Storage @ Work

One of the things I do is set up regional advisory boards so our customers can tell us what they’d like to change or add to our storage systems. Chris D (he asked that I not include his contact information, so I thought I’d not give out his full name) is an excellent customer who uses EqualLogic storage in their production environment and who also helps us out with references for new prospects. Usually, customers want to participate in these advisory boards, but Chris surprised me with his answer. In it he references a recent InfoWorld review of EqualLogic’s product. I probably shouldn’t admit it, but I haven’t actually read the review. I’ve been told its complimentary. Maybe after the posting goes up I’ll visit my blog and click over on the link. Maybe not. Maybe somebody will just tell me what its all about. Maybe I’ll just have to suffer that deer in the headlights experience in public again. Whatever, here is the email thread.

1. My initial email to Chris

Bill and Chris,

mfarley here from EqualLogic, how are things going?

We’d love to have both of you become part of our customer advisory board. The initial meeting for the Atlanta area is scheduled for the morning of March 8 (Thursday) at the Embassy Suites at the Perimeter Mall.

The advisory board is an opportunity to tell us what sorts of improvements you’d like to see us make in our products and our programs, as well as having a chance to meet some of your peers that are using our products.

I apologize for the late notice on this and I hope you can make it.

Regards,
mfarley
Director of Customer Programs, EqualLogic
408-210-7931

2. Chris’ response

Good idea to have the resources come to.

3. Me responding to Chris

Yeah, we think so too, can you make it?

4. Chris back to me

I agree with the first two paragraphs of this recent article:

http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/02/26/09TCequal_1.html

Our EqualLogic purchase was a solid decision and it has performed exactly like we were hoping it would. I don't think we would be able to give you much feedback on what to improve. It is good to see you guys getting some much deserved good press.

5. Me back to Chris

Chris, would it be OK with you if I posted our discussions on this email thread to my blog?
Beyond, that, I’m sure that if you get in a room with other people using our product that you’ll think of things you think we could be doing at least a little better.

-marc

6. Chris back to me

It would be fine if you post our discussion on your blog, but please exclude my contact information.

What time does the gathering begin next Thursday and what is the length? I have a non-standard work shift next week but I would like to try and attend if I can. I just don't want you to have too high of an expectation of my constructive criticism commitment.

I spoke to a customer earlier this week who had a small problem with an online capacity upgrade. He told me that while their new system and capacity were being integrated into their existing storage resources, performance dropped approximately 20%. I brought this up at the Atlanta Customer Advisory Board meeting today to see if the customers that were there had seen anything similar or had any comments. As it turned out, our local SE Wade O'Harrow had been there and gave us an overview. He said the customer's network was designed where the EqualLogic storage systems are connected to multiple edge switches in an core-edge network with relatively thin ISL uplinks between the edge and core switches. These links were not able to keep up with the combination of the customer's normal high-throughput I/O load and the additional load incurred when a new system is added to an existing group and the load is balanced among systems.

The comments from our customers on the advisory board were interesting. They said that core-edge topologies are part of commonly accepted best practices for Ethernet/TCP/IP networks, but that the assumptions used in forming those best practices did not necessarily apply to SANs - especially heavily loaded iSCSI SANs. Storage systems involve much higher traffic levels and I/O loads than most other end nodes connected to edge switches. Instead they offered that best practices for iSCSI SANs would connect storage at the core of the network as a centralized resource or that a different, beefed up edge design including fatter pipes were needed. They thought people would get a lot of value from better documentation of best practices for iSCSI SANs.

I agree. So, I'll try to revisit this topic regularly in this blog and let you know what I find out what's working for other customers.

Robin Harris at storagemojo has lit a small fire by amplifying reliability data on disk drives in a posting titled: Everything you know about disks is wrong.

There are so many angles to this that its hard to figure out where to start commenting. At the end of the day, the question is what steps can a person or organization take to protect themselves from unexpected correlated drive failures. Hot spares, hot swapping and multi-layer redundancy (such as RAID 10, 50 or 6) are truly important technologies to protect from these types of things, but you still have to maintain a certain healthy paranoia and maintain an ongoing awareness for drive failure situations that appear to be spinning out of control. Its hard, because your drives don't form a choir and sing you their group swan song together. Instead, the situation just starts to pile up like a slo-mo train wreck. You can kind of see it coming, but you don't want to believe that its happening, defying all statistics and logic.

