Main Area and Open Discussion > General Software Discussion
Microsoft's dropped feature is Linux's gain
f0dder:
It's never good to see features go away, but is DriveExtender basically RAID JBOD? It sounds pretty alluring to just pop in a disk and have your pool extended, but ugh... JBOD is bad for your health. MS might actually be doing people a service here :)
Stoic Joker:
So MS would be shooting themselves in the foot if they pushed SOHOs away from WHS.
-Stoic Joker (December 02, 2010, 09:46 PM)
--- End quote ---
That, or pushing them towards 365 when it finally comes out.
For some reason, I keep getting the nagging feeling that MS ultimately wants to go over to a "software as a service" model of business for everyone but enterprise clients.
It would make sense. For one thing, it would effectively eliminate casual piracy. And it would also reduce support to requests on how to use an app as opposed to how to also get it (and the OS) to run correctly.-40hz (December 02, 2010, 10:19 PM)
--- End quote ---
Damnit, much as I hate to I can easily see the logic there. SMB teetering on the brink of needing a full-time IT staff could put it off by shifting responsibility to cloud control, and SOHOs would be completely off-the-hook.
I'm not so sure about the casual piracy thing tho as it might actually make it easier for a time. No more registration or activation hassles, just share your login info with a few trusted friends and a whole office can run on a single account. Support...Now that one I gotta give you hands down. :)
Lots of my clients are very interested in getting out from under supporting their own computing infrastructure. Several are actively exploring the viability of "cloud" solutions for their desktop and data storage needs. Maybe they're a bit premature and buying into the industry buzz for where we currently are. But I'm sure it will all become very doable in the relatively near future.-40hz (December 02, 2010, 10:19 PM)
--- End quote ---
Mine too, but they're outsourcing it to us. However ironically We're using a cloud based solution to maintain it for them. Mind you the (totally brilliant) Kaseya solution we're using is hosted on our own internal servers - So It's My Cloud - But it is a cloud none-the-less.
Most have already outsourced their web hosting. About half have done the same with email and purchase transaction processing. So it's only a short psychological hop to the notion of pushing their servers and office apps up to a virtual world.-40hz (December 02, 2010, 10:19 PM)
--- End quote ---
We've got one client (SMB doctors office) that is hosting their Email domain with Gmail. While it is nice given the free hosting of mail@your-domain it has so far proven to be about half as reliable as a coin toss. The web development company that did their site, and recommended the Gmail solution said that it worked fine for many of their clients. So I'm trying really hard to reserve judgment ... But it's becoming difficult (aliases fail, MX record lookups fail, etc.).
In some respects this has parallels with the history of the personal computer. When PCs first came out, the old mainframe crowd dismissed them as unsuitable for 'real' computing. Quarter of a century later and the same thing is happening to the PC and local server world as web apps, virtualization, and clouds offer up a new vision of how to get things done.-40hz (December 02, 2010, 10:19 PM)
--- End quote ---
Well if PCs go boot to web thin client we'd pretty much be full circle back to the (neo-retro) cloud mainframe.
Gonna be an interesting five or so years coming up, that's for sure. 8)
-40hz (December 02, 2010, 10:19 PM)
--- End quote ---
*Shudder* Yep... :D
Stoic Joker:
is DriveExtender basically RAID JBOD?-f0dder (December 03, 2010, 06:52 AM)
--- End quote ---
No, it has built in redundancy and deduplication features so you can "safely" blow and replace a drive without losing any data. Granted to the end user it behaves like JBOD but it's much more under the hood.
f0dder:
is DriveExtender basically RAID JBOD?-f0dder (December 03, 2010, 06:52 AM)
--- End quote ---
No, it has built in redundancy and deduplication features so you can "safely" blow and replace a drive without losing any data. Granted to the end user it behaves like JBOD but it's much more under the hood.
-Stoic Joker (December 03, 2010, 07:06 AM)
--- End quote ---
Ah, OK - might be a loss after all, then :)
40hz:
One thing I find very amusing is how cavalier Microsoft is about dropping Drive Extender when they still have this page (Aug 2008) up on TechNet. There the HS Team extols the virtues of their approach - and argue that RAID is not a "consumer technology."
Last weekend I found some blog posts by a blogger who calls himself "Fear the Cowboy" discussing some of the more severe technical limitations that RAID (especially RAID 5) has compared to Windows Home Server Drive Extender. Check out his posts here.
His posts got me motivated to write this one, which I've been meaning to do for quite some time...
When we were thinking of building the Windows Home Server product and doing focus groups we'd ask consumers "what do you know about RAID". Uniformly the answer was (at least in the U.S.) "Oh, that's a insect repellant".
Geeks & IT professionals know RAID stands for "Redundant Array of Independent Disks" and is a storage technology widely used in the corporate IT world.
Those same geeks, when encountering Windows Home Server for the first time, often ask the question "Why doesn't Windows Home Server use RAID?". The simplest answer is RAID sucks as the basis for a consumer storage product. But, my PR team would rather I not say it in such a negative way. Instead, they want me to say something positive like:
"Windows Home Server is a consumer product that provides an amazingly powerful yet super-simple to use solution to centralizing a mutli-PC household's storage. Windows Home Server includes a new, revolutionary storage technology we call Windows Home Server Drive Extender that kicks RAID's butt."
Or something like that.
--- End quote ---
Which raises the question: If it so "kicked butt" back in 2008, why is it getting its butt kicked out in 2010? ("Enquiring minds want to know...")
Better read it before the page disappears! :P Link here.
----
On a mildly hopeful note: Endgadget reports Steve "Monkey-Boy" Ballmer has indicated he will "look into" the issue in light of all the complaints now circulating. And while there's a good chance this will mean about as much as a diplomat's smile, at least it serves to show that the Big Guy is aware of the issue. Read it here.
Hey Steve! This is for you: SpoilerMicrosoft's dropped feature is Linux's gain
Onward! :Thmbsup:
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page
[*] Previous page
Go to full version