I just ripped through some brief interface shots here and compiled it all together.  It sucks but it’ll give you at least a cursory sense for what the Nexus 10 looks like.

EDIT: @brandonrbennett pointed out that I forgot to set this in landscape mode. It’s currently being updated and I apologize for the n00b mistake.

Hey there…this is a quick ‘n dirty post on the Google/Samsung Nexus 10 tablet.  I’ve been asked by a few folks to provide my first impressions of the tablet and so, here it goes.  For what it’s worth, I HATE unboxing videos so, I’m not going to stoop to that level.  If you want to know what unboxing is like, get one yourself.

Ergonomics/Look/Feel:

I have to say that every iPad i’ve held has seemed “cold” and “heavy.” The “cold” part comes from the metal back and the heavy part…well, you know.  The metal back of the iPad is not really textured, per se, so, consequently, you end up with a bit of handling challenge.  What strikes you immediately with the Nexus 10 is that you can HOLD it without fear of it slipping out of your hand.  The textured back has a good “hand feel” and it doesn’t easily slide from your finger tips.

The heft of the table is just right as well.  This was truly designed for landscape mode so, from that consideration, the way that the ports are configured point to it being used mostly in that fashion.  If you attempt to balance the Nexus 10 on two fingers, you’ll find that it does manage to weigh out across the axis very nicely (in other words, there’s not a bias in weight towards the top or the bottom).

Screen:

all i can say here is WOW.  I’ve seen the Retina iPad and it’s truly awesome.  My eye is not going to be able to tell you this is much different but, it’s so unbelievable CLEAR.  Icons have perfect definition; pictures are well represented too (though, the source of those pictures will influence that to a certain degree).

The tablet comes with “Ice Age” installed.  I fired it up very quickly and watched a few minutes.  No ghosting and the speakers (more below) being on either side of the screen really provide some “depth” to the sound.

Speakers:

For listening to audio, I pulled up Fun.’s “Some Nights” and gave it a listen.  Bass isn’t really there.  More of a Bose-influenced design (if you get where I’m going with that) but certainly you can get a sense for the soundscape without getting pounded by tinny drums.  Good definition and the included equalization function is actually usable.

Software:

Once i plugged in and synced the Google account, i immediatelly pulled down the Android 4.2 update and restarted.  This provided the multi-user login screen, etc.  Overall, this tablet is “fast” in that flipping between screens is immensely fluid and quick.  transitions are immediate without any hesitations or tearing.  Installation of software (twitter, for example) goes at the speed of your broadband pipe and installation is wicked fast.  I’ll start digging into games, etc. at some later point but for now, nothing to worry about.

Power, ports, etc:

one thing I appreciate so much with Samsung is their intent on following micro-USB standards.  The same cable that works with my Galaxy Nexus works to charge the tablet, etc.  This keeps my cable clutter and “proprietary outlay” sane.  I’m going to be looking for a case solution at some point (and a screen protector is immediately warranted given my family) but again, given the bias of the tablet towards landscape mode, ports are aligned where I need them.

Volume and Power switches are up top and aren’t too flush or too overstated.  They’re perfectly set off from the case of the pad (vs. let’s say, the RIM Playbook) and are easy to toggle.

Anyhow, I’ll write more later but for now, these are my initial impressions!

cheers,

D

Related articles

• Google Nexus 10 vs Apple iPad 4: spec comparison(itproportal.com)

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• Review: Nexus 10 tablet is a solid house built on shifting sands(arstechnica.com)

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• Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG)’s Nexus 10 is in a different league(themarketsareopen.blogspot.com)

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August has been exceptionally busy @ Juniper and soon, I’ll be starting to lay out some of the work I’ve been doing in public.  Until that point, however, you’ll have to “suffer” through the ongoing process that is my desk.  To that end, I’ve got a couple of videos for you to spend some time with so that you can see what’s been done and where I’m finally getting to after all these weeks.  Hey, if @drjmetz can work on his Willys Jeep, I can work on my white walnut desk.

First, we have the post-sanding wood conditioner being applied.  For this, I used Howard’s Feed-and-Wax which combines orange oil, carnuba wax, and bee’s wax together into something resembling a paste.

Next up, we have the application of the oil-based polyurethane gloss.  I’m probably going to have to do about 4 or 5 coats since butternut (aka white walnut) is incredibly porous.

As usual, helpful feedback and polite commentary are appreciated.  Tech is coming SOON!!!