Jason Powell is a customer of ours who has the right kind of paranoia-on alert and it saved him from a possible data loss. He got after his problems when they started happening and kept vigilant throughout the process. I'm also proud of the way the EqualLogic support and field teams jumped in to help him out. Jason says some really nice things about us in this post, and we appreciate it, but I think if there's a primary hero in this case, its Jason.

I'm looking at one of four locations for the next customer advisory board meeting. Right now Chicago and Washington are the front runners with NoCal or SoCal as dark horses. If you have a strong interest in this let me know as I'll be deciding in the next week or so. EqualLogic customer advisory board meetings are exclusively for EqualLogic customers to meet with company representatives to discuss future product/technology developments and IT requirements and best practices.

This story speaks for itself: The Mysteries of SANS part ii

Thanks for posting, Trevor.

Two guys, Eric Waters and Ron Whitling running the data center operations for E-Chx, an Internet payroll processing service provider, talking about how EqualLogic iSCSI SAN storage solved their performance problems on SQL Server and the overall ease of use and operations that you get with an EqualLogic SAN.

This is my first YouTube video and therefore also the first time linking a video directly into my blog. It didn't exactly work perfectly and there are several rough edges that I expect to make better in the future. The video ends at the 6 minute mark, but extends into blackness for over an additional minute. I'm not sure why that happened..... Don't be surprised if I re-post this one with a better quality video later this week.

You might need to click twice to make it play.

Solimar Systems is one of EqualLogic's longest standing customers, having purchased their first iSCSI storage system from the company over 3 years ago. I was down in San Diego yesterday and Leo Kameya, our sales manager there took me in to visit Tom Lytle at Solimar on our way to consume mass quantities of sushi together. Solimar provides large scale electronic printing services for companies who need to have PDF versions of traditional print output, such as financial statements, available on demand for their customers. If you have accessed a PDF statement for your bank or credit card, there is a good chace that this data was produced by Solimar.

Tom is a great guy, easygoing and very likable. He showed us around his data center and I took some footage of EqualLogic products at work in Solimar's data center. Maybe I'll put up some of that video, but are few things as dull as watching lights blinking on storage arrays.

What IS interesting, however, is the way that Tom upgraded his first EqualLogic storage system by refreshing (or replacing) its original 250 GB drives with new, high capacity 750GB drives. Usually EqualLogic customers are told that they can add new systems to an existing EqualLogic SAN and that the existing system's data will be spread (load balanced) across the combined volume spaces of the existing and new systems in the group. Tom explained to me how they tweaked this process by creating a two-system group, and then removing the original system from the group. This forced all the data to be migrated over to the new EqualLogic system. After that process completed, the original system was taken offline and the original disk drives were removed and replaced with new drives. With three times its original capacity, the original system was added back to the group and an inverse process was run to restore (remigrate) the data completely back to the original EqualLogic system. Essentially, this is an automated way to perform dump-and-fill storage operations between an existing disk system and its temporary replacement. The kicker in all this according to Tom was that there was never any downtime. The data was online and available the entire time.

Its really quite a cool thing, but it does make it difficult to set meaningful expectations for the lifespan of the product. What is it? - 6 years, 7 years, 8 years, 9 years or more? I really don't know and I suppose its going to be one of those "it depends" things. We're just going to have to wait to find out.

Previously I blogged about Solimar Systems and how they've been a customer for a long time and upgraded the disk drives on an early EqualLogic storage system to new 750 GB drives. So, I made a short video that - well - is somewhat self explanatory. Solimar Systems is a terrific customer with an interesting business and the story is pretty good, the sushi was fresh, but this video leaves a bit to be desired. Here goes:

There is a post on the VMWare forum today where an administrator is having problems getting VMotion to work with their iSCSI SAN.

Further down the thread is a post from an EqualLogic customer who has had a much better and more positive experience.

Thanks to VMWare forum member, acr, who posted his comment on this thread in the VMWare forum. Please look at his expertise level on this forum. (Virtuoso, with over 2600 posts). He says iSCSI is "quickest and easiest when we use VMotion."

EqualLogic's frameless, virtual storage architecture works very well with VMWare. Similar to the way the VMotion feature provides complete transparency for systems, EqualLogic storage systems provide transparency for storage where volumes can be transparently spanned and migrated across storage systems.

I was in Los Angeles today talking to customers here, asking them about their storage applications. One of the themes that came up repeatedly was the use of Microsoft Windows Server 2003 for file services connected to EqualLogic Storage Systems.

