Preston did a great job of talking about the difference between Outage vs Outrage. It usually comes down to one letter.
I like Time Machine, and I like the way Howard explains Apple concepts in his blog posts, so this article “How does Time Machine make a backup?” really hit the spot.
My friend Vincent has made it to 100,000 hits on his blog, and I really hope he gets a lot more. He’s a smart chap.
If you’ve ever had the chance to listen to Rebecca talk, you know she’s really smart. This article on setting the technical direction for a team made for great reading.
All the kids like to talk about storage over networks, not storage area networks. What about when old meets new? Chin-fah posted an excellent article on Fibre Channel protocol in a zero trust world.
Happy New Year (to those who celebrate). Let’s get random.
Those of you who know me well will know I’m a big fan of Debian. I find running manual apt commands on my various Raspberry Pis therapeutic, but an automated approach is probably better. This is a great article on how to configure automated security updates on Debian automatically.
I miss Tru64, and Solaris for that matter. I don’t miss HP-UX. And I definitely won’t miss AIX. Read about the death of Unix over at El Reg – Unix is dead. Long live Unix!
The I3.metal is going away very soon. Remember this is from a sales perspective, VMware is still supporting the I3.metal in the wild, and you’ll still have access to deploy on-demand if required (up to a point).
Welcome to Random Short Take #81. Last one for the year, because who really wants to read this stuff over the holiday season? Let’s get random.
Curtis did a podcast on archive and retrieve as part of his “Backup to Basics” series. It’s something I feel pretty strongly about, so much so that I wrote a chapter in his book about it. You can listen to it here.
More William Gibson content is coming to our screens, with the announcement that Neuromancer is coming to Apple TV. I hope it’s as well done as The Peripheral. Hat tip to John Birmingham for posting the news on his blog.
It’s been a while since I looked at Dell storage, but my friend Max wrote a great article over at Gestalt IT on Dell PowerStore.
I love Backblaze. Not in the sense that I want to marry the company, but I really like what the folks there do. And I really like the transparency with which they operate. This article giving a behind the scenes look at its US East Data Center is a fantastic example of that.
And, to “celebrate” 81 Random Short Takes (remember when I used to list my favourite NBA players and the numbers they wore?), let’s take a stroll down memory lane with two of my all-time, top 5, favourite NBA players – Kobe Bryant and Jalen Rose. The background for this video is explained by Jalen here.
Take care of yourselves and each other, and I’ll hopefully see you all on the line or in person next year.
The November 2022 edition of the Brisbane VMUG meeting will be held on Thursday 24th November at the Cube (QUT) from 5pm – 7pm. It’s sponsored by Pure Storage and promises to be a great afternoon. Register here.
Raise Your Kubernetes Infrastructure Status From Zero to Hero
If your developers or platform architects are asking you for storage features commonly found in your vSphere infrastructure but targeted towards Kubernetes, you are not alone – let Portworx help you go from “I don’t know” to “No problem”!
Locking yourself into a storage solution that is dependent on specific infrastructure is a sure way to reduce efficiency and flexibility for your developers and where their applications can run – Portworx elevates you to “Hero” status by:
Providing your team a consistent, cloud native storage layer you can utilise on ANY Kubernetes platform – whether on-premises or in the public cloud
Giving you the capability to provide Kubernetes native DR and business continuity not only for your persistent storage, but all of the Kubernetes objects associated with your applications (think SRM and vMSC for Kubernetes!)
Enabling you to provide Kubernetes-aware data protection, including ransomware protection and 3-2-1 backup compliance with RBAC roles that can fit the existing policies within your organisation
Delighting your developers that need access to modern databases such as Kafka, PostgreSQL, Cassandra, and more by delivering self-service deployments with best practices “built-in”, which accelerate development cycles without a dinosaur DBA or learning complex Kubernetes operators
Come join us to see how we can create your “Better Together” story with Tanzu and give you the tools and knowledge to bring agility for your developers to your underlying infrastructure for modern applications running on Kubernetes!