As I’ve written previously (here, for those who need the reference), I’m in the process of building a desk (or desk system) using some rough cut planks of butternut (aka white walnut).  The beauty of this process is the fact that I get to choose my finishes and work through the process myself, crafting something that I’ll enjoy. This stands in stark contrast to the particle-board/plywood/other types of product out there where you have to fit THEIR finishes and features to your lifestyle and work habits versus how it should be: finishes and features matched to you.  Previously, we covered a quick overview of finishes that I’ve been evaluating (an arduous process if there ever were one) and now I’ve moved on to preparing the boards for the desk.  Again, I’ve captured in video what otherwise would be a very boring tale of pictures and captions.  Enjoy!

Related articles

• Building the Ultimate Work Desk – Testing Finishes(flickerdown.com)

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• Make Yourself a Standing Desk This Weekend(lifehacker.com)

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• Custom Studio Desks(gearslutz.com)

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• Woven Desk by Bram Vanderbeke(design-milk.com)

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As some of you may or may not know (check Twitter if you don’t), I’m in the process of building a desk system.  I loved the look and function of Ikea‘s Galant desk system but wanted something a bit more organic in nature.  Consequently, I went on the hunt for some different options, finally choosing some two inch thick by eight foot long planks of live-edge butternut (white walnut) wood.  Since most of you may not get the chance to do something like this, I figured that you’d want to live a bit vicariously through me so…here’s a little taste of what’s going on, courtesy of my daughter Maddie and my “Apple wants to see it banned again” Samsung Nexus phone from Google (unlocked…just had to put that in there to bust on the largest patent troll out there currently…Apple.)

Related articles

• This Desk is not from IKEA(shoesoffplease.wordpress.com)

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• A Narrow DIY Desk with Slim Storage IKEA Hackers(apartmenttherapy.com)

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more later, but trust me…this is FANTASTIC!

image (c) by SwitchLightingco.com; used by permission

Since I’ve made a few public promises (on Twitter, no less) stating that I’d actually post something by the end of the year (2011; last post was in June 2011), I’ve decided to actually KEEP that promise.  To that end, here’s my quick ‘n dirty post for the end of the 2011.

This is one of those strange years that I hope you’ll never have to experience.  To recap:

• I left EMC in October of 2010 for a small startup called Cirtas Systems which promised to fundamentally change the process of getting data to the cloud from your SAN environment.
• In April of 2011, after some long & hard fought victories with customers and our own engineering/development, Cirtas folded up shop.  Maybe next year I’ll delve into the specifics there but, suffice it to say, customers WANTED the product but we couldn’t provide everything they NEEDED.  This left me without a job but with a lot of promise out there.
• From April until August 2011, I interviewed with:  VMware, EMC (Education and Green Plum), DataDirect Networks,  BlueArc, Hitachi (HCAP, Parascale, et al.), Riverbed, Nasuni, Panzura, and Juniper Networks before finally landing at Symantec Corporation on August 1st.
• During this interview process, I did a small 2-3 week contract gig with ESG working on a VPLEX article.
• Met a lot of great people in the process and while I did disappoint a few folks who offered, I believe the ultimate landing choice was actually quite the good one.

So, that’s my year in review.  I would LOVE to talk more about the Symantec gig but as I’m still trying to figure out some of their social media policies, it’ll need to wait a few more weeks.

see you in 2012!!

Image via Wikipedia

One benefit of being gainfully under-employed is having those brief bursts of inspiration that allow you to get on paper (or blog) those streaming bits of ideas that could change your destiny.  Perhaps there’s a bit of hyperbole worked in there (ok, a whole lot) but the fact remains, when the mind is allowed to roam a bit, inspiration comes.  Given my background in cognitive sciences and such, this is either one of the most dangerous things to allow or one of the most precious.  Having gone through close to 30 interviews (that’s counting people, not companies) since Cirtas let myself (and 20 odd others) go on April 15th, 2011, I can tell you that one of the most commonly asked questions has been: “If you could do anything, what would it be?”  (For comparison, the most asked question is: “Explain the switch from psychology to enterprise IT.”)  It can be relatively hard to nail down what exactly I view a dream job to be, but given the relatively wide variety of experiences I’ve had over the years, I’ve come to rely on a few common characteristics which I’ll highlight in the following paragraphs.  However, along the way, newer ideas and concepts have come into view and for your enjoyment (and to annoy my wife who’s trying to sleep while I type this) I’ll try to drag them into the light.  With all the precursors aside, then, let’s get into the meat of what this post is about: designing my dream job.

