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Tony Pearson Tony Pearson is a Master Inventor and Senior IT Architect for the IBM Storage product line at the IBM Systems Client Experience Center in Tucson Arizona, and featured contributor to IBM's developerWorks. In 2016, Tony celebrates his 30th year anniversary with IBM Storage. He is author of the Inside System Storage series of books. This blog is for the open exchange of ideas relating to storage and storage networking hardware, software and services.
(Short URL for this blog: ibm.co/Pearson )
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"The postings on this site solely reflect the personal views of each author and do not necessarily represent the views, positions, strategies or opinions of IBM or IBM management."

(c) Copyright Tony Pearson and IBM Corporation. All postings are written by Tony Pearson unless noted otherwise.

Tony Pearson is employed by IBM. Mentions of IBM Products, solutions or services might be deemed as "paid endorsements" or "celebrity endorsements" by the US Federal Trade Commission.

This blog complies with the IBM Business Conduct Guidelines, IBM Social Computing Guidelines, and IBM Social Brand Governance. This blog is admistered by Tony Pearson and Sarochin Tollette.

Safe Harbor Statement: The information on IBM products is intended to outline IBM's general product direction and it should not be relied on in making a purchasing decision. The information on the new products is for informational purposes only and may not be incorporated into any contract. The information on IBM products is not a commitment, promise, or legal obligation to deliver any material, code, or functionality. The development, release, and timing of any features or functionality described for IBM products remains at IBM's sole discretion.

Tony Pearson is a an active participant in local, regional, and industry-specific interests, and does not receive any special payments to mention them on this blog.

Tony Pearson receives part of the revenue proceeds from sales of books he has authored listed in the side panel.

Tony Pearson is not a medical doctor, and this blog does not reference any IBM product or service that is intended for use in the diagnosis, treatment, cure, prevention or monitoring of a disease or medical condition, unless otherwise specified on individual posts.

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ILM for my iPod

| | Comments (2) | Visits (10174)
Last week, Steve Jobs demonstrated the latest evidence that theinmates are running the asylum over at Apple.

I wasn't at the event, but thought it would be good to explain some basic concepts ofInformation Lifecycle Management (ILM),using the files on my iPod as an example. (Disclosure: IBM makes the technology inside many of Apple's computers, and so IBMers get to buy Appleproducts at employee prices. I own a Mac Mini based on IBM's POWER4 processor, and an iPod Photo 60GB model).

I have 20,000 MP3 music files, representing 106GB of data. This fits nicely on my 250GB external disk system attached to my Mac Mini, but won't all fit on my little 60GB iPod. I needed a way to decide what music I keep on bothmy iPod and Mac Mini, and which I keep only on my Mac Mini. When I am traveling, I am able to listen only to the musicin the first group, but when I am at home, I am able to listen to all my music in both groups.(Another disclosure: I use my Tivo connected to my LAN to play all my MP3 music through my home stereo system.I had my entire house wired with Cat5 to make this possible.)

Apple's iTunes software lets me decide which MP3 files are copied to my iPod using "playlists". A playlist is a list of songs. Fixed playlists are created manually, each song copied to its list in a specific order. Smart playlists are createdautomatically, via policy. I give it the criteria, and it finds the songs for me. If I import a new music CD,none of the songs will be added to any fixed playlists, but could be added to my smart playlists if I set the policiescorrectly. Apple iTunes supports both "include" and "exclude" methodologies.

I use primarily smart playlists, based on genre and rating. I have tried to keep the number of genre down to a small manageable list:

  • Ambient
  • Rhythm & Blues
  • Hip Hop
  • Dance
  • Pop
  • Rock
Of course, what I have for genre may not match what's in theGracenote database, so I sometimes have to makeupdates to match my convention. I've picked these based on my different "applications" for my music. For example, I listen to Ambient music to help me fall asleep on airplanes, but Rock when I exercise at the gym.

Next, I use the ratings from one to five stars. The advantage to the rating is that I can change them on-the-fly directly on my iPod. All other "metadata" has to be entered only from the keyboard of my Mac Mini.

*Files for Mac Mini only, not copied to my iPod
**Non-mix, copied to my iPod, but typically spoken words, such as language lessons
***Mix, music to include in my music mixes
****Keep on my iPod, but re-evaluate
*****My favorites

So, I have five smart playlists, "One Star", "Two Stars", etc. for each rating, and have decidedto keep only the 2, 3, 4 and 5 star songs on my iPod, by simply putting check marks on those playlists to copythem over. I have about 50 songs with 5 stars, and 8000 with 3 stars, and the rest in the other categories,leaving me a few GB to spare.

I also have playlists for each genre, "Rock mix", "Pop Mix", "Ambient Mix", etc. where I have selected thosethat match the genre, AND have 3, 4 or 5 stars. In this manner, I can listen to a mix. If I find a song mis-classified for that genre, I change it to four stars, which serves as myreminder to re-evaluate when I am back at home on my Mac Mini. If I don't want a song in my mix, I just lowerit to 2 stars. I want it off my iPod altogether, I lower it to one star.

