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I have been thinking about this for a short time now. I have been spending some time studying the computing market at various levels and across varying technologies; most recently the focus was more on the mobile computing industry. But before I dive into some of my personal opinions I want to revisit some brief events throughout history:

From the late 70’s to the 80’s Apple markets personal computers with a proprietary operating system tied to its proprietary hardware. They charge high prices in exchange for a feature rich and an evolving simplified UI. During this time period Microsoft is providing their software solutions as a software only company.

Originally built on MS-DOS (with the first stable release in 1985), Microsoft distributes Windows for the Intel architecture. Over time, they pushed a radical idea of providing an operating system that was not tied to specific proprietary hardware. This enabled many hardware manufacturers to install and distribute licensed copies of the operating system. Although not as advanced as Apple’s OS UI, it was just good enough to get most people to become more productive.

Cheaper hardware + Hardware independent software = Cheaper PCs = Microsoft’s success of the desktop market

Truth be told. You did (and still do) get what you pay for. Microsoft’s applications and series of operating systems were never necessarily well known for stability and security. Overall, their approach to business made sense for its time.

But what do you have now? The focus has shifted to mobility. A lot of applications are now provided services over the web (i.e. the cloud) and our mobile devices provide us access to these services. For the past decade Apple has made a huge comeback and found itself a market which has been leading to its recent success. Although, they continue to push their proprietary model on all their products.

While other companies are competing with Apple, the most noteworthy is Google (indirectly via its ad-based model) and specifically the Android operating system. Google has taken more of an open approach to how Android is presented but in the end, similar to Microsoft with Windows, it is designed to run on varying hardware platforms. With a nice UI (maybe not always as crisp and clean as the iPhone’s OS) and a constantly growing Market with tens of thousands of applications to choose from, Android has proven itself to be a very worthy competitor. Its market growth numbers have reflected this and Android is significantly catching up to the power players of the smart phone industry.

My question is: Is Apple doomed to repeat its own history? Should we continue to expect Apple market share growth? Or will this plateau as more and more Android devices flood the market offering more affordable and feature rich mobile computing experiences?

I don’t get it. Or maybe I am not expected to understand it. Yesterday I went to a local Best Buy retail store to pick up a USB Flash Drive. After doing a quick price comparison I ended up purchasing the Geek Squad (the Best Buy) branded product. The next day I took the device into work and just as I was about to open it I quickly glanced at the back of the package and noticed:

“Compatible with Windows 2000 SP4/Windows XP/Windows Vista/ Windows 7, Mac OS 10.x and above.“

What about Linux? Coincidentally this device was getting plugged into and used only by a Fedora Linux system. Now I know that this would have worked (despite the package’s information) and not have any problems with ANY Linux and for the most part almost all UNIX -based operating systems. The device (as all other USB Flash Drives) are labeled with a FAT32 file system and Linux, like any other OS kernel can read a FAT32 labeled volume with no problems. On top of that, most mainstream distributions (if not all) enable automount and an auto open of USB storage devices. The user doesn’t need to do it themselves, similar to Windows and the Mac OS. So what is the problem? Why couldn’t the package say “Linux 2.6 and above” or something to that extent?

You would think from a marketing point-of-view it would have been wise to place this on the package for individuals new to the world of Linux and unsure about a few things. Maybe someone new to Ubuntu or Mint or even SUSE just got a netbook with a preloaded Linux-based image on it. They are looking to find some hardware compatible with it and wait a minute the Geek Squad USB Flash Drives sold at Best Buy do not say that they will work. There is a lost sale.

Some of you may think that this is not such a big deal and that I am thinking too deep into this. I don’t disagree. I am thinking too deep into this, but it is only because I am still surprised when I come across things like this. For instance, not too long ago I was looking at laser printers and guess what some said on it (I specifically remember Lexmark):

“…compatible with Linux“

I remember buying a pack of labels to print names and addresses, guess what the package of labels said on the back:

“…compatible with Linux“

The list goes on. Whether end-user market share for Linux is 1%, 0.01% or 100%, manufacturers need to get used to the fact that its market share is creeping up especially with the huge influence Linux holds on mobile devices. For instance, when the Android-based tablets come out, people are going to be looking for:

“…compatible with Linux” or “…compatible with Android“

As long as I can remember I had been using the Netscape web browser which evolved to Mozilla and now Firefox. I still use Firefox and have grown so comfortable with it that I don’t really desire to move onto anything else. Needless to say, Mozilla’s products are not perfect and there is always room for additional features and what I believe to be necessities in order to function in today’s world of computing.

