So long Kevin and Karl

So, I've been delaying this post for a while now. But it's time to put the issue to rest for me personally. A few weeks ago (sometime towards the end of October) Robert Cray let Kevin Hayes and Karl Sevareid go from The Robert Cray Band. We had a lot of discussion about it on the Robert Cray Fan Club. That, by itself was noteworthy. Its been a quiet year on the board from an RCB perspective. Anyway, I pretty much said my peace there, but want to re-iterate it here.

It is a bitter pill to swallow. This line up has been in place for over 16 years, eight studio albums, over 1000 live performances, not to mention the compilation albums. It may be over a private matter, but it's a pubic divorce and all diehard fans are going to be affected. So while we shouldn't publicly speculate about the private reasons why, it's fair for us to discuss and lament it's effect. For me, for now, it's not going to be "The Robert Cray Band" for a while. They broke up. Now it's Robert Cray featuring Jim Pugh. I'm sure this feeling will pass, just like when the Horn's left, but for now I'm still saddened by the news. Karl and Kevin were more than just band members, they were contributers. They have song writing credits across many albums. They worked so well together.

All of the best RCB shows I've seen have been with this foursome. Sometimes with the horns, some times not. In the late 80's I caught the RCB in Minnapolis. Back when it was the Richard Cousins, Peter Boe and David Olson. I don't have the same enthrallment memories of this show as I do the shows I saw in 2000 onward. I didn't get to see too many RCB shows before moving to Washington, DC. The MSP show and one appearance at the Bayfront Blues Fest in 1995 or 1996, I forget which year. I don't know if it's me that's changed or the band, but things just seemed 'better' from 2000 onward. It's probably just nostalgia sneaking up on me.

So now it's on with the Robert Cray group. Still can't call it "band" yet.

P.S. Kevin or Karl, if you're out there, drop me an email.... I'd love to know where you land next.

EMC and cloud storage

Well this is more a collection of stuff for me to read later than a real blog post. EMC has announced their Atmos product. Atmos is the software that used to be called maui. It is used to store data on their "Hulk" product. The high-density, Low-cost storage array. So the tubes have been a buzz with info and questions about the product.

For example, Robin Harris has a link and some discussion about the theoretical underpinnings of the product, and the project in which the idea is based. Clearly the EMC product isn't exactly the "oceanstore" product but it's fairly close.

My favorite storage blogger Chris M Evans wrote up some pretty good summaries and links to even more good posts on the topic. He has the same practical matter questions that I have. How does it actually get done? How is going to handle failures and do it's real work? I'm sure EMC has reasonable methods to handle them, but the idea is different from how we do things today.

My #2 goto Beth Pariseau has an equally compelling look and collection of links about the Atmos product as well. (Sorry Beth, you get paid to write so I have to view it with a skeptical 'payola' eye. It's not you, its me. As such you'll have to settle for my #2 spot (as if it matters to anyone other than me...)).

I have the same basic questions a lot of others seem to have:

• How's it going to work in the real world? How do I, in my point-to-point DS3 world make this work? If the answer is 'bigger pipes' then they've just eliminated a huge customer base. The large scale companies would have to buy it and then re-sell to smaller companies ala Amazon's S3. Well, that hasn't been stellar, and I don't have my data in hand, a company who could be engaging in the next version of credit default swaps does. How do I back this up? Do I need to? How does compliance work?



• Haven't we heard this song and dance before? Storage as a service has been tried and was pretty much a disaster. People want to own it. They want their hands on it. I think people are willing to tollerate their 'in flight' data being in someone else's hands, but data at rest is another issue all together. How do we convince CIO and CTOs that this isn't a remix on a bad B-side single? They've heard SaaS. They've heard Utility Computing. They've heard Grid computing (Twice, no less). Now Cloud storage is some how different. Not feeling the 'gotta have it' need to run right out and get it.



• Overhead much? Caching, N-levels of replication, Rich Meta data, Single Unified Name space... None of this is storage overhead. This is all CPU and Network overhead. Of the three components, CPU, Network and Spindles, they pile on the two that are the hardest to incrementally grow? Where does this caching and metadata 'live'? Who/What maintains consistency with out incurring murderous latency

Anyway, I'm sure the EMC partisans will march out with their explanations. As the product actually ships to live customers who are using it for their core unstructured data store (not some stove-piped sub-group within Dell, for example) I'm sure these questions will all come to pass. For now, I'm sitting on the sidelines trying to get my mind around what's real and what's marketing fluff.

The other big question I can't seem to answer is what business problem is this solving? Reliability? Cost? Performance? I have a hard time believing this will help costs or performance, so that leads to reliability? I'm sure I'll have more thoughts as time permits me to read the glut of information flowing out these days.