Dream Job: The Components

Here’s my global plan for what I’d love to do followed by some careful unpacking (knowing that I’m in process on a few things as I sit here and write this).

Skunkworks

In what is perhaps one of the most overused quotes on earth, Thomas Alva Edison noted that “genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration.” I’ve somewhat taken this to heart in my life in that I’m admittedly not the sharpest tool in the shed.  I make up for it, however, in attempting to be the most useful and to a certain extent, I nail that 99% perspiration mark pretty bang on. That being said, I’ve always had a vision for creating my own little “skunkworks” team dedicated to finding, breaking, designing, manipulating, etc. technology. Part of this vision has always been on emerging technology but grounded in what is available today.  This truly becomes a fulfillment of Edison’s credo mentioned previously.  This skunkworks team would operate free of a type of technology and would seek innovation through perspiration to hopefully inspire genius.  I see this as being a chartered group INSIDE of a larger enterprise, not just a small consultancy tied to linecards.  So, let’s tear this apart a bit more, shall we?

The Core

Having read about the humble beginnings of Dell, HP, Apple, Microsoft, et al., I have noticed a dogged pursuit of an idea (and much more) tends to be their overarching focus.  As I envision the core of this skunkworks team, I want to ensure that I create an atmosphere that allows ideas, however conceptual or nascent, to have their full voice.  Consistently, this usually requires voices that aren’t just engineers but practitioners as well.  The functional aspects of the team are to create from something (not often from nothing) so, having folks that have keen insights into technology in general are important.  I’d probably class the team membership as functional engineers rather than process or systems engineers.

The core also needs to be agile.  I don’t give a flying rip about ITIL, Scrums, etc. but flexibility in thinking outside the box is vital.  I don’t envision this as the frenzied reality of a startup but rather a nuanced understanding that even at 1130pm (when I’m writing this post) innovation happens.  Living outside the confines of a 9-5 become vital and in a global economy, it also becomes worthwhile to have an international team.

The Gear

Any skunkworks team, whether aerospace or marketing, needs gear.  I can write on the back of napkins all I want to capture the germination of an idea, but if I have nothing to start working against, that idea can die pretty quickly.  I know my attention span and I know what is needed to tease the most out of it.  To capture ideas relies on more than mind mapping, Evernote, Dropbox, Facetime, and a napkin.  It relies on an environment that allows for quick exploration and easy clean-up.  I’ll leave this section vague for now, but considering I’m interested in technology, a few racks of servers, storage, and fabrics shouldn’t hurt.

Summing it up

Wrapping the sections above up into a tidy package results in the following:

My dream job would consist of being part of (or leading) a small, agile team of technologists chartered to develop creative solutions to customer problems.  This would be a combination of customer facing solicitations (e.g. the “problems”) along with formative lab and personnel access.  This team would be chartered and equipped to operate outside the political bounds of an enterprise “host” (defined as the parent company) in order to free itself from artificial and unnecessary political dalliances and structures.  This team would be measured on innovation and the ability to solve extant problems, not based on sales.  It would truly be an incubation tank for innovation with productization a distant objective.

Dream Job: The Characteristics

So, I’ve put a few components of my dream job on paper (core team and gear) and summed them up nicely.  However, the physical assets of a team are only part of the equation.  I’m going to attempt to unpack a few more intangibles.

Challenging

I wouldn’t have waxed poetic on my skunkworks team if I didn’t believe there were real challenges to be solved.  In this emerging cloud world, there are plenty of opportunities that present themselves and solutions to be wrought.  Half of the battle in determining value is answering current challenges while proactively seeking to head off future “threats.”  There is challenge in sustaining a product for sure but there is also a feedback loop that needs to take sustaining activities and feed them into a proactive engine that seeks to remedy the same while looking ahead to variants.  Any job that I step into needs to encompass this value; that is, challenges feed both the proactive and the reactive. Any job I evaluate, then, needs to embrace those roles as distinct but interdependent functions and seek to maximize the knowledge that can be gained from each.

