Over the last year as I’ve kept up with Synology they’ve impressed me with several things that they did.  I’m a Mac user…and when OSX Lion came out it broke Time Machine backup on most third-party NAS devices due to a change in authentication.  Synology was quick to put out a beta of new code to fix it.  Yes, it was beta but they did it quickly as it caught many people off guard.  They also back-ported the patch to fix support for Time Machine to older models that are out of support.  Very customer focused.  With the latest release of the Synology OS (DSM 3.2) they increased performance on many ARM CPU based models by up to 19%.

Recently Synology sent me a DS212+ to play with and review.  Actually, they asked what I wanted and since I’ve been working on a small lab build for Varrow employees I wanted to try their newest 2-bay unit.  Not everyone wants to or can afford to start with a 5-bay device and with the current price (late ’11/early ’12) of drives it gets expensive real fast to fill up a larger NAS box so I thought the DS212+ was a good choice.

Synology Model Numbers

A quick note about Synology model numbers.  They might seem confusing at first but once you learn the format they make a lot of sense.  DS is Disk Station, which are their desktop form factor NAS boxes.  The first number, in this case 2, is the number of drive bays.  The second number is the model year, so 2012.  The symbol after the number is:

• + – Performance oriented model
• Nothing – Good compromise of price and performance
• j – Less performance but a cheaper price

The Numbers

The DS212+ is a powerful little NAS, and that’s why I chose to look at it first.

• CPU- 2Ghz ARM
• RAM – 512MB DDR3 (non-upgradable)
• Internal Disk Support – 2 x SATAII 2.5″ or 3.5″ (hot swappable)
• External Disk Support – 2 x USB 3.0, 1 x USB 2.0 (front), 1 x eSATA, 1 x SD Card (front)
• Network – 1 x Gb Ethernet
• Noise – 19.8 db (it’s QUIET)
• Warranty – 2 years

This box has a fast 2GHz ARM CPU and 512MB of RAM.  Unlike its larger cousins that I have you cannot add more memory to this system, but I have yet to see a need to do so.  My other Synology NAS were upgraded to more memory (3GB) but I mainly did that because it was very cheap to do so and I figured it was never a bad thing to add more cache memory.  Keen eye’d readers may notice that there is no SATA III support yet, but since you’re mainly limited to network throughput I don’t see this as a problem.  Being the + model Synology did add USB 3.0 support to this device and I got some USB 3.0 drives to play with and test.

Initial Impressions

It’s a Synology and if you haven’t played with one the initial impressions are usually very good.  Nice packing with thoughtful inclusions such as Ethernet cables and a very simple getting started guide.  In the box is a disc with the tools you need to get your new NAS online, but I suggest you do what I do and go download the latest from their site.  The DS212+ has the newer black look and I like it a lot.  The older Synology units could be ugly but this one is sleek.  It’s also very quiet, which is another plus for these devices.  My lab is in my home office and I rarely ever hear the two larger NAS and this one is very quiet as well.  Any real noise comes from your choice of drives, not the devices.

Installation & Configuration

The process to setup a new Synology is the same across all models.  Unbox the system.  Install your disks.  Plug in network.  Plug in power.  The drive carriers for the DS212+ are nice, but plastic.  I always worry about breaking these.  I like the unlock mechanism better than the one used by my larger devices.  All of the drive carriers I’ve used from Synology have rubber bushings, which I like a lot.  I hate vibration noise from hard drives and I haven’t seen that at all with these.

Once everything is physically installed you just power on the Synology, wait for it to boot, and then use the Synology Assistant to find the device.  Note that these expect a DHCP server on the network.  Once the Assistant app (and there is one for OSX as well as Windows) finds your new NAS you have it install the latest DSM operating system.  DSM, DiskStation Manager, is the operating system that runs on all of the Synology devices and some people are surprised that it’s not installed on there already.  DSM lives on your internal disks in a special partition, which is why the NAS cannot be preloaded.  Once the initial configuration/deployment is done you are ready to go.

