Collection of useful, relevant or just fun places on the Internets for 28th November 2013 and a bit commentary about what I’ve found interesting about them:
Fonts | Simple Font Organizing – MAC OS X App that makes selecting fonts easier by providing font previews. USD$9 in the App Store.
Scroll through a grid view of your fonts, or switch to view them as one list and set your own preview text. Fonts makes it easier than ever to allow you to find the perfect typeface for your designs.
Telstra CTO Explores the Tech Horizon | Light Reading – CTO of Telstra, a very large telco in Australia :
The major part of that complexity comes from the OSS. "We want a standard OSS layer so you can swap out vendors. That's the biggest lock-in to vendors. They want to deliver a vertical OSS, but we want a horizontal layer. But the vendors keep obfuscating."
"vendors keep obfuscating". Telstra is a big and will known Cisco customer and that's probably a direct dig at Cisco.
Backblaze stores 75 petabytes on 25,000 drives, and most are still spinning — Tech News and Analysis – Gigaom has a article about Backblaze and their use of consumer HDDs.
It has been in business for 5 years and 74 percent of the hard drives it has ever deployed are still running.
With the right storage software, this is signficant cost saving over conventional storage technology where "enterprise" drives cost mulitples more expensive. I wonder if the use of the consumer drives could become more common.
‘Hello world’ for network engineers exploring Hadoop – Brilliant tutorial –
The end result is being able to query historical netflow data from a hadoop data store. When you think about it – Hadoop is a great repository for netflow data written by nfdump. Hadoop handles extremely large data repositories (large numbers of large files) with batch querying of data for analysis.
We’ve been using consumer drives even with non-hotswap hardware for backup for a few years. Not had major issues so far *touch wood* 😉 Everything else is just software.