There's nothing wrong with it: unless your me & on the other side of it;-)
Seriously, I think you just made the point I was trying to make in a shorter post. We are being comoditized, because we must be for the sake of progress. And there are too many of us who think we're a 'beautiful & unique snowflake' who could never be steamrolled by progress.
Not just us data janitors, but so goes the life of the source code assembly line workers before us.
NOW is the time to unionize, not latter when we can be replaced in a second. There's nothing wrong with being comoditized, there is something wrong with not realizing it.
"I don't know if a union is really the answer in IT, or in any professional job for that matter"
I think that's where your making your mistake. Trying to put my substantial ego aside, the business is trying there damnedest to make Datacenter IT folk a commodity, and it's working. We're decidedly not unskilled laborers but in most cases, no matter what we want to beleave, we can be replaced without a big impact to the bottom line. You are not a beutifull and unique snowflake. There is a substantial part of Systems Administration work that CAN be done from halfway across the globe, or by the guy in the cube next to you (or who's resume just hit the boss' desk).
Part of this comiditization is eliminating overtime pay, not respecting personal time and expecting we're available 24x7x365 for whatever whim management has.
A union, or similer group, are the collective bargening leverage that would make my (& your?) personal time a thing the company must value. Forcing the employer to have to take into account when the CIO is playing Veruca Salt on a Saterday "I WANT IT NOW!" for the project he'll end up canceling by Tuesday.
I'm not a fan of unions, don't get me wrong, but I think the pendulum is swinging too far in the directions of a Dickens novel these days & rugged individualism isn't fixing it.
The best bet is to be ready to blame the vendor when things go south;-)
Seriously, I'm right there with you. If management does not want to provide for a test lab & reasonable time to test. Then it's clear they've made a 'business decision' that the network is not of sufficient value / risk is not great enough for such investments.
This may change quickly once something goes south (assuming they understand why it did) but you're gonna be talking to a brick wall until then.
It could be worse, you could have management that are afraid of there own shadows & who freak out at the idea of replacing redundant components after a HW failure. (Ever had to get VP approval to replace a failed GBIC? Oh, I have & yes, I hate my life).
I'll see your post dot-com bust graduation & raise you graduating EXACTLY one month before 9/11.
It was a struggle to even get interviews, but on 9/12 they where all canceled (try back next year I was regularly told). I wound up working as an intern, for not much more then 8$/hr, for 6 months (and this was after graduation). Thankfully that internship helped me find a real job (for rather low pay I might add).
It's taken me some time, and a change in employers, but I've at least gotten myself to an AVERAGE pay scale for my role & skill set.
There is certainly a great value in starting ones career on an economic high, rather then a near depression. I seriously pity the kids graduating right now. The term 'lost generation' from Japan's economic near-collapse comes to mind. I know just starting in a smallish recession my life long earning potential has been clipped.
Last death throws of a failing regime. I feel horrible for the Iranian people right now, but thank god they don't seem to be taking this lying down.
It's like the 1960's over there, a huge boom of 'youth' and a repressive establishment to fight. Here's hoping the result of this revolution is a bit more friendly then the last, but more importantly that it treats it's people better.
How else could the man evade us for 9 years spending all of our resources to find him? Who's looking for an eight foot red balloon connected to a dialysis machine in the middle of northern Pakistan when there's a "terr'st" to be hunted who's obviously in a "hidy hole".
I'd modify your recommendation, if he can get around his sound issues. I'm permanently hopefully & permanently disappointed in XBMC's support for MythTV. I don't think I'll find XBMC to be a viable Myth frontend until that fateful future day when the PVR branch gets merged into the XBMC trunk & a good solid Myth plugin is made available for it. I will say the commercial skip feature in the 9.11 Beta is nice, but streaming is still flaky, no real guide feature to be had & library integration doesn't work. Seems even for the PVR branch the devs prefer different back end software then Myth (tvheadend? or pvr? or something). Don't get me wrong, I'm realy a huge XBMC fanboy, but a good myth frontend it isn't (yet).
What I'd recommend, and what I use myself, is a mythbuntu box with XBMC & Hulu desktop. I use XBMC for everything that isn't recorded from TV or Hulu streams. I use mythfrontend for what it does well, watch live TV & recorded programs. Generally I manage my recordings from mythweb, as I really don't like the myth interface at all! I have all three of the players configured to use the same LIRC remote, and have an infinite loop shell script cycle through 'em (a hack I know).