My goal is to do a writeup/review on DSM in the near future.  One very big feature of Synology devices is the fact they all run DSM so configuration, management, and monitoring of the DS212+ is exactly the same as my DS1010+ and DS1511+.  If I don’t look at the address bar in my browser I can’t even tell which one I’m managing.  DSM has a lot of really features.  There are many little things that make it powerful, not just the major features.  For example, from the file browser GUI in the management console I can remotely mount another network share which lets me quickly and easily move files between network devices without “bouncing” them off another system.  You can also schedule data backups from one Synology to another.  Again, I hope to do a good writeup on DSM in the very near future…especially now that DSM 4.0 Beta has been released.

While not really important on a two-bay device since you’re going to do RAID 0, 1, or JBOD, the larger devices support Synology’s Hybrid RAID or SHR.  The idea with SHR is that you can mix, match, and add drives over time and get the best usage out of your configuration while also getting N+1 protection from a disk failure.  Other NAS devices have similar options but it’s an interesting option if you plan to change drives later or not fill a cabinet right away.  For more detailed information on SHR check the Synology wiki page here.

The DS212+ In The Lab

As I just mentioned, all Synology boxes run the same DSM code.  This, at least to me, means that even the devices that are not on the VMware HCL should still work fine…they just haven’t been submitted for testing and so far the DS212+ has proven me correct.  It works just like my other boxes…just not as fast since it doesn’t have five spindles for handling I/O.  These support NFS and iSCSI for vSphere datastores and I primarily use NFS for several reasons.  The big one being that I can mount the datastores directly from my Mac systems.  The only downside to that is that you cannot thin provision VMDKs on NFS.  That’s one feature I’d really like to see.  I’d also like to see NAS VAAI support but that’s a big ask from me on these devices.  Give me thin provisioning first.

NOTE:  I had said that the Synology didn’t support thin provisioning with NFS but that is incorrect as Julian noted in the comments.  I tested it on two of my NAS boxes and it works fine.  It shows the full file size in the directory listing but free/used is correct.  Honestly, I’m not sure why I was thinking it didn’t…I just thought it wouldn’t when I first deployed the DS1010+.  My apologies for the mistake.

There are some catches when using external (USB) drives, though.  They are treated as independent drives and automatically shared out when connected.  You can’t use a fast USB 3.0 drive to extend the internal volume nor can you RAID 1 or 0 a pair of USB 3.0 drives.  You plug in a 3TB USB 3.0 drive and it shares out a 3TB volume.  While you can share out the USB drives via NFS and use them as datastores you cannot create an iSCSI volume on them and use that.  Unfortunately I don’t have an eSATA enclosure to test with but I assume it is the same.  If so, and you are worried about just two spindles, you may want to consider the DS712+ which is a 2-bay unit that can take the external DX510 5-bay expansion.  It’s a little more money but probably worth it later.  I personally feel the DX510 costs too much…but I haven’t had the chance to work with one yet.

Performance

While working with this device I’ve run a number of benchmark tests using Iometer.  The bottom line is this…  Choose the correct disks for your workload.  If this is going in your vSphere (or other environment) lab I suggest you buy good 7,200 RPM drives.  If you plan to use this for archive/backup/media use more power efficient, quieter, green type drives.  That’s the split I have in my DS1010+ (1TB WD Blacks) and DS1511+ (2TB Seagate LPs).  In the DS212+ right now I have a pair of 1TB Seagate Barracudas.  Not the latest and greatest, but again the HD shortage has hurt me on available gear.  The DS212+ had no problem maxing out its Gb Ethernet connection when doing sequential work.  Add in random tests and it would drop down, but that all depends on your spindles, block size, and randomness of the requests.   For a vSphere lab it’s all about the IOPS.  The only time I usually max the throughput on a Gb link is when doing a clone or deploying from a template.  The rest of the time my links are not saturated and it’s all up to the drives delivering IOPS.  If you want a really fast two-bay device you may consider using SSDs instead of spinning disks, depending on the space requirements for your lab.  If you do this you may consider using iSCSI instead of NFS since you can thin provision with that.

The USB 3.0 performance wasn’t as good as I was expecting, though.  I am using a WD 3TB external and a Seagate GoFlex 3TB.  Anandtech reviewed the Seagate drive here and got >150MB/sec sequential performance.  For the first test I simply took the drives out of their boxes and plugged them in.  The DS212+ had no problem mounting the pre-formatted drives and sharing them out.  But…with Iometer the best I could get was about 40MB/sec, well below the 100MB/sec I was hoping to see over the network.  It’s pretty much operating at USB 2.0 speed.

