Glad I Made My Connection Last Night
Last night, returning from my whirlwind trip to the Left Coast – first to Storage Decisions in San Francisco, then to SC09 - the supercomputing show in Portland – my Continental flight landed in Houston…late. Bush is a sprawling airport any way you cut it and Continental has gates over a broad geography of far-flung terminals. While an hour-long layover is usually enough to make a connecting flight (the second leg of my itinerary was home to Tampa), the delay leaving Portland made my connection very tenuous this time.
The delay in Portland was caused by folks who insist on bringing all of their luggage on board — either because they are afraid the carrier will misplace their stuff in transit, or because they are too cheap to shell out the $20 bag check fee. Either way, filling all of those overhead bins with stuff that should go into the belly of the aircraft takes a very very long time to accomplish, and has the added disadvantage of increasing delay to the de-planing process. (This is very similar to storage technology, by the way. See below.)
Anyway, by the time I left the plane, my next flight was already well on its way to boarding. And the departure gate about a mile away from my arrival gate.
I was sweating bullets about missing my flight when a nice lady (who kind of reminded me of my mom) tapped me on the shoulder and invited me to ride in her golf cart — transport usually reserved for AARP folks and wheelchair users. I took her up on the offer, feeling silly for leveraging a service usually reserved for folks a couple of decades my senior. But, as she reminded me, I was no longer a spry OJ Simpson.
It was Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride once the cart got going. She was beeping and shouting to people to get out of the way — or she might run them over with her cart. She went the opposite direction of my gate, off-loaded a bunch of folks to chairs near an intra-terminal train, radioed for someone to help them to get to their destinations, then she really put the peddle to the metal and zipped that cart in and out of gaggles of frightened passengers. I made my gate just in time (though, again, the flight was only still at the gate because everyone was trying to squeeze their rollerboards into overhead compartments). I gave her a hug (in lieu of cash, no time to hit an ATM) and was on my way.
Today, the Air Traffic Control System in the US took a hit and delays were rippling out into all of the major airports last I checked. It reminded me that I was lucky to have made my flight, and that I owe that golf cart driver, whose name I never managed to get, big time!
It seems to me that the same idiocy that is impacting air travel these days is a perfect metaphor for what I see happening in storage infrastructure. Everyone is telling me that they want to make tape go away and to store everything on disk. When a drive fails and a RAID set must rebuild, it takes forever. But folks seem to be buying into the nonsense about a lack of resiliency in tape and the horrific possibility that data they park on that medium will not be retreivable the next day, week or month. For those who don’t use tape today, there is tremendous reluctance to invest in “such a dinosaur technology” when just a few bucks and a little effort will buy you a very capacious — but consumer grade – SATA disk.
Let’s face it, there is nothing sexy about tape. Never has been. And the disk guys, with all of their capacity improvements and wrap-around compression/deduplication marketing woo, makes it seem like more disk is the right way to go.
Only, the overhead compartments are pretty full. Getting to your stuff may mean walking backwards on the I/O path to find the rank of disks where your data actually resides, slowing down the I/O process for everyone else’s stuff. Meandering through lots and lots of storage just to find your data, including a lot of stuff that is seldom if ever accessed, is getting to be a productivity killer.
I wish everyone could have gone to the SuperComputer show. It revitalized me to see a nerd fest rivaling what we used to see at Networld+Interop or COMDEX at the end of the last decade. But most significantly, it was nice to see tape in its full glory.
I was amazed by the T-Finity from Spectra Logic. I took some video of it that I will cut together and show here and on the C-4 Site shortly, together with interviews of Molly Rector and Matt Starr that I shot at the show. They even removed a panel on their box so I could shoot multiple robots doing their thing with ranks of neatly organized square tapes. Overlay some music on the video, and tape might just be sexy again.
More details on the technology will come to you in the video. For now, suffice it to say, it was good to listen to users who are using tape not only to do backups but also as a primary storage capability — streaming data directly to the fastest magnetic recording modality on the planet.
I will write more later. Now, I want to listen in to an Adaptec webconference where they are going to try to convince me that Flash SSD trumps all magnetic recording. I’m not buying it.
Tags: Adaptec, SC09, Spectra Logic, Storage Decisions, tape