Veritas-bu

Re: [Veritas-bu] Tapeless backup environments

2007-10-19 19:06:47
Subject: Re: [Veritas-bu] Tapeless backup environments
From: "Curtis Preston" <cpreston AT glasshouse DOT com>
To: "Eagle, Kent" <KEagle AT WilmingtonTrust DOT com>, <veritas-bu AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu>
Date: Fri, 19 Oct 2007 18:52:06 -0400
Since you've impugned my honor, I feel the need to defend myself a bit,
but I don't want to spend much more time on this topic either:

>My first point was that you quoted a "Wikipedia" article as a source.

The debate as to whether Wikipedia articles have any value is an ongoing
one, and no point in rehashing it here. Suffice it to say that I have
slightly higher opinion of it than you do.

>What I meant was that the posts made by
>"Bob944" seemed to me to be supported by cited facts, and denoted
>personal experiences. 

I have personally used and tested many dedupe solutions.  Based on his
opinion of them, I'm pretty sure Bob944 has not.  So I'm not sure how my
posts could be construed as coming from theory and his from reality.
Perhaps it was just my style of writing.

>He's not pointing to something he previously authored as proof that
>information is fact. 

I never did that.  I only point you to the blog so because I put a lot
of thought into it and figured you could read that version, instead of
me having to rehash it here in email.

>To be fair, I haven't read any of your blog postings, only your posts
in >this forum. 

And I'm guessing you've never read my books or articles or seen me
speak.  I think you'll find that I'm not nearly as stupid as you seem to
think I am.  :)

>And yes; an "Industry Pundit, Author, SME", or whomever, quoting
>"Wikipedia" as a source does tend to dilute credibility, in my mind.
>It's not a personal attack, just my personal position on the issue.

Again, I didn't cite it as my only proof, and yes, we do have a
different opinion on the validity of Wikipedia.

>The part below has me confused where you say " No, because I never said
>those words or anything like them in my article." Since I never...

What I was trying to say was that it seemed to me that he was saying
something along the lines of "my minds already made up, don't confuse me
with the facts."  You said I said the same thing, and I'm saying I
didn't.  In my blog posts (that I was referring and that you did not
read), I think you'll find a very "this is what I think, what do you
think?" mentality.  If you inferred I was trying to say anything else,
please believe I wasn't.

>So one could easily conclude that a position was taken (and published)
>on this topic without sufficient testing or research (the related
>SunSolve and other articles were already out there before these posts
>were made).

Again, you haven't read my blog, so I'm not sure how you can criticize
it.  And it's a BLOG, dude.  The whole spirit of blogging is that it's a
stream of consciousness, not full articles and/or research.  I didn't
write "GbE is a lie!" in an article, I wrote it in a blog.  The same
blog where I wrote "Top 10 Things I learned about backups from watching
Die Hard."  A lot of it is written tongue in cheek and I think anyone
who follows it knows that.  I don't put blogging on a subject on the
same level of "publishing" any more than you consider a Wikipedia
article valid information.  And I think that most people feel the same
way.

BTW, I did a ton of research on Sun.com, neterion, intel, alacritech,
google, etc to find ANY evidence of benchmarks to prove my feelings
wrong before I wrote that blog article.  The sunsolve articles to which
you refer were written, but they aren't benchmarks, they only say "this
is how to configure a 10 GbE NIC on Solaris."

>You can see how maybe a newbie might assume a post as gospel with the
>barrage of credentials? 

I get that, as it happens to me all the time.  It goes with the
territory of being a prolific speaker/author/blogger/blabber.  I try to
help people.  I write and speak a lot as part of that.  If someone takes
my word as gospel without doing their own research then shame on them
and I can't control that.  I stand by what I wrote, and when I'm wrong,
I admit it.  I'm not going to stop writing/emailing/blogging because I
might say something wrong.

>>I actually cut my teeth right down
>>the road from you as the backup guy at MBNA.  (I lived in Newark, DE,
>>and you were my bank.)"

>I'm not sure what you meant to imply by all this? If tenure with backup
>is an issue, than I would suggest you really don't have all that much
>time "in this space",

I never meant to imply that I have more credentials than you.  I only
meant to reply to the part of your post that suggested that I wasn't
coming from a real/practical/having-actually-done-this-before position.
And if 14 years doing backups and restores for my company and other
companies don't give me some amount of credibility, I'm not sure what
does.

>I've never made mention of my employer, or even implied that any of my
>statements represented any opinion or position of theirs? I find this
>statement, well, bizarre...

Dunno.  Seemed right at the time.  What was my point?  I thought it
would help hammer home the "I'm a real person who did real stuff in a
real place" point.  Guess it didn't help at all. ;)

>Maybe I will attend the class after all. I'm beginning to think I'll be
>entertained.

Oh, you'll be entertained!  We don't spend the whole day talking about a
minor point (in the overall scheme of things this discussion is about a
minor point in a much bigger discussion).  We cover real world solutions
to real world problems, and we have a lot of fun, too.  And it's free
for end users.  Coming to a city near you:

http://storagedecisions.techtarget.com/seminars/backup_school.html



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