July 1st, 2009
Why Windows 7 should be free
After the Vista fiasco, Microsoft owes its long-suffering customers more than a “screaming deal.” They’re owed an apology from Steve Ballmer - and a free copy of Vista SP3 Windows 7.
The backstory
Vista’s market failure was not a surprise inside Microsoft. Senior development execs - people who’d actually cut code on large enterprise-quality projects - knew that the project’s many slips, redefinitions and feature cuts were symptoms of a far deeper problem.
The out-of-control development wasn’t just a problem inside Microsoft: it burnt thousands of outside developers too. Many finally gave up on the ever-changing Vista betas to wait for the final shipping product - leading to the application and driver issues that burnt so many users - including Microsoft director and former President Jon Shirley.
Let the grown-ups drive
Windows 7 is coming out so quickly and to such great reviews not because Microsoft hired people who could code - but because they re-architected their development process. While that is a Good Thing it also points to why Windows 7 should be free: Vista was flawed from the beginning.
What about XP?
XP users should pay for Windows 7 because it is a new OS for them. But Vista users - especially people who bought “Vista Capable” machines or retail copies - are owed much more.
The Storage Bits take
Really, is giving people 50% off on the product you should have shipped in the first place a “screaming deal?” I don’t think so.
The Vista train wreck - years in the making - is a long term blot on Microsoft’s reputation. Doing the right thing for customers today will pay dividends tomorrow.
And the Ballmer apology? He’s the CEO and the entire fiasco took place on his watch. The buck stops there and he should own up to it.
Comments welcome, of course.
June 26th, 2009
Blu-ray's Blo-tards bite back
Someone hired the PR/lobbying firm Corporate Advocates to bite back at Storage Bits. Their message: the Harris Poll on Blu-ray was wrong about the number of homes with Blu-ray players.
A fact, it so happens, I never mentioned. But blow enough Blu-smoke and people will forget what they see with their own eyes?
I don’t think so.
Free speech isn’t free
Good thing our corporate overlords can afford the drivel that CorpAds is shoveling:
. . . the dramatic increase in Blu-ray Disc hardware and software sales clearly indicate that the format has in fact reached critical mass (surpassing even DVD penetration at the same point in DVD’s lifespan). . . .
[emphasis mine]
If today’s Blu-ray is what “critical mass” looks like, please don’t show me failure. That would be too scary.
The CorpAds point is that the Harris Poll numbers don’t square with manufacturer numbers. But Storage Bits never mentioned those numbers because they aren’t important.
Update: I’ve published the full text of the CorpAds email so you can read it for yourself. End update.
Update 2: The “evidence” that Blu-ray adoption beats DVD is based on the combined sales of BD players and PS3 consoles. Really, how many people buy PS3’s to play BD disks? Even if it is 20% - a high number - that puts Blu-ray well behind DVD. And ignores the fact that follow-ons usually do better: TV over radio; DVD over VHS; Google over Yahoo etc. End update 2.
So what is important?
Intentions. Harris asked people what they intended to do - and by a wide margin, people don’t much care about Blu-ray: player buying intentions are down; disk buying is lukewarm.
How could that be?
Because you don’t need Blu-ray to get high-def content. HD channels on cable; HD downloads from Netflix, Apple and others; and really good upscaling from Oppo Digital are all good substitutes for Blu-ray.
Price is the issue
All things being equal, consumers would rather have Blu-ray’s slightly better picture. But not if they have to pay a big premium for it.
People will shell out an extra $50 for Blu-ray capability. But Hollywood’s money is in the disks.
In the Harris poll, fully 68% of Blu-ray player or PS3 owners disagreed with the statement “I purchase movies on Blu-ray format regardless of price.” 68%!!!
These are the folks - like me - who own a Blu-ray player and some disks.
If the early adopters aren’t sold why will John Q. Public jump on this? He won’t. Like me he’ll get a few BD disks, think they look nice, and then go back to DVDs.
The Storage Bits take
Most new media fail. Historically, less than ¼ of new media achieve broad acceptance.
