StorageMojo

Always learning
This week’s learning: a hacked web site. There’s been a lot of that going around. Writing has taken a back seat to fixing the problem.

It took a while to grok how deeply StorageMojo had been hacked.

First I got a note from my hosting company - something about a daemon - and I told them to take it down. Which they did.

Thought I was done.

But I wasn’t
Then Gary at Nexsan noted that StorageMojo was alarming his browser. Went into the StorageMojo files on WordPress and discovered some iframes that I hadn’t put there.

Pulled them out. Upgraded to the latest version of WordPress.

Thought I was done.

Wrong again
Fired up the SFTP client and took a look at my web site files. Saw a bunch with names I didn’t recall, like Emma, Alexander and Jordan. Inside, links to hundreds of sites I’d never heard of either.

Got rid of them.

Checked a couple of other sites I host on the account. One had been completely cleaned out by the spamsters - the site was gone - replaced with more collections of links.

Edited the junk out of those sites. Hoped I was done, but decided to go through every single file and folder on all three sites.

Found the malicious code. Very professional. Replicated in several places. Language = ru, whatever that means.

Corrective action
New passwords, of course. Notices that the Dreamhost web management system doesn’t make that easy to do - password management is spread across several different tools - which guarantees that people won’t change them very often.

Read up on security. A couple of good sites are Blog Security and Stop Badware. Google also has a helpful checklist.

Did some other housecleaning and site hardening.

The StorageMojo take
I now know I will never be done. The rest of you with blogs should learn by my misadventure.

The biggest surprise is that there are many things that can be done to make sites harder, but they are not the defaults. You have to do some research and sometimes some configuration.

That is wrong. Other than general exhortations to update software, the hosting companies do almost nothing to make it easy to manage security. Not many consumers are going to dig into log files every couple of days.

I’m more technical than the average blog writer and some of this stuff is a PITA. The Internet Operating System needs some security patches.

Comments welcome, of course. AFAIK nothing bad got sent to readers of StorageMojo.

Spent some time with Nick Pearce, a co-founder of Object Matrix, a UK-based software startup supporting commodity-based archiving.

Their MatrixStore product clusters off-the-shelf servers and storage to create a secure disk based archive. MatrixStore runs out of the box on Mac OS and will work with most Linux supported tin.

Commodity hardware and software
Archived data should not be tied to a specific storage platform. Proprietary formats or filesystems are an accident waiting to happen.

MatrixStore keeps the data on industry standard filesystems in the same format as on the client disk. The data will be retrievable even if the company has disappeared.

Platform lifecycle
Older gear can play in the same config as newer stuff. Roll old hardware out of production into the archive, and double its useful life. Upgrade in place, a critical consideration for archives.

Application-centric storage
MatrixStore is integrated with the recently released Final Cut Server from Apple. They provide life-cycle management of assets and metadata from ingest through archive.

The MatrixStore software stores the added FCS metadata using metadata operations supported by XFS on Linux. When ZFS is supported on Mac OS they plan to use its native metadata support as well.

MatrixStore also automates some tasks that usually require manual configuration, adding capacity, data redundancy, data authenticity and the like. Like Final Cut Server it’s designed for people who aren’t storage admins.

Cool pricing
They give away the first 15TB of software licenses away for free. After the first 15TB it’s $1000 per TB of protected content. There’s a pricing widget to help with configurations on their website.

The StorageMojo take
Digital archiving is a critical issue for content creators. Nick - who had worked at EMC - made choices that will become de rigueur for deep archiving as people come to understand the issues:

• Content in its original format
• Commodity hardware
• Upgrade in place
• Pay as you go
• Automate the small stuff

MatrixStore’s focus on Final Cut Server and their pricing model are both positives. Final Cut Studio has taken out a huge swath in the NLE market - over 1 million licenses sold - so the FC Server business should be a healthy one.

Their pricing transparency and unlimited-time 15 TB trial should also work well. All in all, an up-to-the-minute approach to the market. You might almost think they’re American.

Comments welcome, of course.

Already?
Didn’t we just have one of those?

Leaving sunny Arizona for sunny Florida today. Say hi if you see me.

NAB next week
I’m driving to Las Vegas next week to see what’s cool in media storage.

And EMC World next month!
Never been to one before. Hope to hear all about Maui, the new global digital repository.

Squeezing in a trip to Chicago next month too.
No business planned, but I think I will have some downtime.