Our customers tend to appreciate administrative efficiency and low cost of ownership. Not surprisingly, they also know they can wring a huge amount of functionality out of plain, vanilla Windows file servers. Similar to the way iSCSI helps them leverage their organization's networking skills, Windows file servers help them leverage their entire organization's Windows admin skills, including system and network management, not to mention the licensing agreements they have with Microsoft. For most of them, setting up a Windows file server is a snap and takes almost no time whatsoever. Microsoft has made the iSCSI SAN components very easy to deal with and setup with an EqualLogic storage system is amazingly simple as most of our customers will testify. In most cases, setting up a Windows File server with EqualLogic storage takes less time and effort than installing an industry leading NAS system.

Some in the industry are trying to make a big deal out of the concept of unified storage. The idea of unified storage is that specialized multi-protocol, multi-network NAS/SAN systems will connect to virtually any type of client system using virtually any network or protocol they might want to use. The extension is that if you have a single technology to work with, it is more efficient own. Hmmm. Sounds a bit like a vendor trap to me.

Even if you don't believe that unified storage is another in a long line of storage vendor traps, the weakness with any one-size-fits-all product is the impossibility of fitting all the requirements equally well. Some functions tend to work well, while others tend to be stuck in perpetual mediocrity.

We have customers that believe unified storage is an unnecessary luxury and waste of their resources. Instead, they have made the shrewd observation that all the standards they need already exist and that their best practices begin by enforcing conformity with those standards. For many, Ethernet, TCP/IP and Windows servers are their core infrastructure standards. They have also come to the realization that EqualLogic iSCSI SANs are an extremely good fit for these standards.

A continuing story from a new customer, Sagemont Church in Houston, TX, who has been posting their expereinces with an EqualLogic iSCSI storage system. Here is a link to their blog telling how the installation went. Pretty good pictures and an interesting discussion of their initiator/NIC experiences too.

Storage @ Work interviews Chad Kunz, the systems administrator at LMN Architects in Seattle. Chad talks about how their EqualLogic iSCSI SAN makes his working life easier by being trouble-free and extremely easy to use. Here are a few quote highlights from the interview:

• "Simple as can be"
• "Exceeded all expectations"
• "Very Painless"
• "Quick simple recovery of files"
• "They can't believe how fast it is"
• "I don't really manage the storage, it takes care of itself"
• "The support is terrific"

Click on the video below to play it:

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If you just want to hear the audio, click the player below:

Stephen Foskett on the business model change Netapp is apparently considering.

For those of you at Netapp, trying to figure out how to deal with us Ankle Biters, these links may be helpful to you:
http://ph.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20070611205338AAtuZs0
http://www.supportsusa.com/ankle/
http://www.footphysicians.com/what-is/ns_smelly-feet.htm

Anne Silverthorn wrote a pretty decent article in InfoStor about how SMBs can benefit from installing SANs to replace DAS storage. Lots of vendors are mentioned

Here's an interesting and strange article about EqualLogic's first iSCSI SAN customer in Australia. I really don't know much more about the customer, Ranjeet Rustogi or his company Link Communications Group than anybody who follows the link and reads it. In fact, others usually read things more closely and carefully than I do, so by now, they know more than I do about how an EqualLogic disk array made its way down under. Hey Ranjeet, if you see, this, Thanks a lot! Drop me a line sometime.

The thing that interested me most in this article was which one of our incredibly talented and strange SEs made the trip (it was before I started here). I first thought it was the one who consumes mass quantities like there is no tomorrow, then I figured it was the one who believes sleep is an over-rated luxury because there is so much to do while awake. Hmmmm, now I'm not so sure. Whoever, it is, you need to frame that quote from Mr. Rustogi: "The most knowledgeable person I have ever met". I can only hope for everybody's sake that the knowledge transfer he was thinking of when he said this was limited to network storage because I'm sure many other topics may have been - "embellished?"

Here is a callout to my storage homey, Pai, at Riverbed - I saw the press release you issued with John Rhon at the Lifelink Foundation. He is a terrific guy and excellent customer. Moreover, the time critical nature of their business showcases the value of Riverbed's Steelhead appliances. BTW, Pai if you see this - do you think anybody can beat RF at Wimbledon?

Kirk Goodwin the IT Manager at Unicity - and James Rupprecht, the Storage SE at Valcom in Salt Lake City talk about their success working together on the installation of an EqualLogic iSCSI SAN.