Blu-ray can still succeed with consumers, but vendors need to reduce prices. Of course, then Blu-ray may not be an economic success for vendors.
Oh well. Welcome to the free market. Say hi to your friends on Wall Street.
Update 3: I want to see Blu-ray succeed, mostly because I want to see a convenient 50 GB removable disk succeed. I’m not anti-Blu-ray, I’m anti-dumb. End update 3.
Comments welcome, of course. For historical perspective on new media, the curious might enjoy my wonkish review of an MIT Press book New Media, 1740-1915.
June 23rd, 2009
Blu-ray buzzkill: the death-spiral
Will consumers upgrade to Blu-ray? The CEO & co-founder of fast growing Netflix believes mailed DVDs shall be replaced by web-sent movies. And a recent Harris [no relation, darn it] Poll finds that people today are less likely to buy a Blu-ray player than they were last year.
Now would be a good time to panic
Forget the ever-optimistic “market research” reports blowing smoke up the BDA’s hind end. And the “hold the course” counsel from Blu-ray marketers.
The Harris Poll numbers are damning. Purchase intentions dropped over 20% - from 9% in ‘08 to 7% in ‘09 - while the percentage of “not at all likely” prospects rose to 75% in ‘09 from 65% in ‘08.
Buzzkill: the lukewarm Blu-ray base
But surely the early adopters who’ve experienced the joys of Blu-ray - superb picture quality, uncompressed audio and many new features - the people who - like me - have giant HD screens, surround sound systems and large movie collections, surely we love Blu-ray. Right?
Nope. Even the 16% of the polled who have a PS3 or a Blu-ray player aren’t fired up.
51% won’t wait for Blu-ray if the DVD comes out first. Fully 59% don’t buy the most movies on Blu-ray. 65% won’t replace their DVDs with Blu-ray.
In short, even the people who own Blu-ray are underwhelmed. Yes, it is better, and the people who like it buy more movies than average, but there isn’t the “Wow!” factor that drove widespread adoption of CDs and DVDs.
The Storage Bits take
The decline in buying intentions owes something to the worldwide depression recession, but the apathy of BD owners is ominous. If the players get cheap enough more people will buy them, but even that won’t drive BD disk sales.
Unless drastic action is taken before this Christmas season, Blu-ray will join all the other failed consumer media formats like SACD, Laser Disk, DVD-Audio and the PSP’s UMD. Most new formats fail - Blu-ray’s claim to fame is that it will be, without a doubt, the costliest such failure in history.
What can the BDA and the vendors do to turn it around? How about:
Time is short. Timid incrementalism will kill you.
Comments welcome, of course.
June 15th, 2009
Outrageously cool new hard drive
DataSlide has come out of stealth mode with a very creative SSD replacement technology. They call it a Hard Rectangular Disk or HRD.
Here’s DataSlide’s quick overview:
DataSlide applies technology in new, patented ways to achieve unprecedented high performance 160,000 IOPS & 500MB/sec and low power <4 Watts for a magnetic storage device:
- A piezoelectric actuator keeps the rectangular media in precise motion
- A diamond solid lubricant coating protects the surfaces for years of worry free service
- A massively parallel 2D array of magnetic heads reads from or writes to up to 64 embedded heads at a time
It looks like this:
Hard Rectangular Drive
Shake, rattle & roll
But that’s not all. According to the redoubtable Chris Mellor at The Register device uses a
. . . 2-dimensional array of 64 read-write heads, operating in parallel, … positioned above an piezo-electric-driven oscillating rectangular recording surface. . . .
Here’s another diagram from DataSlide showing how the data and sectors are oriented:
graphic courtesy of DataSlide
500 MB/s divided by 64 seems doable for each head. No word on writes.
Chris also reports that Oracle’s Embedded Global Business Unit is working with DataSlide to incorporate a database to create a “smart” storage device for use in I/O intensive “multiple concurrent stream” applications.
The company says the drive is at the prototype stage and uses existing high-volume production technologies, including perpendicular recording media, semicondutor lithographic heads and LCD glass treatments.
