I came across this little demo video from HP showing their HP Data Protector 7 StoreOnce federated deduplication. I liked it, and one of the reasons I liked it was because it was a step towards the dehydrated enterprise – something I blogged on long ago.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m not claiming for a moment that HP were inspired by my exhortation to come in out of the rain, but like everyone else I prefer to be right than wrong, and to see further ahead than others and that doesn’t happen as often as I would like. What HP have done here is embrace the idea that “re-hydrating” content that was de-duplicated on disk in order to send it over the network is inefficient (or um… nuts) and what we need is integration of the disjoint network and storage de-duplication worlds.  I can’t say I warm to their phrase “adaptive micro-chunking” – it trips off the tongue like a band-aid off a hairy leg, but the block size they are working with is cosnistent with our own sense of the sweet spot for de-duplication in the WAN Optimization world. Will HP take another step into this arid new world?

I’m sure you’re all been following the news that Debian Wheezy will be released in the next few weeks (ok, maybe not).

This is the newest distribution of Debian Linux and the upcoming version of Replify Accelerator will use it as the basis of its virtual appliance.

Why Debian? Well, it has a well deserved reputation as a Linux distribution that takes stability and security very seriously. This is of paramount importance when dealing with servers that are part of your core infrastructure. On a lighter note, each release is named after a character from Toy Story (The current release is named ‘Squeeze’), and the distribution itself was named by Ian Murdoch as a combination of his girlfriend Debra’s name and his own name. We thought that was nice.

Why Linux? There are a number of reasons. Firstly, it is tried and tested. The operating system has been been about for twenty odd years, is used in a wide range of commercial scenarios, is constantly improving and providing new features. Also, we get all these new features for free!

Another great thing is the modularity of the operating system. We supply our software on virtual appliances that we ask our customers to download. With Linux, we can supply an appliance with a base operating system using only a few hundred megabytes of disk space and a similar amount of RAM. However if we want to add extra capabilities, it is a trivial process to download extra utilities and libraries for tasks such as network monitoring and performance benchmarking. Even setting up a web server or a file share on such an appliance only takes a couple of minutes. Additionally, because our appliances are virtualized, it is straight-forward to increase the amount of disk space, CPU and RAM, so that the little appliance we provide for download, can become a heavy-duty machine servicing the needs of thousands of users in an Enterprise Environment.

Our Chief Blogging Officer is often exasperated when he asks if it is possible to do something on Linux and we suggest a simple one-line command that does exactly what he needs, but is apparently unintuitive. In my mind that is part of the beauty mentioned above. Linux gives us a great low-footprint environment containing our WAN optimization software. It is a fully functional operating system that allows us to perform lots of customizations without having all the extra overhead that an Operating System such as Windows provides in order to be “user friendly”. Before you get too worried though, we do provide a web interface to simplify the important stuff, so the majority of users don’t have to deal with the command line. (unless they want to, of course)

Oh, by the way Debian has outlived Debra and Ian who have now split up, however their creation is going from strength to strength and with its help, Replify Accelerator WAN Optimization software will continue to improve too.

One customer has reported a backup time of over 3hours, but after using Replify, this was reduced to just over 2minutes using Netapp! A leading UK IT Managed Services company is now using Replify Accelerator along with their Netapp appliances for backup replication. The combination means that windows back-ups are eliminated and the recovery time for data protection is significantly improved over the WAN. The Replify Accelerator optimises and accelerates data transfer across WANs and since it’s a software only solution, no additional hardware is required. See the Replify backup accelerator datasheet here: http://www.replify.com/products/replify-backup-accelerator/

Let’s be blunt – Windows 8 is just plain stupid on a device with a keyboard and mouse. I flit between android phones, tablets, ipads and my Windows 7 laptop, and that doesn’t hurt my head at all – they all have good “conveyance” – you can tell what you need to do and it doesn’t rely on weird gestures, spooky hotspots, unintuitve keyboard short cuts etc. – but launching a laptop into the Windows “modern” interface is a custard pie in the face. It’s a serious “what the hell!, why did you do this to me?” experience. And I’m angry.

