The 4th Generation of the Apple TV supports installing apps. And part of playing around with new apps is sometimes you’re not going to want them on your TV any more. To remove apps, the process is similar to that of an iPad. Highlight an app that you’d like to remove and then hold down the clicker on the app. The app will go a little larger. Click on it again and you’ll get the option to Delete the app. Click Delete and the app disappears. That’s it. The app, and any storage that is being consumed by the app, is then freed up.
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Yosemite Server: Configure Clients In Xsan 4 Environments
Yosemite brings Xsan 4, which brings a new way to add clients to an Xsan. Xsan Admin is gone. From now on, instead of scanning the network using Xsan Admin. we’ll be adding clients using a Configuration Profile. This is actually a much more similar process to adding Xsan clients to a StorNext environment than it is to adding clients to Metadata Controllers running Xsan 3 and below. But instead of making a fsnameservers file, we’re plugging that information into a profile, which will do that work on the client on our behalf. To make the Xsan configuration profile, we’re going to use Profile Manager. To get started, open the Profile…
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Configure Volume Shadow Copy on Windows Server
Working with Shadow Copy requires elevated privileges. I usually access Shadow Copy through vssuirun. This prompts for elevating privileges. Once open, use the Settings pane to select the volume you’d like to schedule backups to. Then choose how much space shadow copies can use. Click on the Schedule button to configure how frequently backups run. I usually try to time these things for when the server isn’t slammed. Otherwise you might run into issues. By default, Shadow Copy keeps 64 versions of each file. Running snapshots every hour. You can restore easily, by selecting a volume, although volume-based restores are not supported on system derives. Restores can be done using…
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iPad + Box.net = Win
Box.net is a cloud-based file sharing service that I used extensively in my last book. Similar to dropbox.com, Box.net allowed my publishers and I to automate our workflow with regard to the publishing process, but more importantly, I was actually able to do much of the review and exchange of files from the iPad, which was really nice given that the book was on iOS. I’ve been working with a few companies over the past few weeks on coming up with various strategies for cloud interoperability, and Box.net has come up a few times in this regard. Looks like I’m not the only one!
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EMC + Isilon = ?
EMC is buying Isilon for $2.25 billion. They want the video market, which seems to just be growing and growing. EMC stock dipped a little on the news, which is not surprising because Isilon isn’t worth what EMC is paying for it. What does this mean for the video market? More uncertainty. EMC has been an acquisition marathon runner since 2002, buying up Avamar, Documentum, Epoch, McData, Iomega, Archer, Greenplum, Bus-Tech, Kashya, Dantz, Mozy, Data Domain and even VMware (not to mention a bunch of other companies). So what does this mean for Isilon’s product line moving forward. If you look at how the acquisition of Dantz and Iomega sparked…
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Xsan TCO
I recently read an article in CIO magazine about the cost per gig per month. In the article they quoted Google at about 6 cents per gig per month. I use Amazon for a few projects, which runs at about 12 cents per gig per month. Including labor and hardware I decided to look at about what it would cost per gigabyte per month for Xsan storage. Averaging out 30 installs that we did over the past year turned out a total of about 7.2 cents per gig per month, as opposed to around $2.00 per gig per month which is pretty average for many SAN solutions. Now, Xsan…
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iSCSI Target Creation
The iSCSI Initiator that we use for connecting Windows to iSCSI targets has a friend. It’s called Microsoft Windows Storage Server, which you can use to turn a DAS RAID in a Windows box into a LUN for iSCSI. Good stuff. Check out the data sheet here: download.microsoft.com/download/d/8/4/ d84b1c50-e0bb-45ba-b2f4-356f4f456a88/WUDSS%20Datasheet_Final.doc Now that’s not to say they’re the only game in town. iSCSI Target is also a feature of OpenSolaris: http://opensolaris.org/os/project/iscsitgt/ And there’s a nifty little Open Source Project called iSCSI Enterprise Target: http://sourceforge.net/projects/iscsitarget/?abmode=1
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Solid State Storage for the Masses
I originally posted this at http://www.318.com/TechJournal The new MacBook Air was introduced at MacWorld with the option for a 64GB Solid-State hard drive. Toshiba is also now offering Solid-State drives in sizes that are 32GB, 64GB and 128GB. The drives still seem to be lagging in adoption due to high costs, but they offer more durability, faster boot times and lower power requirements which should all lead to higher adoption over the next two years. Toshiba will also begin making Solid-state SATA drives in May that can be used in desktop systems.
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Using Trash for Storage
I’m not sure why this keeps coming up, but you don’t want to use your trash (whether for Entourage, Outlook, Mac OS X or the Recycle Bin in Windows) as a place to store files, emails or anything else you’d be bummed out about loosing. Keep in mind that trash can be taken away at any given moment…
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Primordial Storage
Primordial storage refers to unallocated storage capacity on a storage device. Storage capacity can be allocated from primordial pools to create storage pools. This means that primordial pools are disk/device sources for allocation of storage pools. In Xsan primordial pools aren’t used but there is often unused capacity in the form of LUNs that are referred to as primordial at time. Especially on a Promise RAID where you might have certain LUNs that are smaller than the potential size of others and therefore might end up with disks left over which can be mapped and used as near-line storage later. This term, primordial, can be used to refer to those.