Accidents

While I was working for EMC, I had the privilege of running a small lab in Hopkinton.  This was truly the “mad scientist” think tank for me and allowed for a lot of trial and error testing all in the name of productization.  This where I shot the Cisco C200 M1 unveiling video (see it here) and had a lot of fun with testing new technologies (some that I can’t talk about).  Getting back to the point, this lab offered a chance to grow by allowing room for failure.  Any job that I step into needs to understand the role of failure as a learning process and weight its value accordingly. I (along with everyone else on this glorious planet) are human and we make mistakes.  Mistakes are valuable as learning tools and when they happen within appropriate bounds, they can be formative and powerful.  I am in NO WAY advocating that a job should have a built-in “mistake factor” but that acceptable risk and reward must be present.  To offer anything else is frankly working against the nature of mankind.

Personalities

Since I’ve already mentioned “agile” above, I felt I should clarify things a bit more.  Classic business has always existed with the idea that strong, measurable goals equate to the best performance. However, as organizational psychologists have been quick to point out, maintaining this type of environment invariably leads to a squelching of capabilities since there are such a wide variety of personalities and capabilities.  Any job that I step into needs to have an understanding that I am not a cookie cutter individual or personality.  My “gift” (if it can truly be called that) is that I’m another lens that you view your product through.  I’m Dave Graham and I see… <insert pun of your choice here; “dead people” was my personal favorite>.  Point being, I’m going to be unique and I very well can be that missing perspective you need.

Fluid

Just because the business has “always done it that way” doesn’t mean it’s the best way.  Albert Einstein was quoted as saying “insanity [is] doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”  Applying this to organizations, rigidity has always been “the same thing” and enterprises have constantly tried to turn what they have always done into something new.  I’d argue that some of the products that are being introduced in the converged space today match this criteria perfectly.  Consequently, any job that I step into needs to understand that the old way of doing things isn’t necessarily the best and that sometimes, new perspective is needed.  Putting lipstick on a pig results in a pig with lipstick; patently useless to anyone except for the Miss Universe pageant and perhaps, Donald Trump.  Then again, sometimes the old way is best. Let’s find that out together, shall we?

Summary

This may seem like a 1500 1672 word op-ed piece that isn’t worth your time but, as you work through your career, if you’ve not considered who you are and what you want to be doing, you’re missing a golden opportunity.  Learning what works and what doesn’t is a constant challenge and finding an environment that fosters this type of introspection and growth is hard to come by.  What I hope I’ve been able to do (outside of keeping my own prospects intact) is to get you thinking and to use that thinking as a springboard to greater things.  Comments and feedback welcome.

Image via CrunchBase

This morning, Dave Cahill (@dcahill8) posted a rather in-depth look at Carbonite and provided a counter to their business model by including Dropbox.  While Dave is a conservative guy, I’m really not, so, I took the challenge to hopefully expound upon what I think is Dropbox’s COGS model.  The original article is here: The Economics of Carbonite and I’d STRONGLY advise you to read it prior to coming here.

In my mind, there are two different scenarios:
a.) DevPay – in which each user is given their own Amazon identity but superimposed over their account is Dropbox’s metadata thus giving them a “slice” of revenue that Amazon makes off of data.
b.) Superuser – in which Dropbox simply provisions “buckets” for customers underneath their master account thus allowing them to tap into Amazon’s tiered pricing structure.

Scenario A makes SOME sense but I’m unsure if Dropbox can programmaticly sign up end-users for discrete S3 accounts without some sort of machinations with Amazon’s data and privacy policies. Consequently, what I’ll discuss is scenario B.

In scenario B, if a user signs up for trials, Dropbox provisions a “bucket” underneath their US Standard region S3 account and obfuscates the bucket name (randomizing using alphanumeric characters). By creating the bucket underneath their account, Dropbox can now actualize a cheaper scale than if they went with scenario A.

For a working example, let’s assume several things.
a.) Dropbox has 500TB of data stored in S3
b.) Dropbox is paying rates listed HERE: http://aws.amazon.com/s3/#pricing for US STANDARD region only (not US West which is more expensive)
c.) Dropbox uses Standard (4 replica; 2 DC) storage. I’ll provide metrics for RRS as well.

So, for 500TB of storage, Dropbox is paying:
storage (standard) per month: $0.095
storage (RRS) per month: $0.063
transfer (IN): $0.10
transfer (OUT): $0.08
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Storage Total for 500TB (500,000 GB)
standard: $47,500
RRS: $31,500
-
transfer (IN): $50,000 (this # is skewed as they’re not transferring 500TB per month but this provides a wholistic ingest #)
transfer (OUT): $40,000 (this # is again skewed but would show what it’d cost to shove 500TB downstream from Amazon S3)

As you can tell, Dropbox is in a rather perfect position to cover their expenses without much effort and with minimal investment in infrastructure (I’m assuming they’re using some level of EC2 involvement for control plane, etc.) they’re on a perfect trajectory for profitability @ scale.