Yesterday I heard the expression “God created the heavens and the earth in seven days, but he didn’t have an installed base”. Well Microsoft just pissed all over their installed base. They nullified the investment in time that those customers had made – and not even to replace it with something better, but to replace it with something that doesn’t work well in the laptop context.

To offer a weird analogy – I like the Alien movies. The first was good, the second was gob-smackingly good, and my heart nearly burst out of my chest (like an alien baby) in the closing minutes as the final few protagonists battled it out. And then in Alien 3, in the first few seconds of context setting, they killed off all but one of the people that had survived in the last movie. They pissed all over those memories and ruined both movies. You can’t watch Aliens again because you know that all the people who make it to the end are going to die anyway, and you can’t enjoy Alien 3 because, it’s… well, sh*t. So read Windows 7 for Aliens and Windows 8 for Alien 3 and you may (just) be able to grasp my point.

So I can’t adopt Windows 8 – it’s offensive to me. Not just because it’s not a good engineering solution to the problem, but because I feel it’s wrong to co-operate with Microsoft when they’re being (a) dumb, (b) uncaring. And I don’t much like saying that because for a decade or more I’ve been a Microsoft supporter, and argued that in almost every respect they are a better and more likeable company than Apple. I suspect that the flaccid sales of Windows 8 will result in Microsoft delivering a Windows 7 “theme” that repairs most of what they have broken and at that point I will likely migrate.

And as for Office 2013… suffice to say, I’m installing Office 2010 on my downgraded laptop. Have you seen those terrible colorless ribbons? It’s like working by candlelight.

And what has any of this to do with WAN Optimization and virtual appliances? nothing.

I’ll come clean – the real reason that Malbec is the official grape of Replify is that a bunch of the team spent a very pleasant evening in a restaurant in Tralee a year or so ago, and just for a change we chose a Malbec to accompany dinner. It was delicious, and became even more so after the third bottle. We were enjoying it so much that we never left the restaurant in favor of the pub and instead sat on sipping (gulping probably)  until the restaurant politely asked us to leave. As we staggered out we declared that henceforth the official wine of Replify should be Malbec, and when Replifians (or is it Replicators) gather together to dine we search out the Malbec.

And if anyone is reading this in Argentina (or any other Malbec producing region) we would be only to happy to receive a bottle or two of your produce.  We can’t claim that consumption of Malbec has contributed to the potency of our virtual WOC, but it has certainly helped us decompress after a hard day of compressing, and de-duplicating our customer’s network traffic.

The big problem with this of course is the heat, the chocolate melts pretty quickly.

It’s time we made a new major software release from Replify and this one is definitely worth waiting for.  It’s due for release in May 2013 and covers a couple of important themes for the WAN Optimization market: delivering a variety of clients for wan optimization “on-the-go” and CLAN.

We now support Windows, Mac and Linux as platforms for the mobile client – this is becoming increasingly important due to the number of remote workers these days and people that work from home.  Before you ask, we are working on iOS and Android support – hopefully later this year but as always the Apple pie is the hardest to cook…

WAN Optimization for the mobile market (until 4G really takes off) needs to consider that 3G is going to be around for a bit yet, in places where wifi or wifi hoptspots aren’t available.  Using Replify improves speed and performance as well as offload so if you are struggling keeping under your data allowance each month then WAN optimization should definitely be considered.  General office working such as http traffic, email, VPN etc are all accelerated by Replify.  Certainly any VPN connections I’ve used in the past are slow and clunky like a granny driven Fiesta.  The Replify experience is like driving a tuned Mitsubishi Evo: slick, super-fast acceleration and gets you where you need to go quicker than everyone else.

CLAN, however, is the big elephant here – if you don’t know how it works and how it might benefit you and your business, I will endeavour to explain.  Simply put a CLAN is a group of users that view or access the same content.  Currently, you probably have everyone in an office often downloading the same email, content or data across the WAN.

