Why is this an interesting move ? Because NAS is ideal to store unstructured data, and that is the area that grows the fastest in the storage industry.

But what is structured data as opposed to unstructured ? These are entries that follow a strict definition: such as defined numbers (order numbers inside a company for example) or character strings (such as like customer IDs), etc. SANs (Storage Area Networks), such as Fiber Channel and iSCSI, are generally a good solution to store this structured data – in general in a database. However, NAS is the right solution for the incredible quantity of data that is produced every day from various sources (sensors, digital cameras, spreadsheets, presentations, etc.). According to an ESG report,  the market for NAS will grow by 72% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) from 2010 to 2015 !

IT departments wanting to setup a network-attached storage environment had so far two main options:
- a simple NFS (network file system) server. That simple and cheap solution can be installed on any Linux or Unix server. However, this centralized solution concentrates the file accesses on on single server. Replication, failover and disaster recovery are limited, customized and cumbersome processes and the single server can become a performance bottleneck.
- dedicated appliances based on proprietary technology from EMC, NetApp, etc. Although they have very powerful features and are nicely integrated in enterprise environments, they are very expensive.

What most organizations have been asking, though, is to first to reduce the costs of storing this data that grows at incredible rates and second, have the capability to “burst” and leverage cloud capabilities, such as Amazon’s S3 while managing hybrid environments in an easy manner. Yet legacy solutions cannot offer solutions that cover these needs, and that is precisely why Gluster was developed.

I was fortunate enough to go to Mountain View, CA for a training with the Gluster people and discover their technology that is now called Red hat Storage.

The three strengths of Gluster are its scalability (a cluster can contain up to 64 nodes -supported- and way beyond), its manageability (you manage your public and private cloud storage blocks from one single point of view) and reliability (high-availability is built-in and there is no centralized metadata server, hence no single point of failure).

The Gluster infrastructure is based on commodity hardware, i.e. x86_64 servers from HP, Dell or SuperMicro, with direct attached storage (DAS) at disposal, e.g. the disks that are shipped inside the server. Recommended configuration is to have the OS on two disks (RAID1) and the data on twelve remaining disks (RAID6). This storage space will be put at disposal inside the Gluster environment through the network. No need for an expensive array: just take the servers you already know and Gluster will transform them into storage boxes !

From an architectural point of view, it is very important to mention that, although the technology is called GlusterFS, Gluster is not yet another file system. Gluster leverages standard file systems (such as XFS in the software appliance supported by Red Hat) and provides mechanisms to access the data across multiple servers.

The Gluster architecture is based on four elements (the bricks, the nodes, the volumes and the clients) and looks like this:

[Picture courtesy of Red Hat]

- the node: the Gluster software is installed on our commodity hardware server and on RHEL. This combination is called a storage node.
- the brick: the storage available to the OS, for example the RAID disks, will be formatted with a standard XFS (with extended attributes) and mounted to a certain mount point. A brick equals a mount point.
- the volumes: Gluster will play a sort of LVM role by managing bricks distributed across several nodes as one single mount point over the network.
- the clients are computers which access the data. They can be standard Windows clients (vis CIFS), NFS clients, or they can use a specific Gluster client that provides enhancements over NFS, in terms of high-availability.

Example 1 of a Gluster deployment

Let’s take an example : we have two servers -node01 and node02- running RHEL and Gluster. These two servers are identical and have, for the sake of simplicity, one drive on which we want to store data. This drive is formatted with XFS and mounted to, for instance,  /brick1. This directory (and mount point) is identical on the two servers node01 and node02, to manage them more easily.

What happens next is  that we create one Gluster volume, called volume01 -how creative !- from each brick available on the two servers. As I mentioned above, Gluster will play a sort of LVM role, by creating one logical disk from the two distributed disks attached to node01 and node02.