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I recently posted about a customer of ours in Australia, Linqk, and an article I read in the Australian online edition of SearchStorage. Ranjeet Rustogi, the VP of Engineering for Linqk sent me an email yesterday filling me in with a bit more detail on how things went for them and how they are going.

First things first - thanks Ranjeet for the email, its always nice to hear from customers and blog readers/subjects. Our customers are the only reason we have for existing as a company.

I said previously that one of our SEs made the trip to Australia and met with Linqk. That was wrong. Ranjeet spoke with our SE on the phone who sent Ranjeet lots of technical information that he was able to use to make an informed decision. Our SEs our terrific, I can't say enough about them.

They are now looking at an additional deployment in the region using EqualLogic storage that Ranjeet says will be larger and might include our SAS drive products. Thanks for the good news Ranjeet and your support of EqualLogic.

Hey Elfshadow, Happy System Administrator Appreciation Day to you too! A co-worker brought Elfshadow's blog - "Life in the Digital Matrix" - to my attention. He had attended the VMWare Users Group meeting near Sandusky Ohio and talked about the various sessions he attended.

In his blog he talks about how Dave Siles from Kane County Illinois presented on their extensive use of EqualLogic iSCSI SANs and how impressed he was with it all. The thing that impressed me was that Dave had been invited to speak to the group about VMWare and VM Users groups (I guess he grew up in Sandusky too - small world syndrome!) and he saw that one of our guys, Tim Sherbak, was going to present and asked Tim if he could present his EqualLogic storage perspective to the audience. Tim's no fool and Dave made a great impression.

That's what's amazing about this company: our customers. I say it over and over again, but we really do have the best customers in the world. Thanks Dave for being such an enthusiastic supporter!

I can't remember how it started, but somewhere along the line,

Chuck Wrote: "Does Anyone Take the SPC Seriously?

And a week later, Tony Wrote: "Getting Under EMC Skin"

Within a couple days, Dave Wrote: "Lies, Damned Lies and Benchmark Results"

Then Tony jumped back in with a sequence of writs from Asia, ending with: "Why Not Miles Per Hour?"

To which The Storage Anarchist responded with: "The case against standardized (performance) testing"

To me, this was the storage blogosphere at its best! A battle royale of wits, writs and Hitz! (sorry Dave, it was a rhyming thing....)

In bike racing, riders do weird things to their bodies in an attempt to get an unfair advantage. Testing labs try to catch them with sophisticated testing procedures. In the storage business, contestants do sophisticated, weird things to the tests in order to get an unfair advantage.

In both cases, it can be very difficult to tell how much of an unfair advantage is being perpetrated, but at least in bike racing, a cheater still has to ride to the finish before everybody else. In contrast, with storage, the customer has to figure out for themselves which vendor's exaggerations are closest to the truth.

The good news for storage is that there are no temporary performance boosters like steroids, blood doping or EPO. The system configuration can only do what it is engineered for, nothing more. Customers who want to know the truth can test their own applications and data on the competing storage systems. All they have to do is get the various storage vendors to agree to participate in the "bake off." Get the systems out, load 'em up with data and applications, connect 'em to systems and let 'em crank. Then watch the application numbers. That's a real contest - but without the "con".

It can be a bit complicated though - sometimes customers have difficulty getting systems to test and if they do, they can run into delays getting the systems configured. After all, some storage systems actually can't be configured properly by the customer until they complete a couple weeks of training. In the meantime, customers can make themselves familiar with those systems that don't require pre-installation training or configuration-tuning. That's not an unfair advantage - it's a completely fair advantage called cost of ownership.

Craig Randall wrote yesterday about an experience he had at a Starbucks recently and made a point of how controlling your destiny is such a valuable thing. The topic is aligned with a video I made yesterday and I like what he says:

" when you “outsource your experience” to someone else (e.g. to grocery stores such as Safeway or Albertsons), you run the risk of damaging your brand. The people running the Starbucks kiosk are employees of the grocery chain, not Starbucks. They don’t buy into the brand from an experience stand point, and apparently are not encouraged (e.g. via incentives) to do so by their employer (or indirectly by Starbucks)."

Managing storage products is a core competency that most IT aministrators should have. There are definite risks similar to those Craig mentioned above when you turn the "storage keys" over to somebody else. It's a no-brainer to buy technologies and products that allow you to control your own destiny.

