Technology Ramblings

The Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks or RAID has been a part of the IT vernacular for nearly 30 years. The goal was simple - to increase performance, reliability, availability or capacity by combining multiple physical disks.  From RAID-0 and 1 through RAID 4, 5 or 6 and combinations like RAID 10 or 0+1 you can provide any of the aforementioned capabilities to your application. First introduced way back in 1987, most early RAID implementations were done in software - especially on Unix.   This was typically applied to Just a Bunch of Disks or JBOD.   One of the early ISVs in that space was Veritas with their VFS file system and eventually what became Storage Foundations.    But one argument for some time was why would I want to take away CPU cycles from my application to manage the RAID work. Eventually RAID capability was transformed into hardware via ASICs into what we commonly call today as a RAID Controller.   They took over all of the block m...

Much like the Server hardware and Server OS markets, the Enterprise Storage market has multiple views of how it is measured and therefore how you look at the rankings. For the latest numbers released by IDC for Q2 2016 - let's look at the rankings. First for what is called the Total Enterprise Storage Systems Market.  This view includes not only traditional external SAN/NAS arrays but also direct attached storage (DAS) and Server based storage. The industry sold $5.66B in Q2 of 2016 EMC Ranks # 1 with $1.59B in revenue and a 18.1% market share. But that reflects a 5.5% decline over Q2 of 2015.   HPE is #2 with $1.55B in revenue and a 17.6% market share.  HPE saw an 8.8% increase over 2015. Dell is #3 with $1.01B in revenue and an 11.1% market share.  Dell saw the largest growth at 13.8% which is reflective of the rapid growth in server based storage.   IBM is #4 with $601M in revenue and a 6.8% market share.  IBM experienced a 15.6% revenue decl...

On Nov 17, MS released Windows 10 Build 14971 of the Creators Update to Fast Ring Insiders.  This was a PC only build release. The build added new features around epub document reading in Edge, added the new 3D Paint app, an updated Get Office app and some improvements around Chinese and Japanese typing input.   Along with these features some 15 bugs where addressed. Starting with build 14959 and then 14965 - Windows update began to use the new differential update delivery method to speed download times.   While I did see a slight improvement with the download speed of 14971 - it really didn't impact the overall end-to-end time of "Check for Updates" through new build Login.   One call out in the known issues that appeared with 14965 and was not corrected in 14971 - that was the sudden auto launching of MSN and other Store apps like Photos, Groove and Mail.   After I had written my initial post on 14965 - I started experiencing that issue.   For m...

Like the server hardware market, the server OS market is very hard to get a clear picture on.  While traditional market research firms like Gartner and IDC perform measurements on units/revenue there is also another measure based on Web and DNS statistics. In the corporate enterprise world.  MS still dominates the OS landscape. According to Spiceworks for example they show that fully 87% of all physical and VM server OS on premise is Windows Server with Linux at around 12%. And that makes sense.  When you look at most corporate IT departments - they have Active Directory, File Servers, Exchange, Sharepoint and SQL Server.  Also the boom in the early 2000's of business applications built on Windows Server was prolific.   What is interesting though is that the vast majority - some 45% - of those Windows servers are Windows Server 2003 - a now 13 year old server OS. Another 23% are Windows Server 2008 - which is now 8 years old.   In many cases ...

Versus the PC or Smartphone markets, the server market is both hard to provide a pure apples-to-apples comparison and includes a wide portfolio of products and price points.  But it's interesting to take a look and see where the market is.. According to Gartner and IDC here are the latest market statistics as of Q2 2016. About 2.7M servers were sold in Q2 of 2016.  This includes both x86 (Intel/AMD) and Non-X86 (IBM Power / Sun Sparc).   HPE is #1 in terms of revenue with 3.2B even though that's a 6.6% decline from 2015.   Dell is #2 @ 2.5B with nearly a 10% increase over 2015.   IBM is third at $1.2B and Lenovo (who bought IBMs X86 business in 2014) is fourth at $968M and Cisco rounds out the top 5 with $858M.    Of note is the "Other" category - which sold some $4.6B in Q2.  The other category includes the Original Design Manufacturers (ODM) that supply folks like Google, AWS and MS Azure.   But it's a different story when yo...

Back in the late 90's and early 2000's as companies started to purchase Intel CPU based servers in larger and larger quantities, they started to experience some pain. That pain came in two forms.  First was "server sprawl" of their X86 compute and second was managing all the power and networking requirements that the sprawl created. Back then, most 'rack servers' were 2U in size - with 4U and 6U units that supported larger local storage or 4 CPU sockets.   If the application you were building needed dozens or hundreds of servers, you were eating rack space, power and cooling capability pretty quickly.  And it was hard to get to "full density" - meaning filling - a 42U rack   A nd while the 1U or pizza box rack server form factor helped with rack server density, the power and cabling often became challenging when trying to get 30 or more of these servers in a 42U rack. Companies like RLX came up with the concept of the "blade server...

