R3Ware, Inc. / Robert R. Randall

I’m beginning to suspect that one of the reasons I’m loving my MacBook Pro is that VMware Fusion is such a great product.  I use a lot of virtual machines for cross platform work and for testing networking protocols.  My advise to VMware; make a version of Fusion for Windows 7.  VMware Workstation is very sad when compared to Fusion.  I would happily buy Fusion for Windows 7.  I do that much troubleshooting across multiple platforms that it would be well worth it.  And I’m trying to consolidate my world down to one workstation grade machine and my MacBook Pro.  But I will NOT pay the crazy prices for a Mac Pro tower.  Those are nuts.

While the speed improvements and saved disk space are nice Apple sure missed the mark when it comes to coordinating with the rest of the commercial software world.  I’m having nothing but troubles with plugins for Safari and with running FireFox and plugins for it.  This really isn’t that hard to coordinate.  Apple, quit being so ‘black ops’ about things like this and get your ecosystem on board early with these changes.  It makes you look very bush league and foolish when end users run into these types of problems.  You’re supposed to be the ‘it just works’ platform.  Well, you missed the mark with 10.6.  It doesn’t ‘just work’ but it does do a great job of crashing browsers including Safari.  Please do better next time, or do I have to start running Windows 7?

For those of you out there looking for a RAID stack for embedded applications there appears to be clear momentum behind using the Linux MD RAID stack with hardware acceleration. Both AMCC and Intel have I/O processors that support enhance the MD RAID stack with hardware assisted speed improvements using XOR engines and extra DMA engines. Very lovely stuff if you’re looking for an I/O chip for a RAID application. Linux has support for all of the major interconnects (Ethernet, FCP, Infiniband) with driver support for the popular chips (see SCST project). Building a RAID controller with one of these options appears more like an integration task than a build it yourself task. At least from the vantage point of this software and firmware author.This is a wake up call to all of the old style RAID vendors that still believe their RAID stacks are the crown jewels of the product line. RAID as a feature is a commodity item but isn’t really priced like one at the moment. If we start to see real product in the space that is taking advantage of these building blocks expect some price pressure on the legacy RAID vendors. Storage goodness just keeps getting cheaper and cheaper and that needs to continue for some time to come.

I’m doing some work again with Intel XScale IOP (ARM) processors.  I have to give a shout out to Macraigor for updating their support tools to integrate with Eclipse.  The combination of the two make for a very useful integrated IDE for firmware development work.  Being able to step through RedBoot code in the IDE’s debugger has reduced cycle times immensely.  Thanks Macraigor and the Eclipse teams.  And thanks for making it all available on current Linux distributions.  I’m not a fan of the Windows/Cygwin/etc/etc environment; too difficult to share.  Now I can setup a single Linux server with several JTAGs attached and everyone can use the same toolset while only one of us has to handle the hassle of getting it all installed, configured, and working.  Less setup time + well integrated tools =  more productivity and less wasted time.  And that’s a good thing…

My 2007 vintage MacBook Pro was starting to feel a bit sluggish.  Running several virtual machines under Fusion and doing work at the same time caused just too much stress on the disk i/o and 4GB of RAM.  So I went and did some research and did some upgrades.  I now have a 128GB SSD with the 2nd generation Samsung controller in it and it is amazingly fast.  I also discovered that I could upgrade the machine to 6GB of RAM.  It took some searching to find the right part but it was well worth the effort.  The machine is almost never disk i/o bound, even when swapping, and the extra memory makes a BIG difference when running VMs.  Much happiness for this old geek.  I also plunged into Snow Leopard which also helps since it does conserve some memory and disk space.  Long live my MacBook – it has to, it was not cheap

I’m an agnostic when it comes to operating systems.  I don’t possess the religious ferment present in a lot of us geeks as to the ‘best’ OS nor do I believe in the ‘free is always best’ mantra of the open source zealots.  But this is starting to feel political so I better move on…

I’ve been running Windows 7 RC on my desktop for a while now and I must confess that is has been a refreshing experience, especially when compared to Windows Vista.  Windows 7 has been reliable, fast, and even pleasant.  No strange networking behavior.  No driver uglies.  It just works and doesn’t get in the way.  I’m running 64bit Windows 7 RC on an Intel Core 2 Quad 2.4GHz with 6GB RAM and I’ve yet to push the box at all.  It always has plenty of spare resources.  Dare I write that Windows 7 is more efficient?  Oh gosh, I guess I did .