For instance, I wish there was more of a concentrated effort to bring additional usability and manageability of these same Mozilla products (i.e. Firefox, Thunderbird, to even the SeaMonkey suite) where it can truly compete with Microsoft to even IBM’s Lotus in the professional world.

In this initial example I will choose to focus Lotus Notes and SameTime. This application was built around enterprise productivity. Everything is integrated in such a way where I do not only have the ability to work from my e-mail but through SameTime I can easily connect to the same directory of individuals for instant IM messaging. Google saw an advantage to such an approach and had it integrated into their GMAIL web client. So how difficult would it be to have Thunderbird do the same thing? Now, SeaMonkey may be a better candidate for this integration (as it resembles more of what Netscape used to be) but nobody really knows of its existence.

Another example is the way Microsoft integrates all of its products together to provide a complete solution. If I am using Internet Explorer and I click on something that requires Powerpoint, Excel or something else Microsoft developed, there are no problems in opening up those files and working with them in a new tab of my web browser. It could be beneficial for Mozilla to partner up with Oracle and provide similar transparent integration into their products with Star Office and OpenOffice.org. In fact, what is stopping Red Hat, Canonical, Novell or even Oracle from developing such integration modules in their workstation solutions? I always found it annoying that when I click on a PDF file to open it up in a new tab, it runs outside of the browser instead (unless I were to install a third party developed plug-in most of which are written for Microsoft Windows anyways).

Other things that I would like to see Mozilla work on is better management for corporate environments. Internet Explorer has a centralized managed infrastructure in that it can be controlled using Group Policies across an entire network emphasizing consistency. If you need to change the settings across all web browsers in your network, IE makes that easy and realistic. It is not realistic to e-mail co-worker HOWTOs (especially if they do not have the required permissions) nor is it realistic to visit or remote into every node to address those same changes. This form of management also includes patching/upgrading the browser/e-mail clients. Sometimes this needs to be controlled on a corporate basis as opposed to an individual user.

Mozilla has been doing an excellent job in conquering their fair percentage of market share. All without the billions of dollars dumped into marketing (as seen by their competitors). They are a known household name. A lot of end users know what Firefox is. To move on to the next best thing, I feel they need to start concentrating more on the corporate world.

Last week I finally dumped my Blackberry smartphone and got myself one of the Verizon Droid phones; specifically the Droid Eris. I was waiting for the Nexus One to come to Verizon Wireless for quite some time and when I read that it was to be offered through Google only (unlocked and without a contract deal) for $530, I said forget about it. I will go to the store instead and get one of the Droid phones (Motorola Droid & HTC Droid Eris).

Although it is the slightly outdated version 1.5 of the Android OS, I have been spending the past 2 weeks enjoying my new phone and looking forward to the 2.1 upgrade expected by the end of the month. I will admit that during this period, the coolest application I found on the Android Market was the Google Sky Map which I recommend to anyone and everyone.

Anyways, back to the main point of this post, the past weeks gave me much to think about with regards to the future of Linux. Every year we always hear that “this is the year of Linux Desktop” and yet are surprised that nothing has changed from the years prior. Sure Linux is growing on the end user base but it is a very small growth; almost unnoticeable. Looking at it from a positive angle, portions of this growth is a result of the efforts from such identities like Canonical, with their Ubuntu distribution to even the re-spins like Linux Mint, etc. making it more user friendly for Linux newbies. It is also worth noting that distributions like Fedora (Red Hat based) to even openSUSE have also done excellent work in increasing usability on top of performance and appearance. But my question is, where do they stand in the grand scheme of things? Sure these distributions have a future and a strong one at that. I won’t stop using Fedora, Debian or Ubuntu. But deep down, do I believe that they will get the huge market share that they rightfully deserve? No. At least not in the very near future.