Of course, that's why iSCSI is taking off the way it is - because people feel they can understand and control the networks better than they can with Fibre Channel. It's also the design goal of all our products at EqualLogic - making administration easier and faster so that IT professionals can take charge of their own storage infrastructures and move onto other tasks.

Here is our schedule for VMworld. Many have asked me about the BOF (birds of a feather) meeting. It's going to be at Terra on Wednesday the 12th from 4:00 to 5:00 followed by a customer appreciation party from 5:00 - 7:00. For those that recall last year's party it was a pretty good time. Definitely a lot of energy and excitement around VMware, consolidation and virtualization. I know - it sounds geeky, but if you are into it, there is nothing better. See You there.

I'm pretty stoked about VMworld this week in San Francisco. Going to see lots of interesting stuff and meet with customers and friends from around the industry. I thought VMworld was one of the big highlights of 2006 and expect it will be even bigger this year.

EqualLogic fans might be interested in a few things of note we are doing at the show. The main thing that a lot of people will be interested in is that we are giving away a Harley. Not a stuffed doll of a Harley or a Spinal Tap version of a Harley, but an actual Harley Davidson motorcycle. Next year, you can be in Sturgis in August too!

I am actually a bit torn about this kind of give away. I mean, lot's of our customers tell us that they think our iSCSI SAN products are pretty terrific and I think we should just try to have an event for them (which we are doing - a Birds of Feather and a customer appreciation cocktail party on Wednesday). But I guess if you are going to go beyond the basic feelgood stuff at a major trade show, giving away a Harley isn't so bad. OK, the real problem - truth be told - is that I'm not eligible. Farley on a Harley? The Farley Harley? Farley's gnarly Harley? Videos from the Hogmeister? All these sound pretty good to me, but its not going to come to pass unless I shell out my own money for them. Maybe I'll turn in expense reports for the last year and go get one.

There are a couple Webinars going on this week. I'm doing one tomorrow (Tuesday) AM at 9:00 PDT with VMware and a customer using both technologies. We'll be talking about the synergy of VMware and EqualLogic iSCSI SANs in SMB accounts. Its very powerful stuff with important cost and uptime benefits. Then on Wednesday (also at 9:00 PDT), Eric Schott, our Director of Product management is doing another live webcast with VMware discussing some of the newest technology for Disaster Recovery in VMware environments. This is incredibly important technology that is going to change the IT landscape for many customers so you will want to check it out if you get a chance.

There are a number of breakout sessions with EqualLogic employees or customers participating: There is a listing of them here:

Come see what all the excitement is about at the EqualLogic booth this year, here is where we are in Moscone Center. On this map look for the blue rectangle (#1021) to the right of VMware's booth, which is the big one in the middle.

I caught up with Chris Fricke, from Clackamas County Oregon and we were talking. I like to say we have the greatest customers in the world and in this video, Chris shows why I say that. Thanks Chris!

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WMworld has been an awesome event. Yesterday we had our Birds of Feather / customer appreciation party. EqualLogic's Eric Schott and VMware's Kiran Ranabhor led an interactive discussion of VMWare's announced Site Recovery Manager. There is a lot of interest in this functionality and many who attended wanted to know how they were going to be able to use it.

Afterwards was a lot of fun hanging, snacking and sipping. Cool venue - Terra club at First and Harrison in San Francisco. Many thanks to those who planned this and all customers who came to spend time with the EqualLogic team. Also, a huge thanks to our customers who have made presentations and participated in panels at VMworld: David Siles, Lee Merrick, Jeff Stallworth, Carmine Iannace, Chris Sims, Matt Conley and Ken Kaban who made the trip over from the UK in order to attend and present. Our customers are the greatest!

I led a webcast last Tuesday at VMworld about using VMware and EqualLogic storage in SMB environments. Ben Matheson from VMware and Arell Chapman - a customer from United Bank and Trust joined me. I had suggested that VMware and EqualLogic were like peaches and cream, but then Ben said he thought it was more like a hamburger with fries. Either way, I'll take it. The best part of all was Arell's discussion of his implementation. People will want to listen to what he has to say. Click this link to view and listen to the webinar recording. (requires Real Player)

Then on Wednesday our director of product management Eric Schott and Vivek Chhabria from VMware presented on DR technologies and techniques on a webcast that has relevance to just about everybody. Click here to view the webinar.

Here is a little tech highlight from the Birds of a Feather session at VMworld. In this video, Eric Schott, our director of Product Management discusses how remote replication works using EqualLogic iSCSI storage arrays.

