Byte and Switch – Signiant Appoints Exec – Storage Networking News Wire
BURLINGTON, Mass. — Signiant, the leader in distributed data management, today announced that Dave Lemont has been appointed vice chairman of the company’s board of directors. Previous to this appointment, Lemont served on Signiant’s advisory board since March 2006.
Work In Progress
Phil Abercrombie : now what’s he doing?
Archive for August, 2006
Byte and Switch – Signiant Appoints Exec – Storage Networking News Wire
Are you listening HP?
Techworld.com -
The systems management area, with Aperi, affects storage. Why is IBM doing this? Why is IBM trying to get rid of added value in the storage system management area? The thinking is that IBM benefits because its services arm, IBM Global services, will pick up projects that integrate Aperi and other open source ultra-commoditised software applications into large business projects. It denies sales to competitor products and, because those competitors don’t have world-class services operations, denies them services business too.
There is no threat that hardware could go open source; it’s software that’s the battlefield here. There is a looming problem for storage system software suppliers where an open source approach could work. Are you listening HP? It seems to me that IBM wants to destroy the added value represented by AppIQ and replace it with Aperi code instead.
My take on this:
- open source is hard to engineer (the social problems are tricky, industry consortia don’t have a good track record) and so time frames tend to be long – this may not be acceptable in the immature SRM marketplace
- srm software is expensive to engineer (equipment access in particular doesn’t come cheap) – this may be a barrier to open-source contributors
- The GoF represents most (80%?) of the current and near-term potential market for SRM software. It will be tough for IBM etc. to get on the train.
Gnome Terminal and CTRL-A
One of the great things about modern Linuxes is that you get security updates, and other application updates, pushed to you via your update manager : all you have to do is accept the changes and sit back and watch the install. It’s just like Windows Update but without the spyware.
But of course every piece of silver has a cloudy lining. If you don’t choose when, and what, to update (and with this volume of updates, you don’t have time to research and choose), then you have lost control of the software running on your box (and so, really you’ve lost control of your box).
A recent automatic update to Gnome Terminal added the keyboard accelerator CTRL-A to have the function “New Terminal Window”. Who thought of this one I wonder? Presumably not somebody that used CTRL-A regularly – so if you use bash, or screen, your screwed. Of course you can turn off the accelerator (Edit->Keyboard Shortcuts…), but as I get older I find the arguments against running in a highly customized environment grow stronger, and so it takes about 100 instances of new terminal windows being created on my screen when I’m trying to go back to the start of the line in the shell, before I’m ready to go and make the necessary customization.
Ok. I’ve done it now. I’ll shut up.