October 28th, 2009

Long-term Mozy for Mac review

Posted by Robin Harris @ 5:56 pm

Categories: Infrastructure, Software

Tags: Apple Macintosh, Mozy, Redundancy, Backups, Desktops, Hardware, Robin Harris

I work online and live in a small town 30 miles of 2 lane road from Flagstaff, AZ. I don’t have a lot of options when my infrastructure FUBARs.

Redundancy keeps me up and running. A key piece is 3 backup systems:

1. Hourly Time Machine backups of changed files.
2. Nightly system disk backups to a bootable external drive.
3. Online backup to cloud storage system.

Am I paranoid? When a recent OS upgrade failed due to driver conflicts, I needed 2 of the 3 systems to retrieve all my data. If a backup disk had failed I would have used all 3.

Mozy for Mac
For over 2 years, at my own expense, I used Decho’s Mozy for Mac client to back up critical data - some 40+ GB of it. About 3 months ago I switched to another provider.

Why?

It wasn’t reliable. Worse, after 2+ years, it wasn’t getting more reliable. I kept hoping, not wanting to go through another multi-week data backup, but I gave up after the latest version stopped working for several weeks and 2 reinstalls didn’t fix the problem.

Mozy’s tech support people are uniformly polite and responsive. But if the product doesn’t want to work they can’t do much about it.

A sample size of 1
I want to stress that this is only 1 machine’s experience with Mozy - not a statistically valid study. I have almost 6 TB of disk on a 12 GB Intel quad-core Mac Pro. I capture hundreds of GB of video, surf a lot of websites, run several data collection utilities, support a GigE LAN and use data intensive peripherals such as a fast sheet-fed scanner and a firewire HD camcorder.

I started using Mozy for Mac when it was in beta. After a slow start I gave v1.0 an endorsement of sorts:

I started working with Mozy’s Mac client a year ago, blogged about it for a couple of months (see “Mozy Mac client beta watch” one and deux). But after many continuing bugs and failures I got depressed and stopped.

Progress was slow. Painfully slow.

New! Improved! Now It Works!
Now I can to report that their client is out in v1.0 and it works.

At the time Mozy for Mac had no competition in the $50/yr backup space.

That was then.
It did work, but as the OS upgrades continued, so did the Mozy client problems. The tech support response tended towards “uninstall and reinstall” although they would sometimes ask for logs. Mozy preserved the online data, so data didn’t need a complete backup.

In the meantime some credible competition has arrived in the form of Backblaze and Crashplan. I’ve tried both and they both worked. Now I’m doing a long-term eval of one as a paying customer.

More on that in a future post.

The Storage Bits take
Mozy’s parent company, Decho, was created by EMC, a $15 billion company with 40,000 employees, that also owns Iomega, VMware and RSA. Plenty of software talent and plenty of money to hire anything they needed.

But they couldn’t get the product to work to my satisfaction even though I installed the latest versions, trashed plist files and more. The same problems kept coming up.

It was the lack of progress to stability that finally made me dump Mozy for Mac. After more than 2 years it wasn’t getting better.

Which meant it was getting worse. And that isn’t acceptable in a back up product.

Comments welcome, of course.

October 25th, 2009

Mac ZFS is dead: RIP.

Posted by Robin Harris @ 11:34 pm

Categories: Infrastructure, Software

Tags: NetApp Inc., Apple Macintosh, Sun Microsystems Inc., File System, Apple Inc., Mac ZFS, Current File System, Storage, Hardware, Robin Harris

PC file system progress stalled this week with the news on MacOSforge that Apple’s ZFS project is dead.

ZFS Project Shutdown 2009-10-23
The ZFS project has been discontinued. The mailing list and repository will also be removed shortly.

ZFS, developed by Sun engineers, is the first 21st century file system. NTFS and HFS+ are firmly rooted in the 1980s. ZFS has a lot of cool features:

• End-to-end data integrity. Current file systems are prone to many problems - ranging from phantom writes to inconsistent error-handling - that mess up your data. The ZFS architecture eliminated them with parent block checksums.
• Pooled storage. Add a drive and it adds extra capacity, not another volume. Less management.
• No need for journaling. Which is one problem Solid State Drives don’t handle well. Get rid of it and SSDs work better.
• Built-in RAID that is as fast as hardware RAID. Get data protection for a lower cost.
• Low-cost snapshot copy. As a copy-on-write system, ZFS can create new snapshots - once an hour, minute or second - with low CPU and storage overhead. Cruise back in time to just before the virus hit, recover, and life is good.

