15th at 9 am (local time in Brisbane, Australia - GMT +10), we'll be streaming the Kernel Conference Australia. Go to our UStream page for the live stream and to participate and ask questions via chat.

Of particular interest to the storage crowd: Jeff Bonwick and Bill Moore on ZFS Deduplication! 9:15 am tomorrow. 

Want more Bonwick and Moore?
Join us for their keynote on "Deduplication in ZFS"
at the Kernel Conference in Brisbane, Australia,
July 15-17, 2009.

Bill Moore and Jeff Bonwick gave a three-hour tutorial on ZFS at this year's SNIA SDC. Here's the first hour, the rest to follow next week.

download ZFS The Last Word in File Systems Pt 1 for iPod

view part 2

Going on now at the Grand Hyatt in San Francisco. There's still time to join the live video streams, and, if you're in town, stop by to visit the Community Marketplace while enjoying a drink and a fantastic view on the 36th floor.

Tom Albers, QFS File System Engineer and all-around good Minnesotan

download for iPod

On Halloween I upgraded the desk side PC from Windows XP to Windows 7.  Between multiple reboots, application installs, recovery of email, print server configuration, etc. my wife asked "Why does it have to be so hard?"  As she said this I was looking at the Apple Time Capsule sitting on top of a small cabinet in our home basement. The only item coming out of the Time Capsule was the power cord connected to the power outlet.  I run the Time Capsule as a wireless client in our home network for data backup.  The data consists of many pictures, video clips, songs, the kids homework and basically many various files (some of which are important).

My home (LAN) network has grown over the years from a few PCs connected via an old 802.11b router to a dual band (802.11g/802.11n) router connecting a multitude of wireless clients. These include a XBox, iTouch, PrintServer, OpenSolaris, Ubuntu, Mac, Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7 devices.  Basically a heterogeneous environment.  Will the older Window versions be phased out at home eventually?  Yes.  The Unix/Linux clients will remain out of necessity as well as for hobby.  It's difficult to currently beat the Mac experience.  Adding a Time capsule into my existing home network was relatively easy.  The Airport setup updated the Time Capsule firmware and configured the device in straight forward steps.  It wasn't as "fun" for a "techie" as say CLI commands, but simple is defined as "fun" for most consumers. The Windows XP to Windows 7 full upgrade was painfull but I have to admit the network configuration experience was much improved.  I was pleasantly surprised freeware Bonjour discovery services just worked and the W7 system configured the Time Capsule as a usable share.

One could imply a similar situation in the enterprise space.  For an enterprise business "fun" is defined as high margin dollars on a growing revenue stream.  This usually means your costs are contained, you implement continuous improvements on efficiency and you simplify.  Vendors in the technology industry are all trying to provide a truly "Enterprise Time Capsule" or Appliance.  There has been a large amount of innovation over the past 20 years.  However today's innovation is tomorrow's PDP-11.  Minicomputers were appliances that Mainframes couldn't be.  The evolution has continued over the years in every technology segment.

Enterprise customers want it simple as do consumers.  While the stakes are much higher in the enterprise, the bar is significantly raised for "just working" each and every time.  It doesn't matter if you are playing catchup, you are the incumbent or you are the new thought leader-- the winners will be the set of vendors who provide the tool that "just works" each and every time in the harshest and most complex environments. 

Blog is available also at: http://bobporras.wordpress.com/

...

As an important part of the announcement, STA is promoting a converged
Mini-SAS High-Density (HD) standard connector to create a vibrant and
consistent infrastructure to expand SAS usability and scalability.  The
STA objectives include a consistent connectivity management scheme in
addition to the active copper and optical cable extensions supported by
the new Mini-SAS HD connector....

source SNS Europe

...

"As the SMI specification continues to evolve and become integrated
into an increasing number of storage products, SMI has focused on
increasing the functionality of CTP for end users," said Paul von
Behren, chair of the Storage Management Initiative. "Version 1.4 now
assists end users to better evaluate their storage purchase options by
helping them determine whether a product simply provides basic
discovery and monitoring or whether it allows for configuration
management via SMI-S."

CTP for SMI-S 1.4 features:
·    Easy-to-understand CTP reports
·    Delivery of event notifications
·    Identification of tested management tasks using business-oriented terms

....

source SNS Europe

LSI has announced availability of a new family of high-performance
SATA+SAS host bus adapters (HBAs) based on 6Gb/s SAStechnology. The
LSI™ SAS 9200 series HBAs, based on the LSISAS2008 6Gb/s SAS controller
IC, offer new levels of performance and scalability for internal and
external direct-attached storage deployments using SATA and SAS disk
drives.

source SNS Europe

Emulex is expanding the performance and versatility of its
market-leading InSpeed® Bridging technology through the addition of
enterprise storage system support for Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) to
Serial Advanced Technology Attachment (SATA) bridging in SAS
environments, support for SAS Hard Disk Drives (HDDs) in Fibre Channel
environments, and support for ultra-high performance Solid State Drives
(SSDs) in both SAS and Fibre Channel environments.  

source SNS Europe