Firstly, some disclosure: I do a lot of work with NetApp kit, and have a close working relationship with them. In the past, I’ve had a close working relationship with Sun Professional Services. SunOS was the first Unix I learned on. I even owned some Sun stock once. Sun have… Read More
I’ve been doing a bit of work on ModiPy this week. In particular, I’ve been writing documentation on how to use it. While still far from comprehensive, you can now get a much better idea of how to use it from the wiki. I draw your attention particularly to the… Read More
Back in April of 2006, Unicity (my company) took Bill Moore to lunch to chat about ZFS and a storage system idea Sun was working on. We’d met Bryan Cantrill at a presentation he gave on dtrace, which was the new hotness at the time. We were impressed, and stayed… Read More
I’ve been seeing a lot of hype about “Cloud Computing” lately, the latest being some posts over at NetApp’s Absolute Architect. Several versions of this idea have been tried before, and they never really took off as a mainstream way of doing things, but each iteration gets closer. This latest… Read More
Today I started a professional mentoring program with a friend and colleague of mine: Roger Mannett. He has kindly agreed to act as my mentor, and today was our first meeting in that vein. I’ve long admired Roger professionally. I had the pleasure of working for him during my days… Read More
Wow. Post frenzy this Monday night. AWESOME comment over on MetaFilter. Love those guys. (Aside: originally I typed MetaFiler. A new trademark for NetApp? A new market for MeFe outside of recumbent bicycles, scanned cats and snark? You decide). Consider this: Whenever the IDers, or Creationists, or whatever the anti-evolution… Read More
In recent days, I’ve noticed that a couple of monitoring products out in the market are still doing something dumb. Cacti is one, and NetApp’s Operations Manager (nee DFM) is another. They both do the same dumb thing: They both poll everything in their database all at once. Cacti polls… Read More
In the last week I’ve managed to prove, and improve, the extensibility of ModiPY to be able to provision anything with a command and control interface. I have extended the base classes to use NetApp’s ZAPI, which is a form of XML-RPC. In so doing, I’ve cleaned up a lot… Read More
I’ve just checked in and tagged ModiPY v1.0. This is the first version that I’m prepared to say is ready for use doing real tasks. Grab it at modipy.seafelt.com. I’m really excited about it. :) I tested it out today running on a linux box, and using a NetApp simulator… Read More
Dear Isilon Systems, While you are a relative newcomer to the world of storage vendors, you seem to be doing rather well so far. You have some smart people working for you, and you seem to have some interesting products that at least some people are buying. Please get someone… Read More