No netflix though, this is a failure of netflix not Linux.
The great thing about Slashdot & blogs is not necisarily the articles or any original content. It comes from the community's self generated editorials after the fact. I have my own deeply held opinions on things, but I do find it very interesting to hear others opinions, even if they differ wildly from my own.
Slashdot & others have made an entire business out of these communities. Couple a well designed & well cultivated community driven web site to you point number 1) local news, and you have a powerful force not only for revenue generation but also for driving local politics & change.
As I get older (where did my 20s go?!?!) I'm getting more & more interested in state & city issues around me. And the sites that cater to that are few & far between, and the 'community' behind them is often horrible (if it exists at all, comment sections with 0 comments are very common).
I thought it was common knowledge that google is an advertising company, with a search engine & other such trinkets.
The key is, some of those other trinkets could be used to drive eyeballs back to advertisement (clearly most will fail).
We'll just have to agree to disagree about google's long term viability without this R&D. I tend to be a tinfoil hat type paranoid. My basic thinking is if the company doesn't innovate by itself, then someone else will and outshine even the great google with a good enough idea.
Also realize I think anyone who calls 5 years or less "long term" is a nut job, here again I maybe divergent from the mainstream, I'm talking 10-20 years (or more).
The other great advertising companies, NBC Universal & friends... are clearly seeing that there lack of past R&D and assuming they had a solid long term future is coming back to bite them.
I do partly agree with you. Dividends should be paid from a "wildly profitable company", if it's in a strong long term position. That being said, and my apologies if I misinterpreted you, your attitude strikes me as a bit over the top. Dividends are gravy on the biscuit of increased stock valuation over the long term.
Google, TODAY, is profitable but without reinvestment of this type where will they be tommorow? We as investors and a society have gone way to far in the direction of short term gratification. We drive companies to constantly answer the "what have you done for me lately" question. Leading, far to often, to corporate leadership who sacrifice long term shareholder value for short term profits (which has been structured to drive there pay). I'm not sure if there's an Enron parallel to Godwin's law, but it would probably fit my comment right about now.
R&D is an investment in future shareholder wealth, all investments entail risk, so hedging the companies bets with a spaghetti cannon isn't necisarily bad. If Android takes off & chromeOS doesn't: they haven't needlessly bogged one down with the other (and vice versa). If both are wildly successful, merging shouldn't be too terribly hard if there's a value to be gained, given the profits both return.
At a quick glance that seems to be exactly what I was thinking. Thanks for the link, I don't need it today (only one HDTV directly connected today) but certainly bookmarked for they day that I do.
I'd rather go the QAM encoder route, then buy one of those balun(sp?) arrangements encapsulating HDMI (even if its more expensive up front). Those things are not very future proof IMNSHO, they remind me of those old vcr rabbits. QAM on the other hand should be around for a while.
Good show, I hope you guys do well with selling those things.
RF IR extenders are a godsend for this sort of thing. I recently purchased a "Next Generation Remote Control Extender" that I HIGHLY recommend. I've got my HTPC in the basement and can use the remote control from my bedroom on the second floor without issue. http://www.amazon.com/Next-Generation-Remote-Control-Extender/dp/B000C1Z0HA
Basicly it comes with a very small rechargeable battery that can be put in either an AAA or AA sleeve (The sleeve houses an RF transmitter) . You put this battery & sleeve into the remote control's battery holder and it senses the IR LEDs load on the battery. Turns that data into RF and sends it to a base station placed where your video source is, the base station then sends out the original IR signal. Replaces the 'wife/gf remote' w/a more submissive model;-) (Un)fortunately it doesn't have all the features of the wife/gf, so you should keep at least one of them around as well if those features are important to you (I often question if the tinkering & effort to keep 'em functioning properly is worth it).
I've got a very smiler configuration for SDTV distribution of my HTPC output over existing Coax throughout my house.
I've looked for an ATSC or QAM modulator before, and my searches resulted in substantially costlier solutions then 500$. Try 4 times that for DVI/SPDIF or HDMI to QAM modulator, I couldn't find one that did ATSC. And it would seems ridiculous that low cost solutions for this don't yet exist.
Could you share some information about the ATSC modulators you've found at a ~500$ price point? Sounds like it could be a perfect solution for me if I ever by another HDTV.
This I can not understand: you print you're PDF manuals?
Most PDF manuals I get are very well bookmarked and emenantly searchable.... How is killing a tree 'easier to browse'?
