I've always been surprised by how much of an effect the "Buy One, Get One Free" slogan has on my psyche. For example, I lived in New York during grad school and whenever it rained, within minutes a small cottage industry of street vendors would pop up like daisies all around the city. All of these vendors would be selling umbrellas, with most offering a two-for-one deal. Sometimes if I was already out and about and unprepared for the rain I'd feel compelled to purchase an umbrella, but then since the second one was free, I'd take the second one too so that I was then carrying two umbrellas. After this happened a few times, I owned a half dozen umbrellas, and really, how many umbrellas does one man need?
I was recently reading an article by Alan Radding for SearchStorage about VMware backups, and he described how one of the industry's...
I’ve spent the last couple of weeks travelling through Latin America (Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina) and the one commonality between my experiences in each of these three countries is that I don’t speak the local language in any of them. In high school, I studied French, not Spanish, and Portuguese wasn’t even taught. So, at restaurants I can never read the menu and I usually attempt, in very broken Spanish, to ask the waiter for a recommendation (“Que es bueno?”). Then he says something and I nod enthusiastically and smile.
The process reminds me a bit of what backup administrators face when they are trying to figure out how to back up their VMware environments. There are many ways to do it and often they don't know which is best. The easy and obvious way is to run a backup client from inside each virtual machine. In some cases that works fine, but in other cases, all the backups running simultaneously overloads the physical server (the challenges of sharing I/O and...
