Weekend Fun: New NetApp Installed

Date August 27, 2012

One of the larger differences between a position in Academia and a commercial business is that after-hours or weekend work is far less frequent. Every once in a while, though, there's something that you need to do that can't be done during the day. This weekend was one of those times. Our central fileserver duties [...]

Nasuni - Very cool technology

Date September 15, 2011

I'm in Silicon Valley for Tech Field Day 8, and I just got out of a very cool session. The company is Nasuni, and the two hour presentation was delivered by their founder/CEO Andres Rodriguez. Don't stop reading this blog post after this sentence, but Nasuni provides cloud storage. I know, that's like buzzword-ese for [...]

I'm here to shard data and chew bubblegum...

Date February 3, 2011

and I'm all out of bubblegum. I have an interesting problem. In My God, It's Full of Files..., I discussed some of the things I had to deal with on our production application server stack, and I used the following picture to explain things: In that article, I briefly outlined my plan to reduce wasted [...]

Dedupe to tape: Are you crazy?

Date October 25, 2009

W Curtis Preston, at Backup Central has posted an interesting entry, "Is Dedupe to tape crazy?. Even he admits in the first sentence that, yes, dedupe to tape is crazy. But then he bumps the crazy-fest up a notch by asking whether it's crazy-bad or crazy-good. You should read the article, but let me jump [...]

General update and a long weekend ahead

Date June 5, 2009

After a week of wrestling with CDW and EMC, two weeks of fighting the storage array, and coming up with an ad hoc environment in something like 2 hours, I've had a rough go of this whole backup-site-activation thing. The latest wrinkle has been that although EMC shipped us the storage processor, the burned CD [...]

The god of storage hates me, I know it

Date June 2, 2009

It seems like storage and I never get along. There's always some difficulty somewhere. It's always that I don't have enough, or I don't have enough where I need it, and there's always the occasional sorry-we-sold-you-a-single-controller followed by I'll-overnight-you-another-one which appears to be concluded by sorry-it-won't-be-there-until-next-week. /sigh So yes, looking back at my blog's RSS [...]