So you're thinking about automating your home.   Now the question becomes which is the best approach to connecting all of the new devices and balancing cost, complexity, security and access ?     The good news is there are all kinds of technologies and products out in the market at all sorts of price points.   The bad news is there are all kinds of technologies and products out in the market at all sorts of price points.   So how do you choose the right solution ?   So first let's face some reality.  Most homes are poorly wired.  If your home was built prior to 1990 it has some CAT-3 UTP for phone, maybe a hardwired security system and barely has coax for cable tv.  In many cases the Coax used a daisy-chain topology where the coax outlets are stringed together with "taps" versus a hub-spoke topology where each room had an individual run back to a central indoor or outdoor box.   While that improved in the 1990's, it wasn't until ...

One of the great enablers of the modern home theater explosion was the advent of multi-channel digital audio.   Companies like Dolby, DTS and THX provided the ability to incorporate these multi-channel audio streams into DVD, then Blu-Ray media.  Even a lot of broadcast and streaming sources support multi-channel audio. We often refer to these multi-channel streams by the X.Y standard with 5.1 and 7.2 being two of the most popular.   With 5.1 - you have separate audio channels for front left, center and right speakers, then rear or surround left & right speakers, then the .1 or Bass channel via a Subwoofer.   7.2 - adds left & right "presence" speakers along with a 2nd subwoofer.   This multi-channel sound capability is what provides the "theater" experience. Okay cool - so now I have this great multi-channel audio - so now I need to figure out how to place all the speakers to make it work. The challenge for many folks was getting the proper wiring...

On Nov 9, MS released build 14965 of the Redstone 2 branch of Windows 10 for both PC and Mobile.   Recently renamed to the Creators Update - to be released sometime in Spring of 2017, this build continues to build on the core themes of this update, primarily Ink and Continuum. The feature updates called out for this build included: Controlling external monitors from tablets Sticky Notes App Update Windows Ink Workspace Improvements  Enhancing the Address Bar in Registry Editor  Improving Your Hyper-V VM experience with improved zoom support There where also upwards of 15 additional fixes for PC and 6 for Mobile.   Downloading and applying the build was a mixed bag.   While it worked fine for my traditional PC and Laptop, my tablet downloaded and prepared the update - but failed during the actual update.  A second attempt was needed to get it to update properly.   Similarly on my phone, at the end of the download, windows update display...

On November 8, Elan Blass of Venture Beat authored an article discussing a Dell/Intel internal program called Stack that investigated the use of Intel Kaby Lake m series CPUs as the basis for a new tablet/smartphone platform. According to Mr Blass, the potential 1st generation device morphed from a 6.4" handheld to a 7" tablet with 4/8Gb of RAM and 128/256GB of Storage with SD expansion.  A second generation device was also mentioned that would shrink the package to a 6" phablet smartphone.   So the elusive x86 based Windows Phone. With the focus being Windows 10 the device would support all the latest features, such as Continuum as well as Windows Hello and Ink.  So similar to the design concept behind the HP Elite X3 - a highly portable compute device that would allow you to change it's use case based on using Continuum to change the screen.   In some ways the initial design kind of sounds like the next generation Venue Pro.  I own one of the original Ve...

On Nov 2, MS released a preview of it's latest Team Collaboration tool called Teams for Office365 business customers across various license tiers. Productivity and Collaboration tools have been a main stay of the Microsoft portfolio for years now.  Office and Office365 are a $23B business to MS and is the single largest line of business. And while one can argue that Office is the leader in Productivity - meaning content creation via Word, Excel and PowerPoint - MS has just flailed around over the last 10 - 15 years in the "Collaboration" space. Looking back I have probably used everyone of MS's Collaboration Tools. First it was Exchange - which gave use Email and Calendaring.  Then came SharePoint that provided Doc Libs, and Web Parts for communities and ingesting content from Excel or SQL, or whatever using the Individual, Team and Corporate site model.  Then came Office Communications Server (OCS) which became Lync.  They provided real time communication ...

Today, Nov 3, MS released the first of the newly named "Creators Update" (previously known as Redstone 2) builds to Fast Ring Insiders.  The build number is 14959 and is for PC and Mobile platforms. 14959 contains about half a dozen or so fixes for both PC and Mobile. Specifically for Mobile this release used MS's new Unified Update Platform (UUP) to deploy. UUP is designed to shrink the size of the cumulative updates normally released by creating a "differential" download package based on only the differences between the current build you are on and the new one. What I noticed was that it took a while on Mobile from the time you clicked on check for updates, saw the new build and then the build actually starting to download.  In fact for a few minutes I thought I may have experiencing the same 0% download problem that plagued build 14951.   I really can't say that the download itself or the update preparation phase were any quicker using UUP than ...