What does this acquisition mean… hmmmm…  I could speculate that EMC has acquired iomega to continue their down market push with the obvious connection between iomega and Retrospect, which BTW I think is true.  iomega has some nice disk based products that play well in this space.  I also think that while the Zip drive is not really of much value these days iomega has a heritage of pioneering a storage technology which could help EMC realize the vision of displacing tape as the primary media for offsite storage in the SMB.  iomega’s iStorage also seems to dovetail nicely into EMC’s cloud computing initiative.  My thought here is that iStorage pairs nicely with Mozy, Pi, EMC’s Cloud Infrastructure initiative, etc…  Then of course there is the iomega Jaz the 2GB removable cartridge that never really took off but could EMC look to increase density and really target tape in the SMB with a technology like this?  The speculator is me says, maybe.  If you look around at companies like rdx are on the right track but may not have the market muscle, presence or heritage to capture significant market share and change the market paradigm, you can almost visualize how EMC could and might parlay the iomega acquisition.

EMC continues to move down market with the looming acquisition of Iomega, as I have mentioned there is no doubt that EMC is very focused on capturing data at the edge in the SOHO and enterprise market. The Iomega news comes fresh off the acquisition of Pi and the announcement of a cloud computing initiative.

http://opensolaris.org/os/project/samqfs/

Gisele Bundchen co-MVP Super Bowl XLII

Maybe next year Tom Brady should leave Gisele at home. While she is not a bad trophy / consolation prize it may be a bit easier for Eli to share his trophy (The Vince Lombardi Tropy, shown here on the right) with the team and the fans.

Congrats NY!

Here a screen shot of my Vista desktop running OS X:

There are a number of emerging interconnects that technologically out shine iSCSI the question is how quickly can the market makers move to adopt these technologies, are the market makers interested in accelerating the adoption curve? This is a complicated question, on one hand you could argue that technologies are more stable once they have been around longer (I remember reading papers on iSCSI in 2001, did it really take 7+ years to get iSCSI to where is today?) on the other hand if the market makers validate these technologies too early they run the risk of fierce competition from more nimble startups. It is a complex problem, my feeling is that for the most part the adoption cycle is slowed by the market makers as a way to recoup development cost and and slow competition. IMO the by product of this is a slower innovation cycle.

AoE and HyperSCSI both offer the interconnect price point of iSCSI without the performance burden associated with TCP. AoE and HyperSCSI ride on Layer 2 and do not experience the protocol overhead associated with Layer 3 protocols. SoIP (Storage over IP) uses UDP as the transport protocol as opposed to TCP. We are also seeing the emergence of iSER and iWARP, next generation TCP technology that closely resembles Infiniband. iWARP (Internet Wide Area RDMA Protocol) is a superset of the VI architecture and is aimed at reducing the overhead associated with TCP, iSER (iSCSI Extensions for RDMA) maps the iSCSI protocol over RDMA networks like Infiniband or iWARP. iSER address the overhead associated with TCP and out-of-order packet delivery. How many of us hear about these protocols?

It seems that the majority of marchitecture effort is being put into FCoE (Fibre Channel over Ethernet). Major players such as Brocade, Cisco, EMC, Emulex, QLogic, IBM, Intel, Sun and Mellanox have all gotten behind FCoE in a big way so most likely this will be the next big thing in storage interconnects. The emergence of technologies that further leverage Ethernet as the interconnect will change the game, it is hard to imagine that Cisco’s dominance will will not continue to grow. It is likely that more storage services (i.e. – replication, snapshots, etc…) will be handled at the network layer, as these services move into the network layer we will continue to see the further commoditization of the storage market. Should be interesting to watch over the next few years.

While on the surface protocols that sit on top of Layer 2 (AoE and FCoE) may seem to be superior there is a tremendous amount of functionality that is provided at Layer 3 so it is not a forgone conclusion that FCoE will will the battle. Right now the only forgone conclusion I can see it that Cisco wins regardless, the others will be battling for a piece of the pie. But who knows anything can happen, after all this is technology.

——— SCRIPT STARTS HERE ———

WScript.Echo “B2D Capactiy Reporter – ” & Date
Wscript.Echo “RJB – 1/2/2008″
Wscript.Echo “———————————–”
Wscript.Echo “———————————–”

Dim totalB2D, totalUSED, totalFREE
totalB2D = 0
totalUSED = 0
totalFREE = 0

strComputer = “.”
Set objWMIService = GetObject(“winmgmts:” _
& “{impersonationLevel=impersonate}!\\” & strComputer & “\root\cimv2″)

Set colItems = objWMIService.ExecQuery(“Select * from Win32_Volume where label like ‘b2d%‘”)

For Each objItem In colItems
WScript.Echo “Label: ” & objItem.Label
WScript.Echo “Mount Point: ” & objItem.Name
WScript.Echo “Block Size: ” & (objItem.BlockSize / 1024) & “K”
WScript.Echo “File System: ” & objItem.FileSystem
WScript.Echo “Capacity: ” & round(objItem.Capacity / 1048576 / 1024,2) & ” GB”
WScript.Echo “Used Space: ” & round((objItem.Capacity – objItem.FreeSpace) / 1048576 / 1024,2) & ” GB”
WScript.Echo “Free Space: ” & round(objItem.FreeSpace / 1048576 / 1024,2) & ” GB”
WScript.Echo “Percent Free: ” & round(objItem.FreeSpace / objItem.Capacity,2) * 100 & ” %”
totalB2D = totalB2D + (objItem.Capacity / 1048576 / 1024)
totalFREE = totalFREE + (objItem.FreeSpace / 1048576 / 1024)
totalUSED = totalUSED + ((objItem.Capacity – objItem.FreeSpace)/ 1048576 / 1024)
Wscript.Echo “———————————–”
Next

WScript.Echo “———————————–”
WScript.Echo “Total B2D Capacity: ” & round(totalB2D / 1024,2) & ” TB”
WScript.Echo “Total Used Capacity: ” & round(totalUSED / 1024,2) & ” TB”
WScript.Echo “Total Free Capacity: ” & round(totalFREE / 1024,2) & ” TB”
WScript.Echo “Total Percent Free: ” & round(totalFREE / totalB2D,2) * 100 & ” %”

——— SCRIPT ENDS HERE ———

This script was originally written to report the utilization of devices that were being used as Backup-to-Disk targets, hence the name B2D Capacity Reporter. The scripts keys on the disk label so it is important to label the disks properly so that it will report accurately (this can be done from Disk Management or the Command line). I have bolded above the only change that really needs to be made to make the script function properly. This script could easily be modified to report across multiple systems which could be useful if you are looking to tally all the space across multiple servers.

I have only tested this on Windows 2003 so I am not sure how it will function on other versions of Windows. Enjoy!

Oh, one more thing. When you save the script be sure to run it with cscript not wscript (e.g. – cscript diskspace.vbs).

• The primary user opens a remote console session [START->RUN->] the following command:
  • mstsc -v:servername /F -console
    • This opens a remote desktop session console session to a specified servername in full screen mode
• The second user opens a remote session [START->RUN->] the following command:
  • mstsc -v:servername /F
    • This opens a remote desktop session to a specified servername in full screen mode
  • Next open a command window
    • START->RUN->cmd.exe
    • type “shadow 0″ (omit the quotes)

This will prompt the primary user stating that you would like to connect to their console session, once they accept the connection you will be sharing the same session. For more information refer to this (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/278845) Microsoft knowledge base article.