Odds and Ends - 01/31/10

• The Hot Aisle has an article showing the mathematical inevitability of storage arrays moving to Flash and SATA (AKA Flash and Trash).  While SSD adoption was slow initially, almost every vendor is offering it in some fashion.  I agree that to reap the full benefits, it will eventually have to stop looking like a standard "spindle."
• Storagezilla had a nice post on Oracle's declaration of war on NetApp.  It is the second time Oracle has declared war on an established vendor in recent memory, the first time being their release of rebranded RedHat.  It doesn't look like it affected RedHat in the long term, and I doubt it'll affect NetApp much.  During storage purchases, you're relying on the vendor's ability to deliver as much as what their delivering, and it'll be some time before Oracle has proven itself in the storage realm.
• EMC obliterates the competition in SPECsfs_cifs and posts extremely competitive numbers in SPECsfs_nfs.  The cifs benchmark originally looked like the result of some bored engineer in an EMC lab trying to see how much he could destroy the existing rankings - the benchmark was ran on all SSDs (well, 4 FC disks for Celerra information).  I wonder if this will cause some of the other vendors to post updated cifs numbers.  Storagezilla claims they won't because of how bad their implementation is.  It could be due to the few vendors that can offer that amount of SSD storage.  I have to ask, does CIFs really make sense for this type of a workload?
• Storagebod posted on the cloud-angle of Apple's iPad announcement. I thought something very similar when I saw the announcement, except for a few things.  First of all, the bulk of storage on most consumers computers is media.  iTunes already has most of that content available, so pushing that storage into the iTunes cloud is more a function of scaling IO/access rather than 'having sufficient storage'.  In fact, if Apple could talk Big Content into allowing them to detect non-iTunes media and offer free-of-charge the equivalent iTunes media, this would be even easier.  Pirates won't buy songs they already 'have', so there isn't a lot of money left on the table AND it reduces the availability of completely wide-open music/movie files.
• Cleversafe posted a good primer on silent errors.  This is the main reason why details matter when it comes to RAID implementation, and why you need more than 1 piece of parity for large drives.
• If you have the chance to try it, New Belgium's Spring Seasonal, the Mighty Arrow, is quite tasty.  A nice pale ale that is light on hops and extremely drinkable.