Total Immersion

I had a bit of a screwdriver couple of days this weekend, building (or, in modern flat-pack parlance) assembling a bed, and also replacing the hard drive in my Archos 340 (AV300 series) audio/video jukebox. This latter task had been a while coming, as my music collection alone now takes up 48GB - the straw that broke the camel’s back was inheriting a collection of classical CD’s from a good friend. These are now digitised and the originals stowed, leaving me the listening pleasure but also causing difficulty in knowing what to store, where.

So, I finally succumbed and purchased a 160GB hard drive. There’s quite a lot of information on the Web about upgrading an Archos AV300 series - thanks guys - the one thing I didn’t know was whether it could take a 160GB, though I had read reports of success with the 120GB drives. Answer: no it can’t - I now have a 125GB partition for stuff the Archos can play, and a 35GB partition for various videos it cannot. Live and, through a number of attempts at reformatting, learn (second answer: accept the first partition size the Archos proposes, around 128GB I think).

Having then spent a slow and boring time transferring files from the RAID box to the Archos, I now have a bunch of films recorded from the TV, the aforementioned 48Gb of music and our entire digital collection of family photos. I don’t know if I am now in that gadget honeymoon period (you know, when anything new seems really, really useful) but it is quite remarkable what a difference it can make to have everything in one place. There are some films, for example, that I have been meaning to watch ever since they were recorded - but now I might actually do so, given the fact they are conveniently placed on the jukebox, rather than stuck away somewhere on the server. Right now I’m listening to a bit of Dvorak on a long-haul flight, you can guarantee I couldn’t have done without the new drive.

It takes me back to my IT manager days, when we seemed to be forever struggling against a tide of data. The answer would invariably be the same - to adopt coping strategies for as long as possible before planning in some downtime and going through a consolidation exercise. Things would be great for a while, before eventually our best-laid plans would give way to the pressures referred to by my previous boss Rob Hailstone as “the wardrobe principle.”

Perhaps the worst example of this was caused quite ironically from having too much storage. Sun Microsystems, in their infinite generosity supplied a batch of 40 SS10 workstations with an equal number of - if my memory serves me correctly - external 400 MB drives. At first we were daunted and gleeful in equal measure - this was free stuff, after all - but over time the discs became incorporated into the IT environment. Oracle was a hungry beast, not just because of the database sizes but the number of test instances we needed to run.

For a period there was no problem that couldn’t be solved without throwing extra disk space at it. After a while however, the disks that had held so much promise became a burden of their own, and we had to consolidate things down again.

Still, and no doubt like things will turn out for my newly rejuvenated Archos, it was nice while it lasted.

P.S. Incidentally, a note for Archos lovers - the trick with bending back (carefully) the battery contacts, as remarked upon in a number of places on the Web, really does work to restore battery life. Thanks again!

Funnily enough it was only today that I was recounting a tale to goodman David, about a formative experience I had a few years ago when two hippy friends of mine decided to divorce. It took me a while to reconcile this - after all, I thought, if hippies were so laid back and peace loving, surely they’d just get on?

And so it is when I see people like Dave Hitz and Jonathan Schwarz in a spat. Admittedly I’ve never met Jonathan, but from what I’ve heard about him he’s a regular guy, who just happens to run a rather big IT company - and he sports a pony tail. I’ve met Dave on a couple of occasions through the years, and he’s come across as a regular guy as well. As in a divorce situation, I know I have to be grown up and recognise that (a) books shouldn’t be judged by their covers, and (b) there’s probably an element of truth on both sides.

The story seems to have unfolded something like this:

- many years ago, NetApp decided to build a storage box based on available technologies, and stick some clever IP into the I/O layer while leaving the processing layer as a reliable, if back ward overseer - I seem to remember the expression “trailing edge” technology being banded about, not in a negative sense but as opposed to “bleeding edge” - including such stalwarts as the NFS protocol.