Do you help buy, spec or evaluate storage and related products?
Please take a few minutes to take a survey that I hope will make potential advertisers thrust large piles of green my way. Click on the “We value your opinion” button under my picture to the right.

It is a standard reader demographic survey. Its great virtue is that it is short. 5 minutes tops.

Update: Olga from IDC tells me that the StorageMojo reader response has been outstanding:

. . . congratulations on having such a supportive audience!

Kevin predicted it could take several weeks to get to the right sample size. Instead it took 3 days. So I’m taking the survey down.

Thanks to all who responded! End update.

You can tell me what you like best, too
I put in a couple of questions too: what you like about StorageMojo; what you want more - or less - of in fine storage blogging.

There’s a serious side too
The analyst community gets the huge majority of its money from vendors. That’s not a bad thing, unless you are looking for unvarnished vendor analysis. Then you have to wonder about the analytical rigor. Some firms are simply mouthpieces for their clients. What’s the point?

I take money from vendors too. Mostly the younger, more innovative vendors, yet vendors nonetheless. So part of my intent has been to build a revenue stream that is advertising-based. Yes, money from vendors again, but mediated by a sales force and competition for the page views. If somebody gets mad they pull their adverts and somebody else takes their place. I’m cool with that.

That’s where you come in. Click on the link, click the check boxes, and strike a blow for independent storage blogging.

The StorageMojo take
If you like what StorageMojo does, please complete the survey. I’ll be watching the results, trying to figure out how to make you love StorageMojo even more. Or at least a little. Namaste.

Comments welcome, of course.

The P4P working group demo’d their work Friday at the Distributed Computing Industry Association show in New York. Not only did they show 2-3x faster downloads, but they also cut the average number of inter-metro hops - the expensive kind - from over 5 to less than 1. Cool.

The P4PWG idea is that if P2P is both cheaper for ISPs and faster for users we will all have a happier Internet. Folks from the Yale CompSci department - Haiyong Xie, Y. Richard Yang and Avi Silberschatz - along with Verizon and Pando Networks, cooperated on the demo.

The P4PWG includes AT&T, Verizon, Pando, BitTorrent, Cisco and LimeWire among others. The cable companies are there as observers. The P4P work is an open standard with the hope that all ISPs and P2P networks will endorse it.

How does it work?
The tech papers aren’t available yet on the web, but this is what I’ve pieced together from an afternoon’s websurfing. Update: Wide-awake reader Paul found this P4P Overview on Ars Technica. Thanks Paul! End update.

P2P is network oblivious. When you start downloading streams they might be from anywhere, regardless of network cost. The problem is that big routers are costly and smaller routers are much cheaper, not to mention undersea fiber.

What P4P is inject some knowledge into the P2P network so peering decisions are made more intelligently. It looks like a network version of locality of reference.

Implementation
There are at least 2 ways to deliver network awareness to peers. Here’s one of them.

A peer-tracker (pTracker) and an Internet tracker (iTracker) are added to the P2P network. A peer requests peering information of the pTracker, which has knowledge of local (metro area) and recent non-local resources. The pTracker sends back an edited server list and the peer goes its merry way.

If the resources aren’t local and the pTracker doesn’t know the network topology, it pings the iTracker, which returns high-level peering suggestions. If locality of reference works as well in cyberspace as it does with other data the pTracker won’t be querying the iTracker very often.

It is expected that the pTracker will be maintained by the P2P network, while the iTracker could be maintained by the ISP, network or a trusted 3rd party. This should preserve help P2P user privacy, although the *Tracker names certainly won’t reduce user paranoia.

Guys, how about something less Big Brotherish? PeerServer and RoutServer? Just a thought.

The StorageMojo take
As file sizes continue their secular trend upward the need for P2P will continue to grow. By aligning ISP, telco and user needs for faster and more efficient P2P the P4PWG has pulled off a win/win/win situation.

A less obvious benefit of this work is on VoIP networks, which are also P2P. It doesn’t take much to degrade VoIP quality. To the extent that it enables improvement in P2P network node selection, the P4P project will benefit the rapidly growing population of VoIP users as well.

Kudos to the P4PWG and especially the Yale team.

Comments welcome, of course. Images courtesy of the P4PWG.

Nothing major if you’re wondering.

IDG
You should be seeing higher quality advertising. IDG, the folks who publish everything that ends in “world” like PC World, Computerworld and Macworld have put together a network of mostly IDG content and selected independent publishers like StorageMojo to create a compelling Internet ad buy.

