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+ - SSD-HDD Price Gap Won't Go Away Anytime Soon->

Submitted by storagedude
storagedude (1517243) writes "Flash storage costs have been dropping rapidly for years, but those gains are about to slow, and a number of issues will keep flash from closing the cost gap with HDDs for some time, writes Henry Newman at Enterprise Storage Forum. As SSD density increases, reliability and performance decrease, creating a dilemma for manufacturers who must balance density, cost, reliability and performance.

'[F]lash technology and SSDs cannot yet replace HDDs as primary storage for enterprise and HPC applications due to continued high prices for capacity, bandwidth and power, as well as issues with reliability that can only be addressed by increasing overall costs. At least for the foreseeable future, the cost of flash compared to hard drive storage is not going to change.'"
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+ - Java 8 Officially Released->

Submitted by darthcamaro
darthcamaro (735685) writes "Oracle today officially released Java 8, nearly two years after Java 7, and after much delay. The new release includes a number of critical new features including Lambda expressions and the new Nashorn JavaScript engine. Java 8 however is still missing at least critical piece that Java developers have been asking for, for years.

"It’s a pity that some of the features like Jigsaw were dropped as modularity, runtime dependencies and interoperability are still a huge problem in Java," James Donelan, vice president of engineering at MuleSoft said. "In fact this is the one area where I still think Java has a long way to go."

"
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+ - Will Red Hat Acquire Hortonworks?->

Submitted by darthcamaro
darthcamaro (735685) writes "Red Hat has a history of acquiring key technology partners to help build out its portfolio. In 2011, Red Hat acquired Gluster, which now forms the basis of Red Hat Storage — in 2014 is a Hadoop vendor like Hortonworks in the cards like Hortonworks? The answer is likely not..

"Many enterprises want to run Hadoop on Red Hat’s infrastructure and application platform, but not all customers want to use the same Hadoop distribution," Ranga Rangachari, Red Hat's vice president and general manager, Storage and Big Data said.

"
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+ - Hard Drive Relaibility Study Flawed-> 1

Submitted by storagedude
storagedude (1517243) writes "A recent study of hard drive reliability by Backblaze was deeply flawed, according to Henry Newman, a longtime HPC storage consultant. Writing in Enterprise Storage Forum, Newman notes that the tested Seagate drives that had a high failure rate were either very old or had known issues. The study also failed to address manufacturer's specifications, drive burn-in and data reliability, among other issues.

'The oldest drive in the list is the Seagate Barracuda 1.5 TB drive from 2006. A drive that is almost 8 years old! Since it is well known in study after study that disk drives last about 5 years and no other drive is that old, I find it pretty disingenuous to leave out that information. Add to this that the Seagate 1.5 TB has a well-known problem that Seagate publicly admitted to, it is no surprise that these old drives are failing.'"
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+ - Tulips, Dot-coms and SANs: Why SSD Merger Mania Won't Work->

Submitted by storagedude
storagedude (1517243) writes "Texas Memory and IBM; Cisco and Whiptail; STEC, Virident and WD: the storage industry seems to be in full merger mania over SSDs, but Henry Newman at Enterprise Storage Forum doesn't think the current mania will work out any better than any other great mania of history. Not Invented Here opposition by acquiring engineering teams and the commodity nature of SSDs will make much of the money poured into SSD companies wasted, he says.

'I seriously doubt that the STEC Inc. technology will be seen in HGST/WD SSDs, nor do I think that Virident PCIe cards will be commoditized by HGST/WD to compete with LSI and others,' writes Newman. 'A Whiptail system will likely be put into a Cisco rack, but it’s not like Intel and Cisco are the best corporate partners, and we will likely see other SSDs put into the product. ... It all comes down to what I see as 'the buying arms race.' Company X purchased some SSD company so company Y needs to do the same or they will not be considered a player.'"
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+ - Are We Witnessing the Decline of Ubuntu?-> 2

Submitted by jammag
jammag (1021683) writes ""When the history of free software is written, I am increasingly convinced that this last year will be noted as the start of the decline of Ubuntu," opines Linux pundit Bruce Byfield. After great initial success, Ubuntu and Canonical began to isolate themselves from the mainstream of the free software community. Canonical, he says, has tried to control the open source community, and the company has floundered in many of its initiatives. Really, the mighty Ubuntu, in decline?"
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+ - NSA General Shouts Back At Black Hat Heckler->

Submitted by darthcamaro
darthcamaro (735685) writes "General Keith Alexander , the man behind the NSA's prism effort delivered a keynote at the Black Hat conference today. He attempted to set the record straight claiming what they do is all lawful and is saving American lives. During the keynote, General Alexander was heckled by someone in the audience that yelled out,"You should read the constitution."

The General responded, "I have and so should you.""
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+ - Software-defined data centers might cost companies more than they save->

Submitted by storagedude
storagedude (1517243) writes "As more and more companies move to virtualized, or software-defined, data centers, cost savings might not be one of the benefits. Sure, utilization rates might go up as resources are pooled, but if the end result is that IT resources become easier for end users to access and provision, they might end up using more resources, not less.