It means concretely that if I mount the volume via the network from another computer, called client1 (for example via the Gluster client), I would do the following command:

[root@client1]# mount -t glusterfs node01:/volume1

and I would have access to the capacity of both drives via the network. From a client perspective, no matter what new files I would store, no matter files I would read, I would not know that the underlying data is actually distributed across multiple nodes. Moreover, if I were an administrator of the servers, I could access the files via their mount point without even knowing that Gluster is running, because it leverages the standard components of a Linux infrastructure.

Example 2 of a Gluster deployment

In this example, two business units (marketing and legal) need two different volumes, isolated from each other. We will have roughly the same configuration as before, but with two data disks per server. Each disk on the server will be dedicated either to legal or to marketing. From these two disks, we will then create two volumes, one called marketing, the other one legal, that will be mounted by their respective clients.

How are the files stored ?

In our first example, when the client wants to store a word processing file file called “myfile.odt” at a specific location on the volume (for example /gluster/myplace ), Gluster will take in account the complete path to the file (in our example /gluster/myplace/myfile.odt) and a mechanism called EHA (elastic hashing algorithm), based on the Davies-Meyer algorithm, will compute a hash that will then indicate on which node and on which disk the file will be stored. When the file must be retrieved, the path to the file is given by the client, Gluster will compute the hash and will then be able to find the file on the given node.

The interesting part of this EHA is that if you store, for example 100 files on a two nodes cluster, like in our first example, the distribution rate will be quite equal. After having saved the 100 files on the volume, and regardless of the complexity of their names, we will end up having roughly 50 files on the node01 and roughly 50 files on node02. Why is that so powerful ? Because instead of having one single server becoming a bottleneck, the cluster can spread the files across its nodes and ensure that the network bandwidth will not become an issue, thus generating a highly scalable solution.

One important thing is also that there is no centralized meta-data server. The hash is computed, for example by the client,  for every access and hence removes a huge single point of failure compared to competitive architectures. If the meta-data is broken, the data (and it can be up to petabaytes of it !) is simply gone, there is no way to find it back. Gluster, on the other hand, has no such centralized architecture, and the beauty of it is that there is no proprietary file system underneath. Every file can be accessed from a standard XFS file system, even if the Gluster deamon is shut down on the machine.

Mount type glusterfs ?

As you can see in the examples above, it is possible to mount the volumes with the mount types NFS or glusterfs. Indeed, in order to mount a Gluster volume in a “native” mode, the client needs a specific package installed. The advantage of this client is that high-availability is built-in (i.e. if a node fails, access to the replicated data is possible without any disruption) and also, the client is able to use the EHA to calculate itself the position of a certain file inside the cluster and hence will talk directly to the node that contains the data, thus reducing the speed to access data and reducing the network traffic.

What about High-Availability ?

Gluster offers the possibility to mirror bricks across the network. This means that if a node fails, the data will still be available via another node. It is also of course possible to combine both the distribution of files and the replication with, for example four disks : two used to save the data and two that are their replicas. After the node or the brick are available again, Gluster will use a technology called self-healing and will update -in the background- all the data that was modified during the downtime so that the data is identical on both replica after the self-healing process is done.

When it comes to disaster-recovery, it is also possible to use a two-way technology called georeplication that maintains asynchronously a copy of the data at another site. The recovery site can be a Gluster cluster, or another type of storage.

What are the advantages for my organization ?