Apple announced in June ‘08 that Snow Leopard server would support ZFS. But things came apart early this year.

What happened?
Jeff Bonwick, ZFS architect, posted Saturday on an earlier quoted comment:

> Apple can currently just take the ZFS CDDL code and incorporate it
> (like they did with DTrace), but it may be that they wanted a “private
> license” from Sun (with appropriate technical support and
> indemnification), and the two entities couldn’t come to mutually
> agreeable terms.

I cannot disclose details, but that is the essence of it.

Jeff

Indemnification?
Sun is being sued by NetApp, a $3B enterprise storage company, claiming that ZFS infringes on NetApp patents. If NetApp won, Apple would find itself in a tough position unless Sun shouldered the financial damage. That’s indemnification.

Sun has made a (IMHO) strong case that NetApp’s patents should be invalidated by prior art. But with all their other problems and the Oracle purchase it was a headache they and Oracle didn’t need.

Where does Apple go from here?
Apple has hired some smart file system engineers and wants to hire more to work on “state-of-the-art file system technologies for Mac OS X.”

But writing new file systems isn’t easy. It takes 5-7 years for a new file system to achieve the maturity needed to support large-scale deployment.

So if Apple is starting from scratch we have a long wait for real innovation to appear. Like Mac OS XII.

What about Microsoft?
Redmond’s file system gurus are well aware of NTFS issues. And under the covers they are making stepwise enhancements to the architecture and implementation.

But as the NTFS and HFS+ architectures age and the pace of storage innovation increases the gap between what is and what could be grows. It’s like putting a 1001 hp Bugatti engine in a Model T: the power is there but you can’t use it.

The Storage Bits take
This kind of cock-up makes me hate software patents - but that’s another post. As long as law allows companies will try to enforce them.

NetApp missed a golden opportunity to raise their visibility in the consumer market by cutting a deal with Apple directly. “NetApp is powering Apple’s advanced storage technologies” would make the company a lot more visible outside the enterprise market.

NetApp is a good company, but they’ve lost their way lately. Note to new CEO Tom Georgens: with EMC moving aggressively into the consumer space you don’t have forever to reposition NetApp for a consumer-driven world.

Steve Jobs doesn’t get storage. Consumers are generating masses of video and photos at an accelerating pace - and they’ll need reliable, available and dirt-easy storage. Lots of it.

Until the Next New Thing in file systems rolls out of Cupertino, Redmond or, maybe, Redwood City, consumers will stuck with too many BSODs, missing and corrupted files and app crashes. Let’s hope we don’t have to wait too many more years.

Comments welcome, of course. Update:There’s now a Google Code page for MacZFS.

September 14th, 2009

4 reasons NOT to upgrade to Snow Leopard today

Posted by Robin Harris @ 4:26 pm

Categories: Software

Tags: Apple Macintosh, Snow Leopard, Chances, ScanSnap, Desktops, Hardware, Robin Harris

Upgrading to a new dot release of Mac OS X is almost a no-brainer. The dot releases typically offer better security, more stability and — maybe — a few new features. Apple’s record of high quality dot releases means that for most users when Software Update says there are updates, you do.

But Snow Leopard isn’t like that. Under the hood it is a very different beast than the Leopard version of Mac OS 10. If you make money with your Mac, make haste slowly.

4 reasons not to upgrade to Snow Leopard today:

1. You have a PowerPC Mac.
Snow Leopard won’t run on PowerPC-based Macs. Apple claims 80% of Mac users are running on Intel today. If true most of the remaining 20% live in my town.

Two friends, a filmmaker and a photographer, make their living off their PowerPC based Macs — one of which is 8 years old — and they don’t see a reason to change. And I don’t blame them.

2. You are in the middle of the project.
Why tempt fate? While Snow Leopard has great technology under the hood and some nifty interface tweaks it isn’t a game changer for day-to-day work.

