Random Short Take #103

Posted on 2025-06-22 by dan

Random short take #103. Want news? You’re probably not in the right place. Let’s get random.

My employer announced the general availability of VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0 this week. There’s a handy blog post that covers what’s new here.
Speaking of VCF 9.0, Frances Wong put together an excellent post on configuration drift and how it’s being handled now. You want the community’s view? Check out Christian Mohn’s article on what it’s all about.
Speaking of product releases, Preston de Guise put together a great post on what’s new in PowerProtect Data Manager 19.19. Yes, I know it’s been out a little while now.
And continuing the theme of linking to people I’ve meant in real life, Chris M. Evans has put together an interesting post on NetApp and its foray into cloud. You can read more about that here.
Switching gears slightly, a nice gentleman on the Internet reached out with information about a storage company called Sycomp and what it’s doing with Google Cloud. Check it out here.
In other press release news, Hammerspace announced an interesting collaboration with Animationsinstitut a little while ago. I frequently wish I knew more about the media and entertainment infrastructure industry than I do.
Jeff Geerling posted an interesting article on his recent experience with YouTube and a video he posted about self-hosted media. It’s great to see that modern media and platform companies have gone down the same path as their predecessors. Perish the thought we change our approach to keeping the corporations satisfied.
Joey D’Antoni put together a great piece on in-person user group meetings. It made me think about how some of the VMUG meetings I’ve been to over the years were great, particularly compared to the virtual ones I had to put together when we were in the midst of COVID. It’s tough to pull off, but when it comes together, it’s amazing.

Random Short Take #97

Posted on 2024-09-10 by dan

Welcome to Random Short Take #97. Let’s get random.

I’m a little behind on the news, but Preston wrote about what’s new with PowerProtect Data Manager 19.17.
Speaking of data protection, if you’re a Mac user I bet you think you know a bit about Time Machine. This article from Howard Oakley might make you think otherwise.
Do you need a Stratum 1 NTP server at home? I didn’t think I did, but this article from Justin Paul has me reconsidering it.
Security is hard. And security for operational technology (OT) can be a real pain too. This article over at Gigaom covers some of the challenges.
Speaking of security, Chin-Fah put together a great piece on data governance for cybersecurity and AI.
Speaking of AI, the Active Archive Alliance has released a special report on Active Archives and AI.
Henry Rollins recently made an appearance on The Vinyl Guide podcast talking about his Stay Fanatic!!! series of books and his obsession with music history. Worth checking out if (like me) you’re a fan of Henry or record collecting (or both).
Speaking of archiving, here’s a great piece on archiving CD-ROMs on Linux.

Random Short Take #88

Posted on 2023-09-11 by dan

Welcome to Random Short Take #88. This one’s been sitting in my drafts folder for a while. Let’s get random.

This article from John Birmingham on multitasking was great. I’ve frequently found myself thinking that multitasking was going to save me from myself whilst ultimately leading to an early demise.
What fresh Hell is this? El Reg reported a little while ago that Google launched $99 a night Hotel Mountain View for hybrid workers. It’s rough out there kids, and this might be your only option. But I hope it isn’t.
The USB-C iPhone won’t clean up Apple’s Lightning mess, and that’s a bit of a shame. But I have a bag of dongles in my bag and I don’t want them to go to waste (again).
Chin-Fah wrote a particularly thoughtful article on Open Source Storage and Data Responsibility that made for some great reading.
Backblaze has updated its article “What’s the Diff: Hot and Cold Data Storage“. Very much worth checking out if you’re new to this stuff.
I loves me some data protection, but rest assured that the current market isn’t your father’s data protection market. B&F reports on Gartner seeing shifting players in enterprise backup.
Speaking of data protection, Preston de Guise does a great job talking about what’s new with PowerProtect Data Manager 19.14.
Been wondering if your media streaming experience is really all that it could be? Are discs really better than streaming? I don’t think they are, but I’m often too lazy to get up and put the disc in the player.

Random Short Take #87

Posted on 2023-07-14 by dan

Welcome to Random Short Take #87. Happy Fête Nationale du 14 juillet to those who celebrate. Let’s get random.

I always enjoy it when tech vendors give you a little peak behind the curtain, and Dropbox excels at this. Here is a great article on how Dropbox selects data centre sites. Not every company is operating at the scale that Dropbox is, but these kinds of articles provide useful insights nonetheless. Even if you just skip to the end and follow this process when making technology choices:

1. Identify what you need early.
2. Understand what’s being offered.
3. Validate the technical details.
4. Physically verify each proposal.
5. Negotiate.

