Storage Upcoming!!!

With ideas like thin provisioning taking shape, storage market is bumping with new ideas. And now comes pNFS - parallel NFS which enables multiple NFS servers to contribute to become a single server and share a clustered file system.
NAS though cheap has a fundamental limit in scaling and performance. Here the pNFS chips in. It can reuse your commodity servers to form a cluster out of them and can really scale linearly. It almost works like a multi path file system where a regular NFS server is replaced by a NFS4.1 Meta Data server(MDS). The MDS is moved out of band and now clients can directly talk to the array behind.
The best part is - this effort has been standardized through IETF and on its way to become a part of NFS4.1 draft. So storage vendors know which direction to drive their efforts to. As of now only Panasas provides a pNFS solution and chances are others will follow. It would be really interesting to see next few months on the market :)
Sun is likely to come up with the next implementation. For some good tutorials about pNFS, watch this space .... http://opensolaris.org/os/project/nfsv41/pnfsdemos/basics
An html version of the NFS 4.1 draft is available here
http://www.nfsv4-editor.org/draft-10/draft-ietf-nfsv4-minorversion1-10.html

You conscious?

I strictly believe, one should not mix emotions with his/her profession. At least a developer should not. One should be only professional about his/her work and not sentimental. Then only you can enjoy perks of both.
But there is this certain sense of selfness which often stumbles upon while working, can be called as your conscious. When you are working with an upset mind, you are very much aware of the fact that it is you who is working on something which makes you nervous and you are not able to give out your best. You may take hours to complete things that would have been done in minutes otherwise. Basically you mess up anything you do.
Its quite obvious to be nervous if your boss yells at you or passes signals that he/she is not happy with you. It will definitely affect your work.
In my case, if I am upset, i take a break and have food :). Just spend few minutes not thinking about the thing just happened and get back to work.
I think only experience can fix those things. If you are getting conscious, work more often, you will lose it eventually.

Bored???

Another software guy got bored of his job? Doesn't know how to spend time? Or the worst part, are you on bench? Don't worry, we have got a good news for you folks:). A recent Slashdot post tells about ideas that were born of the spare time. Web 2.0, Ajax, Linux kernel development to mention a few.
Check this out - http://www.longtail.com/the_long_tail/2007/05/the_awesome_pow.html
So if you are suffering from the same problems, cheer up and try to work on a spare-time project. Chances are you would be able to do better whatever you do, software:) No harm. Plus you can gain a little recognition in the web world.
Believe me, I am trying to work on a spare time project myself. Its hard for sure :). But I won't quit. Let me know if you complete yours :)

System layering

Recently Andrew Morton, a lead Linux kernel developer called ZFS as layering violation. And you can see a fantastic reply from Jeff Bonwick, the lead of ZFS project here -
http://blogs.sun.com/bonwick/entry/rampant_layering_violation
IMHO, even if ZFS violates the conventional layering stack, it will thrive as long as it is performing better than other file systems. ZFS is the future of file systems and has introduced many path breaking features which no other file systems can claim as of now. Few mentions would be detecting silent data corruption, numerous snapshots, scalable infrastructure, in short end to end data integrity which is what matters at the end of the day.
I might sound like anoother ZFS fan but the truth is out there. ext2/ext3 apart from doing what they are supposed to do are prone to silent corruptions and are doing basically what FFS was doing few years ago. Since ZFS guys were brave enough to throw away years old conventions, they have been able to aggregate the control to only one entity, the file system which can manage from raid groups to backup to clones.
I personally believe Linux is the best thing happened with the computers in last few years. But ZFS took over almost everyone in File Systems development. I think both OpenSolaris and Linux would thrive and Linux might adapt the new features offered by ZFS.

Hello world...

Hi!!! My name is Anand Vidwansa. This is my first post for the world. A typical beginning would be to tell about myself, my hobbies, etc etc. And I am not gonna be a path breaker here :)
I am just one of the software guys you find in bulk these days. My interests vary from Music, bikes, hanging out and finally to the damn computers. I am no different than any other software guy out there. Still I want to tell you about myself. After all, I am a human being, looking out for people with similar interests and I guess computers would be the most common one.
So you would be seeing a lot of crap here about Music, philosophy, computers blah blah blah :)

My computer intestest typically fall within Storage, Systems, *nix kernels. I have been working in the industry for past 2 and half years. I have primarily worked with File Systems, VFS, physical file system, Quotas, Archiving, NFS, CIFS and LVM.