To me, this is simply an unwillingness to embrace a different way of doing things not a realistic evaluation of what's easier.
I much prefere teh computer screen, I have many & they are always near me... I read 75% of Atlas Shrugged from a.txt file. If I can do that, I think you can stop wasting paper for manuals.
Looking at your SAN utilization and seeing HBA throughput of next to nothing is not necessarily proof it's the app or db. As a storage admin, I'd love to say it's never our fault, but clearly if your spending all your time looking at the network and not the disk utilization itself, your looking in the wrong place. I agree that 8Gb and even 4Gb links for disk HBAs are usually way overkill (on average), but that often is due to the fact that the spindles on the backend (or the server itself) can't service the load being pushed by the app or db. I rarely even bother looking at perf stats on my switches, as I know they will be under 50% utilized. But when I see my disk response times going well into the double digits, I know that the switches are not at issue and we may need to address the disk layout.
As per the death of raid, I also see it's day coming. I don't mean to sound like an IBM fanboi (I'm not) but there XIV product looks like they've got the right idea for anti-raid (i think HPs EVA does this to a lesser extent). Band as many cheap ol' SATA disks together as possible, and be mad paranoid about mirroring it. Need more capacity? no worries pop it in and we'll start moving data around to reduce access density automagicly. Teiring your storage is a bad idea that needs to die (mico-managment) as to lower your access density you end up short stroking. Instead put that low IO NAS device right next to your high IO financial system on disk and use both the capacity & IO ability of the drive effectively. I -personly- don't see the death of centralized storage coming anytime soon, it's just that 1) raid needs to die as we spread IO over more & more larger & slower per GB spindles, and 2) for the near term (5+ years) that SSD stuff is going to be used as a second level cache at best do to cost per GB. Either w/the disk array using it as a second stage cache, or intelligently written apps doing it for themselves (likely better for everyone).
The 'cloud' is a lie for most enterprise class apps, at least when you get to the DB level. (p.s. I also get frustrated with the app & dba premadonas, but it's even WORSE on the rare occasion when they are right;-) )
"that can get you 5 at the Big House in Pontiac." ?!?... You mean Jackson maybe? The only 'big house' in Pontiac is the city & Oakland county jails... (or am I missing something here?).... p.s. steer clear of the UPers... they bight.
I started with Red Hat 5.0 in '98 on a, wait for it, Packard Bell. Nonstandard Hardware FTL!. That chmod 666? I wish it where that easy to get my soundcard/modem combo card working under Linux back in the day. On the plus side, this is how I learned about the basics of the linux kernel, module management & recompiling. And BOY did it take a while to recompile the kernel on a pentium 133, but all that scrolling text was mesmerizing.
Once I got everything working, I didn't have a whole lot to DO in the OS until around 2000/2001, but it sure was fun to get working...Finally made the full switch in 2002...(personal year of the Linux desktop).
Sick man that I am, I found this level of frustration fascinating & I was in love w/Linux ever since. (k)Ubuntu is almost boring now (thank god for KDE4 to keep me angry:-) ).
Not to knock your employer (ok, so maybe to knock your employer). But the Celerra has soured my tast for EMC NAS (or NAS type) solutions so much that even without ever working with NetApp, I would recomend them.
Of course, the centera always did sound interesting. But last I heard you still needed to write to the centera API, no block access for you (or real NAS type either). But I did hear murmers of this changing.
That and Major Pain are the only TWO movies I have ever walked out of the theater on..... and Major Pain was damn fine cinima in comparison.
-Rupert p.s. your names 'anactofgod', you walked out on cool world? you don't happen to be a Mormon who lived in the Detroit area 'round the early 90s?.....
Wouldn't we all love to have an employeer pay for us to sit down and code our own full blown portal software. But for most cases, this does not make buisness sence. No offence but, homegrown software for something as complicated as CMS and as truly generic as portal software is like throwing money down a toilet. You might as well open up Emacs and start cloning SAP unsing python/MySQL.
Slashdot Mirror
There's nothing wrong with it: unless your me & on the other side of it ;-)
Seriously, I think you just made the point I was trying to make in a shorter post. We are being comoditized, because we must be for the sake of progress. And there are too many of us who think we're a 'beautiful & unique snowflake' who could never be steamrolled by progress.
Not just us data janitors, but so goes the life of the source code assembly line workers before us.
NOW is the time to unionize, not latter when we can be replaced in a second. There's nothing wrong with being comoditized, there is something wrong with not realizing it.