What I do see is a trend started by companies like Google and Apple. The trend focus on mobility and portability. Less and less users are running out and buying desktop machines. This idea seemed to have died rendering the concept of a desktop to become obsolete years ago. The focus has been more on the low-cost laptop and netbook devices. On top of that Google does something that they are well known for and it is the idea of creating and promoting a name. For instance, Google is used everywhere to reference the company, their products and even in the form of a verb to search for information. I feel that the same thing may happen with the Android Operating System. The end user market knows what the Android is; not necessarily caring what exists under the hood (i.e the Linux kernel). Android usage has been growing at a rapid rate and provides the majority of functionality that a standard end-user needs with a huge listing of applications offered. Here is an interesting fact: Android enabled phones have jumped from 2% market share in February 2009 to 24% market share of February 2010 (of smartphones).

As of the past 6 months or so, Google has been hyping up their new Chrome OS to be used on low-powered mobile internet device (MID) such as netbooks and possibly lightweight tablet PCs. For those who do not know the details, it is basically a browser running on top of the Linux kernel. The browser desktop environment provides some interesting concepts but will it ever captivate the end user audience enough to dump the one over the other or will it be, at the most, a dual boot option for a quick boot to the Internet?

I for one see a lot more potential with the Android. Maybe customize the desktop to cater to a netbook or tablet PC. Port the Google Chrome web browser over to the OS. Add quick launch apps for Google Docs and then call it a day. I do see success of Linux at the end user market. I feel confident that they will leave Microsoft behind in a cloud of smoke; seeing how Microsoft still focuses on the obsolete desktop environment with some efforts moving slowly toward the cloud. Slowly the “year of the Linux desktop” idea will disappear as more and more individuals focus more on mobility and begin to use web enabled devices and eventually bring on the “year of the Linux MID”.

My question to everyone is: Do you still think Linux has a chance (moving away from the idea of the desktop and focus more on the MID)?

It is hard to believe that Microsoft’s Internet Explorer still has the majority of market share in the web browser world (62.12%). I am just glad to see the rising popularity of Mozilla Firefox (24.43%), Google Chrome (5.22%) to even others such as Apple Safari (4.53%), Opera (2.38%), etc. Whenever I spend time to do various Javascript to even CSS development for various dynamic webpages, I am always held back by the non-compliant Internet Explorer. Today I will be picking IE8 as it is the latest and greatest from Microsoft.

For instance, I was doing some Javascript development earlier in the day yesterday morning and IE8 would fail on the following code:

<script language=“javascript” type=“text/javascript”>
    grabURL=window.location.href.split(”?”);
    if(grabURL[1] == null)
        window.location = ‘error.html’;

    [ ... ]

</script>

Specifically it would fail on the line of code changing the window’s location. I am not looking for any answers or workaround in this blog entry. I am merely venting off some frustration. Why does Firefox, Chrome, Opera and Safari not see any problems with this perfectly legal piece of code and Internet Explorer errors on it? Also, the error never gives a detailed enough reason as to what it had a problem with exactly.

I come across this kind of thing all the time. The above sample of code is one of many I have had to hack around for IE. It becomes very difficult to take the browser seriously but at the same time it is hard not to since they still own a good chunk of browser share.

I was just having a conversation with a colleague when we had gotten to the topic of the disposable PC.  If you are not familiar with the concept, this post will highlight the details below. When I first dabbled with computers back in the late 80’s, it was an Apple. We didn’t own it. It was available at the local school in the school’s computer lab of no more than 25-30 computers. They were running the Apple IIe and even though they were outdated at the time, they didn’t have the finances to upgrade the systems. By the time the 90’s hit I was already well acquainted with Macintosh line of PCs but again our family didn’t own any. All computers were just too expensive. At around 1995 (maybe a little earlier) our family dropped nearly $2,000 (USD) into a Packard Bell (rated as one of the worst PCs of all time). I am going off of memory but it ran no more than 70 MHz (Intel Pentium) and had no more than 8 or 16 MBytes of EDO RAM. I don’t remember the hard drive space, although I believe it was 2 GBytes supplied from one of the old school big foot drives. The PC came with Windows 3.11 but was soon later upgraded to Windows 95.