Mike Carpendale
Mike joined Pure Storage in April 2021 as the APJ Regions Platform Architect. He has 20+ years experience in the industry, ranging from his expert level hands-on experience of designing and managing large scale on-prem as-a-service offerings underpinned by VMware, to his more recent work in the public cloud.
PIZZA AND NETWORKING BREAK!
This will be followed by:
VMware Session
Peter Hauck – Senior Solutions Engineer
VMware
And we will be finishing off with:
Preparing for VMware Certifications
With the increase of position requirements in the last few years, certifications help you demonstrate your skills and move you a step forward on getting better jobs. In this Community Ssession we will help you understand how to prepare for a VMware certification exam and some useful tips you can use during the exam.
We will talk about:
Different types of exams
How to schedule an exam
Where to get material to study
Lessons learned from the field per type of exam
Francisco Fernandez Cardarelli – Senior Consultant (4 x VCIX)
Soft drinks and vBeers will be available throughout the evening! We look forward to seeing you there! Doors open at 5pm. Please make your way to The Cube.
Verity ES recently announced its official company launch and the commercial availability of its Verity ES data eradication enterprise software solution. I had the opportunity to speak to Kevin Enders about the announcement and thought I’d briefly share some thoughts here.
From Revert to Re-birth?
Revert, a sister company of Verity ES, is an on-site data eradication service provider. It’s also a partner for a number of Storage OEMs.
The Problem
The folks at Revert have had an awful lot of experience with data eradication in big enterprise environments. With that experience, they’d observed a few challenges, namely:
The software doing the data eradication was too slow;
Eradicating data in enterprise environments introduced particular requirements at high volumes; and
Larger capacity HDDs and SDDs were a real problem to deal with.
The Real Problem?
Okay, so the process to get rid of old data on storage and compute devices is a bit of a problem. But what’s the real problem? Organisations need to get rid of end of life data – particularly from a legal standpoint – in a more efficient way. Just as data growth continues to explode, so too does the requirement to delete the old data.
The Solution
Verity ES was spawned to develop software to solve a number of the challenges Revert were coming across in the field. There are two ways to do it:
Eliminate the data destructively (via device shredding / degaussing); or
Why eradicate? It’s a sustainable approach, enables residual value recovery, and allows for asset re-use. But it nonetheless needs to be secure, economical, and operationally simple to do. How does Verity ES address these requirements? It has Product Assurance Certification from ADISA. It’s also developed software that’s more efficient, particularly when it comes to those troublesome high capacity drives.
[image courtesy of Verity ES]
Who’s Buying?
Who’s this product aimed at? Primarily enterprise DC operators, hyperscalers, IT asset disposal companies, and 3rd-party hardware maintenance providers.
Thoughts
If you’ve spent any time on my blog you’ll know that I write a whole lot about data protection, and this is probably one of the first times that I’ve written about data destruction as a product. But it’s an interesting problem that many organisations are facing now. There is a tonne of data being generated every day, and some of that data needs to be gotten rid of, either because it’s sitting on equipment that’s old and needs to be retired, or because legislatively there’s a requirement to get rid of the data.
The way we tackle this problem has changed over time too. One of the most popular articles on this blog was about making an EMC CLARiiON CX700 useful again after EMC did a certified erasure on the array. There was no data to be found on the array, but it was able to be repurposed as lab equipment, and enjoyed a few more months of usefulness. In the current climate, we’re all looking at doing more sensible things with our old disk drives, rather than simply putting a bullet in them (except for the Feds – but they’re a bit odd). Doing this at scale can be challenging, so it’s interesting to see Verity ES step up to the plate with a solution that promises to help with some of these challenges. It takes time to wipe drives, particularly when you need to do it securely.
I should be clear that this data doesn’t go out and identify what data needs to be erased – you have to do that through some other tools. So it won’t tell you that a bunch of PII is buried in a home directory somewhere, or sitting in a spot it shouldn’t be. It also won’t go out and dig through your data protection data and tell you what needs to go. Hopefully, though, you’ve got tools that can handle that problem for you. What this solution does seem to do is provide organisations with options when it comes to cost-effective, efficient data eradication. And that’s something that’s going to become crucial as we continue to generate data, need to delete old data, and do so on larger and larger disk drives.