You can have static CLAN or dynamic CLAN.  Static CLAN is where you, the network admin, decide who belongs to a certain group – so for example the sales team could be a CLAN, the admin team could be a CLAN or maybe you want people in a certain location to be in a CLAN.  Dynamic CLAN is where it’s automatically decided who is part of a CLAN, maybe based on IP address, ping times or other rules.  CLAN works so that if one CLAN member has viewed certain content, the other members of that CLAN can get this content from that user rather than having to retrieve if off the WAN – thus saving your bandwidth and also speeding up the data retrieval.  It is a very cool feature.

Other nice features we have managed to sneak into this release are around performance and things we believe are required for WAN Optimization products in today’s market.  We have decreased our memory footprint to provision for tablets and mobile devices, we have added signed CIFS support, Clairvoyance, faster first pass acceleration and connection persistence.  Connection persistence will help in environments where there are bad quality connections and drop outs for short periods – Replify will maintain the virtual appliance links.  Clairvoyance is a feature which looks like it works by some sort of magic – it allows the virtual appliances to anticipate usage patterns based on historical information – e.g. staff come into the office at 9am and check BBC news (or maybe a database system?) – well why not warm up their cache with this information before they come in rather than having bandwidth issues at 9am when everyone comes into the office?

There are many more enhancements added – feel free to contact Replify for a full list on support@replify.com.  Is there something you would like to see in your WAN Optimization product that isn’t there?  Please tell us – Replify like to react to the markets needs and if you’re happy, we’re happy.

How is this possible?  Well of course Moore’s law has played a big part in this, but we also have to acknowledge the power of the Erlang language and platform to deliver phenomenally efficient protocol handling, and there’s rather a lot of Replify secret sauce in the design of our indexing, searching and caching algorithms. It’s rather fired my imagination – our demonstrator “train set”, which consisted of two Dell Zinos, a Network Nightmare and some odds and ends in a chunky flight case, can now be replaced by a few devices I can fit in my pocket. I’ve now ordered a Cubox – admittedly more expensive at around $120, but much more potent than the Pi, and I’m dying to see what it can do.

Oh yes, and that’s Dusty the dwarf hamster, he’s impressed by the Pi too, although he prefers nuts to fruit.

A bit of online searching found many references to upright desks and some DIY designs. One of these was based on bits from Ikea, so given that it takes me longer to walk through Ikea than it does to get there from my house, I went shopping.  And found, after two miles of weaving back and forth, that they didn’t have the table I required. But no matter, as the rest of the team will tell you, my attic and garage are an endless source of “stuff” so I started from scratch and came up with my own design.

Since I didn’t know who (if anyone) was going to use the desk I needed it to be highly configurable – so I based it on spur shelving.  Two spur rails,  6 spur brackets,  some wooden struts to hold the thing together and make it rigid, and a couple of pieces of MDF covered in vinyl for mouse-friendly shelves.  The only inventive parts were: (a) realising that I needed to saw off the ends of the rails so that I could use two of the brackets upside down to create the “feet”.

The desk “feet”

(b) gluing/screwing dowel roads to the bottom of the shelves so that they would sit snugly on the spurs without having to screw them down, and thereby allowing them to slide back and forth as needed

Shelf design

The result: the Moorhead Mark I upright desk was a success. I’m now on Mark IV,  but they’re all pretty much the same – they mainly differ because the “stuff” from my attic is somewhat varied. In Mk 1, the rails alone acted as the uprights – but it was a bit too bouncy.  In Mk 2 I added additional uprights, separate from the rails, for more rigidity.  In Mk 4 I just built a rectangle of wood and screwed the uprights on to it.  Both approaches work well.

Mark 2 Desk

Mark 4 Desk

What’s the conclusion? – well too early to say perhaps. The regular users claim more energy and alertness, but also some foot pain (so we’re trying foam mats). Most folks are alternating periods of standing with periods of sitting and the design allow for this pretty well – stick your laptop underneath for when you’re sitting and use an external monitor, keyboard and mouse when standing.  I’ll let you know in a few months whether it’s a fad or the office furniture of the future. The only problem is with our daily stand-ups.  We’re already standing up. Doh!

Bracket details

p.s. an orange folding bike is not a bike that can fold oranges. that technology has not yet been invented.