This method is simple enough, and allows me to enjoy my music right away, and more effectively, without having to wait for completely finishing my classification process.

Next week, I'm traveling to Africa (purely vacation, not related to my job, my senator, or myinvolvement in anycharitable organizations). My Canon camera has only a 1GB IBM Microdrive, but I am able to offloadmy pictures to my iPod, connected via USB cable, and review the pictures on the little 2-inch screen. By simply "unchecking" my 2-star and 3-starplaylists, and checking only those mixes I plan to take with me, I was able to clear 17GB of space, plenty ofroom for all my photos of elephants and giraffes, but still plenty of music to listen to. Thanks to my simple methodology, I was able to do this with minimal effort, and willhave no problem putting all my music back when I return.

When evaluating an ILM process, many people are overwhelmed by their fear of the classification process, when in reality it doesn't have to be so complicated.

Is there an "iTunes" for the storage in your datacenter? Yes! It's called IBM TotalStorage Productivity Center. It can help you list and classify all the files in your IT environment,including files in your internal disks inside the servers, your NAS and SAN external disk systems, across both IBM and non-IBM hardware.It's a good thing to consider as part of your overall ILM strategy.

technorati tags: Apple, Steve Jobs, inmates, running, asylum, IBM, information, lifecycle, management, iPod, music, genre, star, rating, iTunes, datacenter, TotalStorage, Productivity Center, NAS, SAN, ILM

[Read More]

Tags:  infrastructure lifecycle music ipod

Webinars on Tape

| | Visits (5080)
Hey everyone, I'm having a great time in New York.

Here are a few webinars this week you might be interested in, related to tape, and tape encryption:

1) Wednesday
If regulatory compliance and protecting your data against security breaches is top of mind for you, I invite you to attend a webinar on a new enterprise encryption solution from IBM featuring the IBM System Storage™ TS1120 tape drive. On September 20, 2006 Jon Oltsik, Senior Analyst for Information Security with the Enterprise Strategy Group, will moderate a discussion on IBM’s encryption strategy and latest data security advances with a panel of our product and industry experts.

Securing your data – IBM Tape Encryption Solutions

2) Thursday
I personally know Dianne McAdam, from the Clipper Group, so the following should be very interesting:

Tape vs. Disk Which Really Eats More Power[Read More]

Tags:  tape

50 años para el sistema de disco - 50 years of disk systems for Latin America

| | Visits (5171)

The "50 Years of Disk Systems Innovation" has been extended to Latin America.Pages translated into Spanish and Brazillian Portuguese are now available for the following countries:

  • Argentina
  • my home country of Bolivia
  • Brazil
  • Chile
  • Colombia
  • Ecuador
  • Mexico
  • Paraguay
  • Peru
  • Uruguay
  • Venezuela
[Read More]

Tags:  disk

IBM IT Service Management for the ITIL crowd

| | Visits (5719)
My colleagues have put up a nice new company-wide webpage to explain IBM's new IT Service Management initiative (ITSM):www.ibm.com/itsm, including a video interview with Nancy Pearson (no relation).

Of course, storage management is a big part of this, and products like IBM TotalStorage Productivity Center play a key role.

But ITSM is more than just a better way to manage operational tasks, it is focused on the best practices of the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) which has been adopted bythe European Union, and now being adopted worldwide by both government agencies and private enterprises as a smartway to run your IT environment.

Last year, we talked about storage provisioning andorchestration.This year, we bring it up a notch, introducing IBM Tivoli Storage Process Manager. Of all the talk we gave the past decade on the promises of "autonomic computing", it's initiatives like IBM Service Management that give it real meaning.

Of course, we've designed our solutions to apply to your entire IT environment, supporting both IBM and non-IBM equipment, so even if not all of your servers and storage come from IBM, at least your software can be.[Read More]

Tags:  infrastructure

IBM System Storage for System x and BladeCenter

| | Visits (6360)
A few years ago, I was the IBM portfolio manager for storage connected to BladeCenter solutions. I learned a lot about the BladeCenter design, and got to speak at various x86 server events.

My colleague John put together a nice webpage on storage for System x and BladeCenter servers:
IBM System Storage for System x

BladeCenterservers come in many flavors, including blades with Intel, AMD and POWER chipsets, and can be configured in Grid and SuperComputer configurations. Up to 14 blade servers can fit intoa single 7U-high chassis, making this twice as dense as standard 1U-high rack-mounted servers.

System x, the new "IBM Systems" name for our popular xSeries product line, support Intel and AMD chipsets. These come in both rack-mountedand tower configurations. These also are idea for clustered and SuperComputer configurations.[Read More]

Tags:  san bc services lifecycle tape disk infrastructure

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