James M. Burke

For those of you interested, you can add me as a Buddy on 30 Boxes via the following link:

View My Public Buddy Page

One of the things I’ve been looking for is a great, simple calendaring tool that I can integrate into the blog for events, activities, travel, etc. Well, I’ve been searching for months — I guess what I’m looking for is something simple that works like Flickr, but with events. I just haven’t found it…but today, on Robert Scoble’s blog, he says he received an early copy of 30 Boxes and says things such as “wow” and “beautiful.”

Could this be what I’m looking for? I won’t know until Sunday when they launch the Public Beta. Thomas Hawk has a lot more in a blog entry called “30 Boxes, Best… Calender… EVER!” Apparently 30 Boxes has great search capabilities and you’re able to share your calendar with friends by e-mail address. But, you’re not just restricted to all or nothing - you can even restrict what the people can see by using tags. There is a quote on the page saying “30 Boxes will be to calendars what GMail was to Email.” I can’t wait to try this out…

Source: Scobleizer - Microsoft Geek Blogger: Calendaring Heats Up
View: Thomas Hawk’s Digital Collection: 30 Boxes, Best… Calender… EVER!

I have been waiting for this for quite some time now. The popular application, Google Earth is now available on a Mac OS X 10.4 and up. If you own a PC and haven’t tried this out, then I highly recommend you follow the link at the bottom and install this app! What is Google Earth? Google describes it as a “3D interface to the planet.”

Want to know more about a specific location? Dive right in — Google Earth combines satellite imagery, maps and the power of Google Search to put the world’s geographic information at your fingertips.

Download: Google Earth - Home

Over on lightning-alley.com, Richard discovered that the 802.11n wireless draft was approved today. This means it will only be a matter of time before we’re all using 802.11n at a mere 600Mbps. Today, 802.11g is the fastest wireless technology at 54Mbps. It’s amazing how technology keeps advancing!

A few years ago, when I started working for IBM as a Co-op (Intern), I discovered this whole new world of enterprise storage. I just saw on my acceptance letter…”SAN TEST.” My first reaction was “What is SAN?” My next reaction was “What does test involve?” I honestly had no idea (being a college student) that companies thoroughly tested products….as crazy as that may sound. But, as a consumer, do you really think about those kinds of things? No. Most of us just buy a product and don’t even think about the kind of work that went into that product to get it into the state that it is when it hits the market. Because believe it or not…programmers aren’t perfect either. So, what does SAN Testing include? There is entirely too much to even begin to describe. The problem is that any little tweak could cause a number of other things to break. At IBM, I was testing fibre channel switches…so, if a vendor released a new firmware or driver update for A switch, we would test it with pretty much ALL of the IBM storage/server products to make sure that the change didn’t affect the full operation of the SAN. Just take a second and think about the number of combinations involved in that. Not only that, but I wasn’t the only one testing…there were many many groups testing…so things really get tested thoroughly. Now, testing eliminates a lot of problems, but there are just some instances/scenarios that we can’t simulate and bugs do appear. But, the idea is to keep those to an absolute minimum and try to get those resolved ASAP..again without breaking anthing else. Now, my job is strictly with Windows. Instead of focusing on the switch firmware/driver, we (more so) focus on the HBA (Host Bus Adapter) firmware and Windows driver. With our storage, I do various driver installations, upgrading/downgrading HBA firmware levels, link speed negotiation with the switch, basic LUN provisioning, basic I/O (making sure we are able to read and write data to the disk without ANY errors), fault injection (performing cluster failover/failbacks, panics, reboots, high I/O load, etc. to make sure host is not affected AT ALL), SAN Booting, and various timeout value tests. The timeout value tests are important because they affect the way everything would behave in the event of a failure. If any of you readers out there made it to this point and have any questions or comments about SAN Testing, feel free to post a reply or a message in the forum…I’d be happy to make an attempt to answer your question.

Call me a geek, but I think SAN (Storage Area Network) Booting is probably one of the coolest things there is. I’ve been working with it a lot lately, and the more I work with it, the more I like it…especially on NetApp storage! For those of you not familiar with SAN’s, it’s basically booting your computer off of a NetApp filer. That’s right….no hard drive is needed in your computer. What’s so cool about that? Think about it…you can load an operating system on a NetApp filer in Germany and boot off of it in the USA over iSCSI. Now, you probably wouldn’t want to do that, because the speed would be terrible right now…but the fact that you can is amazing. What’s even cooler is being able to use ndmp, Snapshots, etc. on the filer to further the reliability, scalability, etc.. If you boot off of the filer, all of your data is constantly backed up via NetApp Snapshot Technology. With Snapshots, you can backup and restore all of your data in an emergency situation in seconds. Seriously, Snapshots typically take less than one second to create and can be scheduled. What about ndmp? Well, I’ve been doing some experimenting…I have 2 clustered filers, one running Data ONTAP 7.0.3, and the other cluster runs Data ONTAP 7.1rc4. Well, after I boot off of the cluster running 7.0.3…what if I want to boot off of the other cluster? I simply ran ‘ndmpcopy -sa user:pwd -da user:pwd /vol/vol1 filer2:/vol/vol1′ and all of my data was copied to the other cluster in 2 minutes. Then, I just changed the HBA settings to see the other filer, and bam….booted Windows Server 2003 from the other cluster.

Jim Gray, a Distinguished Engineer for the Microsoft Bay Area Research Center recently gave a talk at the 4th Usenix Conference on File and Storage Technologies (FAST).  There are some interesting things covered in this talk, such as disk reliability, indexing, file system versus database formats, computation and memory, file system structure, parallel file systems, etc.

View:  FAST ‘05 Technical Sessions (Slides and MP3 audio)

One of the great things about working for a storage company is that I have access to TONS of storage. In the current project I’m working on, I have to create a huge volume and fill it up to ensure that the SCSI/FCP layer, NetApp filer, and the operating system are all able to handle it. How large was my test volume? Sixteen Terabytes (16TB = 16 * (2^40) bytes):

Volume in drive E is NTAP1
Volume Serial Number is DC10-EBF9

Directory of E:\

01/09/2006 02:25 PM 7 testFile
1 File(s) 7 bytes
0 Dir(s) 17,554,814,398,464 bytes free

I was able to easily pull it off by converting the disk to a GUID Partition Table (Windows Server 2003 SP1 GPT) and then perform a quick format, of course. So, now I’m off to begin the long process of filling this thing up.

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