The Storage Bits take
DataSlide has taken from IBM’s Millipede concept and reimagined it using common technologies. While much remains to be done to productize the prototype, the fact of such architectural creativity should spur new thinking at the hard drive companies.
Of course, just like SSDs, drives with such low latencies shouldn’t be stuck at the end of a long, complex, high-latency interconnect chain. PCI-e HRD card, anyone?
Also, the relatively low capacity - 36GB - of the prototype device suggests it may slot in between larger capacity SSDs and DRAM. Until we know the economics though that is almost baseless speculation.
Let’s hope they can get it to market in less than 3 years. And let the based speculation begin!
Comments welcome, of course. This post got a couple of quick updates, including adding the figures, after it was first published.
June 10th, 2009
Apple's MacBook flop - fixed!
6 months ago I asked: Apple’s new MacBooks: flop or fiasco? Apple answered “flop” by backpedalling on pricing, the unibody and FireWire - in record time!
The big loser? Microsoft’s successful ads focused on price. Maybe that’s a card you don’t want to play.
Pricing
The 32% price cut on the slightly upgraded SSD MacBook Air - 1.86GHz to 2.13Ghz - is just a down payment. The big news is the new price point for the 15″ MacBook Pro: $1699 - down 15%.
These new price points are permanent. Despite the myth that Apple doesn’t cut prices, they have moved price points down many times over the years.
But other price drops - and the aggressive “buy a MacBook, get an iPod Touch” offer - portend even more pricing actions for the Christmas season. Apple isn’t about to let Mac momentum die. This is good news for all consumers - Mac and PC.
Unibody
Last November I called the unibody “a costly addition that no one was asking for.” And guess what: no more unibody MacBooks. MacBook Pro’s yes. But now the name MacBook is only on the plastic model.
That’s a great move. Apple needs a price-optimized entry level system. Expect to see even more aggressive pricing on MacBooks now that there are 2 visually distinct brands again.
Firewire
Not widely used on PCs, FireWire is the preferred interconnect for high-speed Mac peripherals. Not only is it faster than USB, but the spec supports up to 45 watts of power at up to 30 volts - great for powering external drives, mixers and other devices without another power brick.
On the new 13″ unibody MacBook Pro FireWire has returned in an even faster 800Mb/s version. An adapter will connect existing 400Mb/s devices.
And on the low-end MacBook? FireWire 400 never went away.
The Storage Bits take
The econoclypse has sobered up Cupertino: Microsoft’s campaign made price an issue that Apple couldn’t ignore. And they didn’t.
Apple doesn’t need price parity with Wintel to keep their business healthy and growing. These price drops affect people at the margin: people who wanted a Mac but found the lure of a lower price too tempting. Some of those folks will now buy a ‘Book.
The big lesson is for Microsoft. The marketing adage, “Win on price - lose on price” applies here.
With the iPhone on a major roll and Mac margins that are the envy of the PC world, Apple is well-positioned to play the price game. Macs get top ratings from Consumer Reports because regular folks like them better - if they can afford them.
Longer term, Wintel has no choice but to build better products - or become the General Motors of the PC world.
Comments welcome, of course. Sure, USB claims “480Mb/s” but that’s bidirectional bandwidth. FW400 is faster and FW800 is way faster. But USB 3.0 is coming next year. . . . And BTW, who is shipping those 500GB 7200 rpm notebook drives? Haven’t seen that announcement.
June 8th, 2009
Cut. Scan. Read.
Google books has nothing on me: for months now I’ve been cutting the pages out of old books, scanning them into PDFs, storing them on a hard drive and recycling the paper. OCR makes the text searchable and selectable.
Most important: I’ll never schlep them up a flight of stairs again.
Ripping books. Literally.
I have a sheet-fed scanner - a Fujitsu Scan Snap S510M - which works quickly. It handles about 20 sheets per minute, scanning both sides. A 200 page book takes about 5 minutes to scan.
The problem is turning a bound book into sheets. I’ve been using a utility knife to cut the pages, but I’m hoping to find something quicker - and smaller than a bandsaw.