That's the view of Peder Ulander of Citrix, who cites the Jevons Paradox, a 150-year-old economic theory that arose from an observation about the relationship between coal efficiency and consumption. Making a resource easier to use leads to greater consumption, not less, says Ulander. As users can do more for themselves and don't have to wait for IT, they do more, so more gets used.

The real gain, then, might be that more gets accomplished as IT becomes less of a bottleneck. It won't mean cost savings, but it could mean higher revenues."
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+ - Is Red Hat Making Money from OpenStack?->

Submitted by Sean Michael Kerner
Sean Michael Kerner (2895521) writes "Everyone is talking about the OpenStack open source cloud platform — but few vendors are actually making any money from it. Take for example, Linux leader Red Hat. During the company's first quarter fiscal 2014earnings call, CEO Jim Whitehurst admitted that while expectations are high, the OpenStack money is at least a year away.

"My guess is we will do a lot of POCs (Proof of Concepts) in the next year on OpenStack, but people won't start writing 6-figure checks for software," Whitehurst said. "They may for some services, but for software, until they get a little closer to production, that's probably still a year or 18 months away."

"
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+ - Subversion 1.8 Released But Will You Still Use Git?->

Submitted by darthcamaro
darthcamaro (735685) writes "Remember back in the day when we all used CVS? Then we moved to SVN (subversion) but in the last three yrs or so everyone and their brother seems to have moved to Git, right? Well truth is Subversion is still going strong and just released version 1.8. While Git is still faster for some things, Greg Stein, the former chair of the Apache Software Foundation, figures SVN is better than Git at lots of things.

With Subversion, you can have a 1T repository and check out just a small portion of it, The developers don't need full copies," Stein explained. "Git shops typically have many, smaller repositories, while svn shops typically have a single repository, which eases administration, backup, etc."

"
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+ - 10GbE: What the Heck Took So Long?-> 2

Submitted by storagedude
storagedude (1517243) writes "10 Gigabit Ethernet may finally be catching on, some six years later than many predicted. So why did it take so long? Henry Newman offers a few reasons at Enterprise Networking Planet: 10GbE and PCIe 2 were a very promising combination when they appeared in 2007, but the Great Recession hit soon after and IT departments were dumping hardware rather than buying more. The final missing piece is finally arriving: 10GbE support on motherboards.

'What 10 GbE needs to become a commodity is exactly what 1 GbE got and what Fibre Channel failed to get: support on every motherboard,' writes Newman. 'The current landscape looks promising. 10 GbE is starting to appear on motherboards from every major server vendor, and I suspect that in just a few years, we'll start to see it on home PC boards, with the price dropping from the double digits to single digits, and then even down to cents.'

See the article at 10 Gig: What Took So Darn Long?"
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+ - Brands Don't Matter Much to Cloud Computing Buyers->

Submitted by storagedude
storagedude (1517243) writes "You may have one of the best-known and respected brands in cloud computing, but that may not matter much when it comes time for RFPs, according to a new survey of IT buyers from Palmer Research/QuinStreet. A third of respondents view big names like Google, Amazon and Microsoft very favorably, yet at RFP time, less than 10% of those names get asked for formal proposals. It could be a sign that the cloud is a wide-open market that's up for grabs, as buyers seem much more interested in basics like reliability, technology expertise, pricing, maintenance and customer service, according to the survey. Oh, and trialware doesn't hurt either."
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+ - 1 Year After World IPv6 Launch - Are We There Yet?->

Submitted by darthcamaro
darthcamaro (735685) writes "One year ago today was the the official 'Launch Day' of IPv6. The idea was that IPv6 would get turned on and stay on at major carriers and website. So where are we now? Only 1.27% of Google traffic comes from IPv6 and barely 12 percent of the Alexa Top 1000 sites are even accessible via IPv6. In general though, the Internet Society is pleased with the progress over the last year.

"The good news is that almost everywhere we look, IPv6 is increasing," Phil Roberts,technology program manager at the Internet Society said. "It seems to be me that it's now at the groundswell stage and it all looks like everything is up and to the right."

"
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+ - If You Don't Get Your Way In an Open Source Project Do You Stay or Go?->

Submitted by darthcamaro
darthcamaro (735685) writes "The largest open source effort in the history of networking is now facing its first big challenge — as one of the core founding member of the OpenDaylight Foundation is leaving. OpenDaylight is an effort led by the Linux Foundation to build open source Software Defined Networking tech. Big Switch, the founder of the open source Floodlight controller, didn't get everyone to adopt their approach so they are leaving. While Big Switch is trying to paint the story as open source vs goliath, the Linux Foundation's OpenDaylight people don't see it that way.

"In this case the developer community combined technology from multiple sources (including BSN), which the company obviously didn't like. Open source is based on compromise and working together. Sometimes strong motivations and investor goals can get in the way of that. In the spirit of open source, we fully expect BSN to honor its commitments to this project."

"
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When in doubt, mumble; when in trouble, delegate; when in charge, ponder. -- James H. Boren

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