Note that I still use those big foot drives. I actually have a few scattered around the house and are used as door stops. It is all about recycling old computer equipment.

So there you have it, that is what almost $2000 bought you. So when you had a problem with your PC, you spent the money to fix. That is you bought all the necessary software or paid the appropriate technicians to handle all of the work. The PC was an investment and you were not going to drop it for anything else.

Flash forward to the year 2001, when Windows XP was released. A decent computer could be purchased as low as $700 USD. That included a licensed copy of Windows XP. Flash forward to the present when mobility is a constant demand, and a decent notebook or even netbook could be purchased at $500 USD. Obviously thanks to manufacturers such as Intel, AMD among others, the prices for hardware components have dropped significantly. It is very affordable to acquire the necessary equipment and has gotten easier to set it up in a home or anywhere else.

When I write about the disposable PC, blame for the creation and maintaining of such a culture does not belong to a single entity. It has gotten to the point where hardware has become so cheap that whenever someone who lacks any real technical knowledge comes across a computing problem (whether it be hardware or software related) has no problem running out and purchasing a new replacement. Microsoft and retail stores add to this culture.

For instance, what happens when you (a non-technical person) are prompted with a bunch of error dialog boxes, a virus or a system crash? If you do not personally know anybody who can fix it, you will take it in to a retail store that offers PC repair services, such as Best Buy. The only reason why I pick on Best Buy is not because I harbor any negative feelings toward them (they are a business selling services and products) but instead because in the late 90’s to around 2001/2 I used to work for them and was familiar with the processes and routines when it came to PC repair.

Note that prices may have changed since then.

To diagnose a PC, it was $60. We would not have repaired the PC, even if the problem was apparent unless this diagnostics fee was paid in full. This $60 was never applied toward any other repairs either. So if we came back saying that your hard drive went bad and you need to replace it and reinstall the OS, you looked at spending another $120 for a hard drive, $60 to re image Windows followed by another $20 or more to install all Windows Updates and/or any other applications or device drivers. Add another $60 if we were able to salvage data from your old hard drive and transfer it to the new one. At times you were looking to spend over $320 for repairing a PC. This could have been more than half the price of buying a new PC. So why invest into something that is already outdated? And if the service prices have increased since then, then what is the point when you can spend $400 or less and get a netbook with a Linux distribution or Windows 7 pre-installed?

Some of you may be asking: how does Microsoft fit into this? Deep down, I believe that more than half of the problems in Windows are intentional primarily because Microsoft (and good for them) is a money making machine. In order for them to make money, the people that sell and repair their products have to make money. I am pretty sure that if Microsoft wanted to invest the time and money to create the most secure and stable operating system, they could. They don’t have idiots working for them. I think it is that “if you scratch my back, I will scratch yours mentality.” It also doesn’t help that whenever a call is placed to a support center or when a PC is brought into a repair shop, the solution usually given by the technician is to re-image Windows. If I have a virus, why can’t you just remove the virus and I will be on my way?

I, as many of my readers, on the other hand know better and choose to rely on something a lot more stable and secure with (insert flavor of Linux or UNIX here). Why be bothered with constantly having to maintain or repair your OS. Sometimes you just need things to work. Maybe that is why you read stories about how repair shops such as Best Buy’s will refuse the repair of a computing device if you are not running a version of Windows. They probably don’t see any money it.

Linked from linuxtoday.com, I found an interesting article posted on FlexTk regarding NAS Performance Comparisons between Linux, Windows and OpenSolaris. The results are very interesting. Under each category, comparisons are drawn between:

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3 (64-bit)
• Ubuntu Server 9.04 (64-bit)
• OpenSolaris 2009.06 (64-bit)
• Windows Server 2003 (64-bit)
• Windows Server 2008 (64-bit)
• Windows Storage Server 2008 (64-bit)

I assume that each operating system is utilizing the default file systems with default settings for that specific release. Red Hat and Ubuntu should be using Ext3-fs, Windows obviously uses NTFS while OpenSolaris is built on top of ZFS. The CIFS/NFS exported share(s) in turn are running on top of these defaulted file systems. Either way, with average overall performance, OpenSolaris seemed to really shine. It also did well in some of the other categories which made sense when knowing the design of the ZFS file system.

