Getting Caught Up and Holiday Shopping

Its a busy time of the year as things wind down and wrap up, including holiday shopping and applicable gift wrapping unless you outsource the wrapping to the likes of Amazon.com when shopping on-line in a cloud enabled world.

For me this was a busy week with a quick trip out to New York City (NYC) for some meetings and to do another dinner keynote event, in addition to wrapping up some other projects as well as getting a jump on some up-coming projects and adding some additional events to the 2009 calendar (more on those soon).

Speaking of holiday shopping, Beth Pariseau over at SearchStorage has put out her annual what to get a geek for the holidays piece with this edition titled "Jingle bell storage: What to buy a geek for the holidays".

In addition to Beth’s great list, here are some additional considerations.

For those who might forget their heads if not attached to their shoulders, or late for their own wake, how about a wrist watch with USB flash drive built in (encrypted preferred)

Speaking of encryption, to support increased data growth, replace that too small 8GB encrypted USB flash with a new 16GB encrypted version (My 8GB version I bought a while ago works great).

Oh, and upgrade the DVR (add more and bigger disk drives) to support more editions of “Friday Night Lights“, “How its Made”, “Worlds Toughest Fixes”, “Sunday Night Football”, "Factory Floor" and anything on “HDnet” or “HDnet Movies”, a larger capacity external SAS or SATA attached disk with software to copy what I already have saved.

For those who enjoy Wine and I/O, check out the Vinturi Essential Wine Aerator (Bought one of these after seeing them in Sonoma on a recent trip)

For those who like removable storage media and want to compliment their EMC Retrospect (I have been a Retrospect since well before EMC bought them, I guess that makes me an EMC customer?) or other backups, the Imation Odyssey portable USB adapter (I bought an Odyssey over a year ago) is great for larger backups (beyond a flash drive) when traveling.

In order to track those lost tapes to avoid getting on next years Santa naughty or nice list, how about FujiFind (FujiFilm) Tape tracker

On the software and tools front, Xobni (a form of eDiscovery and search for Microsoft Outlook) along with OutTwit (twitter interface where you can also find myself) if you are using Microsoft Outlook (have been using both of these, great productivity tools).

Still not sure, how about my new book "The Green and Virtual Data Center" (Auerbach) or my other book "Resilient Storage Networks" (Elseiver) both available at Amazon.com and other fine venues around the world (I bought a copy of both to see how on-line sale worked ;).

That’s it for now as I need to get a few more things done including more holiday shopping and chores not to mention get ready for the snowstorm that is forecasted to dump several inches of new snow tomorrow here in the Stillwater area.

Ok, nuff said.

Cheers gs

Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
twitter @storageio

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