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Carmine Iannace is the IT director at the Brattle Group , an economics consulting firm in Cambridge Massachusetts. He was an early implementer of VMware technology at Welch's before bringing his virtualization vision to the Brattle Group, where he has almost completely converted their IT infrastructure to virtual systems and storage. I interviewed Carmine last week when I was in Boston and he spoke about his use of virtualization and the role that EqualLogic iSCSI storage has in it, including its deployment in their European lights-out data centers and its DR role, performing remote data replication.

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I finally got around to mixing up some of the video from our customer appreciation party at VMworld. Like I always say, we have the greatest customers - it's nice to be able to kick back with them.

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We had special guests from VMware for this event too. Preceding the party was a birds of a feather session where we explored VMware's newly announced Site Recovery Manager (SRM). Very cool.

The big news this morning is that Dell has struck an agreement to acquire EqualLogic. This is certainly a surprise as we have been hunkering down in preparation for an initial public offering, so it gives the future a much different look than it had over the weekend. The deal will probably complete in three to four months. Let’s get on with it, I say – full speed ahead.

Acquisitions raise lots of questions – most of them I don’t have answers to, such as how will this impact EqualLogic’s business and its customers. People that know me, know that I tend to be skeptical because there are many more ways for things to go wrong than right, but I am fairly bullish on this acquisition. Michael Dell has been making bold moves at Dell since his return to the helm last January and seems to have changed his primary focus from streamlining internal operations to improving the customer experience with Dell products. His vision to Simplify IT is right on course, but difficult to accomplish. The decision to spend $1.4 Billion on EqualLogic shows a very real commitment to executing on that vision. As far as I can tell, Dell has entered this agreement with a vision of building upon EqualLogic’s early successes and plans to grow EqualLogic both as a storage provider and as a channel business entity. If so, that will be a very good thing for EqualLogic’s business, its customers and its channel partners. In doing so, Dell will be making a large number of customers’ IT experiences much simpler.

I’ve received a couple emails already from customers and friends. Most were congratulatory, but one was from one of my favorite customers who suggested that Dell will “now ruin an otherwise good product.” I really don’t think so. I think Dell understands the talent and creativity we have and believes that supporting EqualLogic will be better than extracting the technology and dumping the talent, as sometimes happens with storage acquisitions. Among other things that were discussed in a conference call this morning, Dell representatives told us that nobody will be asked to move to Texas. That's probably a bit premature, but it's also a very good sign of their intentions to increase EqualLogic's capabilities.

Justin (of cmsJustin) writes about his company's purchase of an EqualLogic iSCSI SAN array. He's been documenting his evaluation process on his blog and we're very happy to have Justin as a customer. Thanks Justin for spelling things out on your blog and you made a good move with the 400 GB drives.

Read to the bottom of his blog entry: he's looking for help with dynamic VLAN configuration linked to MAC addresses. If anyone reading this has any insights for him, please jump on his site and let him know.

First, this one from a competitor. Yikes! Somebody needs help here, but I don't think it's our customers.

Then in a strangely-related blog post, Jon Toigo, the irrepressible contrarian of storage, gave last week's news of Dell's acquisition of EqualLogic a yawn. Thank goodness he didn't say anything positive because then I would be worried. He goes on to say that SMB customers are primarily interested in cost. That's on the right track but I'd say value (what you get for your money) is actually much more important to them. Then he writes on how SMB admins prefer Harley tattoos to those from giant technology companies. Ummm, yes, I suppose that is true - definitely! But what about those tattooed, Harley-riding data center folks? Do you think they actually have three letter tattoos hidden somewhere that don't spell MOM?

As it turns out the leading tattoo computer company is probably Apple.

And for you science lovers out there, here is a bit of strangelet news. Do you think they are getting younger or older?

This post is for people wondering how to set up iSCSI drivers for Solaris.

It has not been tested or approved by EqualLogic. I'm just passing along a link that looks like it would be useful to blog readers. Please send any comments about its contents to the author on the Weibeltech site.

Ezra Wiesner from the Kimmel Center in Philadelphia talks about using EqualLogic iSCSI SAN storage for their SQL server and video applications. The audio on this interview is a bit screwed up - my apologies.

Check out their online media player for events and artists appearing during the 2007-2008 season. Extremely cool!

Note: The web video service I use for this blog appears to be having some performance problems - I don't know how long this will last.

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