Yesterday afternoon I was really bored at work and had eventually navigated to a website dedicated to Easter Eggs that could be found on an operating system, software application and more. Naturally I went to the list of operating systems and started looking up the operating systems which were accessible to me. As I read through the Linux and UNIX related ones, I had already known some but there were a few that I was interested in trying.

Seeing how I was on an OpenSolaris laptop I decided to first look through the SunOS list. Unfortunately none of them seemed to work. It would appear that they were taken out. But I did remember one from many years ago that a friend (Marian Lakov) had shown me. Originally found on an installation of RHEL, it was in the man page for the xorg.conf file.

Listed under the VIDEOADAPTER SECTION you will read the following: Nobody wants to say how this works. Maybe nobody knows…

If you know of any hidden secret(s) that is not listed on the site posted earlier, please feel free to share.

Two days ago Sun Microsystems released the latest update to the VirtualBox virtualization application as version 3.0.4. You can download it here and view the Changelog here.

Please note that this is only a personal opinion of mine as I have been observing the growth and various decline of storage concepts within the data storage industry. The views of the reader may differ from my own which is why I would invite you to please post your opinions as a comment to this post.

One of the most volatile and yet needed industries is the data storage industry. As computing technologies become more cloud centric and rely upon the web for business, productivity, education to even recreation, there is a constant push to increase capacities but even more so increase I/O throughput. As a result of recent demands, our approach with these technologies need to be re-evaluated. The primary focus of this article is on the future of data storage concepts and the limited life and functionality of RAID.

Back in 1987 when the idea of RAID was first conceived, the goal or vision was to be able to scale multiple drives into a single volume which was represented to a host as such while also offering a form of redundancy with a more sensitive magnetic platter-based disk technology. Flash forward to the present and we are still reliant upon the same technologies. Is that because RAID is so perfect or have we just grown too comfortable and are too afraid of change?

Hardware Vs. Software RAID 

There was a time when processing power was limited and it became advantageous to utilize external methods for creating and managing arrays of data storage, but as time progressed, this approach became increasingly insignificant. At least that is to say for the Small-to-Medium sized Business (SMB). For the last decade, a lot of efforts have been placed toward increasing the reliability, stability and enhanced features with the software-based RAID. This has slowly been eating away at the hardware vendors. Although it has been rarely noticeable.

These software implementations are integrated with methods of Logical Volume Management (with built in redundancy via RAID 1-6), Load Balancing/Multipathing capabilities, data encryption, along with the abilities to utilize incremental snapshot(s) over designated volumes. These software implementations include dynamic resizing, quota/permission management, enhanced copy-on-write file systems that perform very well along with routine checksums to correct noisy and silent data corruption; almost all of which can be managed while volumes are on-line. Some of these volume managers have the capability to export iSCSI & FCoE targets and can also be tuned to support FC targets.

To name a few you have ZFS (an all-in-one solution), Btrfs (still in development and under test), device-mapper / LVM2 / multipath-tools, mdadm, DRBD, etc. The list goes on. What is to stop an SMB from setting up an array of JBODS and (if more redundancy is needed) cluster a couple of Solaris / OpenSolaris or Linux servers to manage their software RAID while also exporting it via a file server or into a SAN? Note that Lustre support for ZFS is still in development. Realistically most entry-level modular external RAID solutions don’t run on the latest and greatest of hardware components (as they are intended for a limited purpose and not to provide other hosting services). You will most likely achieve much greater performance with the software approach while also utilizing a much more efficient virtual memory manager (for enhanced caching) alongside a finely tuned schedular.

On the enterprise end of computing you will find some very impressive storage solutions that are intended to take the workload of the enterprise environment. Such companies as Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) have been doing an excellent job with providing high-quality and well performing storage solutions that are also easily manageable. Other companies have resorted to being a little creative in order to gain some market share with the SMB and larger companies. Such notable companies are NetApp, Data Domain to even Cleversafe.

