James M. Burke

Is it just me, or is the Playstation 3 interface just flat out ugly? Engadget recently posted a video of a complete walkthrough of the Playstation 3 user interface. It looks so 1990ish - especially when compared to the Xbox 360’s user interface.

It’s not all bad though - the picture slideshow looks nice, as does the video clip preview. Read my last post and this one, and it would appear as if I’m biased.

Back in July, I posted my thoughts on HD-DVD vs. Blu-ray.  Personally, I’ve chosen to go the HD-DVD route with the Xbox 360 HD-DVD drive.  I pre-ordered it on Amazon, and it ships this week.  I’ve seen many articles comparing the two, and I still see HD-DVD as ruling the format war, at least in the short term.  There are four main reasons for that: 1) It’s cheaper - at least until the PS3 rolls around  2) The ability to have HD on one side of a disc and SD on the other really appeals to home users  3) The standards are higher for HD - required ethernet capability, required multiple video streams for Picture-in-Picture, quicker menus, etc.  4) The compression format - again, Blu-ray is using a 10 year old compression algorithm (MPEG-2) hindering its storage capablities.  HD-DVD has been using the brand-new VC-1 by Microsoft since day one.

That doesn’t even go into the production process - where Blu-ray media is burned on the top of the disc, and is therefore more prone to damage….Anyway - I’m excited to get my drive in!

Last week was an incredible week for me at NetApp.  My team just shipped two more products for the Windows® platform.

The first being the updated FCP Windows Attach Kit that was renamed to the FCP Windows Host Utilities 3.0 for Native OS.  New for this release is support for the Itanium (IA64) platform, a bump to the new QLogic driver (9.1.2.11 for SCSIport or 9.1.2.16 for STORport), and other bug fixes to the utilities and installation packages.

Secondly, the MAJOR release our department has been focused on is the Data ONTAP® DSM 3.0 for Windows MPIO.  This takes the place of the MPIO component that was previously bundled with SnapDrive®.  Now, the multipathing component belongs to our team, and the Device Specific Module was rewritten in this new version.

The Data ONTAP DSM 3.0 for Windows MPIO enables you to manage multiple Fibre Channel protocol (FCP) paths between a Network Appliance™ storage system and a Windows host computer. You can have one active path and multiple passive paths. If the active path fails, the DSM automatically switches to a passive path, maintaining the host’s access to its storage.

New to the DSM is support for SnapDrive 4.2, Failover and Automatic load balancing, and more.  It is available for Windows 2000 and Windows 2003 (x86, x64, Itanium).

Download: FCP Windows® Host Utilities 3.0 for Native OS (NOW) 
Download: Data ONTAP® DSM 3.0 for Windows® MPIO (NOW, requires license key)