"I don't know if a union is really the answer in IT, or in any professional job for that matter"
I think that's where your making your mistake. Trying to put my substantial ego aside, the business is trying there damnedest to make Datacenter IT folk a commodity, and it's working. We're decidedly not unskilled laborers but in most cases, no matter what we want to beleave, we can be replaced without a big impact to the bottom line. You are not a beutifull and unique snowflake. There is a substantial part of Systems Administration work that CAN be done from halfway across the globe, or by the guy in the cube next to you (or who's resume just hit the boss' desk).
Part of this comiditization is eliminating overtime pay, not respecting personal time and expecting we're available 24x7x365 for whatever whim management has.
A union, or similer group, are the collective bargening leverage that would make my (& your?) personal time a thing the company must value. Forcing the employer to have to take into account when the CIO is playing Veruca Salt on a Saterday "I WANT IT NOW!" for the project he'll end up canceling by Tuesday.
I'm not a fan of unions, don't get me wrong, but I think the pendulum is swinging too far in the directions of a Dickens novel these days & rugged individualism isn't fixing it.
The best bet is to be ready to blame the vendor when things go south ;-)
Seriously, I'm right there with you. If management does not want to provide for a test lab & reasonable time to test. Then it's clear they've made a 'business decision' that the network is not of sufficient value / risk is not great enough for such investments.
This may change quickly once something goes south (assuming they understand why it did) but you're gonna be talking to a brick wall until then.
It could be worse, you could have management that are afraid of there own shadows & who freak out at the idea of replacing redundant components after a HW failure. (Ever had to get VP approval to replace a failed GBIC? Oh, I have & yes, I hate my life).
Clearcase: UGH!
I don't code, I work in infrastructure support, but this app is HORRIBLY overcomplicated to support at that level for what it really does.
The phrase I am looking for, is "Pedantic Jerk"
I'll see your post dot-com bust graduation & raise you graduating EXACTLY one month before 9/11.
It was a struggle to even get interviews, but on 9/12 they where all canceled (try back next year I was regularly told). I wound up working as an intern, for not much more then 8$/hr, for 6 months (and this was after graduation). Thankfully that internship helped me find a real job (for rather low pay I might add).
It's taken me some time, and a change in employers, but I've at least gotten myself to an AVERAGE pay scale for my role & skill set.
There is certainly a great value in starting ones career on an economic high, rather then a near depression. I seriously pity the kids graduating right now. The term 'lost generation' from Japan's economic near-collapse comes to mind. I know just starting in a smallish recession my life long earning potential has been clipped.
I'd be laughing, if I wasn't weeping about how true that statement is 'round these parts.
Bah,
Last death throws of a failing regime. I feel horrible for the Iranian people right now, but thank god they don't seem to be taking this lying down.
It's like the 1960's over there, a huge boom of 'youth' and a repressive establishment to fight. Here's hoping the result of this revolution is a bit more friendly then the last, but more importantly that it treats it's people better.
You jest, but that makes perfect sense!
How else could the man evade us for 9 years spending all of our resources to find him? Who's looking for an eight foot red balloon connected to a dialysis machine in the middle of northern Pakistan when there's a "terr'st" to be hunted who's obviously in a "hidy hole".
(please god note the sarcasm there)
I'd modify your recommendation, if he can get around his sound issues. I'm permanently hopefully & permanently disappointed in XBMC's support for MythTV. I don't think I'll find XBMC to be a viable Myth frontend until that fateful future day when the PVR branch gets merged into the XBMC trunk & a good solid Myth plugin is made available for it. I will say the commercial skip feature in the 9.11 Beta is nice, but streaming is still flaky, no real guide feature to be had & library integration doesn't work. Seems even for the PVR branch the devs prefer different back end software then Myth (tvheadend? or pvr? or something). Don't get me wrong, I'm realy a huge XBMC fanboy, but a good myth frontend it isn't (yet).
What I'd recommend, and what I use myself, is a mythbuntu box with XBMC & Hulu desktop. I use XBMC for everything that isn't recorded from TV or Hulu streams. I use mythfrontend for what it does well, watch live TV & recorded programs. Generally I manage my recordings from mythweb, as I really don't like the myth interface at all! I have all three of the players configured to use the same LIRC remote, and have an infinite loop shell script cycle through 'em (a hack I know).
No netflix though, this is a failure of netflix not Linux.
Works very well for me, ymmv.
If your operating a large scale data center and not replacing the SERVERS every few years..... your doing it wrong.
