Anyone who has ever dealt with Microsoft Outlook will know the .pst file format - it's the binary, undocumented file in which all data from Outlook is stored - emails, contacts, calendar, you name it, it's in there. Microsoft has announced that it will release detailed technical documentation on the Outlook .pst data format.
Archivio per ottobre 2009Here’s another Storage Virtual Appliance (joining the Celerra, Avamar, Atmos and many many others) – this time, EMC Rainfinity File Management Appliance – Virtual Edition (FMA/VE). A big thank you to the EMC Rainfinity team for doing the right thing and opening this up, in particular Scott Hall. Thanks Scott! What is Rainfinity File Management Appliance? It’s an appliance that can move files between filesystems transparently, enabling automated policy-driven tiering. For example, you can move files on a Celerra between Flash based tiers, FC based tiers, SATA based tiers, and in and out of deduped filesystems. On the real product (not the current Virtual Edition – this is one difference between the virtual and physical versions…) you can also use it between Celerra and NetApp systems, and to and from NAS devices to Centera (gee – I wonder what could be the next cloudy tier? :-). Why would you do it? Most filesystems are mostly old stale data. They consume all the storage costs as if they were actively used. They are backed up every time a full filesystem backup is done. For most customers – this can save a whackload of money, and make backups of any NAS environment work better. If you’re interested, read on for details, downloads and documentation!
Filesystems studies (whether academic, or the assessments we do for our customers) almost always show that the overwhelming volume of content is VERY stale. Simply archiving (if it can be done easily and transparently) is one of the easiest ways to drive efficiency both into the production and backup sides of the equation.
How Rainfinity FMA reclaim this stale storage? Well, you can read here for more on EMC.com. You can get more detail on Powerlink if you are a customer, partner, or EMCer/VMware employee – follow the breadcrumb trail: Home > Products > Software P-R > Rainfinity Family > Rainfinity File Management Appliance But – in a nutshell, as shown in the diagram below it’s an out-of-band device, scans the filesystem for files that meet policies, moves them to the other tier, and leaves a stub in the filesystem. What does a stub look like to a user? Like the screenshot below, it’s pretty transparent. The file metadata (date/size) stay as they were before (though the attributes are marked as offline – which makes most backups skip the file – a side benefit) , the icon has a little offline note.
What happens if someone deletes the stub? Rainfinity FMA reports on deleted stubs and can recreate them. In the words of a customer:
If you want to play, all you need is a VMware environment. Download the Rainfinity FMA/VE OVA here. Download the document (still draft, but has the core stuff) on how to set it up here. Remember – THIS IS NOT SUPPORTED IN GENERAL, AND CERTAINLY NOT IN PRODUCTION ENVIRONMENTS. That the quid pro-quo for a tool that we’re making freely and openly available, with no time-out. You can use it with real Celerras, or just use the virtual Celerra Appliance – which you can download here. Remember that the Celerra VSA thrives when you are using vSphere 4 with a CPU which supports Intel VT or AMD-V (follow the instructions here) HOWTO 101: Installing and Basic EMC Rainfinity FMA/VE Configuration:
Download the high-rez video here. HOWTO 201: Configuring Networks and VLANs with the EMC Rainfinity FMA/VE:
Download the high-rez video here. HOWTO 301: Configuring the EMC Rainfinity FMA/VE with a Celerra for Fully Automated Storage Tiering on NAS
Download the high-rez video here. BTW – if you’re reading this far… Pause and think about this for a second. Every EMC capability is now based on x86. Our storage platforms are leveraging the Intel cost/performance curve, and some of them even can scale out horizontally out of those consistent “storage engine” x86 building blocks we use on all the main current platforms. We’re taking all that stuff that either came on CDs or as physical generic 2U servers into virtual appliances. Wouldn’t it be great if we used this to do mass-integration of our capabilities? :-) Don’t get too excited – there’s a long, long way to go, but we’re getting there.
Icemaann writes "Pingdom and Network World are reporting that the SE tld dropped off the internet yesterday due to a bug in the script that generates the SE zone file. The SE tld has close to one million domains that all went down due to missing the trailing dot in the SE zone file. Some caching nameservers may still be returning invalid DNS responses for 24 hours."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Astronaut Needed: Craigslist ad wants someone for a trip to Titan, $25K cash. Only drawback - it's a one-way trip.
T-Mobile's now reporting that personal data stored on Sidekicks has "almost certainly has been lost as a result of a server failure at Microsoft/Danger."
We polled the attendees at a recent Amazon SimpleDB webinar and found that over half of them didn't know that they could start using the service for free. That's a shame because SimpleDB is easy to use, scales easily to handle high request rates, and is available in our US and EU regions. You can keep up to 1 gigabyte of data in SimpleDB without paying any storage fees. You can transfer 1 GB of data and use up to 25 Machine Hours to process your queries each month. This should be sufficient to allow you to issue about 2 million PutAttribute or Select calls per month. We have pages of SimpleDB sample code and libraries, plenty of SimpleDB articles and tutorials, and some really good SimpleDB documentation. I've spent the last couple of months writing a book on AWS programming (to be published by SitePoint later this year) and I had a lot of fun with SimpleDB. The book is targeted at web developers, so I wrote all of the code in PHP and used the Tarzan toolkit (soon to be renamed Cloud Fusion). I had fun creating examples to show how to store RSS feeds, AWS usage information, and EBS snapshot metadata in SimpleDB. Here are some examples of just how easy it is to store and retrieve data using SimpleDB, PHP, and Tarzan. The first step is to include the class file:
require_once("class.tarzan.php");
Create a new domain and verify that the call succeeded:
$SDB = new AmazonSimpleDB();
Store some items (error checking omitted to keep this post brief):
$Item1 = array("Name" => "Jeff", "Sex" => "M", "Age" => 49);
In this example I took advantage of SimpleDB's flexible schemaless model to avoid disclosing my wife's age. Here's how to retrieve all items with Sex set to "F":
$Res = $SDB->select("select * from my_domain where Sex='F'");
The select method returns an object of type TarzanHTTPResponse. Digging in to this object is as simple as referencing $Res->body->SelectResult->Item:
foreach ($Res->body->SelectResult->Item as $Item)
The item is an object of type SimpleXMLElement. Here's what it looks like:
SimpleXMLElement Object
Here's how to access the SimpleDB attributes of the item:
foreach ($Res->body->SelectResult->Item as $Item)
What you can't see from the code, but which is important nevertheless, is that this code, if used at the core of a busy application, can handle thousands of storage or retrieval requests per second without any additional effort on my part. In addition, I don't have to worry about hardware failures, replicas, full disks, improper indexing, and so forth. I can focus on my application and on meeting the needs of my users. -- Jeff;   
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