Biscotti - comming home

A new member of the family! Biscotti came home with us today. He came home at 6 pounds 8 oz at 9 weeksof age. Mr. Biscotti is a Goldendoodle from Placer Goldendoodles outside of Ft. Collins, CO. We are looking forward to many hours of fun with our little fluff ball!

Enjoying the warmth and humidity of CA.

Happy April Fools' Day - from Google http://ping.fm/aBZfx

De-dup compared

A very interesting blog post showed up yesterday: Backup Central - Performance Comparison of Deduped Disk Vendors

This provides are very interesting side by side comparison of the performance of various de-dup products. What is interesting is the comparison of marketing vs marketing. There is no real side-by-side comparison using actual data, but it does pull together the marketing brochures.

And interesting read for those looking into de-dup technologies.

Quantum DXi7500 - stuff to learn

Being new to Quantum and to the de-duplication space I've been trying to increase my knowledge. I'm sure that's pretty evident from the link aggregation that I've been doing. Internally we've been adding people to our numbers (and are still hiring) and we've needed to get them trained. Recently we completed a Galaxy University where a senior architect went through the whole software stack. It was a fun walk through the history of the product and provided a great information exchange. While the session was recorded, it is proprietary and I cannot share it .... sorry. For those inside Quantum let me know if you are interested and I can provide a link.

However, you all can benefit from this “University” via the learning of one of our instructional designers. With the most recent release of DXi7500 there are some new courses available. There are courses directed at field support and resellers and an online “Operators Guide” course. This new course provides behind-the-scenes explanations for VTL, NAS and de-duplication functionality. It also has some great visuals and explanations of the de-duplication concepts. There are graphics to show how variable-length block de-duplication is accomplished and how the DXi software can perform both in-line and post-processing de-duplication. (Yes these graphics are also “secret” until you take the course, but I’m working on finding some good material that I can share.)

Take a look and see … maybe you’ll learn something. I know I did.

What I'm reading: Quantum DXi 7500 - Product of the Year - Bronze

The folks at SearchStorage.com have released their 2008 Product of the Year Awards. This year the Quantum DXi7500 was awarded the bronze medal in the back up hardware category. This is great to see the efforts of our engineers resulting in an award.

It is also exciting to know that the same software used in this product is also used in this product is the same that is used in the EMC Disk Library 3D family of products.

One other note, the software stack for the DXi7500 has recently been updated. I'll be writing more about that in a few days. There are performance enhancements, stability improvements and lots more.

The Bad Apple & The Good Leader

Thanks go out to my long time mentor Howard Fear for this article;
Coding Horror: The Bad Apple: Group Poison.

As I reflect on current and past teams I have to agree with every one of the points. Bad Apples to quickly destroy a great team, and great leaders minimize bad apples and raise the qualities of the whole team.

Human nature seems to enjoy the bad, the cynic, the non-positive. The challenge for me always seems to be in finding the good and creating the positive environment. But I too, reflect human nature, more often than I care to admit. Sinking to being part of the bad apples is way too easy, being a good leader is a real struggle.

This article is a great challenge to step up to the positive leadership role that we are all called to live.

Thanks Howard.

Breaking News: StorNext 3.1.3

Some breaking news. The StorNext team has just release a new maintenance version (3.1.3 ). This release represents a good number of bug fixes to increase the stability of the code and also added was support for two StorNext platform service packs: Redhat Enterprise Linux 4 Service Pack 7 and SUSE Enterprise Linux 10 Service Pack 2.  Additionally, the Sun/STK ACSLS 7.3 library family using the SL 3000 library was validated with a number of drives.

 

If you are not familiar with StorNext check it out. It is a great data sharing and archive product.

 

A great accomplishment for the team!

 

What I'm reading: TechValidate: Quantum DXi-Series TechFact Case Study -- Source: Chief Information Officer, Large Enterprise Banking

This morning I received a Google Alert about a case study of the Quantum DXi dedup product. What is cool is the TechValidate service, a 3rd party service that collects and published end-user experiences.

TechValidate: Quantum DXi-Series TechFact Case Study -- Source: Chief Information Officer, Large Enterprise Banking
This note give a summary of a Large Bank where they reduced their backup and restore times by implementing Quantum DXi.

A cool note and a new service to watch.

What I'm Reading: 7500 Coverage

Quantum beefs up disk-based backup 1/30/09

InfoStor - Kevin Komiega

A nice quick summary of the latest happening at Quantum

NetBackup, OpenStorage and Quantum, 1/30/09
Symantec NetBackup Blog - Tim Burlowski

This is a transcript of a Q&A between Tim and Steve Whitner (Product Marketing @ Quantum). It was interesting to see Steve's answers about OpenStorage. This is not how I have defined OpenStorage (while at Sun), but there are different levels of open and different API levels. Here Quantum is looking at the application level, where at Sun we were looking at the OS, hardware level.

DCIG, 1/28/09
Dedupe Gets Smarter in New DXi7500 Release (Blog)
Jerome M Wendt and Howard Haile
This is a nice piece that gives an overview of the upcoming release of the software stack that makes up the Quantum product line. There are some exciting new features that are slated to show up in the next few weeks.

That's it for today ... I'm behind in my reading and even further behind in my blogging.

What I'm Reading: SearchStorage.com - Backup hardware finalists

The folks at SearchStrorage have released their finalists for the 2008 Storage Product of the Year Awards. The Quantum 7500 is one of the Backup hardware finalists!

Pretty cool ...

What I'm reading: Jeff Tofano - The Business Benefits of Deduplication

The Business Benefits of Deduplication

The Quantum CTO, Jeff Tofano, had an article published today at eBizQ. This article give a great overview of the evolution of de-duplication technologies and some considerations that people deploying this technology should take into consideration.

As a fun coincidence, I was chatting with Peter Cassidy this morning about the history of the Quantum de-dup backend, the block pool. Peter is the department manager for the Quantum team in Adelaide Austriallia. This team formerly known as Rocksoft brought the deduplication technology into the stroage worked from data security. They developed the de-dup techniques to deal with shipping around cryptographic signature files. They found that these files changes very rarely and they could use the blocklets(TM) concepts to only ship the changes over then network. This evolved into the dedup engine of the Quantum DXi product line.

It is good to have team meetings where you can find out these fun stories.

DXi in German ...

Do you speak (or read) German? If so, check out the recent press release about a European tour of the Quantum DXi product line. This is pretty cool to see out products being toured around Europe.
pressrelations.de | Pressemitteilungen
Maye I can get invited next time? What do you say boss?