Gluster is a great technology that brings a lot of advantages. The highlights are definitely that Gluster :
- increases the availability of the data by replicating the data and by having no meta-data server i.e. no single point of failure
- manages the data better. The command-line interface is very intuitive and is able to manage petabytes of data in an easy way
- scales to petabytes level, by spreading linearly the data across multiple nodes, hence avoiding the creation of bottlenecks
- lowers the costs of storage by using commodity hardware

I think that Red Hat was very smart to extend its portfolio to storage. Indeed, after the commoditization of the server market from proprietary Unix architectures to standard Linux servers, it is time for the storage vendors to become more open and dramatically increase their affordability. This is just the beginning…

# wget https://www.rooms.hp.com/vRoom_Cab/hpvirtualrooms-install64-F4-8.0.0.4282.tar.gz

# tar -xzvf hpvirtualrooms-install64-F4-8.0.0.4282.tar.gz

# cd hpvirtualrooms-install

# ./install-hpvirtualrooms
virtualrooms-install : /lib/ld-linux.so.2: bad ELF interpreter: No such file or directory

Then I learned a cool feature of yum : you just need to enter the file that you need and yum will download and install the package that needs the file for you. For example :

# yum -y install /lib/ld-linux.so.2

So, all in all, you need to install the following packages :

# yum -y install glibc-2.14.90-24 libXi.so.6 libSM.so.6 libXi.so.6 libXrender.so.1 libXrandr.so.2 libz.so.1 libglib-2.0.so.0 libXfixes.so.3 libasound.so.2 libfontconfig.so.1 libpng12.so.0 libGLU.so.1

and then test it.

However, Google will soon introduce a new privacy policy, that worries me. So far, your research history was not combined with other Google products. They could not combine your feed reader or Google plus account to target their ads towards what they think you were looking for in their search engine. With the new privacy policy, this separation stops and Google will use all its possible data to match your search or action to target their ads even more.

One simple step to avoid that is to follow the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s advice to have Google stop saving your search history. Do it ! It takes just a couple of seconds and your privacy will thank you (a bit).

And if you want to go a bit further, the EFF’s 6 privacy tips will also help you keep your data for yourself !

I lived four amazing years at HP, surrounded by fantastic and dedicated people. I learned a tremendous amount of things. I could acquire a sound technical knowledge about enterprise IT environments and also learned a lot from my mentor and my colleagues. I also attended very useful and interesting sales and soft skills trainings.

This change to Red Hat is quite a challenge. First of all, the company’s business is radically different. I always found right to sell Free and Open Source Software and this is a great opportunity to do my job according to my ethical principles. Moreover, I change from the biggest IT company in the world, with 300,000 employees (not counting all the contractors and partners) to a roughly 4,000 persons company. Red Hat is clearly not a start-up any more, but it is way smaller and things need to be handled in a creative way.

I’ll take over a new role in Red Hat to support systems integrators, OEMs (such as HP) and ISVs from a presales perspective at the EMEA level. I look forward to passing my Red Hat Certified Engineer certification and to learning a lot. The fact that KVM is installed and ready to create virtual machines on all PCs inside the company is a great sign of geekiness and that is already a good start!

As I was browsing the website faz.net, I read an article about Nicolas Sarkozy called “Sarkozy’s truths” published on October 28th. The article mistakenly mentioned that the work time reduction to 35 hours a week in France had been voted when Francois Mitterand  was president, although this had been done in 1997 when Jacques Chirac was the head of state.

I took the freedom to send them an email to correct that online and heard nothing from them… Until someone (thanks Cécile and Mom !) noticed that the paper had published an erratum signed under my name on November 11th in its paper version and told me. I was really surprised because I never thought it would be published. I thought they would correct the online version and move on, but  I officially published something in the FAZ now

The conclusion of that is that the FAZ is accurate in its content, but should reward the attentive readers by telling them that they were published !

WebOS was already based on Linux and on open-source software stack (with, for example, a standard Linux kernel, LVM, etc.). This change will benefit the community with a great component for UI development, as well as webOS users, who will benefit from more applications and a broader ecosystem in the future.

This event was the counterpart of the American HP Discover that took place back in June in Las Vegas.The setting was huge and the executives have delivered sessions about HP’s strategy. Meg Whitman, for instance, described her vision of HP centered around the hardware infrastructure as a core, the infrastructure software as an extension and the services as a wrap-up layer. This strategy sounds very much like where Mark Hurd was heading  in the past. She did not use a flip chart as Hurd used to do all the time, but all in all, she delivered a solid keynote.