Point 5, IMHO, is the big one.
The great thing about Slashdot & blogs is not necisarily the articles or any original content. It comes from the community's self generated editorials after the fact. I have my own deeply held opinions on things, but I do find it very interesting to hear others opinions, even if they differ wildly from my own.
Slashdot & others have made an entire business out of these communities. Couple a well designed & well cultivated community driven web site to you point number 1) local news, and you have a powerful force not only for revenue generation but also for driving local politics & change.
As I get older (where did my 20s go?!?!) I'm getting more & more interested in state & city issues around me. And the sites that cater to that are few & far between, and the 'community' behind them is often horrible (if it exists at all, comment sections with 0 comments are very common).
I thought it was common knowledge that google is an advertising company, with a search engine & other such trinkets.
The key is, some of those other trinkets could be used to drive eyeballs back to advertisement (clearly most will fail).
We'll just have to agree to disagree about google's long term viability without this R&D. I tend to be a tinfoil hat type paranoid. My basic thinking is if the company doesn't innovate by itself, then someone else will and outshine even the great google with a good enough idea.
Also realize I think anyone who calls 5 years or less "long term" is a nut job, here again I maybe divergent from the mainstream, I'm talking 10-20 years (or more).
The other great advertising companies, NBC Universal & friends... are clearly seeing that there lack of past R&D and assuming they had a solid long term future is coming back to bite them.
But that's just like, -my- -opinion-, man.
I do partly agree with you. Dividends should be paid from a "wildly profitable company", if it's in a strong long term position. That being said, and my apologies if I misinterpreted you, your attitude strikes me as a bit over the top. Dividends are gravy on the biscuit of increased stock valuation over the long term.
Google, TODAY, is profitable but without reinvestment of this type where will they be tommorow? We as investors and a society have gone way to far in the direction of short term gratification. We drive companies to constantly answer the "what have you done for me lately" question. Leading, far to often, to corporate leadership who sacrifice long term shareholder value for short term profits (which has been structured to drive there pay). I'm not sure if there's an Enron parallel to Godwin's law, but it would probably fit my comment right about now.
R&D is an investment in future shareholder wealth, all investments entail risk, so hedging the companies bets with a spaghetti cannon isn't necisarily bad. If Android takes off & chromeOS doesn't: they haven't needlessly bogged one down with the other (and vice versa). If both are wildly successful, merging shouldn't be too terribly hard if there's a value to be gained, given the profits both return.
Nope, not all gonna die. But a large chunk of us are gonna feel horrible for 2-3 days, and then harbor a slowly diminishing cough for several weeks.
At least watching the talking heads scream "OMFG where all gonna die!!!!!11elevin" was entertaining when I couldn't get outa bed.
ooh, pretty shiny!!!
At a quick glance that seems to be exactly what I was thinking. Thanks for the link, I don't need it today (only one HDTV directly connected today) but certainly bookmarked for they day that I do.
I'd rather go the QAM encoder route, then buy one of those balun(sp?) arrangements encapsulating HDMI (even if its more expensive up front). Those things are not very future proof IMNSHO, they remind me of those old vcr rabbits. QAM on the other hand should be around for a while.
Good show, I hope you guys do well with selling those things.
RF IR extenders are a godsend for this sort of thing. I recently purchased a "Next Generation Remote Control Extender" that I HIGHLY recommend. I've got my HTPC in the basement and can use the remote control from my bedroom on the second floor without issue.
http://www.amazon.com/Next-Generation-Remote-Control-Extender/dp/B000C1Z0HA
Basicly it comes with a very small rechargeable battery that can be put in either an AAA or AA sleeve (The sleeve houses an RF transmitter) . You put this battery & sleeve into the remote control's battery holder and it senses the IR LEDs load on the battery. Turns that data into RF and sends it to a base station placed where your video source is, the base station then sends out the original IR signal. Replaces the 'wife/gf remote' w/a more submissive model ;-) (Un)fortunately it doesn't have all the features of the wife/gf, so you should keep at least one of them around as well if those features are important to you (I often question if the tinkering & effort to keep 'em functioning properly is worth it).
I've got a very smiler configuration for SDTV distribution of my HTPC output over existing Coax throughout my house.
I've looked for an ATSC or QAM modulator before, and my searches resulted in substantially costlier solutions then 500$. Try 4 times that for DVI/SPDIF or HDMI to QAM modulator, I couldn't find one that did ATSC. And it would seems ridiculous that low cost solutions for this don't yet exist.
