James M. Burke

I don’t think I have a good chance of getting ahold of an Xbox 360 during first shipment. Circuit City began accepting web orders at 2:00pm on Friday. I had Rebecca try to order at 2:00pm, but their web server was completely overloaded, and she was only able to get it into the cart. It would not let her check out…then, by 4:30pm, Circuit City had updated their site saying “Sold Out!” My original intention was to order one, and still wait in line on Monday night at midnight to try to grab one…ensuring I would at least get one during first shipment. Well, I guess I still have one last shot…

Well, once again, I want to thank Catherine Helzerman. Ha! She had made a post called The Complete Concise History of GNU/Linux from digg. I thought I knew most of the story. Basically, Linux was founded by Linus Torvalds. He wanted to make improvements on an older operating system called Minix, but the author declined. Well, who was the original author? None other than Andrew Tanenbaum. He wrote the book for my Modern Operating Systems class that I took in college. Great book by the way….I just had no idea that Minix was his original creation. Very cool.

I’m still not quite sure what kind of audience I pull in on this site, but I wanted to talk about 10Gbps ethernet. So, since I’ve been working with Fibre Channel, I’ve seen it go from 1Gbps to 2Gbps to more recently, 4Gbps. 4Gbps is still not quite widely adopted, and it still needed some improvements last I looked. Fibre Channel also offers a 10Gbps solution, but my understanding is that it is currently ISL (Inter-Switch Link) only.

Well, working at Network Appliance, we are the leaders in iSCSI technology. Many of the people believe here that iSCSI will be the future…especially with 10Gbps Ethernet’s adoption. See, people could run a private network at 10Gbps to handle their storage, and it would be simple, cheap, reliable, and FAST. (Sidenote: NetApp’s motto is Fast, Simple, Reliable.)

What do you think? Do you think fibre channel will be here to stay? Or, do you think that iSCSI could take over fibre channel once 10Gbps (or even 40Gbps) ethernet is here?

Related Articles: Combining iSCSI and 10 Gigabit Ethernet, Fibre Channel vs. iSCSI, iSCSI vs. Fibre Channel

My company, Network Appliance, has the most bizarre fiscal year schedule I have ever seen. First quarter is May, June, July…making second quarter August, September, October. Well, today, we announced our results for Q2 of FY06.

Network Appliance Announces Results for Second Quarter Fiscal Year 2006
Achieves 29% Year-over-Year Revenue Growth and Record Operating Income

Sunnyvale, Calif. — November 16, 2005 – Network Appliance, Inc. (NASDAQ: NTAP), the leader in advanced networked storage solutions, today reported results for the second quarter of fiscal year 2006. Revenues for the second fiscal quarter were $483.1 million, an increase of 29% compared to revenues of $375.2 million for the same period a year ago and an increase of 8% compared to $448.4 million in the prior quarter.

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It also mentions that we estimate another 25-28% growth next quarter.

View Press Release

Catherine Helzerman found an article on Digg, which said: “Read about a bug on gmail that granted access to your gmail account, the geniuses at google have been defeated once more.”

Apparently someone found out an interesting way to get through the Gmail security and log-in as anyone without the use of passwords. He has posted the steps to take on elhacker.net with screenshots. He does inform us that Gmail has corrected the problem, but it was surprising to see!

View: Digg: Someone may have got into your gmail account and you even knew it

One of my co-workers at NetApp sent me this:

Worst Job

Warning: Contains explicit language. Very funny, but not work safe at high volume.

20 Petabytes. What is that? That is a “best guess” of the amount of storage that NetApp’s largest customer currently has. How much is 20 Petabytes, you may ask? Well, let’s take a look:

1 Petabyte = 1000 Terabytes = 1000000 Gigabytes = 1000000000 Megabytes
To be exact, 1 Petabyte = 1,125,899,906,842,624 bytes or 2^50 bytes. A lot of times, the exact number is rounded down to 1,000,000,000,000,000 bytes.
But, we’ll use the exact amount…therefore, 20 Petabytes is 22,517,998,136,852,480 bytes.

So, what does that number mean? Well, according to James S. Huggins’ Refrigerator Door:
1 Megabyte = A small novel; 3.5″ floppy disk (1.44 MB)
1 Gigabyte = Paper in the bed of a pickup; symphony in high-fidelity sound; broadcast quality movie
1 Terabyte = Automated tape robot; all the X-ray films in a large technological hospital; 50,000 trees made into paper and printed; daily rate of EOS (Earth Orbiting System) data (1998)
1 Petabyte = 3 years of EOS data (2001)
2 Petabytes = All U. S. academic research libraries
20 Petabytes = 1995 production of hard-disk drives

Just think. A blank CD-R can hold approximately 650-700 Megabytes of data. That means that 20 Petabytes of storage is enough to hold the contents of about 32,168,568 700 MB CD’s. That’s a lot of data! It’s still not enough. The world needs more and more storage daily. It really is mind boggling…

As part of my new hire orientation, they ask that we fly to Sunnyvale to go through various courses. So, my plane departs in a few hours for San Francisco, and I will be out there until Sunday, Nov 13. I’m not sure if I’ll have much internet connectivity, so blogging may not be possible until I get back. We’ll see…

This just in on Neowin:

SGI, also known as Silicon Graphics, Inc, announced today that it has been advised by the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) that its common stock - ticker symbol SGI - will no longer be traded on the NYSE beginning with the opening of business on Monday, November 7, 2005.

Link: Neowin.net - SGI delisted on NYSE

I’ve been meaning to rant about this for quite some time… Raleigh traffic is about 1500% worse than Tucson (my own statistical estimation, not to be used by anyone else). Seriously…I wondered why we have 5 lanes going both ways on I-40 between Durham and Raleigh. Now I know. It’s funny too, because the window is pretty short, but it happens to be when I want to go to work. If you go between 7:30 and 7:50, you’re good. But, anything between like 7:50 and 8:45 is terrible. The I-540 beltline is new, and is still in construction, not even 25% complete, but I live near I-540 and NC Highway 70. Taking 70 to I-540, then I-540 to I-40 is ridiculous! I thought that would be the way to go, but NO. It really upsets me, because the traffic should flow with no problems, but you always have dumb drivers who don’t know what they’re doing and end up holding up all the rest of the cars. Say 120 cars are traveling in one lane, if everyone has 1 second delay in moving, it causes the last car to have to wait 2 minutes! So, to make a long story short, I take a “backroads.” I end up going further but it ends up saving me quite a bit of time.

Check out the live Raleigh/Durham traffic cams

Just click on the magnifying glass and it’ll zoom in to show you more cameras. I-540 isn’t shown, but it’s the major road above the I-440 beltline that merges into I-40.