Chances are good you won’t have any problems updating the Snow Leopard. But if you make money on your Mac wait until you have some free time to upgrade and check out Snow Leopards new capabilities.

3. You run your office on the Mac.
I love my Fujitsu ScanSnap S510M scanner but the scanner driver doesn’t love Snow Leopard. I could probably get along with the manual workaround outlined on the Fujitsu website, but Snow Leopard isn’t compelling enough to make it worth the trouble.

The ScanSnap is just one piece of equipment. I haven’t had any problems with my Wacom tablet or my HD camcorder. But if you use low-volume USB accessories - or an old printer - go to the vendor’s website and check driver compatibility.

4. You use RAID storage.
I’ve been testing the Apricorn PCIe raid array. When I installed Snow Leopard the OS noted that that driver for the array was not compatible and put it in a special folder. Fine.

But there were two problems with that. First, and most obvious, the array was no longer available. I’d guessed that and wasn’t concerned. But the second problem was more serious. The array driver kept causing kernel panics.

A kernel panic on a Mac causes a gray window shade to descend on your display with a note in 5 languages that says reboot your system. Everything stops.

It isn’t pretty.

Take precautions.
That last problem FUBAR’d my system. So I decided to reinstall Leopard.

It wasn’t simple. I did a clean system install and used Migration Assistant to migrate my data back from my daily bootable disk clone - which saved my bacon.

One key problem: Snow Leopard’s Mail updates your mail folders to a new format. It isn’t backward compatible with Leopard Mail. If you don’t have a 10.5 copy you are hosed.

Protect your data.
If you earn your living on a Mac there are 2 precautions to take before upgrading to Snow Leopard. True, 99% of the time you won’t have a problem. But if you do you’ll be glad you did these two things. I was.

Time Machine should be enabled. Time Machine is Apple’s cool backup tool that snapshots your system every hour to an external disk. Best to have at several days of snapshots on your Time machine backup disk.

Make a clone of your system disk just prior to the upgrade. Either Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper will do it and both are free for casual use.

If the upgrade burps you’ll be able to do a clean install of Leopard and use Migration Assistant to restore files, folders, network settings and other preferences.

The Storage Bits take
Apple has compiled an enviable record of trouble-free operating system updates, especially in the dot releases. While the huge majority of Leopard users have encountered no problems upgrading to Snow Leopard, if you rely on your Mac to make your living you should take precautions before the upgrade.

My data protection plan includes three backup systems: hourly Time Machine snapshots; a daily disc clone: and remote online backup. I used 2 of them to recover from the failed upgrade.

I almost never use them but this weekend I needed both to finish a project. Most of Snow Leopard’s enhancements are keyed to developers not end-users. There is no reason to rush to upgrade.

And every reason to protect your data.

Comments welcome, of course.

September 1st, 2009

Build a RAID 6 array for $100/TB

Posted by Robin Harris @ 10:36 am

Categories: Disk drives, Infrastructure, RAID, Software

Tags: RAID, Storage, Hardware, Robin Harris

Imagine storage that didn’t cost much more than bare drives. High density storage with RAID 6 - double-fault - protection, reasonable bandwidth and web-friendly HTTPS access.

And really, really cheap.

Not your enterprise’s RAID array
Raw disk cost is only 5-10% of an enterprise RAID system’s cost. The rest goes for corporate jets, sales commissions, tradeshows, sheetmetal, 2 Intel x86 mobos, obscene profits and some pale and blinking engineers in a windowless lab who make it work.

But what if you don’t want 4-color brochures or the barely-clad booth babes. What if you just want cheap economical and reliable storage?

You aren’t running the global financial system - what’s left of it anyway - or a 500 person call center. But you want enough redundancy so it will stay up until morning.

Meet the Storage Pod
You aren’t the only one. Backblaze, a new online backup provider, designed the Storage Pod for their own use and are sharing it with everyone. They aren’t selling it - that’s where the build comes from - so they aren’t trying to get rich off you.

Here’s what it looks like:

Here’s an exploded diagram with a simplified BOM:

And then there’s the (free) software. 64-bit Debian Linux, IBM’s open source JFS file system and HTTPS access. Simply stated each file gets a URL. Put a web server in front of it and serve the world - or just your home.