You should be seeing the first of the new format ads at the top of the page and to the right. I’ll be replacing the Google ads with the IDG ads to reduce clutter.

Soon there will be a larger ad in the center column. IDG tells me that advertisers love them, i.e. pay more. As a card-carrying capitalist I’m down with that.

The point is to generate significant revenue so I can continue to bring you lovely pictures of red rocks and maybe even more content.

IDG offers publishers a traditional CPM model based on impressions rather than clicks. Benefit: you don’t have to click Google ads just so I can eat.

New format?
The timing is less certain, but I’ve found a new format, or theme, for Wordpress that would be a nice update. It is a cleaner layout, more whitespace, better typography and offers a larger header picture. I don’t know when I’ll do the update, but it is on the agenda.

I hope you’ll like it, whenever it arrives.

Top 100 analyst blog
I discovered today that StorageMojo made Technobabble’s Top 100 analyst blog list. AFAIK there are only about 120 analyst blogs, but I’m heartened that StorageMojo came in #19 overall and ahead of any other storage analyst blog. Dave Hitz probably gets more hits, but as co-founder of NetApp he isn’t a storage analyst.

Warning: if StorageMojo falls off the next version of the list, don’t expect to read about it here!

Update: Someone, bless ‘em, linked to StorageMojo from - who knew? - Flickr! LOL!

Maybe I need to get with the social networking thing after all.

Comments welcome, of course.

Darn! It looks like I screwed up. I’m sorry. While Microsoft did disable a number of early Word and other file formats, it wasn’t as long a list as I thought.

Textual analysis
I take a text-heavy approach to the content on StorageMojo. I prefer to go to original source material, unpack the meaning and the context, and then give my take on it.

That usually works pretty well. But in this case it didn’t.

What happened?
I read a lot of technical documents. Most never get written about. But the Microsoft knowledge base article was an exception. Since Microsoft was the topic it also got a lot of attention from me and others

There is a lot of emotion around Microsoft. They are a big, powerful, immensely profitable and sometimes clueless corporation whose desktop monopoly is a fact of life for computer users and IT professionals.

I try to stay with the facts as best I can determine them. In this case I got confused by the KB article. That other people made the same mistake is small comfort and no excuse (see a Microsoft take here).

Lessons learned
Other than resolving to analyze content from Microsoft more carefully, I’m not sure what else I would do differently. I didn’t question their motives for the change, only the way it was handled.

However, I do have some suggestions for Microsoft.

• Reducing functionality on an already purchased product is a problem. You should notify users that you are limiting product functionality and give them the opportunity to decline the update. Even if it is for their own good.
• Suggesting that editing the registry or using esoteric admin tools to solve the problem is OK for the tech savvy. But what about my 85 year old neighbor Dorothy, whose computer is a lifeline to her great-grandchildren? Her late husband was an engineer, so she has files that go back quite a few years. Microsoft, you are both an enterprise and a consumer company. Own it.
• Communication is worth spending money on. Tech writers tell me that Microsoft doesn’t pay very well and, as a result, it doesn’t get very good tech writing. Maybe MCSEs are used to the style, but it sure didn’t work for this reasonably tech-savvy consumer.

The StorageMojo take
Tech is complicated and sometimes people - like I just did - get it wrong. Listening to criticism and learning from mistakes is how we all get better, even Microsoft. I hope you’ll keep coming back to StorageMojo and I’ll keep doing my level best to make it worth your time.

Comments welcome, as always.

I’m off to America’s Sin City for a weekend of good clean storage fun. I’m attending Tom Coughlin’s Storage Visions conference.

Then I’m sticking around on Monday to take in a few hours of CES, a show I’ve never attended. There are some storage-related firms whose booths I want to see.

If you are in LV this weekend, look me up. I’ll be at the Flamingo with the SV conference.

Can’t win ‘em all - darn it!
A year ago I offered predictions for 2007 (see 2007 in review) and it was with deep foreboding that I went back to look at them.

Cynic or optimist?
Here’s the list and my take on each prediction.

Cloud computing?

-CIOs realized they are at a significant cost disadvantage and started prototyping new apps on services such as Amazon’s EC and S3. They did see some cost savings, but the big win was faster implementation and scaling of the infrastructure. Very little industry buzz though, since storage vendors don’t do business with the service providers and the CIOs who know aren’t talking.