I haven’t used NetWorker for a while, but if you do, this article from Preston on what’s new in NetWorker 19.9 should be of use to you.
In VMware Cloud on AWS news, vCenter Federation for VMware Cloud on AWS is now live. You can read all about it here.
Familiar with Write Once, Read Many (WORM) storage? This article from the good folks at Datadobi on WORM retention made for some interesting reading. In short, keeping everything for ever is really a data management strategy, and it could cost you.
Speaking of data management, check out this article from Chin-Fah on data management and ransomware – it’s an alternative view very much worth considering.
Mellor wrote an article on Pixar and VAST Data’s collaboration. And he did one on DreamWorks and NetApp for good measure. I’m fascinated by media creation in general, and it’s always interesting to see what the big shops are using as part of their infrastructure toolkit.
JB put out a short piece highlighting some AI-related content shenanigans over at Gizmodo. The best part was the quoted reactions from staff – “16 thumbs down emoji, 11 wastebasket emoji, six clown emoji, two face palm emoji and two poop emoji.”
Finally, the recent Royal Commission into the “Robodebt” program completed and released a report outlining just how bad it really was. You can read Simon’s coverage over at El Reg. It’s these kinds of things that make you want to shake people when they come up with ideas that are destined to cause pain.

Random Short Take #64

Posted on 2021-12-01 by dan

Welcome to Random Short take #64. It’s the start of the last month of the year. We’re almost there.

Want to read an article that’s both funny and informative? Look no further than this beginner’s guide to subnetting. I did Elizabethan literature at uni, so it was good to get a reminder on Shakespeare’s involvement in IP addressing.
Continuing with the amusing articles, Chris Colotti published a video of outtakes from some Cohesity lightboard sessions that had me cracking up. It’s always nice when people don’t take themselves too seriously.
On a more serious note, data hoarding is a problem (I know this because I’ve been guilty of it), and this article from Preston outlines some of the reasons why it can be a bad thing for business.
Still on data protection, Howard Oakley looks at checking the integrity of Time Machine backups in this post. I’ve probably mentioned this a few times previously, but if you find macOS behaviour baffling at times, Howard likely has an article that can explain why you’re seeing what you’re seeing.
Zerto recently announced Zerto In-Cloud for AWS – you read more about that here. Zerto is really starting to put together a comprehensive suite of DR solutions. Worth checking out.
Still on press releases, Datadobi has announced new enhancements to DobiMigrate with 5.13. The company also recently validated Google Cloud Storage as an endpoint for its DobiProtect solution.
Leaseweb Global is also doing stuff with Google Cloud – you can read more about that here.
Finally, this article over at Blocks and Files on what constitutes a startup made for some interesting reading. Some companies truly are Peter Pans at this point, whilst others are holding on to the idea that they’re still in startup mode.

Random Short Take #58

Posted on 2021-07-27 by dan

Welcome to Random Short take #58.

One of the many reasons I like Chin-Fah is that he isn’t afraid to voice his opinion on various things. This article on what enterprise storage is (and isn’t) made for some insightful reading.
VMware Cloud Director 10.3 is now GA – you can read more about it here.
Feeling good about yourself? That’ll be quite enough of that thanks. This article from Tom on Value Added Resellers (VARs) and technical debt goes in a direction you might not expect. (Spoiler: staff are the technical debt). I don’t miss that part of the industry at all.
Speaking of work, this article from Preston on being busy was spot on. I’ve worked in many places in my time where it’s simply alarming how much effort gets expended in not achieving anything. It’s funny how people deal with it in different ways too.
I’m not done with articles by Preston though. This one on configuring a NetWorker AFTD target with S3 was enlightening. It’s been a long time since I worked with NetWorker, but this definitely wasn’t an option back then. Most importantly, as Preston points out, “we backup to recover”, and he does a great job of demonstrating the process end to end.
I don’t think I talk about data protection nearly enough on this weblog, so here’s another article from a home user’s perspective on backing up data with macOS.
Do you have a few Rubrik environments lying around that you need to report on? Frederic has you covered.
Finally, the good folks at Backblaze are changing the way they do storage pods. You can read more about that here.

*Bonus Round*

I think this is the 1000th post I’ve published here. Thanks to everyone who continues to read it. I’ll be having a morning tea soon.

Random Short Take #40

Posted on 2020-07-24 by dan

Welcome to Random Short Take #40. Quite a few players have worn 40 in the NBA, including the flat-top king Frank Brickowski. But my favourite player to wear number 40 was the Reign Man – Shawn Kemp. So let’s get random.