Things were a little different compared with the American event. First, there were less sessions. The exhibition was smaller, and we have had a private concert of Anastacia (the people in Las Vegas have enjoyed Paul MacCartney…). Also things have changed since June from the HP-UX / Business Critical Servers perspective, because of the Odyssey announcement. Many customers asked what were HP’s plans for the future, and the HP announcement sets the vision on which HP will deliver in the future, giving a clear strategic roadmap. As I presented CloudSystem Matrix, I introduced the advantage of deploying cloud services with mixes of both x86_64 and Itanium-based solutions to customers from all the EMEA region.

However, many actual new announcements came from the HP storage division, such as its new dedupe system. 3PAR and the latest SPC  benchmark for 3PAR arrays were also hot topics. The storage part of the exhibition was full all the time.

Also, many customers were extremely interested in the HP Software products (especially given the latest acquisitions of Autonomy and Vertica). CloudSystem combining HP Operations Orchestration and Server Automation It was then quite easy for me to demo their capabilities and then guide customers to the corresponding HP Software booths.

I think it was a very good event, with many customers and in a wonderful city (Vienna is an amazing place). Also the important part for me was to network and meet people from the whole IT industry to share ideas and insights. And that is invaluable.

This bi-yearly event takes place every time in a different city among the numerous continental European countries that belong to the district (Portugal, Spain, France, Belgium, Luxemburg, the Netherlands, Germany, Danemark, Poland, the Czech Republic, Austria, Finland, Sweden and Norway).

The main purpose of this Fall conference is to host the humorous speech contests (held in French, German and English), as well as the table topics contests (impromptu speeches) held in all three languages. These finals attract among the best speakers in continental Europe !

I arrived on Friday afternoon in Basel by train, as I took the role of chief judge for the German table topics. The conference was hosted in the Ramada Hotel in Basel: a great location for such an event !

After having briefed the judges about the rules and the ranking criteria for the contest, I attended both the German and French table topics contest, and one of the the English humorous speech contest semi-final. Finally, on Friday, the District Executive Committee Meeting (DECM) took place. This meeting gathered all Toastmasters Area, Division and District governors to present the progress made by the district towards its goals fixed at the beginning of the year.
From my perspective, the Area I supervise (F1) contributed to the general progress, as a new club was is being chartered in Stuttgart, which is excellent news for all Stuttgarters.

It was definitely an exciting experience to see how structured the success plan of the district is and also to see that it is executed in a fairly disciplined manner. All aspects of the plan were addressed : club and membership growth, educational achievements of the members, organization of the district conference and financial status. Although all people who contribute are completely benevolent, a lot of time and energy is put inside this organization.

One interesting fact is that the district has grown so big that it will be split in two in the coming years. A vote of all club president, VP education and district officers allowed the start of the procedure to check all facts and make a proposal in that sense. I personally think that the strength of this district is its diversity (especially of languages) but its size is just too big and a split would benefit the members. One of the biggest challenges of this reform is that a “border” will need to be defined to separate the two districts. As Germany provides by far most of the clubs, I fear that it may be separated, thus making a German speaking district contest less interesting. Germany also has a not-so-positive history with splitting…

On Saturday, Ted Corcoran, an Irishman, former Toastmasters International President, gave a very good keynote speech about leadership by stating ten skills leaders show (for example “take responsibility”, “be proactive”, etc.). Although these presentations may look repetitive, their core message is still important and the delivery of the one-hour speech was impeccable.

I then attended the German humorous speech contest (yes, these two things are compatible !), the English table topics contest, as well as the finals for humorous speeches. The table topic, an impromptu speech usually to answer a question, was this time very original. The table topics master gave an egg to the speaker, who had to make a one-to-two minutes speech out of it. The result was very different from speaker to speaker and it was fun to watch. The last contest was the humorous speech contest. As expected, the level of the speeches was excellent. The winner deserved her title and although some speeches were funnier than others, all participants deserved their applauds.