Cleverly worded to avoid measurement, I suspect that while some CIOs have piloted projects using online resources, the practice is not as common as I’d thought.

Medical records market

-Electronic medical records failed to get any storage industry attention even as this multi-billion dollar opportunity slipped away. American consumers, seeing widespread abuse by insurance companies, debt collectors, law enforcement and employers, began fighting their use in the courts and through “off the grid” health care options.

Nailed the industry’s reaction to EMR. Are American’s fighting their use? Hard to say. It appears they haven’t gotten enough traction to spur a reaction one way or the other.

1.5 TB disk drive?
I predicted they’d be shipping by year end, but none have even been announced. Is disk capacity growth slowing? We’ll know by mid-year.

Small-write optimized flash drives?

-The biggest device surprise - Small Write-Optimized Flash (SWOF) drives - in 32 and 64 GB capacities from Samsung, took off in as OLTP-oriented IDCs realized they could have higher reliability and performance at much lower costs over conventional disk drives. In a brilliant marketing move, Samsung got certified with Oracle, DB2, SQL Server and MySQL, dramatically raising the technical buzz around SWOF drives.

If we had more performance data Fusion-io drive might be a SWOF drive. And no Internet data centers picked them for broad implementation. Total miss.

Zmanda open source backup

-Zmanda open source backup really started taking off this year. It is cheap, reliable, and easily readable. At some point folks started waking up to the fact that they could lock themselves in to a single software product by using some sort-of cool features, or they could use Zmanda and know they’ll be able to recover the data on any Unix/Linux system.

Zmanda CEO Chander Kant assures me that Zmanda sales indeed started taking off this year. I’ll take his word for it.

He also noted that they can back up directly to Amazon’s S3. According to the AWS blog:

Zmanda Internet Backup is a plugin for the Amanda Enterprise backup software. Amanda Enterprise is a certified, tested, and supported version of the popular Amanda open source backup and recovery tool. Amanda can now use Amazon S3 to backup, archive and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the Internet.

Pretty cool.

Apple’s Time Machine

-Apple’s spring trio of storage software products, based on ZFS, including Time Machine, Replicant and Total Recall - note their cool use of Sci-Fi movie references - left every other storage app looking like crank-start Model T’s next to a Ferrari F430.

No other cool storage tools. No cool names. Fact is, I’m not even using Time Machine yet because I’ve had so many problems with Leopard.

But I’m sure it will be insanely great when I do.

The final prediction:

2007 was a good year for storage. Despite the profitable inertia enjoyed by the big guys, some exciting technology and applications made waves . . . . All of these contributed to a growing rethinking of storage architectures in the high-volume, cool-data, internet age.

I stick by this last prediction: 2007 was a good year for storage. The momentum for cluster-based storage grew, particularly with EMC’s Hulk/Maui teaser announcement. 1 TB drives made it into mass production and their prices are dropping. WD’s greener drives appear to be a real advance.

The StorageMojo take
My predictions were generally optimistic so I guess I must be an optimist. But the big trend in new storage architectures is one I’ve been looking for - and advocating - for years. And that is definitely happening.

While I don’t buy the hype around cloud computing, it is clear that big customers and some VCs are waking up to the fact that the old storage business model is not going to be the new storage business model. We are on the verge of a surprisingly rapid shift in how new data systems are designed and built.

But that is a topic for another day.

Comments welcome, of course. What was the biggest surprise you saw in 2007?

Fast, high-capacity flash drive
Fusion-io’s impressive demo at DEMOfall07 piqued my interest (see Fusion io - great demo. Now comes the hard part.) and skepticism. They’ve announced some pricing and refined the specs.

The ioDrive

The ioDrive is a PCIe x4 card with 80, 160 or 320 GB of NAND flash. With a claimed performance of a sustained 87,500 8k IOPS - down from the DEMOfall claim of 150,000 IOPS - the ioDrive offers fast relief from disk latency.

While not as fast as RAM with a device latency of 25us - I’d guess driver latency would be more - the non-volatility, higher capacity and competitive price make it a reasonable substitute for more server RAM. Retail pricing starts at $2400, which is the $30/GB they promised. I’d assume the larger versions would have lower $/GB pricing.

The card is supported on Red Hat AS 4.0 and SUSE ES 10.

The StorageMojo take
Flash drive performance on single-user systems has not lived up to the hype. But servers are another story.