To try and improve this I had the DS212+ reformat the drives as ext4, which is a very common Linux filesystem.  If you’re not aware, the Synology devices run their own distribution of Linux.  After formatting the drives I ran the same Iometer test again and this time I saw speeds around 70MB/sec over the network.  Performing a copy from the USB 3.0 drive to the internal disks in the DS212+ I saw the same speed.  You can do this test by enabling shell access in DSM and then sshing in to the device.  This tells me two things.  First, there was very little difference between internal copies and network copies.  Second, it’s still not as fast as I’d like it to be.  Now I am basing my opinion on Anandtech’s numbers.  Being a Mac user I don’t have a single USB 3.0 port available to me at home or in my Varrow labs.  70MB/sec is more than you can get with USB 2.0, but not maxing out a Gb link.  I suspect that these early USB 3.0 chipsets are not all equal and things can and will improve in the future.

A common question I get is about bottlenecks in these NAS devices.  Everything is done in software…so it’s a good question.  To me, it appears that Synology does a good job of overbuilding their devices, especially the performance models.  The above picture shows the Resource Monitor CPU graph when doing 4K writes, 100% Random to the internal disks and external USB.  It maxes at 20% CPU.  There is a LOT of headroom there.  What can you do with that headroom?  Use the other cool features in DSM or add your own applications.  These boxes can do a lot more than simple file sharing.  More to come in a DSM post.

I don’t show it but memory utilization during this test was flat at 11%.  Again, headroom.  This unused memory will be used for caching and in my lab I enable async mode for NFS so I get write caching as well.  If you do this make sure you have the Synology on a UPS device to reduce the chance of data corruption should you lose power.

Other Thoughts

There really isn’t anything bad to say about the DS212+.  The price may be a bit more (~$475 at time of writing) than some want to spend on a 2-bay unit but it’s a very powerful and flexible NAS.  External connectivity with USB 3.0 and eSATA is very good.  There are less expensive options from Synology (remember, DS212 and DS212j) for basic lab setups which will probably work just fine but if you’re like me you’ll probably find you keep asking the NAS to do more, and more.  Just plan accordingly.

Being a OSX user I am using File Vault 2 which arrived with Lion.  Unlike File Vault, FV2 does full disk encryption where as the original File Vault just encrypted your home directory.  While everything of value on my MBA is in my home dir I do like the idea of full encryption.  Like almost everything Apple does the implementation of full disk encryption is very elegant so I thought I’d do a quick writeup on it as well as perform some before and after benchmarks.

The first question most people ask when looking at full-disk encryption…or any encryption really…is how they can recover their data should their be a problem.  Apple does a very good job with this.  When you enable File Vault 2 you are given a recovery key.  You should take care to have that key somewhere OFF OF YOUR ENCRYPTED SYSTEM and safe should you need it later.  It does no good to have that key in a text file…which is encrypted on your system.

The first step is to just enable File Vault 2.  Now, if you upgraded to Lion from Snow Leopard and used the original File Vault you can’t use them both together.  When you enable FV2 it should ask you if you want to stop using FV and start using FV2.  My vote is yes…yes you do.  To enable FV2 just go to System Preferences and then Security & Privacy.  Click the FileVault tab and then click the lock at the bottom left to enable changes.  Enter your password.  Next it’s as simple as just clicking Turn On FileVault…

NOTE:  If you have multiple user accounts on your computer (and I don’t) you will need to tell FileVault which users are allowed to unlock the disk.  If you do not let a user unlock a disk but still want them to log in then a permitted user must first log in to the system, then log out, and then let the user that cannot unlock the disk log in so it’s a multi-step process.  You will be prompted to authorize users when you enable FileVault.

After clicking the button to enable FV2 you will be given the recovery key as mentioned before.  Keep this somewhere besides the system you are encrypting!

And no..that’s not my recovery key!

As a second layer of protection you are given the option to have your key stored on Apple’s system.  It is encrypted on their side and you need to answer three security questions to recover the key.  Make sure that you answer these specifically as you will need to give them back EXACTLY as you typed them in.