The organization of the conference must have been a huge work for the organizers. I contributed a bit by volunteering as a chief judge, but the task of managing this whole convention must have been a herculean task. The organization team can be proud of themselves !

For the future, from a personal perspective, I would like to contribute to the success of the district by taking over a role in the district team, for instance as Lieutenant Governor Marketing. Growth is something I am fascinated by and I would like to help extending the network of clubs all across Europe.

The next district conference will take place in Spring, in Poznan, Poland. The evaluations and International speech contest will be held there. I am confident that I will have achieved all the goals set for my Area for this Toastmasters year (June 2011-May 2012) until then. Also, I looking forward to go for the first time in Poland and to participate to the growth of Toastmasters in continental Europe !

As stated in this press conference, HP has launched a project called “Odissey” that will probably be a complete game changer in the x86 industry.

So far, only HP-UX could be run on a Superdome, but now, customers will have the capability of running HP-UX as well as Linux in the same Superdome server. The lowest-level virtualization layer of the Superdome is the nPar (node partition) and is an electrically-isolated group of Superdome cells (the picture on the right shows the SD2 enclosure populated with cell blades). As nPars are electrically isolated from each other, it will be possible to have nPars equipped with Xeon CPUs and other nPars with Itanium CPUs. Just as the first generation of Superdomes could run PA-RISC and Itanium processors in different nPars in the same server. A mix of CPUs types or families will not be possible.

Of course, the HP-UX cell blade will need Itanium CPUs and the Linux cell blade will need Xeon CPUs (as Linux is not supported on the latest Itanium-based servers), however, this opens the door to bringing Linux to new levels of availability, making use, for example, of the highly available crossbar of the Superdome 2 that routes all IO signals from the IO extenders, which contain the PCI-e cards, to the cell blades. This crossbar is able to retry all possible transactions and to reroute signals to make sure that every IO is performed accurately.

HP-UX will not be ported under under x86 and it will continue to run on the Integrity blades, rx2800 i2 rack-mount servers, as well as on the Superdome cells with Itanium CPUs. Also, this integration will only be for Intel Xeon processors, not AMD Opterons. The development of HP-UX will continue, as the Itanium roadmap still has two CPUs codenamed “Poulson” and “Kittson” to be delivered in the future.

It would be possible to run Linux (with the current Xeon CPUs – the number of cores of Intel’s next platform, codenamed Sandy bridge, for servers is not clear as of now) on 32 sockets, or 320 cores, or 640 threads !! That is huge and great news for all the customers who wanted to switch smoothly from Unix to Linux, or needed scale-up servers going beyond the 8 sockets provided by most of the vendors.

Also, the Integrity blades, which were very modular (they could be extended from two sockets to four sockets and even to eight sockets by just combining blades together and linking them with a blade link pictured below), will also be made available for Xeon processors.

The new servers (Superdome 2 and scalable blades) are planned for 2013.

Finally, HP announced that the Linux HA portfolio would be similar to the HP-UX one, which means that ServiceGuard for Linux (that was stopped two years ago) will be reactivated.

I think that all these announcements are great news for Linux customers who wanted to push their Linux infrastructures to mission-critical levels. Although HP-UX still has a clear roadmap, the attractiveness of the Xeon processor with Linux on such a scalable and available platform will be very strong.

This offer could also be interesting for customers of other commercial Unix versions by offering amazing scale-up capabilities for Linux on the x86 platform, which is the most open one.

The organization encountered identity problems as clubs and geographical divisions were created around the world. Many clubs started to use their own logos, colors and tag lines. The District 59, for example, which comprises all western European Toastmasters clubs, invented its own motto “Connect through diversity”. Although this sentence makes sense for this particular district with so much diversity, the strength of the Toastmasters brand was diluted. Indeed, there are around 89 districts in the world, each with its own tag line !