The ioDrive gives low-end servers high-end RAID I/O performance at a much lower cost and footprint. Price competitive with RAM the ioDrive offers power-limited data centers another way to increase I/O performance without adding power-hungry arrays.

Kudos to Fusion-io for figuring out how to harness the promise of NAND flash in the real world.

Comments welcome, of course.

Some Christmas cheer
Some, not a lot.

According to Sun, there have been some significant changes in the mutual lawsuits:

• In November, the two parties agreed to litigate their mutual lawsuits in northern California instead of east Texas.
• They are litigating both the original NetApp suit and Sun’s countersuit before a mutually agreed-upon judge.
• Sun has filed reexamination requests for three NetApp patents covering COW, snapshots and writable snapshots.

Catch up on your prior art over the holidays
Sun’s litigation documents page offers a selection of scholarly articles on related topics. Sun believes these document prior art that was not considered by the USPTO in the original patent examination.

The StorageMojo take
Bravo to NetApp for moving to a California court. Let’s get these cases settled on their merits, and soon.

NetApp needs to focus on their long-term marketing problem: NAS is a commodity. They’ve got 5 years to re-invent themselves for a world of Internet-scale data centers.

Unlike most minicomputer companies that the PC laid low, NetApp has deep core expertise, the respect of a broad customer base and a relevant brand. If any storage company can make the transition, NetApp can.

But sitting around hoping patents will protect their business won’t cut it. NetApp’s strategic planners need to be burning the midnight oil for the next 6 months. The secular trends are clear. The business cases follow. NetApp has a rich technology portfolio and a marketing edge. Will they put it together?

Comments welcome, of course. I’ll be on a light posting schedule this week. Happy holidays to one and all.

I gave up watching much TV about 20 years ago. Other than a general incomprehension of new popcult references from Seinfeld, Friends, Monday Night Football and such, I can’t say I’ve missed much.

If it is really good, like Band of Brothers, I buy it on DVD to support the data storage industry.

But I do watch - on DVR - The Daily Show and the Colbert Report for my evening news fix. Since the writer’s strike started, no new shows. I’m bummed, but I’ll live.

What is it writers do?
Being writers, they put together, using Apple’s Keynote, an explanation. It is well written (of course), and worth a view.

The StorageMojo take
Home entertainment is a growing driver of the storage industry. But it requires content worth watching. Good storytellers are rare and they should be encouraged.

I hope the studios stop reaming the writers so we can get back to getting entertained.’

Comments welcome, especially from striking writers.

With the flameouts of Ed Zander at Motorola and a number of hedge-fund managers whose “rocket-science” CDOs have brought the world’s financial system to the brink of ruin - oh, and the current US President - this free article at the Wall Street Journal is apropos. Titled Keys to Spotting a Flawed CEO — Before It’s Too Late management professor Terry Leap offers a set of warning signals.

Here’s a few:

• An overt zeal for prestige, power and wealth. A manager’s tendency to put his or her own success ahead of the company’s often is evident long before that person is ready to assume the CEO post.
• A proclivity for developing grandiose strategies with little thought toward their implementation. These executives may assume that others at lower levels will magically turn strategy into reality.
• An impulsive, flippant decision-making style. CEOs who approach decision-making with clever one-liners rather than with balanced, thoughtful and informed analyses can expect to encounter difficulty.
• A penchant for inconsiderate acts. Individuals who exhibit rude behavior are apt to alienate the wrong person at the wrong time.
• A superb ability to compartmentalize and/or rationalize. Some executives have learned to separate, in their own minds, their bad behavior from their better qualities, so that their misdeeds don’t diminish their opinions of themselves. An important internal check is missing. Others are always ready to cite a higher purpose to justify their bad decisions.

[emphasis added]

Prof. Leap offers several suggestions for the hiring process. My favorites:

• Don’t assume that past success is a predictor of future success. As CEO, an executive will face a whole new set of personalities and conditions, especially when switching companies.
• Determine how much of an executive’s career success has been based on favorable economic and industry conditions and the support of colleagues, and how much has been based on the executive’s individual efforts. Pay close attention to how candidates performed when industry conditions were bad, when controversies arose or when difficult decisions had to be made.
• Be clear about ethics. Provide as much information as possible to finalists about how the board expects shareholders, prospective investors, customers, employees, financial institutions, auditors, regulators, political figures and other stakeholders to be treated.

The StorageMojo take
I doubt Prof. Leap’s excellent suggestions will keep stop many bad hiring decisions. Hiring management - be they boards or voters - often fail to do the hard work of framing the problems that an executive needs to manage.

