Bob Plankers

Bob Plankers is a man who wears many hats. In his professional career he has spent three decades leading teams that design, build, operate, and talk about reliable, secure, and compliant IT infrastructures, both in the public sector and in the high tech industry. He currently focuses on applied security, compliance, and operational resilience for virtualization and cloud platforms.

Last.fm Thinks I'm Gay

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Remember how there was this big thing about how Tivos were learning the viewing habits of their users, and the users were sure that their Tivos thought they were gay. Last.fm sure does have a strange idea of what I want. Listening to their “recommendation radio” is a great way to find new music, and I love the control where you can move the slider between “mainstream” and “obscure.” But dammit anyhow, I’d like a non-emo, non-Backstreet Boys recommendation from time to time. Geez. So I’ve just loaded a playlist in iTunes with a lot of my old favorites, hit play, and turned my speakers off. My plan will probably backfire, making the computers think I’ll like Enya and Yanni …

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Musings on What I Want From Storage Virtualization

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Brian over at stereoroid.com commented on my last post about what I want from a storage virtualization engine. Brian, I hope you don’t mind but I’d like to answer outside of the comments section. Your comments were not counterpoint, they were more in the realm of adding clarity, something which my other post may have lacked. I hope this doesn’t scare people away from making comments. 🙂 I really appreciate them. I’m most familiar with EMC and IBM high-end and midrange offerings, and a smattering of whatever LSI Logic is called now (StorageTek/FastT/Engenio/etc.). I don’t know very much about HP EVAs. From what you’ve said it sounds like they are very much like EMC and IBM’s high-end offerings where there …

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What I Want From A Storage Virtualization Engine

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Storage virtualization engines suck. Sure, they make it easy to move your data around. They also add cache, which helps a bit. While they’re doing this they also add another point of failure on your SAN, another potential performance bottleneck, another system to learn how to use. They’re clumsy, they’re feature-poor, and I think they have a real long way to go. I’d think about them more positively if they did a few things for me: 1) Automate array-level failover. Take IBM’s Storage Virtualization Controller, for example. It can mirror your data to another array, but if the primary array dies your hosts will lose their storage. You then have to go into the SVC and promote the second copy …

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links for 2006-07-23

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Digital SLR cameras: Canon Digital Rebel and Nikon D70s (tags: Photography camera photo) Nikon Digital SLR System (tags: photography camera photo) Internet Archive: Details: Glen Phillips Live at The Canal Room on 2006-05-12 Willy Porter opened for Glen Phillips. Amazing to have them together. EFF: Bloggers’ FAQ: Privacy (tags: privacy)

How Much I/O Are You Doing?

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How much disk I/O are you doing? Are your performance monitors watching everything they need to? I had occasion to dissect a storage setup recently, and it became obvious that the I/O to and from the arrays, including the remote mirroring traffic, wasn’t really being watched. When your host writes to LUN across a SAN, you: 1) Generate load on the link between the host and the fibre channel switch. 2) Generate load on the ISLs between the fibre channel switches. 3) Generate load on the link between a fibre channel switch and the array. 4) Generate load back out of the array as it writes the I/O remotely. If this is synchronous the host will be waiting for it. …

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last.fm

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So I started this blog with the idea that I’d write about system administration topics. My forays into last.fm are another example of how I’ve been failing to write about what I started to write about. Maybe that’s okay. 🙂 Introspection aside, I added a page pointing to the last few things I’ve listened to. I didn’t want to put it on the main page because it takes a while to load. Last.fm is pretty damn cool as a data collector and sorter, and I’ve found some new music that way. They are getting more commercial which dulls the experience a little but it’s okay for now. Update 7/7/07: I took that page down. While we’re at it Yo La …

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VMware License Server

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So why do I get this feeling, this instinctive repulsion, for VMware’s new license server setup? Is it because FlexLM sucks? Maybe it’s the FlexLM license server I run for a customer where the thing hoses the Linux box if anything is wrong with the network connection. Not that it happens often, but once is once too many. I’m just wondering when the VMware license server is going to take a dump all over my setup like that. It’ll probably be while I’m on vacation somewhere. Maybe it’s just the fact that VMware totally messed up my license key deployment for VI3. Instead of getting the 20 CPUs of standard VIN licenses I got 8, mailed to my purchasing dude. …

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Charter Blows

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Dear Charter, I enjoyed the data service outage tonight. I was only present for seven hours of it, but those seven hours were a blast. I got to play a thousand games of Hangaroo, watch eighty reruns of CSI, do laundry, clean my kitchen, and reread a Harry Potter novel. A banner night for me. I absolutely have to build a development box for home. That way when I schedule time to work on a project, like tonight, and your service is out, like tonight, I can work on something productive. Not that cleaning my kitchen wasn’t productive, but I’m kinda overstating it. I just loaded the dishwasher and killed a fly. I look forward to the daily mini-outages that …

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Blitz

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This weekend was busier than most. Beer drinking on Friday, with live music and friends. Beer drinking on Saturday, with live theater and friends. Fixing vehicles on Sunday with live friends. All in 90+ degree heat. Icky. The live music was down at the UW-Madison Memorial Union Terrace. If you’re ever in Madison on a Friday and you are wondering where everybody is, they’re all there. Hip hop isn’t usually my bag, but Dumate and Know Boundaries are damn good. Know Boundaries has a Rage Against the Machine/Linkin Park/rap thing going on, and it’s cool. Dumate is the collision of the venerable Natty Nation with the remains of Smoking With Superman. Mr. Parker definitely has some grammatical skillz. Saturday was …

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links for 2006-07-17

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Planet Bluegrass – Telluride Bluegrass Festival (tags: music festival) Austin City Limits Music Festival (tags: festival music)

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