Fill out three of your favorite questions and Continue.  You will be prompted to reboot your system so make sure and save anything you need and tell it to go ahead.  You may notice something different…your login screen is different.  You no longer have your pretty background and it appears faster.  That’s because you no longer log in to OSX.  Instead, you log in to the EFI (BIOS for the system) and then your login credentials are passed through to OSX.  This is how the disk is “unlocked” for use and OSX allowed to boot.

Your system is now encrypting your disk in the background.  To check the status just go back to Security & Privacy and you will see the status and an ETA.  On my 256GB 1.8GHz i7 MacBook Air it took like 45 minutes or so.  You can continue to use the system while it’s encrypting..and honestly I didn’t even notice that it was doing it.

Now for the next question…what kind of performance hit will I take?  Here is a table that I created by doing three tests with Xbench before and after:

As you can see there is a performance hit, but it’s not terrible.  It ranges from 0% to a little over 25% for large uncached reads.  Most things are in the 10% to 15% range.  Also keep in mind that this is against throughput…the encryption should not have a large impact on IOPS, which is what I care about with a notebook drive and why I use SSDs.  Also note that this is the internal SSD in my MacBook Air.

I’ve had my drive encrypted for several days now and honestly I can’t tell any difference at all.  But…if you find you don’t like the encryption for any reason it’s very easy to undo it.  Just go back to Security & Privacy and click the button to decrypt your drive.  It will ask you to reboot again and then start the decryption process in the background…almost exactly what you did but in reverse.  Very easy.  Very elegant.

That was a huge mistake.  People need a way to learn…to test…to have environments they can work with that isn’t production.  Using the free tools simply isn’t viable.  It’s a stripped down version that doesn’t let people work with the features they need to test and learn.  If you’re using a lab to learn you don’t want to have to rebuild that every 60-days when your evaluation license runs out.

Whenever I’ve brought this up, usually on the Twitter, I’ve gotten more pushback than I honestly expected.  The usual answers are either use the 60-day evals or be nominated as a vExpert since they get 365-day licenses.  That’s an interesting thought.  Become someone that evangelizes VMware technology and products without any real support from VMware and having to struggle to do it.  That makes no sense.  Yes, people could drop a lot of money for an Essentials license…but that’s not smart.  You are paying too much for not enough for a lab environment.

One reason that the lack of a VMTN type program has baffled me is that VMware is REALLY good at listening to the community and responding when there is a need.  They are GREAT at it.  Look at the licensing debacle.  Go to a VMworld and look at the community, blogger, social media nut outreach.  They are the best…yet they turn their backs on people trying to learn and use their technology.  Baffling.

Back when I was a younger man…oh young Jason..so naive…I was a very early MCSE.  Very early.  Everyone was a CNE and I was the only Microsoft person kind of early.  I did that by using things like MSDN and Technet.  I became a big evangelist of Microsoft technologies and products.  People like me built the Microsoft empire (My bad!  We didn’t know!).  How does VMware expect to reach those people without a program like this?

I can tell you how people are learning right now.  They either rebuild their labs…the honest people…or they use one of the several working keygens out there and just pirate the software.  Who wins there?  Nobody does.  The person trying to learn loses by running questionable software to generate keys and VMware loses two ways.  First, they are not endearing themselves to the user and second most people would be more than happy to pay VMware a reasonable sum of money for lab licenses.

Hey VMware!  Listen.  Hyper-V is getting better with every release.  It’s reaching the “good enough” stage for a lot of people.  Microsoft gives it out like candy and it’s easy to get it in a lab.  Look ahead 5 years to see what that means.  When I talk to people about their labs, and I talk to a number due to my lab blog posts, this comes up.  They can’t get VMware licenses…but they can get Hyper-V licenses…or Xen.  That’s not a forward looking strategy.  You need a grass roots effort and that’s why you need to bring back VMTN.

Mike Laverick started a post here to garner support for bringing back the VMTN program.  If you want it back you need to go there and voice your opinion.  VMware listens..it might take them a while but they do listen.

My good buddy Josh Atwell put up a great post today outlining a suggested VMTN structure.  Josh, awesome job.  You saved me the work and I think you are SPOT ON with that.

