Robby Pedrica's Tech Blog

Tag: storage

  • Cloud Services and Availability

    Cloud Services and Availability

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    Robby Pedrica
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    From the way that Cloud vendors promote their wares and how apologists fawn over these services, one would think that Cloud was the be all and end all of computing. The fact is that we’ve been here before and Cloud is just a more advanced form of central or mainframe computing from the 60s and…

  • NAS and SMR collide

    NAS and SMR collide

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    Robby Pedrica
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    A ‘brief’ primer on NAS TL;DR move to the next section if you find this boring … NAS, being the (mostly) cheaper cousin to SANs, is used pervasively everywhere from SOHO environments to large corporates. Netapp (Network Appliance) basically invented the category in the 90’s with their F-series of units combining SMB and NFS access,…

  • Bakbone and Falconstor

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    Robby Pedrica
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    In breaking news, Qwest has purchased Bakbone for $55m and stock options. Seeing as we have quite a lot of clients locally running Netvault, it will be interesting to see how this purchase affects the product lineup going forward. Buyouts can sometimes work, and other times fall down badly. Let’s try and be optimistic about…

  • Virtualisation part 3: VMware backup scenarios

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    Robby Pedrica
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    Backups in a virtualisation environment take on a whole new meaning, typically complex ( as opposed to the simple outlook that the vm vendors would like to portray )  because now you are dealing with shared SAN storage, vm images instead of files, very specific requirements around backup hardware and setup, 3rd party backup agents…

  • On-line storage – safe or not?

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    Robby Pedrica
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    Cloud computing has become a major buzzword this year and entails the provisioning of application and storage services within a distributed system operating on the Internet. Think Google Apps ( Wave, Docs, GMail, etc. ), T-Mobile SideKick, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud ( EC2 )/Web Services, Salesforce, Bittorrent and many others. These can be put into…

  • Intel’s SSD updates and firmware issues

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    Robby Pedrica
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    It seems that Intel just can’t get it right when it comes to SSD firmware updates. First they introduced a subsector remap algorithm on the G1 which increased performance but this was shown to cause fragmentation and performance loss over time. This was fixed with a firmware update but a new G2 appeared with more…

  • Virtualisation part 2: Storage

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    Robby Pedrica
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    The first part of the series focussed on the OS layer of virtualisation. This second part will focus on storage in relation to server virtualisation. Storage on its own, is a minefield of standards, specifications, technologies, protocols and incompatibilities. Add to this the concept of virtualisation and you’re looking at an area that’s difficult to…

  • Backups? We don’t need no stinking backups!

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    Robby Pedrica
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    Here are 2 stories ( just in this week ) of tragic data loss or nearly … My wife’s aunt phoned last night and indicated her daughter’s MacBook had been stolen while at a client. Simple: call the insurance, claim for a new laptop and restore your data. Not so fast. No backups … Considering…

  • Local insurance company loses client data

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    Robby Pedrica
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    So it’s not just the Americans who are poor at client data security – the South Africans have got into the act as well. Local insurance firm Zurich SA said it had lost a tape containing client information. Apparently the backup tape was lost during a routing tape transfer to a data storage centre in…

  • Data loss for Sidekick users Part 3

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    Robby Pedrica
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    Internetnews.com mentioned on the 16th October that the bulk of the data had been recovered: “Microsoft today reports it recovered the majority of lost customer data for Sidekick owners amid a flurry of lawsuits filed yesterday over the recent server failure caused a service outage and data loss.” This is not quite the truth: no…

  • Virtualisation part 1: OS

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    Robby Pedrica
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    I had an interesting question from a business colleague of mine today – please spell out what types of virtualisation are available. It’s good to know that, even though it’s fairly pervasive these days, people can still inquire as to what is the reality. Because running virtualisation for production loads can have a big effect…

  • Corrupted Intel SSDs?

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    Robby Pedrica
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    Intel has indicated that there is the possibility of corruption on X25m and X18m SSD units related to setting a drive BIOS password. The problem is triggered if a user has set a password, changes or removes the password and then reboots the host computer. Shipments of these SSDs have been suspended however here in…

  • Cluster and distributed filesystems

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    Robby Pedrica
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    This is a surprisingly large ecosystem for an area of OS’s that would on the face of it seem very specialised. I think there are a few  facts that are bringing these features to the mainstream: 1. we’re looking at new IT innovations like cloud computing 2. management interfaces to provide these features are being…

  • Backups, backups and more backups

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    Robby Pedrica
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    Why is it that when it comes to backup, most people just draw a blank? Although it can be a complex topic, surely it’s not useful to stick your head in the sand. But that seems to be the trend – until something happens and data is lost. Consider that you are responsible for your…