I/O and virtual machines...

Robin Harris has an interesting post:

The Virtual Machine I/O Blender

In the post he brings up the topic of what Virtual Machines do to the pieces of the storage puzzle that have have been optimized based upon traditional I/O patterns. Does the Empirical data gained through the years help at all when you pile virtual machines on it? Looks like the answer is: Not so much. Which brings up the argument about 'stupid vs smart' storage. So fast dumb storage would be preferable to fast smart storage it seems when you're in the virtual machine arena. It's an interesting idea. Should we purchase lots of (presumably) cheaper 'dumb' storage or bigger/faster smart storage? Reminds me of the commodity server hardware vs high-end server hardware argument from a few years back. The price point won the day back then, and I suspect if storage goes the same way, it will rule storage too. There's no universal rule on what will be best for all situations, so there will be room in the market for DMX's and Tagmas, but I suspect cheaper/dumb-ish storage with VM's in mind is going to start to creep into the market place. It'll focus on random I/Os rather than trying guess via-caching what the host is going to ask for next.

If you get a chance, check out Robin's article. In particular, read the comments. Even more good thoughts in there.

Diving in Croatia

Some notes and thoughts about diving on Hvar, Croatia in June, 2008.

Went diving out of of the city of Jelsa on the island of Hvar in Croatia.

View Larger Map

I used the Divercenter Jelsa in Jelsa. They took me out in their Bombard Explorer with a pair of Yamaha 100's on it. It got you to the dive site pretty quickly. The visibility was great and the water was very blue. The first dive (6/24) was to an island called "Nudist Island". The name comes from a nudist camp on the main island across the channel.





The dive was to a max depth of 111' and had a bottom time of 0:42. I started out with 225 Bar and ended with ~25 Bar. The visibility was easily 50'. There was several neat things to see. It was only me an Wolf, the dive master. I was a bit too excited and used a lot more air then I expected. The dive went deep early and then gradually up the incline to the shallower water. Spent the last 15 minutes or more at 30' or less.





More photos from the dive are here



The second day (6/25) was 'plan raut' (not sure of the spelling). It was just me and Wolf again. This dive was to 107' and had a bottom time of 48 minutes. Again, the last part of the dive was at 30' or less. My camera locked up on me once on this dive. The auto-shutoff turned the camera off and Wolf found a nudibranch. I pushed the power on, and then pushed the 'close up' setting (probably too quickly) and the screen went 'pink'. I was bummed. I held the power button down for 5 seconds and it came back to life, but we had moved on from there by then.



The 2nd dive of the day was to Steenova.... I might have the name wrong, I'm trying to find a map so i can find the exact spot. At any rate, there were 4 divers on this trip. Not speaking German was a real detriment on this dive. The cove has straight rock walls and the water was as blue as you can imagine. The walls were full of holes and over hangs with lost of things to investigate. The dive had a max depth of 89' and a bottom time of 46 minutes. I had a squeeze in my right ear that made me miss a nice photo of a lobster. Got another shot at a nudibranch though

More photos from the dive are here

The last dive was to Zala Luka. It was another awsome dive. The water was clear and the sun was shining bright, so the vis was incredible. It was to a max of 92' with a bottom time of 54 minutes. A lot of the dive took place at 30' or so. Lots of Anenomes and schools of fish everywhere.





It was a great diving experience and I'm so glad I went. If you're ever in the area, you have to go diving. It's incredible.

Update (12/2/2008): Added gallery links to individual dive photos for dive 1 and 2.

Pictures of Diving in Croatia

I've posted the pictures I took while diving in Croatia. More details to come, this is just a big dump of photos, no narrative or timeline.

More to come...

UPDATE (12/2/2008): I've migrated to a 'gallery2' system to manage my photos. The link to the pictures has been updated accordingly.

New Dive Camera!

Bought a new dive camera for my trip to Croatia. It was touch and go for a bit there. Flight was Friday afternoon and they were supposed to arrive Friday morning. Well, the timing worked out and I'm the proud owner of a DC800 from sealife.

It's an 8Mp camera and housing combination. It has 3 underwater photo modes (I'm still learning how all that works). I have quite a backlog of photos and posts to get through but hopefully once that's all done I'll be able to write a bit more about the camera. So far it's great, but the shutter speed isn't as fast as i'd like some times. And I did manage to crash the camera while on a dive. It does take some great pictures though.

My dive buddy had his xeon flashlight illuminating the fish, so that's why it's eye is an odd color. More on dive lights instead of strobes later too hopefully.

New New Dive Computer

First bit of scuba news in a while! Bought an Aeris Manta dive computer.

It's been pretty easy to use and fits my writs nicely. I don't dive enough to buy air integrated. I really should have boughten the Atmos 2, their big hockey puck style computer, but it only has one button and it's huge. Plus there are a few other features of the manta I like as well. Not sure if I'll ever use the advanced features it has over the atmos 2 (which also seems to be discontinued) but I'd hate to have bought that and then turned around in a year or so and bought the upgrade. Anyway, 4 dives logged on the computer and so far it's great!

Legato notes and links...

I keep telling myself to never admin you know a backup software. If you say you know it, you always run the risk of being declared the backup expert. Well, it's happened to me. I am now on the backup team with my current client until they have the expertise in house to run their Legato 7.2 infrastructure. They had some great contractors from Edge Tech Ltd. Ricky and Co where absolute Legato ninjas. But the word came down to eliminate or convert all contrators. So they were let go, and I'm left holding the backup bag.

So here's my post collecting Legotcha links and commands.

IPnom has a great collection of man pages online

I use the nsr_group and nsr_client pages for nsradmin a lot.

Backupcentral.com has a page: What neat things can I do with nsradmin

Avisit has a list too

David Mussulman has a list of EMC Legato Networker Admin Tools

Here's some of my commands:

root@rcomanchi013:/var/tmp> nsradmin -i - . type: nsr client

show name; group

print

Get some group info

. type: NSR group

show name;status;start time;last start;last end

print

Show groups to find running status

. type: NSR group

show name;status;last start

print

# list the volumes the media server knows about that aren't “full” (!full doesn't seem to work)

mminfo -a -r 'volume,%used,pool,location' -q '!full'

To find a tape that's been cloned off site, when you know the 'onsite' tape that was backed up to:

mminfo -q volume=N31407 -r 'volume,cloneid,client'

This will spit out things like:

Volume CloneID Host

N31407 1204238003 host2.name.net.com.org.blah

N31407 1204239940 host2.name.net.com.org.blah

Then you can search for the CloneID in question:

mminfo -q cloneid=1204239940 -r 'volume'

Which will put out a list of volumes. Find the volume of the type that goes off site and you're all set.

Higher gas shifting the traffic jams online?

So I've been reading several articles that say that $4.00 gas is causing people to change their driving habits. Consolidating trips, canceling vacations, no free pizza delivery, tele-commuting, etc. Which made me start to think that if gas goes higher (and it probably will) and tele-work becomes more and more prevalent (I hope it does, I love working from my home office). Will the traffic jams in the DC Metro area move from the real highway to the information highway? ISP's are already cracking down on P2P and other high-bandwidth apps. What's going to happen when a few thousand go2mypc users hope on the net on your local DSLAM or its Cable equivalent. Will Verizion regret giving such high speeds to FIOS users initially? I guess on the plus side, adding more lanes to the information-highway is far easier than the real highway. It'll be interesting to see how this pans out.

I should google this meme... I'd bet I'm tech-person number 32,1231 to have come up with this 'all on their own' this week.

Rich