Online Storage Optimization

Plenty of commentary on one particular storage story filling up the blogosphere today, and so we felt no need to stick our oar in–at least not yet. Instead, here’s a news story that made me sit up and take notice. According to GigaOm greentech blog Earth2Tech, California’s megautility PG&E is in the midst of a project to develop solar power in space.

As reporter Katie Fehrenbacher explains, the project is in coordination with a company called Solaren, which–you guessed it–develops solar power in space. The site for this company is essentially a frontpage with no information, beyond some primitive Flash that reads “Energy for Tomorrow with the Technology of Today.” Not exactly reassuring.

According to Fehrenbacher, the plan is to convert the solar energy to radio frequency energy, which can then be beamed down to earth and used as electricity.

A hoax? Or a real potential breakthrough in green energy? Hard to say. There’s a lot of commentary on GigaOm that tends to imply it could be both or neither, and which certainly doesn’t settle the question. Here’s one obvious issue: exactly how much fossil fuel does it take to blast these panels up there?

Image: PG&E Blog

Thanks to Twitter, I was alerted this week to a recent LA Times profile of a woman who restored old NASA files detailing its 1966 scientific missions to the moon using the Lunar Orbiter. The story of what happened to that data is a truly epic tale and one that might interest many in the IT and storage industries.

According to the story: “NASA was so preoccupied with getting an astronaut to the moon ahead of the Soviets that little attention was paid to the mountains of scientific data that flowed back to Earth from its early space missions. The data, stored on miles of fragile tapes, grew into mountains that were packed up and sent to a government warehouse with crates of other stuff.

And so they eventually came to the attention of Nancy Evans, a no-nonsense woman with flaming red hair that fit her sometimes-impatient nature. She had been trained as a biologist, but within the sprawling space agency she had found her niche as an archivist.”

I won’t spoil the story–it’s really worth reading all the way through–but I will say that it involves an old McDonald’s that used to be known as “McMoon’s,” an army vet who first learned about repair fixing tractors on his family farm, and a whole lot of searching for old computer parts. Enjoy!

April 1 is a day to fool the foolish and the wise. Here are a few of the better items we’ve seen today:

1. This morning on NPR, I listened to Rene Montaigne describe a new amusement park sponsored by The Economist magazine, “Econoland.”

2. Thanks to Rachel Maddow for this NASA page on how an astronaut had her head upgraded.

And my personal favorite…

3.  The Tweetdoubler - from @andrew303, a tool that uses “patented compression technology” to enable a tweet on Twitter that is 280 characters long, rather than the currently allowed 140.

Questions about names have pursued me throughout my life. As someone with the first name Sunshine, I am constantly asked about it. As if defying the laws of probability, they are always same two or three questions:

1. Is that your real name?

2. Were your parents hippies?

3. That must be a lot of pressure. Do you ever wish you were named cloudy day? (Variation: should I call you overcast?)

Now that I’m doing work for a company called Ocarina Networks, I often get a series of questions about that name, which stands out as a not-so-techy sounding alternative to the Zloobs and Creacraws of the Web three dot oh era. These questions, too, tend to be the same:

1. Where did you get the name Ocarina?

2. Does the name in any way relate to the company’s optimization technology? (Variation: Do musical ocarinas shrink anything?)

3. What exactly is an ocarina?

The last question has been somewhat less frequent since the introduction of the ocarina iPhone app.

So, what are the answers to all these questions? To just answer would be giving it all away. However, I do encourage you to contact your high school music teacher to see if you can learn about the history of the ocarina. It’s an amazing little musical device. And, if saving millions on storage isn’t enough incentive, Ocarina’s customers get a free ocarina as a gift.

Life in tech can be tough, and for the bright minds within it, a mini-vacation from reality can be good therapy. Today’s post will take a look at some of the more intriguing and futuristic distractions available right now. That way, you can at least read about the idea of having fun, even if you don’t have time to have any.

Virtual gunplay. First up, the newest from LEGO - “Augmented Reality” glasses enhance game play with computer generated images allows kids to shoot each other’s real toys, releasing aggression and maybe giving the toymaker a leg up on the encroaching competition posted by Nintendo, et al. Thanks Gizmodo for that tip.

Bruce Wayne Yourself. What looks to be the first truly great Batman video game is due out in June–or May 31 for the XBox collector’s edition. The preview alone for “Batman: Arkham Asylum” could make you reserve a copy for yourself, and this review would probably clinch it. (Thanks @Storagezilla for the heads up on this one.)

Fun with a Mac Mini. Call this a project rather than pure entertainment, but Stephen Foskett today detailed on his Packrat blog how he took the new 2009 Mac Mini base model and souped it up into a cherry speed demon for a total cost of $701. For those with the chops, this looks like fun.