I’ve been a Dropbox user for some time, and as disk-slinger in a former life, I really enjoy reading the company’s tech blog. This post on cloud storage abstraction with Object Store was great.
Data breaches – everyone’s having them. Are you missing out? It’s probably just a matter of time. While you’re waiting, check out this article from Preston – John Proctor and Data Breaches.
It’s always sad when a startup stops. Mellor writes that Pavilion Data – last NVMe over Fabrics flash array startup – has died. I had the opportunity to take the kit for a spin in a previous role, and spent some time with some of their people. Smart folks doing interesting things. I hope those impacted land on their feet.
I always enjoy talking to Chris about his Plex setup, because he’s taken it to the next level. Here’s a great article he put together on how to automate lighting with Plex playback.
Finally, our old friend VMware vCenter Converter is back. You can download it from here.
The October 2022 edition of the Brisbane VMUG meeting will be held on Wednesday 12th October at the Cube (QUT) from 5pm – 7pm. It’s sponsored by NetApp and promises to be a great afternoon.
Two’s Company, Three’s a Cloud – NetApp, VMware and AWS
NetApp has had a strategic relationship with VMware for over 20 years, and with AWS for over 10 years. Recently at VMware Explore we made a significant announcement about VMC support for NFS Datastores provided by the AWS FSx for NetApp ONTAP service.
Come and learn about this exciting announcement and more on the benefits of NetApp with VMware Cloud. We will discuss architecture concepts, use cases and cover topics such as migration, data protection and disaster recovery as well as Hybrid Cloud configurations.
There will be a lucky door prize as well as a prize for best question on the night. Looking forward to see you there!
Wade Juppenlatz – Specialist Systems Engineer – QLD/NT
Chris (Gonzo) Gondek – Partner Technical Lead QLD/NT
PIZZA AND NETWORKING BREAK!
This will be followed by:
All the News from VMware Explore – (without the jet lag)
We will cover a variety of cloudy announcements from VMware Explore, including:
vSphere 8
vSAN 8
VMware Cloud on AWS
VMware Cloud Flex Storage
GCVE, OCVS, AVS
Cloud Universal
VMware Ransomware Recovery for Cloud DR
Dan Frith – Staff Solutions Architect – VMware Cloud on AWS, VMware
And we will be finishing off with:
Preparing for VMware Certifications
With the increase of position requirements in the last few years, certifications help you demonstrate your skills and move you a step forward on getting better jobs. In this Community Ssession we will help you understand how to prepare for a VMware certification exam and some useful tips you can use during the exam.
We will talk about:
Different types of exams
How to schedule an exam
Where to get material to study
Lessons learned from the field per type of exam
Francisco Fernandez Cardarelli – Senior Consultant (4 x VCIX)
Soft drinks and vBeers will be available throughout the evening! We look forward to seeing you there!
Doors open at 5pm. Please make your way to The Atrium, on Level 6.
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.
I (sadly) haven’t touched Rubrik in around a year now, but I couldn’t resist linking to Frederic’s post on Active Directory recovery with Rubrik. Great how-to article as always.
This short, sharp piece from JB is the best. Too often I’ve found myself grinding through a TV show because I had high hopes for it, or so many people told me it was great. What I should have realised is that amateur TV critics (i.e. your friends and colleagues) are often like home theatre enthusiasts who have bought their first subwoofer. Whether it’s good or bad, that’s the choice they made, and they need you to endorse that choice so they can feel better about it as well.
Finally, the blog turned 15 years old recently (about a month ago). I’ve been so busy with the day job that I forgot to appropriately mark the occasion. But I thought we should do something. So if you’d like some stickers (I have some small ones for laptops, and some big ones because I can’t measure things properly), send me your address via this contact form and I’ll send you something as a thank you for reading along.
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