3.001: my 18tb ipad 3g
OK, so I'm starting to see a faint glimmer of light at the end of the Get-Ready-For-EMC-World tunnel, as the content has to be nailed down pretty much solid tonight so that the hundreds of laptops can be pre-loaded for the week of sessions we'll be doing.
Whew!
For R&R between now and then, I thought I'd do a fun little post.
Soo…riddle me this:
Question: What does THIS
have to do with THAT?
Answer: I received a brand-spanking new Apple iPad 3G (64GB model, on the left) as a gift last Friday, and it is rapidly become my mobile desktop of choice. In fact, I'm almost convinced I'll do the entire EMC World without ever taking my laptop out of its case (I'm sure I'll not be the only one on that mission next week). I've already armed it with the productivity apps and presentations I'll need for my 1-on-1s, and things are looking pretty awesome.
On the right is the brand-spanking new Iomega ix12-300r SMB/Distributed Office rackmount storage array that Iomega announced yesterday. I am fortunate to have been a beta tester of the product for some (undisclosed amount of) time, and I must say, it is almost as exciting to the storage geek inside me as is the iPad to the personal-productivity geek that I am.
Best part? My ix12, fully loaded with 12 2TB SATA drives turns my 64GB iPad into a 18TB portable storage tablet.
Yes, Virginia, 12x2TB is 24TB, but drive vendor TBs aren't "real" TBs – the drives actually hold about 1.8 "real" TBs, and with 10+2 RAID 6, you get about 18TBs of usable capacity out of a fully-loaded ix12. For that matter, my iPad is actually only 59.17GB, but who's counting?
Seriously…my iPad can directly access the entire usable capacity of my RAID 6-protected ix12 via the new WebDAV interface provided by the latest version of Lifeline. Using any of several available iPad apps that include WebDAV clients (I chose PrintCentral from Eurosmartz), I can not only copy files to/from my home-based ix12, I can also directly open and edit files. PrintCentral also supports my iPod Touch and provides printing support as well, allowing me to print to via my home computer OR via the native CUPS print server built into the ix12 – double bonus!
And with 3G observed download rates around 320 Kbytes/s (and the unlimited data plan), it's even reasonable to pull fairly large files down from my ix12…although I do expect to take advantage of the EMC World's free Wi-Fi as often as I can. With two communications options available, I can hopefully side step the wireless congestion we all experienced last year during the breaks. If not, I'll be in the Blogger's Lounge :).
But I'm not here to sing the praises of Apple – there are more than enough starry-eyed folks around to do that.
let's talk about the ix12
In addition to being an ideal storage capacity peripheral for my new iPad, the ix12 has tons of features that make it ideal for small- to medium-businesses looking for cost-effective storage for their local and/or distributed offices. Take a few minutes to browse through the specs, and you'll be possibly overwhelmed at how far Iomega and EMC have taken the Lifeline-based platform.
NFS? Check. CIFS? Check. AFP? Check (complete with Time Machine backup support). FTP? Sure. WebDAV? K-kool! iSCSI? You betcha! 4x bondable 1Gb Ethernet? Check.
Wait a minute – did I just say iSCSI? Indeed, iSCSI was first introduced on the ix4, and I've been using it as storage for my photos and music collections since the day I got my ix4 last year – first with Vista Ultimate, and now with Windows 7 Ultimate (drivers are built-in to both versions of Windows). And this is cool – the performance of iSCSI is nothing short of amazing…I'm seeing better performance with my iSCSI devices than I'm getting on several of my external USB disk drives! Indeed, I suspect that the cache of the ix12 plays a big role, as does the inherent value of wide-striping across all 12 drives in the array. Very, very impressive.
The other thing that is remarkable about the ix12 is the amount of concurrent I/O workloads it can handle. As the development team will attest, my first test with every code drop they gave me was to fire up as many copy jobs as possible. I'd start the ix12 internal copy engines pulling my several hundred GBs of files from my 1x4. I'd kick off a ROBOCOPY /MT:16 copy job to move almost 1TB of TiVo videos into the device. I'd start up a Windows 7 backup to network share job to backup the 700GB+ of data on my primary laptop (which is also backed up to MoZy, just in case – I'm a belt-and-suspenders guy for sure). Plus a few more things from each of the other computers in my house. Plus, I'd ask the ix12's media server to scan for new music/files every so often, and I had my 4 perimeter webcams routinely FTPing any "record on motion detection" clips (about 7MB each) into the box as well (I didn't use the built-in Security Camera feature because it doesn't yet support the Sharx cameras I use – but no worry, they each have their own internal FTP clients to push clips out)
And I'd turn all this on even before the RAID 6 protection build had been completed (indeed, the implementation allows I/O even before the initialization process is finished).
No surprise, I found a few bugs this way, but it didn't take long for the team to get them all debugged and closed. And I'm sure they all breathed a sigh of relief that day back when that I told them the entire process had completed without event.
but wait, there's more
As others have noted, there are numerous other features that will appeal to the SMB (and perhaps some SOHO consumers, like me). The VMware and HyperV seal of approval means this thing is well suited for the server (and storage) consolidation play. Chad Sakac, Chuck Hollis and Stephen Foskett each provide their perspectives on their blogs, so if you want to know more from a variety of perspectives, I encourage the visit.
But for me, I'm just happy to be taking an 18,491.17GB (usable) iPad to EMC World next week!
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