What do you think?

cheers,

Dave

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• Dropbox Interview (ghacks.net)
• Dropbox Faces Security Controversy (appreaders.com)
• The Economics of Dropbox (w2lessons.com)
• At Dropbox, Over 100 Billion Files Served – And Counting (gigaom.com)
• Dropbox Security (schneier.com)
• Amazon Cloud Drive Is Not Dropbox (stream.thisisapipe.com)
• Dropbox Users Save 1 Million Files Every 5 Minutes (fakeiitian.com)
• Cloud Storage Faceoff: Windows Live SkyDrive vs. Dropbox vs. Amazon Cloud Drive (mjou812.wordpress.com)

Since it’s been roughly (i don’t know) several months since i last wrote (and yes, i’m doing the e.e. cummings thing by only using lower case letters), i decided it was time to motivate the sedentary gray matter between my ears and actually put finger to keyboard to…pontificate, really over the recent events in the Iron Mountain stepping-out-of-the-cloud debate.  Coupled to that was a challenge from Val B @ NTAP to expound upon my assertion that Iron Mountain, Nirvanix, and Nasuni were all stratified differently in the cloud space.  So, without further ado, here’s my thoughts.

(brief editor’s note here:  I’m really not doing a ton of research into specific features/functionality here.  just reporting what my end users are seeing and what reality, as unfortunate as it may be, dictates)

Nasuni.  Nasuni is a MSO offering where the “manager” is Nasuni and the offering is a limited scale scalable, semi-SMB 2.0 compliant set of virtual machines.  I’m not trying to disparage what they’re doing because honestly, it’s a great product when positioned correctly.  However, if you’re looking for performance (e.g. speeds/feeds), you’re going to be out of luck.  Classically, this is a Small-Medium business product. The decoupling of Nasuni from the backend service is an interesting question to ask them;  typically, a customer runs their Amazon account directly through the service, paying “all in” to Nasuni.

Nirvanix.  Nirvanix is a hybrid of a cloud offering plus perimeter edge (or gateway style) deployment model.  As such, Nirvanix most CLOSELY mirrors what IRM was trying to do, but they’ve been moderately more successful.   I say “moderately” in that I’ve run across exactly 0 (zero, for those who need it spelled out) folks who actually use their product.  Moderately from the sense that, in my not-so-humble-opinion, their CloudNAS is a wasted effort when compared to Nasuni.  So, with Nirvanix, you’ve got backhaul (e.g. the “public” cloud portion) via their SDN and on-premises via hnodes and/or CloudNAS.

Iron Mountain. Iron Mountain approached the cloud like another business model to be tackled.  as a “master” of backup, the assumption was made that the same model could be made to work using the existing customer base plus some on-premise hardware that would accelerate the writing to the cloud for digital asset management (assets being loosely defined as backup/archive). to further ‘extend’ functionality here, Iron Mountain brought to bear two discrete clouds; one for their archiving services and one for the backup services.  The problem here is in the approach; rather than create a SOA-based architecture, IRM went for the retrofit…and lost.  It’s unfortunate, to be sure, but certainly not unexpected given the momentum in the cloud storage space.  With application level “integration” (albeit loosely), IRM essentially looked like a scaled-down version of Nirvanix with software capabilities.  Target market here was everyone, SMB, Commercial, Enterprise with (my opinion) the biggest folks involved being commercial and enterprise, not SMB.

Conclusion

The cloud is constantly evolving and frankly, we’re only at the tip of the “cloud darwinism” cycle.  many more CSSPs will be subject to closure and it’ll be the strongest that will survive, both from standpoint of application integration and perimeter reach.

UPDATE:  it’s also important to look at who controls the data.  IRM was on-pre + cloud w/applications.  Nirvanix is application agnostic but self contained.  Nasuni is on-prem with no owned cloud but multiple backends…

Related articles

• Nasuni solves tricky cloud storage problems (zdnet.com)
• Report: Iron Mountain to Shutter Cloud Storage Service (pcworld.com)
• Front Porch Digital Reaches for the Nirvanix Cloud (prnewswire.com)
• Bruised Iron Mountain gives up on storage cloud (go.theregister.com)
• Nirvanix Announces New Webcast: Stop Your Backup Pain with Cloud Storage (prnewswire.com)