What’s next on iPhone. Today’s Apple iPhone OS 3.0 preview event offered some games that will be upcoming on the new iPhone. So far, none look mindblowing, but this live feed from Engadget may yield a few more as the day wears on. The multiplayer game “LiveFire” sounds like it has some potential.

Colbert Goes to the Graveyard: If you only have a few moments, you can take time out to watch this interview on the Colbert Report with Neil Gaiman, author of The Graveyard Book, Coraline, the Sandman comic series, and so on and so forth. Die hard fanboys/girls can also follow him on Twitter and find out what he’s having for breakfast.

OK, end of break. Get back to work!

Photo: Gizmodo

Twitter is a powerful tool, not to mention a great distraction … er, method of connecting with others. If a show biz personality who is just learning email can get 70K followers in 24 hours, then clearly anyone can dive in and have fun. Yet, Twitter can also be a headache-inducing, information-spewing overload machine, especially for those of us who use it to keep up with the latest tech trends.

To deal with this, Twitter has made some updates, such as home page search, which can be helpful. Yet, it’s still hard to keep one’s head above water with all the noise out there (insert continued mixed metaphor here). Heck, it can even be overwhelming to figure out which tools to use to manage one’s Twitter accounts and usage.

For all of this, the TwiTip blog is a solid source for advice on how to keep the info deluge under control. Today’s post dealt with the many Twitter-based tools and honed it down, offering 10 MORE Must Have Twitter Tools. One item on the list that’s already generating some discussion is TwitterSnooze. This service puts some of your more, shall we say, prolific followers on a pause button so you don’t have to receive their tweets for a period of time–something that’s less cruel and final than unfollowing someone. The downside is that the person you’ve snoozed will be alerted on the day you “unsnooze” them.  Therefore, the folks at TwitterSnooze suggest you send the following card:

Tasteful, don’t you agree?

Another way to keep your head from exploding due to overload is to get into a hash tag room of interest, such as this one. These are becoming more popular and keep your follows under control to some extent. A variation on this is the Retweetist, which aggregates the most popular retweets going around the twit-o-sphere at any given moment.

What are some more useful Twitter tips and tricks? We’d like to hear from you.

The confirmation of Vivek Kundra as the first Federal CIO has  prompted a great deal of discussion across the tech blogosphere. Some are saying this could be a shot in the arm for cloud computing. Last Thursday, Kundra held a press conference has yielded discussion about his promises to increase government transparency through such sites as the still glitchy recovery.gov (which some say was suggested by Twitter CEO Ev Williams). One thing everyone’s agreeing about–Obama is the most digitally savvy president we’ve had so far.

Perhaps the most interesting posts have been those that offer the incoming Kundra some words of advice. This provides a snapshot of the most pressing issues from the point of view of industry insiders. Two of the best we’ve found:

Chuck’s Blog: Chuck at EMC notes in a post, Dear Mr. Kundra: “…many of us believe that the current state of affairs has more to do with how things get done, rather than what gets done.”

CIO: In a piece Advice for Obama’s New Federal CIO, contributor  Niel Nickolaisen suggests “Build and Use a Network of Nerds.”

We will watch to see what Mr. Kundra is and is not able to accomplish in his new position.

Here’s a completely non-storage related topic that I found fascinating. Science writer Brandon Keim’s story in Wired today reports that beauty is experienced differently by men and women. Summarizing findings from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the article states:

“In men, images they consider to be beautiful appear to activate brain regions responsible for locating objects in absolute terms — x- and y-coordinates on a grid. Images considered beautiful by women do the same, but they also activate regions associated with relative location: above and behind, over and under.”

Hard to say whether these prelimary findings will be reinforced by further study, but the potential for unlocking this difference–which seems to match common experience–is very interesting. Thoughts?

If you’ve visited this blog in the past, you’ll notice a new look and feel. We’ve changed the name slightly as well–from Storage Optimization to Online Storage Optimization. One reason for this is  that we began to notice that because deduplication is such a frequently cited new technology, oftentimes people aren’t aware of the vast difference between dedupe for backups and dedupe for online.

As part of this new format, we will be adopting a more newsy approach to the blog, with shorter posts that pull out more of the ongoing changes that affect our industry. Today’s post, for example, will be about the growing trend–of which Ocarina is a large part–of VCs funding startups that can show a real cost benefit for customers rather than just gee whiz technology on its own.

We will also begin showcasing posts from guest authors–industry movers and shakers who have a unique take on the questions surrounding storage and storage optimization. Other new features will be added in the coming weeks, and so we hope you’ll pay us another visit soon. Meanwhile, enjoy the new blog. Subscribers are welcome!