But the knife only takes a few minutes. In less than 10 minutes I can reduce a bulky 2-3 pound book to a weightless file with all the typography, graphics and even the paper’s color preserved in a PDF.
A target rich environment
I still have books from college and grad school, such as Mendenhall’s Understanding Statistics, the most practical stat book I’ve found. Having it on my computer rather than upstairs on a shelf makes it much more usable.
Many books get occasional reference use, and they are all top candidates for the cut/scan/read treatment. Hardcover books also can be cut up, scanned and reglued, or so it is claimed.
There are non-destructive scanners but my point is to get rid of the book after it is scanned. For college students the point is to avoid paying high textbook prices.
I’m not saying they should have scanned those books, but I understand.
The Storage Bits take
Buckminster Fuller used to talk about the ephemeralization of the physical, the logical outcome of “doing more with less.” We are still caught up in the physicality of media, from the 10 Commandment’s stone tablets to the soothing solidity of a book-lined wall.
But the downloading iTunes generation has moved past that. You want a greener society? Stop cutting down trees and lugging books around.
Me? I just want to save my back the next time I move.
Comments welcome, of course.
May 25th, 2009
The $17.5 million hard drive
Some employers think they own you when all they’re doing is renting your time. It cost 1 company $17.5 million to learn that stealing an employee’s hard drive is really, really stupid.
It’s about time.
Wha’ happened?
An RV sales manager was hired by an RV manufacturer Forest River, told he was going to get a big raise “later,” and when he realized “later” meant “never” started looking for a new job.
The cheapskate company didn’t even provide a notebook, so the guy used his own to build an 11 state sales network, as well as software for tracking sales. When the company Prez got wind that the guy was looking - and before firing him - the Prez stole his notebook, took the hard drive and erased all the files.
The Prez thought the sales manager was going to steal company secrets and figured that was all the justification he needed. He figured wrong.
In the meantime the RV builder got bought by the v deep-pocketed Berkshire Hathaway holding company for legendary investor Warren Buffet.
Wha’ happened then?
The sales manager was a believable witness - despite popular prejudice, most good salesmen are believable - and the jury awarded him his lost sales commissions, $7 million in punitive damages against the RV company and $8 million in punitive damages against the RV company president and founder.
Ouch!
The Storage Bits take
Most companies aren’t as stupid and cheap as Forest River was. They’ll buy the notebook you use and have you sign a non-disclosure agreement.
When you use a company computer you have NO privacy and NO right to the personal data you store on it. Whether you think your job is secure or not, back up your personal data including pictures, contacts and emails.
Comments welcome, of course. Learn more about this case and employee rights generally at Ellen Simon’s Employee Rights Post blog.
May 19th, 2009
RAIDfail: Don't use RAID 5 on small arrays
Big storage companies stopped recommending RAID 5 a couple of years ago. But I still see small 4-drive arrays touting RAID 5 for home and small office use.
Big mistake. You want to save money, but you also want to keep your data. RAID 5 isn’t worth it.
What’s the problem?
The problem is that RAID 5 only protects against a single disk failure. But SATA drives are spec’d at one Unrecoverable Read Error (URE) every ~12.5 TB.
Let’s do the math.
In a small 4 drive array using 2 TB disks, if you lose a disk you have 6 TB - 3 drives - of remaining capacity. That includes the parity data used to reconstruct the data lost on the failed drive.
Reading through that 6 TB you have a better than 40% chance of encountering an URE - and at that point the disk rebuild will stop since the RAID controller doesn’t have the information it needs to reconstruct your data.
Then you pull out your backup copies. You have backups, right?
How to use a small RAID array.
4-drive arrays have lots of advantages: cost; performance (with FireWire or eSATA) fast enough for HD video editing; and portability.
But if you care about your data, RAID 5 is too big a threat. And if you don’t mind risking your data - as in performance driven apps like video editing where the data copies are on tape or another disk - RAID 0 (striping) is cheaper and faster.
Most small arrays come with a RAID 1 (mirroring) option that copies your data to 2 different disks. Lose 1 and the other should have it - subject to the occasional URE.
