oracle

Three Thoughts on the Nutanix & StorageReview Situation

by

I’ve watched the recent dustup between VMware and Nutanix carefully. It’s very instructive to watch how companies war with each other in public, and as a potential customer in the hyperconverged market it’s nice to see companies go through a public opinion shakedown. Certainly both VMware and Nutanix tell stories that seem too good to be true about their technology. On the VMware side VSAN is new-ish, and VMware doesn’t have the greatest track record for stability in new tech, though vSphere 6 seems to be a major improvement. On the Nutanix side I have always had a guarded opinion of technologies that introduce complexity and dependency loops, especially where storage systems are competing with workloads for resources. I’ve argued …

Read More

New Java Security Settings: More Proof That Oracle Hates You

by

I began the day yesterday updating to Java 7u51, after which absolutely none of my enterprise Java applications worked anymore. I could not reach the consoles of my Rackspace cloud servers. I could not open the iDRAC console on my Dell PowerEdge. They all exited with some error about the Permissions attribute not being set. Being the guy that I am I decided to search for the error. Turns out that 7u51 sneaks a major change in a point release: on the default Java security slider setting of “high” no applet may run if it’s self-signed, unsigned, or is missing the Permissions attribute. Unfortunately, that describes all enterprise software, at least all the current versions of things I’m using. This isn’t …

Read More

Who Cares About Time Zones Anyway?

by

If you think you have a thankless job you should think about Arthur David Olson and Paul Eggert. Heck, it’s not even a paying job for them. They’re volunteers. Perhaps even masochists. What do they do? They maintain the time zone database (“zoneinfo”) for all of the computing world. And while residents of a particular country have to put up with just the general stupidity of their own politicians, these guys have to put up with all the stupidity of all politicians, across the Earth. Every time a politician in Russia, or Cameroon, or Indiana thinks it’d be a good idea to screw with the clocks these guys update and redistribute their database[0]. Vendors pick up the update and send …

Read More

Official: Revisions to VMware vSphere 5 Licensing

by

It’s official, VMware is changing the vRAM licensing in response to the feedback they’ve received. And, from the sounds of it, lots of feedback. They read every single vRAM post and thread in the Communities, read all the blog posts and comments, read all the feedback that was sent to them through the sales representatives and technical account managers. As they put it to me, most of the feedback was along these lines: It was less about the conversion to vSphere 5 than future growth, and the fact that the business case for future growth was drastically different now [and quite a bit more costly] than under the vSphere 4 licensing model. The new license model “introduced additional hesitation for …

Read More