The Storage Bits take
Many applications just need a big bucket that doesn’t cost $5,000/TB. This is it.

You can build it yourself, but it is probably more complex than a high-end gamer system. Download the 3D SolidWorks files and have Protocase build you 1 or 500 of the boxes.

But the density is good, the performance is reasonable, the availability is decent and the price is right. This is a DC-3, not a 747. It is all you need for the right application.

And at $100/TB you can mirror all your data 2 or 3 or 4 times if you need more availability - and still be way less than half the cost of name brand arrays. Get the details from the Backblaze blog.

Comments welcome, of course. BTW, I’m trying out their free trial Mac online backup - at least one of the founders worked at Apple - and I’ll let you know how it goes. I don’t have a business relationship with them either, in case you’re wondering.

August 30th, 2009

Snow Leopard fixes disk capacity bug

Posted by Robin Harris @ 2:12 pm

Categories: Disk drives, Software

Tags: Disk, Capacity, Storage, Hardware, Robin Harris

When will Microsoft follow?
It is a common question: why does my computer say a 1,000 GB drive is only 932 GB? What happened to the other 68 GB I paid for?

Actually, you have every byte you bought. But because operating systems report storage capacity in base 2 rather than the official base 10 the numbers look short.

And as drives get bigger, the “shortage” gets bigger:

Table from Your capacity will vary

Main memory is measured in base 2 as well - 1 KB of RAM is actually 1024 bytes - because most processors access memory in base 2 chunks - 8, 16, 32 or 64 bits - and it simplifies the internal math to use the same base 2 that the processor uses.

But disks are just a box of bytes that can be formatted many different ways. For example, a vendor can choose to store data in 20-bit chunks - 16 for data and 4 for extra ECC - which reduces the available capacity but not the raw capacity that disk vendor shipped.

The Apple fix
In Snow Leopard MacOS 10.6 storage capacity is now reported the way storage vendors specify it: in base 10. Snow Leopard will report the same capacity that the drive vendor shipped.

Of course, some capacity is used for formatting and other capacity may be used for files that are normally kept invisible. But at least the capacity the operating system reports and the capacity you thought you were buying will now match.

The Storage Bits take
Over the last 25 years, ever since hard drives started becoming common on PCs, curious users have been confused by the capacity reporting anomaly. Apple’s simple fix is one small but important step towards making data storage user friendly.

Some may argue that this wasn’t a bug, that the reporting was correct and the people wrong. But that isn’t the way it works in a consumer-driven world: if it isn’t right for the people using the system, it isn’t right. Get over it.

Update: Many commenters are arguing that mega, giga, tera etc. are base 2 metrics. Sorry for shouting but YOU ARE WRONG!

SI, IEC and IEEE have all specified, some starting over 10 years ago, that mega, giga, tera etc. are base 10 metrics. If you want base 2 you need to specify it with prefixes like kibi.

So man up, flush your stale cache and join the 21st century. I’ll ignore the slurs on my credibility for now, but don’t let it happen again. End update.

Comments welcome, of course. That’s right, officially MB is base 10, while MiB is base 2. Read the official Apple knowledge base article here.

August 28th, 2009

Apple kicks ZFS in the butt

Posted by Robin Harris @ 9:02 pm

Categories: RAID, Software

Tags: File System, Apple Inc., Sun-developed ZFS, ZFS, Robin Harris

It’s official: ZFS - a kick-butt file system - is nowhere to be seen in the latest release of Mac OS X, Snow Leopard. Even though it appeared in 10.5 Server, and was expected to become the default file system at some point, Apple has abandoned the Sun-developed ZFS, the first 21st century file system.

A bummer for anyone who stores data on their computer.

Why should I care?
Apple is hoping you don’t - and they’re probably right. None of the mainstream press have mentioned dropped feature, even though it is right up there with parallel processing support as a winner for users.

ZFS combines a file system and a volume manager, along with some cool architectural features, to create an easily managed and highly reliable file system. Advanced features that just work.

Some cool features.