This is also a bit of self-serving request.  I don’t need the VMTN program.  I work for the most awesome partner on the planet and I get any NFR license that I want for my lab.  But we’re hiring and even in this economy we can’t find people with the skills we need.  VMware, help us fill that gap.  I talk to people all the time that are really smart…really driven…want to learn…but are in an environment where they can’t just play with cluster features and other advanced VMware offerings.  Give them that chance to learn so they can grow and they can help us get even better.

You can get it here.

Cisco released the bundles for the rest of the year today and they are GOOD.  First, most of the bundles from last quarter were carried forward which makes things easy.  Here is a graphic showing the config of these:

For the sake of brevity I won’t rehash the descriptions of these from last time.  If you want them they are here.  If you received a quote for these the pricing should stay the same.

But here is where it gets fun.  New bundles available with the 6248UP interconnects!

If you notice these are the same as some of the other bundles except the SKU has a U at the end.  That converts the bundle to a 6248UP-equipped bundle.  Want to hear what is great?

THEY COST THE SAME PRICE (or really close, slight variation in Smartnet)

That’s right!  If you were about to buy an existing bundle you can now get the new 6248UP interconnects and 2208 I/O modules for the SAME PRICE as the 6120 offerings.  WOW!

So there we go!  If you would like Varrow to help you down the path of Cisco UCS, or to talk and see if it’s a good fit for your environment (spoiler alert:  It probably is!) just let me know.  We’d love to help.

Oh yeah, one more thing!  All of these bundles expire on 12/31.

A position profile is attached for your reference. Compensation commensurate with experience, with significant growth opportunities for high performers.

Varrow is a dynamic, culture-driven, customer focused IT services company that has been recognized as one of the fastest growing companies in the region and as a leader in delivering storage, virtualization and disaster recovery solutions. More information about us is available at http://varrow.com/about/

I have linked the job description here.  This position works in our Consulting Services group.  This group does more advanced consulting engagements and projects with customers such as impact analysis, gap analysis, DR planning, full assessments, etc.  Very interesting work where you work more with the business and how it operates than simply infrastructure.

What we are looking for:

• Technical, practical experience
• Great attitude and work ethic
• Willing to be measured based on productive time
• Skills in Citrix, VMware, EMC storage, Exchange, and SQL (doubt one person will have all of these, but as many as possible)

I forgot to take a picture of the sign for VSP3111 (my session specifically on the Nexus 1Kv).

Part of my week was spent preparing for and delivering my two sessions for a total of three times.  It’s a lot of fun to do these….it’s a lot of work up front, but the payoff is nice.  I was originally scheduled to do each session (VSP2757 and VSP31111) once each but the week before VMworld my VSP2757 (vDS and 1Kv) session had a repeat added for Monday.  Nothing like starting a conference off with hosting a session!  No time to slack off there….  What was a shocker was my Thursday session.  It was the last session slot on the last day of the conference, but I had a LOT of people registered.  I figured I’d be lucky to get 100 as I’ve seen that happen before.  Even so, they put me in a gigantic ballroom.

In the end there were around 500 people in the room…so a really good showing (if you ask me) for the last slot in the last day.  It was a lot of fun presenting on that stage.  Nice LED lights…displays in front of the stage so I could see my slides and a timer so I knew how I was doing with time.  Not too shabby.

By the way, I have posted the slide decks and videos from my presentations here.

VMware continues to make this conference better and better.  I’ve been to a number of different manufacturer and vendor conferences over the years and VMworld is my favorite for a few reasons.  First, it brings together a lot of different people, vendors, technologies, and ideas.  While, yes, it is VMworld you get exposed to so much more.  Storage, networking, management, startups, the old guard…it’s all there.  It’s a lot of fun.  VMworld also continues to be the best show when it comes to social media, thanks to John Troyer and his crew.  The blogger’s lounge and other areas are even better this year.  But what was REALLY cool was how VMworld gave everyone a place to just hang out and relax…called the “Hang Out Space”.