Toastmasters International gradually lost control on its own brand and needed an energetic answer to the fragmentation of its identity across the world. Moreover, some of its communication artifacts were not representative of the current state of the organization, such as its exponential international growth.

The logo, for instance, was one of the most outmoded part of the branding. Although the globe gave a sense of the international purpose of the organization, it was centered around the American continent only.
The gavels, one is used to open the Toastmasters club meetings, were not understood from a large part of the population. Some even believed to see fists gripping the world !
Furthermore, this logo, which is an evolution of the first logo designed in the 1930′s profoundly lacked dynamics and modernity. On the other hand, it provided a sense of authority (the gavels reminding of the justice) and of tradition.

The tag line of the organization was “Become the leader and speaker you want to be“. Although it perfectly described the goals achievable through this organization, it had a major issue : its length. No one could remember exactly the sentence after having heard it for the first time.

Finally, the organization used to use a patchwork of unrelated colors, changing, at each event or in each manuals.

Toastmasters International hence decided to hire a consultancy to refresh and align the Toastmasters brand on a worldwide basis. The outcome can be seen on Toastmasters International’s website, as well as on my club’s.

A definition of a brand is an idea embodied in, among others, products, services and experiences. The brand represents the interface between us and Toastmasters. It is present on all web pages, all official documents, all flyers and promotional items. If a branding is not efficient or not focused, it loses its strength and the message of the organization weakens with it. Toastmasters hence introduced in August a new unified branding for the worldwide organization. Its goal is clear : the clubs need to align to the headquarters’s communication to give a unified and controlled member experience.

The consultancy came up with a “brand” new concept, with a distinct set of colors that are culturally neutral and are not part of any country flag in order to emphasize the international vocation of Toastmasters. Also, this color panel is distinct from any other public speaking association, thus increasing the distinction and value of TM. I think they completely succeeded in this task.

The new logo is now much less centered on the USA and looks much more modern. However, as modern as it may look, the drawback is certainly that it will be outmoded much faster than the previous, more conservative, logo. Note the use of the new color scheme.

Finally, and this is my only real complaint, the emphasis of this new branding is clearly much more important on the leadership side than on the public speaking side of Toastmasters.

For instance, the tag line was changed to “Where leaders are made“. In the elevator speech provided by Toastmasters for district leaders, I could count one “speech”, three “communication”-related words , one “tell” versus 12 derivatives of the word “lead” !

The reason for that is that the consultancy associated the needs of the target groups (one of the most important being the young professionals) with the will of becoming better leaders. Thus these people will look for opportunities to increase their leadership capabilities and will acknowledge that, in order to become better leaders, they need to become better speakers.

I fundamentally disagree with that assumption. Although I look for leadership opportunities in this organization, I came on first place to improve my public speaking skills, and so did all members I know.
I highly doubt that people will make the connection between leadership and public speaking at first. Googling on the web “public speaking” would lead them to a website where “leaders are made”… not exactly what they were looking for, and in a world where the first impression is often the last one, I think this messaging will not grab the attention of the prospective learners enough to make them stay and learn more on the website.

This brand positioning assumes people want to become leaders, putting the public speaking skills aside. However, leadership can be understood in many ways and is too fuzzy to be really effective as a tag line. Hence, instead of reinforcing the message of Toastmasters, which is dedicated to helping people improve their public speaking first and then their leadership skills, this branding centered around leadership rather undermines it.

Despite this point, I think that this branding was much needed. Unifying and changing the color codes and the logo was necessary to regain control of the Toastmasters brand and to give members a better experience wherever they are on Earth. Nonetheless, I fundamentally disagree with the emphasis set on the leadership side of the educational program. I think it weakens our message, as well as will be less effective for prospective members to connect leadership and public speaking and eventually join this fantastic organization.