If you want availability and better performance use RAID 1+0 - often abbreviated RAID 10 - which combines mirroring and striping to provide 2 complete copies of your data with the performance of 2 striped drives.
The Storage Bits take
The attraction of RAID 5 is that it gives you 3 drives worth of capacity on a 4 drive array - but at the cost of having to use backups if an URE is encountered. Better to use RAID 1 and get 2/3rds the capacity of RAID 5 with a much lower chance of data loss.
The biggest storage mistake consumers make is to believe that any storage device is 100% safe. It isn’t.
Maintain at least 2 copies of any data you value. If the data is vital, make that 3 copies. And if thinking about RAID levels makes your teeth ache, consider a Drobo or the new Drobo Pro.
Storage is cheap. Use lots.
Comments welcome, of course. Check out an earlier post Why RAID 5 stops working in 2009 for more details on the RAID 5 problem.
May 14th, 2009
The "erotic services" shell game: hypocrisy online
It is memorialized as the world’s oldest profession. The movie Pretty Woman glamorized it. Congressmen and Governors get in trouble over it.
But what it isn’t, is on craigslist anymore. A group of state attorneys general’s have browbeat craigslist into closing the “erotic services” section.
Web 2.0, meet Hypocrisy 1.0. Online storage, meet online censorship.
Oh, and “erotic services” - meet “adult services”
Yup, craigslist is replacing “erotic services” with “adult services.” Which is completely different because - well - because “erotic” sounds fun and “adult” sounds boring.
Your dentist might advertise cheap root canals in “adult services.” Tax prep software. DUI lawyers. Hair implants. Face lifts. Credit card counseling.
Yuck. Double Yuck.
Adult city, you and me . . . .
But if it makes the nation’s attorneys general happy. . . .
Privacy? Get over it.
If Sun’s McNealy is right, we have no privacy on the Internet. For the first time the whole sordid range of human misbehavior - much first documented in the Bible - will be public. In real time.
Then what?
Sick is the new normal?
We’ll either have to pretend that normal human behavior is sick. Or accept that what consenting adults choose to do in private is none of the state’s business.
For all its promise, the Internet may simply enable a new, global prudery and repression. To paraphrase a keen observer of human behavior: “sinners cast the first stone.”
The Storage Bits take
This is a classic shell game played with fig leaves. The state AG’s get to pretend they’re tough on crime while the only thing that’s really changed is a section name on craigslist.
What about crime? As craigslist notes, the assault rate for cl users is much lower than for print classifieds. Criminal predators will use whatever works.
Craigslist has gone above and beyond duty and the law to reduce illegal offers. The most likely outcome though is that someone else takes advantage of cl’s tougher requirements. Like most efforts to control “vice” the AG’s will simply drive it somewhere harder to police.
Comments welcome, of course. Guys: think it can’t happen to you? Read about Belle Gunness, America’s most prolific female serial killer.
May 5th, 2009
Cloud vs sand: Google vs Microsoft
The numbers don’t lie
An independent study found on-site Microsoft apps - Office and Exchange - cost 20x in capital dollars and 5x-6x more than Google Apps on a 3 year Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) basis. How can Microsoft compete?
The debate
Cloud, as in Google apps, and sand, as in locally hosted Microsoft apps, are battling for business mind share. “Cloud is cheaper” say proponents. “Traditional apps are more reliable” say skeptics.
The rub: both are right. The business problem is finding the most cost-effective path given your needs.
No Microsoft or Google money
A Boston company TwinStrata did this study with no funding from Google or Microsoft. TwinStrata sells Clarity AP (Assessment & Planning), that quantifies infrastructure data loss and downtime risks.
Figuring out downtime
People are lousy at estimating the risk of uncommon events. All disk drives fail, yet few back up. SATA RAID 5 is no longer safe, yet people buy it.
But when one solution costs 20x more, it makes sense to take a 2nd look. Clarity AP uses Bayesian analysis to model the reliability and availability of systems, software, networks and operations. You can compare the difference between RAID 5 and 6, or tape and disk backup, or a Tier 1 data center against Amazon’s S3. And much more, such as recovery processes.
