Nybbles for the end of the week

Needing a few interesting things to read at the end of the week?

Here’s a few things I’ve found fascinating this week:

• Why do IT operations suck? An insightful article by Steve O’Donnell. Steve asks why our staff who have primary involvement with systems 24×7 (operators) are often the least skilled, least trained and least paid. (As a consultant, I’ve frequently experienced companies who consider it a waste of time to properly train operators, and as a result their systems usually suffer for it.)
• Over at Daring Fireball, John Gruber has an article called The Original Tablet. (It’s a great historical perspective on why Microsoft can’t exclusively claim ownership of the tablet idea.)
• Like many others, I found Google’s slap in the face to China’s net censorship and cyber-warfare activities well timed and highly appropriate. On the other hand, others such as John Obeto over at Absolutely Windows found it not much more than petty PR. Somewhere in the middle is probably the whole story…
• Over at IT Depends, I found Terri McClure’s views on Microsoft’s requirements for accessing their Azure SLAs to be the same as mine – staggeringly stupid. (According to Microsoft Fanboy site The Register, Microsoft are reviewing their decision on that one.)
• Storagebod got me thinking again about Availability and Uptime with his article about how availability is measured.
• Not technically reading, but I’ve finally jumped on board the growing number of listeners to Infosmack. This podcast is run by Greg Knieriemen and Marc Farley, and frequently has guests from many of the storage vendors and other storage bloggers. I’m really regretting that I haven’t been listening to it for longer. It’s definitely going to be a regular podcast for me from now on.
• Over at Storage Monkeys, Sunshine Mugrabi’s article on EMC’s heavy involvement in social networking is definitely worth reviewing. (For what it’s worth, if you haven’t ever read it, you need to read The Cluetrain Manifesto if you think that all this social networking stuff is rubbish or just a passing fad. It isn’t. Written years before its time, The Cluetrain Manifesto is a clear and articulate series of essays about exactly how important social networking is.)
• Finally, there’s been some interesting discussions on VMware and application level VSS backups through VCB/vSphere. Check my posting here for the summary of the important links to be following about it.

Finishing up, a little about what you’ve been reading: the NetWorker Power Users Guide to nsradmin. The number of downloads has been staggering – far more than I hoped for, and I hope like the main blog, the guide proves useful to many a NetWorker administrator.