Ironically I was sitting at lunch today and was asked by one of my associates about holographic storage. This is ironic because I was reading about the technology just this weekend.

To put the future of storage technology into perspective a ferroelectric storage drive device the size of an iPod nano or 3.5 inch drive could hold enough MP3 music to play for 300,000 years without repeating a song or enough DVD quality video to play movies for 10,000 years without repetition. I would say this technology would be pretty appealing to the storage market.

What is available today. InPhase Technologies plans to release their first generation drive at the end of 2006. This drive will be a write-once WORM discs designed for fixed content archiving with a capacity of about 300 GB. Re-writable discs with 1.6 TB capacities are planned for release in 2009. As well as enterprise class storage, InPhase is also considering small consumer targeted devices with capacities ranging from 2 GB on a postage stamp to 210 GB on a credit card. They predict that the 200R will have a media shelf life of about 50 years, compared to 10 years for tape.

InPhase claims that the tapestry system has a recording density of 200 Gigabits / square inch and can read data at 27 MB/s. Contrast this with traditional magnetic disk that has a recording density of 120 Mbpsi and the newer perpendicular recording disks with a density of 240Mbpsi. High performance tapes can read data at 40 MB/s or more.
Tapestry uses a twin polymer implementation for the storage medium. The recording medium polymer is dissolved inside a solid matrix polymer; This 2-chemistry combination is a 1.5 mm thick recording material that is sandwiched between two plastic plates; there is no metallic layer such as used in DVD storage. Data is stored by crossing two separate laser beams inside the polymer, which records pages of data. One laser beam works the write the data and the second laser beam is used as a reference beam. Individual pages can hold approximately 1 megabit, and multiple pages are recorded by varying the angle of incidence and wavelength of the reference beam. 252 ‘pages’ are collected together into one ‘book’, and fifteen books or 3780 pages can all the stored in the same piece of recording material. The media used today will most often be referred to a HVD (holographic versatile disc).

While holographic and ferroelectirc technology is extremely interesting most of these technologies are in the incubation phases of research and development. While the technology does hold the promise of revolutionizing the storage market I would not hold off on the 500GB magnetic hard disk purchase for a storage device that holds 15 Terabytes per square inch. I think it may be a while.

-RJB

This weekend I was sitting at home and doing a significant amount of blogging from my adirondak chair on my lawn and getting fairly frustrated with the HTML online editor that WordPress and Serendipity offer. Alternatively I started typing the blogs in AbiWord and cutting and pasting them into the online HTML editor when I was ready to post, not the most elegant solution but better the the previous method. Late on Saturday night I began searching around for a desktop blogging application and tested Quamana, w.bloggar, and BlogDesk. By far my favorite is BlogDesk, it just works and offers all the right features.

-RJB

Did it set myself up or am I clairvoyant? Not only was my daughter up at 4 AM this morning but my dog seemed to have eaten some sort of paper product, peas, corn and some other stuff that was partially digested and could not be identified. The dog was pacing all night long with intermittent pauses to purge his system (there is nothing like the sound of a dog purging to inhibit REM sleep). Obviously the dog mess needed to be cleaned up but it gets worse, when I looked out into the back yard I noticed that approximately ten thousand gallons of water was missing from my pool. The only good answer here is that my neighbors house burnt down in the middle of the night and the fire department needed to pump from my pool to fight the fire, unfortunately for me this was not the case. Rather when setting up the pool last night I managed to shut off all of the returns which caused a pipe on the filter to blow out, so instead of cleaning my pool last night I pumped ten thousand gallons of water into my back yard. I wonder how this day is going to turn out?

-RJB

It is 1 AM on July 6th, 2006 and I think that I may have reached the pinnacle of techie stupidity. I am sure you are asking why? Well the answer is that I should have gone to bed hours ago because my 1 year old daughter is going to get me up in 3 or if I am lucky 4 hours from now. The reality is by the time I am done writing this post it will probably be more like 2 hours.

Anyway, I was sitting at the computer tonight and out of pure boredom decided to finish up some code I started a while ago at a techie conference session (I was probably suffering from an even more sever case of boredom then). This was a perl script that would function in the same way as rexec but utilizing the more secure ssh protocol. Again you may ask why? I often find myself asking the same question. No, really the concept was to include this in a much larger project that is still on the drawing board and may or may not actually happen depending on if I can find the cycles.

I have decided to post to code to my blog for anyone else who would like to improve, modify or use the code. I also have a windows binary version compiled for users who may want to use it but do not know how to install ActivePerl or the required perl modules, if you leave a comment I will provide the ftp site where you can grab it from.

Right now the connection speed is a bit slow and I am not sure why, I think there may be a problem with the Net::SSH::W32Perl module and password authentication but I can not verify.

You will also need to create a hosts.txt file in the same directory where the srexec.pl script is.? This file should contain the host(s) you would like the passed command to be run on.