Music Brainz Picard

So my MP3 library's been a mess for a long time. I have a large folder full of MP3's called "Bad Tags". They're the tracks I don't listen to very often and have tags that are messed up. In most cases I'm too lazy to get the CD out of the attic and re-rip it and it would take forever to re-type them. My most common tag issue is truncated fields or the infamous "Track 01" song name from back in the days of using Real Jukebox. Man, those were the days. Then Sound Jam on the Mac. Nostalgia! Anyway, lots of bad albums.

Enter Music Brainz Picard. It makes cleaning them up a breeze! If you have MP3 tags that are wrong and want an easy tool to clean them up in, Music Brainz is the best free tool I've ever used. I've used some of the 'fee' based ones. They're good and all, but I don't like to pay for a tool I'm going to use once and never again. It's back-ended by the MusicBrainz meta data database and it quite extensive.

Heroes... love the show

So I watch a lot of shows online (hulu, iTunes, etc). I'm totally hooked on heroes since season 1. Season 2 was iffy because of the writers strike, but still pretty good. I love how the end an arc every season. But little things bug me from time to time. Here's an example: in Episode 4 of Season 3 "I Am Become Death". Future Peter and Present Peter are walking down the street and Peter Says they can't stay because they're looking for him. They know how to become invisible and can stop time. Seriously. Stop time or go invisible. They can fly. Why run? Fly away. They have telekinesis and other 'fire' type abilities. They can phase like Niko's dad (forget the name). The list goes on. Peter is just too dumb in one second, then clever about others. It bugs me.

Anyway, just my rant.

Cheers,

Rich

Jim Pugh/Pastel Motif

Jim Pugh (Robert Cray Band Keyboard maestro) has come out with a solo project.

http://pastelmotif.com/

As Jim himself put it:

Hi everybody!

For all those who enjoy deep spul groove Hammond B3 instrumental music check out

JimPugh/pastelMotif at PastelMotif.com.

There's info on PastelMotif and you can also check out some of the tunes.

Cheers.

There's a lot of great info about Jim on the site as well. Check out the Bio Page in particular. He has a few samples from the project up on the website.

Yeah but when can I buy it?

So I came across a slashdot article about new solar cells that set some efficiency records. Almost all of the initial comments say the same thing: Yeah, but when can I buy it? That's the trouble with a lot of the new technology announcements in todays world. People want it now. They don't want to know that a breakthrough has been made, they want to know how it's going to make their life better, products cheaper, or things faster.

This 'improvement' isn't going to help 'general' solar usage much at all from what I can tell. Yeah, it may be very efficient, making it great for space/satalite usage, but becuase it uses gallium and indium. Scarce and expensive (not to mention a little toxic) elements. The goal would be to get efficient solar cells that don't rely on scarce materials to work. Oh well, it's a step in the right direction.

A storage blog battle Royal...

So there's been a bit of a dust-up going on over mid-tier storage going on. Chuck Hollis from EMC posted an interesting idea about evaluating "Usable Capacity" for arrays. He focused on an exchange use case. He compared the recently released CX4, NetApp's FAS series, and HP's EVA. Three very competitive models. He then proceeds to say why he thinks the CX4 is a better value because it achieves a 70% Storage Capacity Efficiency. That is, 70% of the raw is usable. He then does the same thing for the other two giving an HP EVA 47.2% and NetApp 33.61%. There's a pretty good set of links associated with it to show he's not making these numbers up. Problem is, like with anything, there's more than one way to do something. And boy did NetApp fans (and some employees) and EVA fans (and some employees) let him have it. There was also a follow-up post by Chuck Hollis And in the comments for both posts, NetApp and EVA champions throw some counter-evidence and poke holes in the configurations (which were worse case in my opinion) Chuck used that made the other offerings suffer in comparison. So when you change configurations to ones that favor NetApp or HP, they each best EMC (of course they do...). The truth is always somewhere in the middle.

The tit-for-tat bickering that went on in the comments ran the gamut. Some were very insightful and pointed out areas that Chuck should consider. Chuck also responded to some of the comments in a respectable (although somewhat antagonistic) manor. Some of the comments were down right rude. I guess an average day on the internet, come to think of it. My beef is Chuck's taking the worst case or outdated case scenarios for the competitors while using the new-car-smell versions of EMC's products. He hides behind the idea of "show me the document on their website that says that" mantra. Some commenters rightfully called him out to produce the same for his gear. This all took place before the long labor-day weekend so it'll be interesting to see if it keeps it's momentum this week or if the down time has tempered people's zeal.

It also reminded me of a bit from Comedy Central's The Daily Show from back in May. In it Terry McAuliffe (Hillary campaign staff) and Chris Matthews (MSNBC commentator) engage in what Jon Stewart calls a "West Virginia Douche-Off". I got that kind of vibe from from the back and forth between the NetApp and EMC crowd. You can see the clip here (it's the last 1:42 of the clip, starts around the 6-minute mark):

Tip of the hat to Chris M Evans who's blog post turned me onto the drama