Bayesian methods determine the total variability of a group of many subsystems. Virtually forgotten 40 years ago the technique is now widely used. (Here’s a short YouTube video on Bayesian theory and the software.)
Clarity AP figures out the expected availability of a complex system and, by plugging in costs for downtime and data loss, figure out the expected uptime of a configuration and what the downtime cost.
The study focuses on cost and data availability. It assumes that application integration, security, performance and compliance meets minimum business requirements.
It also assumes that you have about 20 employees and use good quality products, such as a NetApp external filer.
The method
Model assumptions
| Daily volume of new email | 100 MB |
| Local copy of email | None |
| Archiving | None |
| Cost per hour of downtime | $500 |
| Cost per GB of data loss | $5,000 |
| Network outage | Lose email access |
Office apps assumptions:
| Daily volume of new documents | 50 MB |
| Local copies of documents | None |
| Cost per hour of downtime | $250 |
| Cost per GB of data loss | $30,000 |
| Network outage | No application access |
The cost of downtime and data loss is critical for assessing cloud vs sand. The Clarity AP software makes it easy to perform sensitivity analysis.
The results
The study looked at four different configurations: 1) Google apps with a single network connection; 2) Google apps with two network connections for added availability; 3) Microsoft Office and Exchange with internal disk storage; and, 4) Office and Exchange with an external storage array.
| Solution | Capital expense | Operating expense | 3 year TCO |
| $1.3k | $10.7k | $33.4k | |
| Google dual network | $1.3k | $17.4k | $53.5k |
| MS internal disk | $27.5k | $40.5k | $148.9k |
| MS external array | $69.1k | $46.5k | $208.8k |
What about risk?
Most new small businesses would stop there: 1/20th the cost of an on-site system is too good to ignore. But what if you are thinking of migrating to Google or your existing system needs replacement?
Here’s how the options cost out when adjusted for risk.
| Solution | Annual risk of downtime | Annual risk of data loss | Adjusted TCO |
| $19.1k | $1k | $93.5k | |
| Google dual network | $13.2k | $1k | $95.9k |
| MS internal disk | $10.2k | $8.6k | $205.3k |
| MS external array | $7.2k | $1.1k | $233.7k |
Note that the dual network option reduces downtime costs, while the external array is much less likely to lose data.
Adjusting for the cloud’s greater downtime Google is less than half the cost of Microsoft. As Google’s availability improves the cost advantage will only grow.
If Google ever figures out how to make their stuff usable by small business owners, Redmond will be a ghost town.
The Storage Bits take
Google will, of course, blow their huge cost advantage over Microsoft. At heart they’re geeks who don’t understand small business. In 20 years they’ll look like Sun does now.
Here are a few of Google’s problems in the SMB arena.
- Privacy suckage. They ask for too much information and aren’t explicit about how information will be used. For example, if you want to use Google calendar you have to upload all your contacts to Google. Why?
- Non-existent support. People are willing to pay for support. Google needs to figure it out. They could, for example, train and credential ISP, VARs and consultants to offer Google Apps support.
- User experience and design. Google’s homepage, designed for minimum bandwidth when most people used modems, was an accidental triumph - but it’s been downhill from there. Marissa Mayer, VP of User Ignorance, is a disaster. Marissa, a word of advice: you’re young, rich and w-a-a-ay too comfortable at Google - go spread your wings at another company and find out if you’re smart or just lucky. Hint: it’s the latter.
The real message of this analysis is that the economics of the Internet have made it a competitive advantage to be small. Capital requirements are minimal - good thing today - and cloud infrastructure + cheap local computes and storage
Comments welcome, of course. I’ve been doing some work for TwinStrata - like the video mentioned above - but the study was their idea. Update:Here’s a link to a 3MB zip of a pdf presentation on the study from StorageMojo.com. End update.
Robin Harris has been messing with computers for over 30 years and selling and marketing data storage for over 20 in companies large and small. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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