I’ve seen many executives hired whose experience and desires were only marginally related to the new job and who failed. For example, an executive in channel marketing being asked to take over marketing and product management for a direct sales company. Or a big company exec moving to a small company. Some people will surprise. Most will flounder.

Candidates are expected to put their best foot forward. The real problem is willful blindness on the part of the hiring management team. “We have problems. This guy comes from a successful company, so maybe he can solve them. Just because he never has before . . . .”

It isn’t always about the candidate. It’s the people doing the hiring. Perhaps the good professor can offer advice for that problem.

Comments welcome, as always.

Postscript
For StorageMojo’s non-US readers who’ve wondered what has happened to America: most Americans share your dismay. President Bush now has 50% of Americans strongly disapproving of his performance. Another 14% moderately disapprove.

That puts him in a statistical dead heat with Richard M. Nixon’s low point, just before he was forced to resign over the Watergate break-in coverup.

Mr. Bush is, of course, confident he will be vindicated by a higher power.

We’ve all heard the story before: little company mugged by Microsoft. So I was inclined to be sympathetic to Mandriva’s complaint against Microsoft last week. Until I looked into it.

Mandriva makes the sale
They signed a contract to sell 17,000 notebooks to Nigeria, loaded with Mandriva’s Linux distro.

They deliver the 17,000 notebooks with Linux and, I assume, got paid per the contract.

Sounds good so far.

Then the raptor of Redmond swoops in
Microsoft then persuaded the customer to replace Linux with Windows.

We actually closed the deal, we took the order, we qualified the software, we got the machine shipped. To conclude, we did our job. And, the machine are being delivered right now.

Now, we hear a different story from the customer : “we shall pay for the Mandriva Software as agreed, but we shall replace it by Windows afterward.”

Let me get this straight
You sold something. You delivered it. You got paid.

After the customer took delivery another vendor persuaded them to replace your software with theirs.

I’m not seeing the problem, unless you took a loss on the sale hoping to make it up in services or something. If that happened, then OK, be mad. But be mad at yourself.

Or is it the loss of follow-on business? I don’t know. You don’t say.

The StorageMojo take
Microsoft, like EMC, plays hardball. But the Mandriva complaint sounds like sour grapes. No harm, no foul.

Comments welcome, as always.

Meet Danny Rhodes and the Messengers
For a small town in the mountains of northern Arizona, 2 hours from Phoenix, we have a great local music scene. Ms. Mojo and I are out most weekend nights dancing to live music.

Our favorite bluesman is Danny Rhodes and the Messengers. He’s played in all 50 states, Canada, Japan, and Europe with a wide variety of artists, including Charlie Rich, Mel McDaniel and Brenda Lee. With these artists and with his own bands, he has performed on Austin City Limits , the Grand Ole Opry, HBO , and the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival. In the late 70’s, Danny spent two years in Austin, TX and shared bills with Stevie Ray Vaughn and the Neville Brothers among others.

Isn’t this what storage is for?
Danny generously offered a free track to StorageMojo readers. I’ve uploaded a high-quality 320 kb/s, 8.1 MB mp3.zip of one of my favorites, Meadowlark. Just unzip the file and you’ll have a high quality track you can import into iTunes or put on any mp3 player.

http://storagemojo.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/10/dannyrhodes.thumbnail.jpg

Meadowlark is a cut from his album Welcome to the Night. You can listen to more excerpts from the album there as well. Also check out Cairo to Cottonwood.

Both albums are available from CD Baby, a great online music service. They offer physical CDs and high-quality, DRM-free mp3s. Unlike record companies, they pay 90% of the revenue to the artist. To date they’ve paid over $50 million to musicians.

Is that cool or what? Disclosure: I have no financial relationship with Danny - other than buying his CDs - or CD Baby.

The StorageMojo take
Data storage for personal - mostly entertainment - use is now driving disk sales. Here’s my chance to help Seagate, WD and the rest along.

With all the back and forth about architectures, features, products and business models on StorageMojo it is easy to forget that analog data storage got its start with entertainment: music, photography and later moving pictures. For many of us it is the business uses of data storage that pays the bills. Yet it is the personal use for photos, movies and music that brings us joy.

Download Meadowlark and the rest of Danny’s music and have a good time tonight.

Comments welcome, of course.
If people like this I’ll put up some more tracks by my favorite local musicians. Let me know what you think.