Dell EMC PowerProtect Data Manager 19.5 was released in early July and Preston covered it pretty comprehensively here.
Speaking of data protection software releases and enhancements, we’ve barely recovered from the excitement of Veeam v10 being released and Anthony is already talking about v11. More on that here.
Speaking of Veeam, Rhys posted a very detailed article on setting up a Veeam backup repository on NFS using a Pure Storage FlashBlade environment.
Sticking with the data protection theme, I penned a piece over at Gestalt IT for Druva talking about OneDrive protection and why it’s important.
OpenDrives has some new gear available – you can read more about that here.
The nice folks at Spectro Cloud recently announced that its first product is generally available. You can read the press release here.
Wiliam Lam put out a great article on passing through the integrated GPU on Apple Mac minis with ESXi 7.
Time passes on, and Christian recently celebrated 10 years on his blog, which I think is a worthy achievement.

Happy Friday!

Random Short Take #37

Posted on 2020-05-29 by dan

Welcome to Random Short Take #37. Not a huge amount of players have worn 37 in the NBA, but Metta World Peace did a few times. When he wasn’t wearing 15, and other odd numbers. But I digress. Let’s get random.

Pavilion Data recently added S3 capability to its platform. It’s based on a variant of MinIO, and adds an interesting dimension to what Pavilion Data has traditionally offered. Mellor provided some good coverage here.
Speaking of object storage, Dell EMC recently announced ECS 3.5. You can read more on that here. The architectural white paper has been updated to reflect the new version as well.
Speaking of Dell EMC, Preston posted a handy article on Data Domain Retention Lock and NetWorker. Have you pre-ordered Preston’s book yet? I’ll keep asking until you do.
Online events are all the rage at the moment, and two noteworthy events are coming up shortly: Pure//Accelerate and VeeamON 2020. Speaking of online events, we’re running a virtual BNEVMUG next week. Details on that here. ZertoCON Virtual is also a thing.
Speaking of Pure Storage, this article from Cody Hosterman on NVMe and vSphere 7 is lengthy, but definitely worth the read.
I can’t recall whether I mentioned that this white paper covering VCD on VCF 3.9 is available now, and I can’t be bothered checking. So here it is.
I’m not just a fan of Backblaze because of its cool consumer backup solution and object storage platform, I’m also a big fan because of its blog. Articles like this one are a great example of companies doing corporate culture right (at least from what I can see).
I have the impression that Datadobi has been doing some cool stuff recently, and this story certainly seems to back it up.

Random Short Take #26

Posted on 2019-11-28 by dan

Welcome to my semi-regular, random news post in a short format. This is #26. I was going to start naming them after my favourite basketball players. This one could be the Korver edition, for example. I don’t think that’ll last though. We’ll see. I’ll stop rambling now.

Veeam recently released v4 of its Veeam Backup for Office 365 backup solution. Of note is the object storage support. Anthony provides some good coverage on that here.
This article on the need for common data personalities from Chin-Fah is excellent.
The damn cat meme has been doing the rounds lately, and Preston has put together an excellent collection of data protection related ones. Speaking of Dell Technologies, there’s some marketing genius behind this.
I hadn’t noticed this change in sizing for the Management Domain servers in VMware Cloud Foundation 3.9, but Viktor did.
Do you know Cody? Cody’s a smart guy, and very good at expressing technical things on his blog. This article on deploying the Pure Storage OVA using PowerShell is a good example of that.
Speaking of smart people, Stellios wrote an article on Identifying Uncommitted Space culprits with PowerCLI. It’s great stuff.
InfiniteIO has been doing some cool stuff. I spoke to them recently and will be writing something about them in the near future. In the meantime, here’s their most recent press release.
I wrote about Excelero recently, but neglected to mention some of what it’s been doing with NVIDIA. You can read more about that here.

Brisbane VMUG – August 2019

Posted on 2019-07-15 by dan

The August edition of the Brisbane VMUG meeting will be held on Tuesday 20th August at Fishburners from 4 – 6pm. It’s sponsored by Dell EMC and should to be a great afternoon.

Here’s the agenda:

VMUG Intro
VMware Presentation: TBA
Dell EMC Presentation: Protecting Your Critical Assets With Dell EMC
Q&A
Refreshments and drinks.

Dell EMC have gone to great lengths to make sure this will be a fun and informative session and I’m really looking forward to hearing about their data protection portfolio. You can find out more information and register for the event here. I hope to see you there. Also, if you’re interested in sponsoring one of these events, please get in touch with me and I can help make it happen.

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