The Synology DS1512 has been a popular choice for many home labs in recent years. I hoped that the company’s raft of recent product updates would reach this model eventually. Well my wish was granted as Synology have announced the DS1513+.
There are a few modifications to note. The one that stands out the most at first glance is the doubling of LAN capability. The DS1513+ boasts no fewer than 4 RJ45 ports. That does seem like quite a lot. It does open up some interesting possibilities though…
Whether you love or loathe VMware and their products, one area that you can’t fault is the community that’s built up around them. In that community blood, sweat, tears and a dash of brilliance have produced many amazing things. vOpenData looks like it could be one of them.
vOpenData is the brainchild of Ben Thomas and was built with William Lam and assistance from several other VMware community members. Essentially it is a public database of VMware Virtual Infrastructure statistics / configurations. Users download a script that collects some anonymous data about their infrastructure. Once uploaded and added to the database, the data contributes to a plethora of publicly available statistics.
At the time of writing there are over 50,000 VMs in the database. The average VMDK size is just over 70Gb. For me, as a techie / evangelist / consultant, this is useful information and there’s so much more there besides. Here’s a quick grab from the public dashboard:
As a community project, its value is huge and will get even better the more people contribute data to it. Head over to the vOpenData website and find out more.
Forbes Guthrie and Scott Lowe have been busy. I very much enjoyed the first edition of the VMware vSphere Design book and now the second edition is up on Amazon for download in Kindle format or pre-order for print copies. In this edition, there’s also a chapter on vCloud design by Kendrick Coleman.
Besides being a good read in and of itself, the first book was good to help with VCAP4-DCD preparation. I imagine that this edition will be equally useful for VCAP5-DCD preparation. I look forward to reading it. Well, I will when my copy shows up (family rule: I’m not allowed to buy anything for myself in the month of my birthday).
Yesterday, Google announced that as of July 1st 2013 they are retiring the Google Reader service. It was one of several stories that caused some bloating of my twitter timeline as scores of people that I follow picked up on it.
My initial reaction was not a good one. I started using Google Reader only a few years ago but it has become a trusted and valuable way for me to consume information and news from the industry that I work in. Its absence will have a considerable impact on my daily activities.
Having slept on it though, I’m certainly a lot more relaxed about it. Yes, it’s going to have an impact but have Google actually just provided me with a catalyst to change the way that I consume information? I mean, I could easily just swap to using another service. Feedly, for example, even have processes in place to allow you to migrate from Google Reader (something that may have contributed to their site being incredibly slow last night after the Google announcement broke). But does Googles decision point towards a trend of moving away from RSS? What then is the alternative way of reading updates from the various sites and feeds that I have been following?
I don’t have a clear answer to any of these questions just yet but I’m going to be thinking about alternatives now. In the short term, moving my collection of feeds to another service seems to be the logical thing to do. After all, that’s one of the benefits of cloud services - portability. It will only be the work of a few minutes and I can carry on reading my RSS feeds on any of my devices beyond the end of June.
It’s that time again. For the last few years Eric Siebert, over at vsphere-land.com, has organised a vote giving you, the readers of virtualization blogs, the opportunity to decide which you think is the best.
Jeremy and I run this site in our spare time because we want to but if you could see you way clear to voting for us, or any of you other favourite virtualization blogs, then you have our thanks.
Just hit the “vote” button to the left to be directed to the voting page, or click here.
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