Terrible picture, I know.  But it was this surreal indoor space with a great outdoor feel.  There were “bushes” and “grass” and trees…a volloyball court and a badminton net.  There were a couple of gigantic chess boards that looked like they came straight out of Alice in Wonderland.  It was really cool…inviting…and a nice place to just relax.  It was a neat little oasis in the concrete jungle that is Las Vegas.  If you’re like me and hate sitting in small event center chairs in a sea of people it also had a great large screen for watching the general sessions and keynotes.

You can’t imagine how surprised I was when I walked in to the blogger’s lounge and people said “Hey, have you seen yourself on the big screen?”.  What?!  They must be starved for content as they had my Train Signal interview from Cisco Live up there a few times….

A big draw for VMworld, and rightfully so, are the labs.  The labs are always impressive and that continued this year.  I know there were some performance issues at times but my labs went fine.  I stopped by and did the vShield lab.  One thing about this year’s labs…they were deep!  The labs were moved to scenario based labs which made them a lot more interesting than just clicking through some steps.  The vShield lab was VERY thorough.  Some REALLY great news is that VMware is saying these labs will be open for access outside of VMworld starting early next year.  That is AWESOME.  Really great work guys!  You can’t imagine how nice that is for a lot of people that would like access to testing those products and technologies….and a real showcase for cloud offerings.

Just like last year the labs were set up using thin clients with dual displays.  You had your lab manual on one side and your console on the other.  Very slick.  At times the wait for labs was long, but I think that shows the popularity.  Several people I spoke with commented that they planned to spend most of the time in the labs since they could catch a lot of the session content later online.  Not a bad idea.

As I said, I only went to two sessions that weren’t mine.  These were the VCDX Prep session and the Group Discussion with Duncan Epping and Frank Denneman.  Both were absolutely valuable.  The VCDX Prep was a lot of fun.  Since I’m already a VCDX I went just to watch people squirm and see what they were saying to potential applicants.  There has been a lot of lively debate around pass/fail ratios and information regarding the defense.  I thought that Brian Rice and John Arrisjad did an excellent job.  They had volunteers (who quickly regretted volunteering) go through some mock ad hoc defenses and troubleshooting scenarios and gave feedback on the questions they asked and their methodology.  There is talk of recording a longer version of this and putting it on VMware’s site.  I think that’s a great idea.  This session showed people what to expect and also showed some weaknesses on how many applicants view the process.  You quickly saw people dive in to technical discussions and requirements when this is a design certification…it’s not all speeds and feeds.  Great session.

The group discussion with Duncan and Frank was also top notch.  How often do you get two guys like that in a room with 25 or 30 people and get to quiz them?  There is one problem with these type of sessions though…  Many people that attended asked basic questions…which is fine…but given the talent in the room there are a lot of people that would love the chance to really talk in-depth design and implementation with these guys but they couldn’t get in since it was such a small audience.  I’m all for these group discussion…but maybe some sort of qualifier to get in.  I’m really not sure how you do that, but I’m not the one that has to implement it.

The Solution Exchange was huge this year…vendors showing all sorts of new products and technologies.  Honestly, I could have spent another 2 or 3 days in here talking and looking.  There just isn’t enough time in the week…  EMC continued the tradition of having some really great walk-up labs right in their booth.

There isn’t a lot more to talk about there…  Vendors…booths…everything.  VMware has a walk up “genius bar” setup so you can ask tough questions.  Cisco was showing a lot of cool technology, such as the virtual ASA appliance coming next year as well as demos of the new VXLAN technology that I’ll write more about soon.

So…after all that..what else?  Well, VMworld has turned in to an overwhelming social event as well.  We were invited to a ton of parties and only attended a few, unfortunately.  We all went to the WuPaaS party at an awesome Irish pub.  Joe and I had planned to go to the vExpert meeting on Sunday as well as the CTO party but other meetings came up and we couldn’t make those this year.  Disappointing, but I can’t say we didn’t have a great time meeting with customers.  Parties are nice…but sitting down with customers and partners over dinner is a lot more my style and that’s what I did most of the week.  In fact, I was REALLY excited that The Killers were playing the main show on Wednesday but didn’t even get to see them.  I was invited to dinner with some of the guys in the Nexus 1000v and virtual networking team at Cisco along with one of their larger customers.  While I would have liked to see The Killers I wouldn’t trade the conversation we had over dinner…no way.  One of the best couple of hours of real virtual networking, industry, and customer needs discussions I’ve had in a long time.