The same code will work on UNIX/Linux just use the Net::SSH perl module as opposed to the NET::SSH::W32Perl module. Both modules can be acquired from CPAN (http://www.cpan.org).

Enjoy!

-RJB

#————begin————

#!/usr/local/bin/perl
### srexec.exe – Secure Remote Execution
### Rich Bocchinfuso
### Revision History
### 06-06-2006 – rev 0.02a

### 04-25-2006 – rev 0.01a

use strict;
use Net::SSH::W32Perl;

my $f=’hosts.txt’;

if ($ARGV[0] eq “-e”) {
&execute;
}
elsif ($ARGV[0] eq “-h”) {
&error;
}
elsif ($ARGV[0] eq “-about”) {
&about;
}

sub execute {
( my $command = $ARGV[1] || &error);
#chop $command;
( my $user = $ARGV[2] || &error);
#chop $user;
( my $pass = $ARGV[3] || &error);
#chop $pass;

my ($ssh, $out, $err, $exit);

my %args;
$args{debug} = 1;
$args{protocol} = 2;

open F, “< $f" or die "Can't open $f : $!"; while () { chop $_; $ssh = new Net::SSH::W32Perl($_, %args); $ssh->login($user, $pass);
($out, $err, $exit) = $ssh->cmd($command,”\n”);
}
close (F);
exit;
}

sub error {
print “\nsrexec.exe\n\nUsage: srexec.exe [option] [command string] [username] [password]\n”;
print “i.e. – srexec.exe -e \”ps -ef | grep getty > test.out\” user password\n”;
print “srexec.exe -h => This Help\n”;
print “srexec.exe -about => Detailed srexec info\n”;
exit;
}

sub about {
print “\nSecure Remote Execution\n”;
print “Rev 0.1a build date: 04-25-2006 \n”;
print “Author: Rich Bocchinfuso \n”;
print “Licence: GPL\n”;
exit;
}

#————end————

As I sat around the house this July 4th weekend I finished reading the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) report on Globalization and Offshoring of Software.? Having recently completed the book The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century by Thomas L. Friedman this was of particular interest to me.? The ACM report focuses on many of the same points that Friedman made in the first three chapters of his book. It is evident that globalization has leveled (flattened) the playing field for software and the IT services industry.

Today there are at least six kinds of work that are sent offshore related to software and information technology:

1. programming, software testing, and software maintenance
2. IT research and development
3. high-end jobs such as software architecture, product design, project management, IT consulting and business strategy
4. physical product manufacturing – semiconductors, computer components, computers
5. business process outsourcing / IT enables services – insurance claim processing, medical billing, accounting, bookkeeping, medical transcription, digitization of engineering drawings, desktop publishing, and high-end IT enabled services such as financial analysis and reading of X-rays
6. call centers and tele-marketing

What the heck is left?? As a fellow propeller head it feels like not only is the hardware infrastructure market a commodity but the skills that we value so dearly are as well.? As individuals with families and personal lives we are are competing with countries who?seem to have adopted?a sense of nationalism focused on information technology.? How can we compete?

Before I ran down to the local real estate office and began planning my relocation to India, China, Malaysia, or the Philippines I continued reading.? The reality is that while many jobs are being outsourced to these countries the size of the IT employment market in the United States today is higher than it was at the height of the dot-com boom. Todays’ IT worker needs to hone their “soft skills” involving communication, management and teamwork. They should become familiar with the application domain, especially in growth fields such as health care, these skills are as important if not more important that the core technical computing skills that once defined the American IT worker.

Most organizations today struggle with business processes which are not routine, these organizations often require the assistance of a competent firm with the aptitude to help them strategize, realize and optimize their infrastructure. ?The ability to execute within this paradigm is often predicated on locality, cultural understanding, resources availability, ability to protect privacy, data security and intellectual property, and of course costs.

Building a strategy includes everything from assessing the current business process and technology to laying out the road-map for the future.? Realization occurs upon execution of this strategy in a way which provides actual business value, typically this is when the actual architecture is documented and implemented.? Optimization is truly the culmination of infrastructure life-cycle and business process. ?IT infrastructure is an ever-evolving environment which require constant review, reorganization and improvement.

While companies will continue leverage outsourcing to decrease costs they will continue to spawn new more specialized roles focused on business problems and not solely on the technology. These roles will demand a higher level of skill that focuses on the applicability of information technology as a means to increase productivity and streamline business process.

Now that brings me to the point of this post…? As the inaugural post on the gotitsolutions.org blog I wanted to set a tone.? This blog will be focused on solutions not discrete?infrastructure technologies.??Posts will discuss?hardware, software, best practices, industry trends and other related IT topics?and their applicability in the marketplace today.??We will attempt to uncover the myths and realities behind these technologies but most of the posts will be musings much like this that are meant to provoke thought and offer possible solutions to problems that organizations and individuals throughout the IT community are facing today.

-RJB