Be Generous

Busy preparing for the trip to Japan. Already in holiday spirit. Need to catchup on storage stuff.


Medina House of an Hungarian guy. He reportedly received one percent stake to leave IBM and work for a startup, now we know as Microsoft.

Got photo blog inspiration from Andy Gray's Japan Photo Blog.

What Do You Care What Other People Think?

Last few weeks, I spent some time exploring life and work of Richard Feynman (1918 - 1988), a winner of Nobel Prize in Physics, inventor of Feynman diagram for quantum field theory calculations, a member of the investigating panel on Space Shuttle Challenger disaster, and a professor at Caltech.

• Read book Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! Adventures of a Curious Character Richard P. Feynman


• Listened to an audio book What Do You Care What Other People Think? Further Adventures of a Curious Character Richard P. Feynman


• Watched a PBS NOVA documentary DVD The best mind since Einstein profiling Richard Feynman.


• Watched this 50 minutes Google Video The pleasure of finding things out - RP Feynman

Why did I want to know more about Richard Feynman? He was brought to my attention by my boss. For a while, he has been commenting that I remind him of his Physics professor at Caltech. Now, I am sure not for my beautiful mind but for my eccentricities like speaking my mind and questioning status quo.

In the end, learning about Richard Feynman and his work gave me a new perspective on feedback received from others irrespective of whether it is about my blog or the ways I approach and discuss issues.

Thank you all for your opinions and feedbacks and keep them coming! And, no I am not growing up and I have no plans to quit blogging.

Data De-duplication crossing the Chasm

For last couple of days, storage blogosphere and media has been buzzing about EMC acquisition of Avamar, a data de-duplication vendor (See related entries below for the extent of coverage). It wasn't a best kept secret as rumors were circulating for a while that Avamar is being courted by EMC.

Recently, I have been studying Avamar data de-duplication technology after writing several times about data de-duplication and Data Domain. Few weeks ago, they were kind enough to send me promptly marketing and technical material. Don't know if that had to do with me being storage blogger or their openness to anyone interested.

Congratulations to Avamar for a very attractive exit. In exchange, EMC is getting a strong technology platform in real-time data de-duplication and handling both data-at-rest and data-in-transit. And it has potential to take EMC's backup, archive, replication and, contrary to popular thinking, array products to the next level.

Acquisition of Avamar by EMC, Rocksoft by ADIC, rumored IPO plans of Data Domain, and total segment revenue potentially reaching $100+ million, it appears that data de-duplication finally has crossed the chasm.

Related Entries:

Jeff Boles, Tony Asaro, Storagezilla, Storagezilla again, Mark Lewis, Byte & Switch, Dave Raffo, Beth Pariseau, Sharon Fisher, Raj Bala, Joseph Kovar, Tim Stammers