- a couple of years ago, StorageTek was miffed about something NetApp had done, but the sides never reached any particular resolution. STK was then bought by Sun Microsystems, who then continued bickering with NetApp. However, as storage wasn’t seen as particularly strategic at the time, its still didn’t come to anything.

- quite recently and indeed laudably, Sun decided to treat storage more strategically, at the same time as reaching a level of corporate psychological resolution about the relationship between its own software and open source. All admirable stuff, with the result that Sun decided to do some more stuff with storage - including releasing the ZFS file system to the open source community.

- unfortunately, NetApp saw this and wept, in the belief (now to be proven in a court of law) that Sun was riding roughshod over some of the “clever layer” intellectual property, indeed, patents that Dave Hitz himself had filed all them years ago (and suddenly, its personal). This may or may not have been ill-thought-out but unintentional on the part of Sun, or indeed, it may have been deliberate, anti-competitive move, a bit like “accidentally” leaving Coca-Cola’s ingredients list on Howard Stern’s desk. We’ll find out - but right now, we know that it led to NetApp taking out a lawsuit on Sun.

- of course, the dot in dot-com was not going to take this lying down. After (no doubt) that quick call to determine whether some amicable resolution could be reached, Sun assessed its options and today has decided to countersue, not just about ZFS but calling into question the very, “trailing edge” foundation that NetApp had adopted, at the very inception of the company.

Nasty. Commenters have quite rightly compared this to the SCO vs Novell case, and indeed raised questions about whether IP can be open sourced, or indeed closed back up if it does infringe on patents. To me, this also echoes the rather dodgy ground Microsoft finds itself standing upon whenever it reiterates its patents issues against Linux (I’m still not sure if Steely Neelie Kroes has put this one to bed).

I’m also rather fascinated at how the battle lines are being drawn up in the blogs. Mr Schwartz has always been an advocate of the openness of CEO blogs, but of course when the fecal matter hits the fan, one cannot stop being declarative even if one wants to. This is where it’s like my hippy friends - bloggers are supposed to argue, sure, but when it comes to them acting like good ol’ boy CEO types, what happens then? things sure as heck don’t get decided by the number of diggs assigned to the counter-arguments, or consider adverse comments as a form of cross-examination.

I confess I have a nasty feeling about this. Court battles are just that - battles - and fighting dirty is acceptable as long as it happens within the confines of the law. Already we have seen Dave Hitz branded a liar and a troll, and while Dave H has not used the terms, he has called into question Jonathan S’s records of events. NetApp has (as illustrated in that same blog post) started from a position of, “let’s get along, but use the courts, that’s what they are there for,” but it doesn’t appear that Sun isn’t going to keep the gloves on. Call me old fashioned but Jonathan’s statement, “we are requesting a permanent injunction to remove all of their filer products from the marketplace” doesn’t appear to be wanting to meet anyone half way.

Where will it all end up? Messily, certainly. We now have two court cases, one of which may find it correct to say Sun shouldn’t have released NetApp’s IP into the open community - it’s difficult to know what the outcome would be from there, other than requesting people to kindly switch it off. Or it may find Sun in the clear, in which case NetApp will look a bit foolish, and perhaps in trouble as the patents in question are reputed to be a mainstay of the company’s offering.

Meanwhile, Sun’s own case, if it succeeds, could bring NetApp to its knees. If it fails, Sun will look a bit silly but can revert to the counter-sue argument, so nothing lost other than a bunch of legal fees. Hopefully this second case exists purely as a counterpoint, and the situation will be judged on the technical merits of the claims rather than obscure interpretations of patent law.

What do I feel about it all, besides just wishing naively that everybody could just get on? The only recommendation I would make to both sides, is that the behaviours exhibited during the process can be as damaging to a company as the topics under discussion, so - play nice, guys. Meanwhile, while I’m not sure I’d want to rush off and install ZFS across the entire organisation until I was sure I could keep it, I wouldn’t be switching off my NetApp filers just yet.