Earlier I found an interesting link differentiating the positives and negatives of both hardware and software RAID implementations. It should be noted that times have changed and some of the key points highlighted are no longer an issue. For instance, under the category /boot partition, this seems to no longer be an issue with at least ZFS.

Enter the SSD

In more recent years, the Flash-based Solid State Drive (SSD) has been entering into enterprise markets. This is a result from such notable providers as Sun Microsystems, etc. Currently the percentage in SSD usage in the enterprise is somewhat minimal as their is a limit in maximum capacities for the drives. This may soon change as in Q3 of 2009, PureSilicon will release their Nitro 1TB SSD drive. The throughput and performance speeds seem very optimal in arenas where greater speeds are needed, but the technology introduces additional handicaps (in the form of write operations and a limited cell life) which most environments and some manufacturers have a difficult time in accomodating to. To combat the limited cell life, vendors have implemented their own method of wear leveling, transparent to the host. With this concept, the same data cell, when accessed and written to multiple times will not get written to the exact location but instead, through an “intelligent” built in firmware the data will get written to another cell on the drive. To the operating system, it is still the same “sector” location. While there is very little latency in seeking performance (sequential and random), write operations take a huge hit, especially with smaller I/O transfer sizes, when typically the flash medium erase/rewrite a 128K page at a time.

SSD Tuning

With the recent hype of Flash-based SSDs, many vendors and UNIX/Linux distributions have been writing file systems tuned to perform extremely well on SSDs (and limit the impact of these handicaps). For example, Sun Microsystem’s ZFS (available on Solaris, OpenSolaris, MacOS X [read-only], FreeBSD and Linux [over FUSE]) had recently added tunable support for SSDs in their release versions for Solaris & OpenSolaris, while the development of Btrfs for Linux has done the same. In contrast the Microsoft developed NTFS does not offer such features or functionality. In fact the file system has remained somewhat unchanged over the course of the years and is just as inferior now as it was when it was first released as a replacement to the FAT series of file systems. I wrote an entire post explaining why the NTFS file system is not well suited for today’s methods of computing here.

In recent releases it should be noted that Microsoft’s Windows 7 has been tuned for SSDs that are to be provided on netbooks. What this means, I do not know? And by tuned, this is still unclear. You can read some of that information here. The only reason for the lack of changes in NTFS is to preserve backwards compatibility. This approach limits the ability to update a current existing server’s (if not running Windows 7) NTFS module if it needed to serve backend storage utilizing SSD media.

The Impact on RAID Technologies

As SSDs become more popular the advantages to using RAID are reduced, where the only benefits are gained from a simple stripe in a RAID 0 or mirroring to a backup array within a SAN or other form of network using RAID 01 (not to be confused with a RAID 10); just in case access to the first fails for whatever reason. This is where DRBD would come in real handy. As I briefly mentioned earlier, the whole concept of this form of redundancy was dependent upon the problematic nature of a magnetic disk device; where failures were imminent. And for those who are concerned with a method of error detection for both silent and noisy data corruptions, the majority of RAID implementations (both hardware and software) do not validate the data like the ZFS or Btrfs checksum implementation.

Changes in Protocol Layers?

With the popularity of SSD technologies growing and its costs reducing, the one drawback that is setting manufacturers and consumers back are the limitations offered by the protocols that they are working with. Today, Fibre Channel, SAS and SATA are not capable of handling full SSD speeds and serve only as a bottleneck to the technology. There have been recent attempts from vendors as Fusion-io to even PureSilicon to rely on other protocol interfaces such as PCI Express (PCI-E). Capable of handling up to 1 GB per second, it only seems natural for these vendors to move in that direction. I anticipate that shortly, others will follow. Fibre Channel and SAS may continue to serve the SAN (and with the appropriate load balancing mechanisms configured, it will perform well) but when it comes to the drive within the chassis, I expect to see more PCI Express in the near future. But who knows, with the recent drop in prices for 10Gb Ethernet or the supported high throughput offered from Infiniband, things may be moving toward another direction altogether.

In conclusion, I predict that in five years time we will start to see some huge and very interesting changes. I am looking forward to it.