• Manage storage, not disks. You can put all your disks in a pool and specify the redundancy level. ZFS takes care of the rest.
• No more silent data corruption.Wonky things can happen to your data to and from a disk. ZFS checksums every file before it is written and stores the checksum on the parent. When the file is read, the checksum tells the filesystem if that is the block it wrote.
• Easy snapshots. Ever wish you could roll back to a known good state? Snapshots make that easy and ZFS makes snapshots easy.
• High performance software RAID built-in. Worried about protecting your data. ZFS provides strong RAID capabilities without adding hardware.
• Transparent compression on the fly. Save capacity by compressing old and/or large files automagically.

What happened?
2 years ago it looked like ZFS was locked in to Snow Leopard. The Apple team was working with the Sun ZFS team. It was enabled as a read-only file system on 10.5 server. Apple even freakin’ announced ZFS on Snow Leopard. The advantages - to storage geeks - were obvious.

Plus the opportunity to put daylight between OS X and Windows 7. Microsoft’s ambitions for something called WinFS crashed to earth 3 years ago (see Bring me the head of WinFS.

But Apple started walking back ZFS about 9 months ago. Newer builds of Snow Leopard had less and less ZFS content until today’s official release - which has none.

Maybe some insight will emerge from secretive Apple, but don’t count on it. Removing ZFS from the server edition, where it makes even more obvious sense, suggests it is gone for good.

What did it in? Maybe it was a schedule problem - file systems require a lot of testing - and rewriting all the other bits took precedence. NIH - Not Invented Here - syndrome is another possibility. Or perhaps the uncertainty of Sun’s future led Apple to pull back.

Or maybe they just decided customers wouldn’t know enough to care, so why bother? Whatever the reason it is a major step backwards for the PC industry.

The Storage Bits take
File systems are essential but unsexy plumbing. Whether it’s a missing or corrupted file or a system slowing to a crawl because the directory is bloated, there is no error message that says “Your FS is screwed up.”

And as noted in How Microsoft puts your data at risk - which indicted Apple’s HFS+ as well -

. . . more than half of all data loss is caused by system and hardware problems. A high quality file system that took better care of our data could eliminate many of those failures.

The industry knows how to fix the problems. The question is when. With a resurgent Mac pushing ZFS maybe Redmond will see the light sooner, rather than later, and dramatically increase the reliability of all our systems.

With Apple’s retreat from ZFS everyone who uses a personal computer is the loser. Maybe the Microsoft team working to improve NTFS will now take the lead in file system quality and feature.

Comments welcome, of course. Update: I got some more theories over the weekend on why the ZFS deal fell through. Check them out on StorageMojo. The short answer: licensing; GPL vs CDDL. End update.

July 26th, 2009

The Wintel blue light special

Posted by Robin Harris @ 8:18 am

Categories: Marketing, Software

Tags: Wintel, Apple Macintosh, Apple MacBook, Apple Inc., Price, Sales Strategy, Notebooks, Sales, Hardware, Notebooks & Tablets

Attention MSmart shoppers.
Wintel’s results are in the toilet and Apple’s surpassed estimates. Despite Microsoft’s sassy Laptop Hunter ads, Apple sold more Macs than anyone expected. Want to know why?

Win on price, lose on price
Behind the engaging little customer stories in the Microsoft ads there is one simple message: “Windows notebooks are cheaper than Apple notebooks.” Cheaper, not better.

No wins in speed, security, quality, weight, comfort, coolness, or whatever. They just cost less. That’s it.

Which is wonderful. But it gives Apple a simple response: cut prices.

In June they did. And sales soared.

How much? Wall Street’s consensus estimate was 200,000 Macs below the actual sales. Since the price cuts came in the last 3 weeks of the quarter - and sales were presumably lagging - the cuts up’d Mac sales by ≈300,000.

If the economy stays steady - and I doubt we’ve seen the worst of it - Apple could ship a record-breaking 3.5 million Macs this quarter. And if they release a $799 MacBook, even more.

Not big cuts either.
It didn’t take much. The cuts ranged from $100 to $800 - plus some added features.

For the entry level 13″ MacBook Pro they added features - FireWire, 9400M graphics and 7 hour battery - and dropped the price almost 8% or $100. On the entry-level 15″ they dropped the price $300, or 15%.