 Best of luck with your Windows 7 endeavors.  So far mine have been pleasant and pain free.  And for a Windows OS RC experience that is a new result, at least for me.

Yikes, so here we go…  We need to give the least transparent and least accountable entity with the most control over our economy more power without restrictions or transparency.  That sounds like a great idea, doesn’t it?  NO!  IT DOES NOT.  The Federal Reserve does not need more power and giving it more power without forcing transparency on decision making will leave us with more closed door decisions that benefit Wall Street at the expense of the tax payer.  NO THANKS!!

 Oh yeah, and we need another regulator to oversee financial instruments marketed to consumers to make sure they are safe.  Hey, keep that lead paint out of my mortgage!  Another massive bureaucracy funded by our tax dollars with little or no accountability and no firewall between duty to the consumer and political pressures from the beltway.  Yes sir may I have another!  But it feels so good when it stops!

What we really need and many independent analysts agree is real reform.  The regulatory system in place today is a patchwork of incomprehensible junk built up over years and years of patching a system designed for the economy that existed six decades ago.  It ALL need to be rethought, simplified, and firewalled from politics.  But, of course, when those in charge benefit from the current system, this type of reform is dead on arrival.

Ah well, the very very very very slow pace of democracy when campaign cycles drive decision making.  It is just as bad as the myopic quarterly obsessions of publicly traded companies.  The Democrats have one year to get something meaningful accomplished.  After that, we’ll be back to gridlock over the midterm elections and then the next Presidential cycle. 

What a mess.

Well I’m drooling a bit over the new MacBook Pro models.  I happen to love the design, support and build quality of the notebooks as well as the stability of the platform.  The new models that can hold 8GB of DDR3 along with an SSD for storage should be really fast and very very lovely for running lots of virtual machines and avoiding the pain of waiting on disk i/o.  Come on, a 5400 RPM drive is way to slow for power users.  But an SSD, now we’re getting somewhere.

cnet’s Apple Byte has some info after you get past the iPhone hype.

I’ve been spending a fair amount of time working with Microsoft’s storage management enhancements.  These include the Virtual Disk Service (VDS), Multi-path I/O (MPIO), iSCSI, iSNS, and the Volume Shadow-copy Service (VSS).  If you’re not familiar with these don’t worry.  Use your favorite search engine or the Microsoft corporate site to learn more.  They are all quite useful and add more value to what is in the box when you purchase a Window Server version.

I’ve implemented VDS and VSS hardware providers, MPIO DSMs, iSCSI targets, and management tools for all of the above.  If you need assistance with any of these technologies please feel free to contact me.  I’m always happy to answer quick questions and my offer advice.

And of course, I’m always interested in new business.

I’ve been spending some of my time implementing the storage vendor supplied widget that fits into Microsoft’s MPIO solution.  MPIO is short for Multi-path I/O.  What is that?  It is the ability to have more than one physical connection to your storage device.  Why would you want that?  For redundancy and performance.  The concept and storage vendor specific implementations have been around for a long time.  Microsoft first introduced MPIO as an add-on available only from storage vendors as part of Windows Server 2003.  Microsoft then decided to add it to the OS distribution in Windows Server 2008.  So if you are running 2008, you have it.  The storage vendor supplies a widget called the Device Specific Module (DSM).  The DSM is responsible for selecting which path an i/o request (think read or write) will take to the storage device.  Now this can be a bit complex in large Storage Area Networks (SANs) and it can be very simple in directly attached SAS drives.  Remember SAS drives have two ports, not one like the old parallel SCSI drives.  So every SAS drive is capable of taking advantage of MPIO. Check out Microsoft’s FAQ.
If you’re trying the new Windows Server 2008 R2 check out this. for the latest information. There are also command line tools for when you’re using Server Core.

So if you have specific questions regarding MPIO and would like a second opinion or an independent (I’m not a Microsoft employee) opinion feel free to toss questions at this post or at my email address (see Sales tab).

It feels like I know just about all there is to know about the moving parts in this solution and how to effectively manage it in large environments.

Check out my blogroll, there are a few Microsoft blogs worth catching if you’re working on understanding what this is and how to take advantage of it.  It offers some goodness in-box that usually costs a lot of extra money from the storage vendors.  So be careful to ask your array vendor if they support Microsoft’s MPIO and if support costs extra.  It just might save you a few thousand dollars per host which is nothing to take lightly these days.