Could you share some information about the ATSC modulators you've found at a ~500$ price point? Sounds like it could be a perfect solution for me if I ever by another HDTV.
This I can not understand: you print you're PDF manuals?
Most PDF manuals I get are very well bookmarked and emenantly searchable.... How is killing a tree 'easier to browse'?
To me, this is simply an unwillingness to embrace a different way of doing things not a realistic evaluation of what's easier.
I much prefere teh computer screen, I have many & they are always near me... I read 75% of Atlas Shrugged from a .txt file. If I can do that, I think you can stop wasting paper for manuals.
Slippy you are spot on sir,
Looking at your SAN utilization and seeing HBA throughput of next to nothing is not necessarily proof it's the app or db. As a storage admin, I'd love to say it's never our fault, but clearly if your spending all your time looking at the network and not the disk utilization itself, your looking in the wrong place. I agree that 8Gb and even 4Gb links for disk HBAs are usually way overkill (on average), but that often is due to the fact that the spindles on the backend (or the server itself) can't service the load being pushed by the app or db. I rarely even bother looking at perf stats on my switches, as I know they will be under 50% utilized. But when I see my disk response times going well into the double digits, I know that the switches are not at issue and we may need to address the disk layout.
As per the death of raid, I also see it's day coming. I don't mean to sound like an IBM fanboi (I'm not) but there XIV product looks like they've got the right idea for anti-raid (i think HPs EVA does this to a lesser extent). Band as many cheap ol' SATA disks together as possible, and be mad paranoid about mirroring it. Need more capacity? no worries pop it in and we'll start moving data around to reduce access density automagicly. Teiring your storage is a bad idea that needs to die (mico-managment) as to lower your access density you end up short stroking. Instead put that low IO NAS device right next to your high IO financial system on disk and use both the capacity & IO ability of the drive effectively. I -personly- don't see the death of centralized storage coming anytime soon, it's just that 1) raid needs to die as we spread IO over more & more larger & slower per GB spindles, and 2) for the near term (5+ years) that SSD stuff is going to be used as a second level cache at best do to cost per GB. Either w/the disk array using it as a second stage cache, or intelligently written apps doing it for themselves (likely better for everyone).
The 'cloud' is a lie for most enterprise class apps, at least when you get to the DB level. (p.s. I also get frustrated with the app & dba premadonas, but it's even WORSE on the rare occasion when they are right ;-) )
"that can get you 5 at the Big House in Pontiac." ?!?... You mean Jackson maybe? The only 'big house' in Pontiac is the city & Oakland county jails... (or am I missing something here?).... p.s. steer clear of the UPers... they bight.
I feel yer pain pal,
I started with Red Hat 5.0 in '98 on a, wait for it, Packard Bell. Nonstandard Hardware FTL!. That chmod 666? I wish it where that easy to get my soundcard/modem combo card working under Linux back in the day. On the plus side, this is how I learned about the basics of the linux kernel, module management & recompiling. And BOY did it take a while to recompile the kernel on a pentium 133, but all that scrolling text was mesmerizing.
Once I got everything working, I didn't have a whole lot to DO in the OS until around 2000/2001, but it sure was fun to get working...Finally made the full switch in 2002...(personal year of the Linux desktop).
Sick man that I am, I found this level of frustration fascinating & I was in love w/Linux ever since. (k)Ubuntu is almost boring now (thank god for KDE4 to keep me angry :-) ).
Not to knock your employer (ok, so maybe to knock your employer). But the Celerra has soured my tast for EMC NAS (or NAS type) solutions so much that even without ever working with NetApp, I would recomend them.
Of course, the centera always did sound interesting. But last I heard you still needed to write to the centera API, no block access for you (or real NAS type either). But I did hear murmers of this changing.
Anything to avoid a Celerra.
GOOD GOD MAN!!
That and Major Pain are the only TWO movies I have ever walked out of the theater on..... and Major Pain was damn fine cinima in comparison.
-Rupert
p.s. your names 'anactofgod', you walked out on cool world? you don't happen to be a Mormon who lived in the Detroit area 'round the early 90s?.....
Wouldn't we all love to have an employeer pay for us to sit down and code our own full blown portal software. But for most cases, this does not make buisness sence. No offence but, homegrown software for something as complicated as CMS and as truly generic as portal software is like throwing money down a toilet. You might as well open up Emacs and start cloning SAP unsing python/MySQL.
-Rupert