Those prices are still way higher than the average Wintel notebook. Even with the cuts Apple’s gross margin - the difference between product cost and sale price - jumped to 36.3%, or more than 3 percentage points higher than they’d forecast.

Translation: Apple can cut prices further. Expect the next move to be an $899, or even $799 machine. The long-rumored tablet or a cost-reduced MacBook? Either would work.

The Storage Bits take
Microsoft seems to have forgotten why it is in business: to build great software. Not video games, cellphones, advertising or music players.

They spend $10 billion a year on R&D. Many of world’s top computer scientists and software engineers work there. There’s almost nothing they can’t do in software.

And yet. We get the Vista fiasco and Zunes. A security soap-opera starring you as the victim. Billions poured into business distractions like online advertising. MSN. MSNBC. Anti-trust violations. Patent infringements.

And the only thing they can say is “notebooks running our software are cheaper?” Sad.

Update: Some commenters are confused. I’m not saying that Wintel can’t claim anything beyond cheaper. But that is all the ads claim. Stay tuned for an upcoming post on the subject. End update.

Comments welcome, of course.

July 8th, 2009

Chrome OS: good for you; bad for Microsoft

Posted by Robin Harris @ 9:34 am

Categories: Marketing, Software

Tags: Google Inc., Operating System, Microsoft Corp., Netbook, Netbooks, Nettops & MIDs, Linux, Operating Systems, Hardware, Software, Robin Harris

Google’s latest announcement is good news for all computer users. It helps loosen Microsoft’s death grip on the PC market and promises lower prices, higher reliability and smarter design.

Unpacking Google’s announcement
This announcement was carefully calculated - not an over-caffeinated coder’s late-night howl.

• Timing. Note the 12-18 month delivery: they’ve been watching how M$ freezes the market with “strategic” pre-annoucements.
• Pricing. Free, as in open-source. M$ will have to fight for every dollar from netbook makers. Google should be handing out “Chrome OS” coffee cups to every M$ OEM starting with HP and Dell.
• Target. Developers: “For application developers, the web is the platform. . . . [it will give] developers the largest user base of any platform.”
• Goal. “. . . computers need to get better.” More like a big smartphone and less like a server - a clear swipe at M$.
• Market. “. . . small netbooks to full-size desktop systems.” Google is generously ceding the server OS market to M$ and Linux - for now.

Low-end becomes mid-range
As noted in Windows kicks Linux to the curb, it is costly for M$ to defend Windows pricing at the low-end. On a 99¢ netbook even $5 for the OS is a problem. The uncoordinated Linux assault on Windows has fizzled out, but Google has the money and the presence to reignite the competition.

And competition is a Good Thing.

The Storage Bits take
As Moore’s Law and economies of scale make it possible for a $200 netbook to do what most folks need, the lucrative OEM OS market will start to dry up. Microsoft will have to decide between clawing for OS dollars or protecting their Office franchise.

They’ll be wise to choose the latter, but old habits - and revenue streams - die hard. Consumer operating systems should be low-cost commodities, and the Chrome OS is a step in the right direction.

Today’s personal computers - including Macs - are about where cars were in the 1930’s: funky 2-speed automatics; manual chokes; flaky brakes; hinky electrical systems; vapor lock; but hey! you don’t have to crank start them hand load the boot program. The industry has a long way to go.

Comments welcome, of course. History note: there is an older GCOS, influenced by the Multics OS that inspired Unix, the General Comprehensive Operating System. Almost 50 years old, it is still running on some mainframes in emulation.

July 1st, 2009

Why Windows 7 should be free

Posted by Robin Harris @ 6:49 am

Categories: Marketing, Software

Tags: Microsoft Windows Vista, Microsoft Corp., Microsoft Windows 7, Microsoft Windows Vista (Longhorn), Operating Systems, Microsoft Windows, Software, Robin Harris

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.

May 5th, 2009

Cloud vs sand: Google vs Microsoft

Posted by Robin Harris @ 10:08 pm

Categories: Infrastructure, Software

Tags: Google Inc., Google Apps, Network, Data Loss, Downtime, Microsoft Corp., Business Problem, TwinStrata, SATA RAID 5, Capital Requirement

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

Office apps assumptions:

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.

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.

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.

1. 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?
2. 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.
3. 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.