That’s me at the Rhumbar at the Mirage Thursday night….after all my sessions were done…finally relaxing.  One nice thing about these shows for me is the chance to get to know my coworkers better.  We run thin at Varrow so it’s not often I get to spend time socializing with Joe, Tom, Dan, and Andrew.  We had a good time…Dan taught us how to play Craps…I lost some money…but it was money well spent considering who I spent it with.  I will also blame Dan for my new habit, cigars.  I’m enjoying a Perdomo Lot 23 right now as I write this…  Thanks Dan.

It was a great week..lot of fun…and I was absolutely exhausted.  When I got home I slept 12 hours…got up and did some stuff around the house and played with my son, and then slept 12 hours again.  I’m already looking forward to next year…and wishing I was going to Copenhagen next month.  Maybe I’ll see about doing a session there next year….

]]> http://jasonnash.com/2011/09/13/at-long-last-vmworld-2011-recap/feed/ 1 nashwj vsp2757 sign2 ballroom hang out big screen labs SE1 SE2 relax http://jasonnash.com/2011/09/11/911-technology-and-meaningful-events/ http://jasonnash.com/2011/09/11/911-technology-and-meaningful-events/#comments Sun, 11 Sep 2011 23:29:50 +0000 nashwj http://jasonnash.com/?p=971 ]]> Throughout the day today people have been sharing experiences, how they felt, and where they were when they learned about the events unfolding on September 11th, 2001.  Throughout my life (I’m 36 right now…) there have been several major events of note that I will always remember.  They include the Challenger disaster in 1986 when I was home sick from school, the tragedy at Columbine when I was working out of town in Atlanta, and September 11th where I was at a normal day of work as a Network Team Lead.  My stories are nothing unusual…  I wasn’t “close” to any of those events.

What strikes me though, is that technology has changed how we can look at these events.  September 11th, 2001 is a great example.  On that day I was working for Railinc as a Network Team Lead.  It was in the morning (east coaster) and it was a normal day.  The Internet was very popular in 2001 and many people used it for communication and news.  I’m no exception, of course.

When the news started to break about a plane hitting the first tower many people went online.  The utilization on our Internet connection headed toward maximum.  Most people went to CNN or MSNBC.  I was hanging out in my usual places…IRC and Slashdot.  For those that may not know, IRC (Internet Relay Chat) is a text chat system that has been around a long time.  There are people that I know from IRC that I have known for literally 19 years now with unbroken communication.  Slashdot was an early “community driven” news and discussion site (that still exists).   Users  submit news stories, questions, or articles that get posted to the main pages.  Others read them, comment on them, and can moderate the comments of other users.  Good comments get moderated up (hopefully), and bad/useless/troll comments get moderated down (hopefully).  It’s community driven…similar to Digg and Reddit.

To me, the best remembrance of that day was done by Slashdot today…very simply, they linked back to the stories from September 11th, 2001…all of them.  When you look at those you see people’s instant reactions.  They haven’t been rewritten.  They haven’t changed due to time.  They aren’t fuzzy.  They are right there just as they were that morning.  You see the initial incorrect reports.  People’s speculations.  Updates to the reports…that were still very fuzzy and incomplete.  It’s a time capsule saved for, hopefully, ever…  And that’s the point of this post.

We are now people that will have our reactions, fears, and comments saved for the future.  It’s not like it was before the Internet where we have snippets of newspaper articles filtered by editorial staff and aged anecdotes by participants and observers.  It’s right there for the world to see.  With even more casual communication methods like Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ we will get even more participants and an even better recollection of these cultural stories and events.

There is a downside to some of this…  As I said, I wasn’t close to these events but some IRC channels, online forums, and discussion sites I frequent lost people that day.  Each one was someone I had communicated with online…sometimes a lot, sometimes a little…but it was still a loss.  This casual and easy communication lets us tell our stories and have them be saved, but it also extends the loss,  just as it did that day.

• VSP2757 - A Deep Dive on Virtual Distributed Switching and Cisco Nexus 1000v
• VSP3111 - Cisco Nexus 1000v: Architecture, Deployment, and Management