It’s been eight years since I’ve been in Seattle. It feels so good to be back; I have an itch to move.
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Usually when I am on a plane I either read a book or sleep, but this time I am bored to death! This is probably because I know I am going to be on this thing for the next nine hours. I don’t want sleep because I’m not tired at all and I don’t want read because all I have is a book on c++.
This should be interesting.
In July I lost my iPod flying to Texas. I was bugged but blamed it on the pain killer I had to take to endure cramped seating with a torn hamstring. I remember putting it in my backpack in the same pocket as my passport.
Fastforward a couple of months and I find myself on three flights in less than a week. In reverse order: I should be on a flight to Bangalore India with a 24hr layover in paris on thursday which happens to be tomorrow. As I write this entry I am ok my way to San francisco to get visa from the India consulate. I have to do this on person because last week I flew to los angeles to get a temporary passport from the south Africa consulate. Why? Because my passport is prpbably rockn out with my iPod.
What a crappy way to get sky miles!
I won’t even get started on how useless United airlines is when it comes to helping customers find lost items. To put it mildly they suck!
Wow! I can blog from my iPhone! Yikes!
So we’ve been testing EMC’s Lifeline software for network appliances on an Intel box. The potential for this project is just awesome! But, like everything else technical in nature it doesn’t come out right in the first release (Oooops maybe if you don’t include the iPod, iPhone and pretty much anything Apple produces).
Lifeline is designed and developed for the SOHO market as a network storage device that will work as a remote backup center, not online backup like Mozy, file share and media server. Most people perk their ears when they hear media server. One thing that has worked pretty well is the media server; iTunes recognizes it w/ ease and you can stream media from the server to your machine w/o problems.
I promise to write a more complete usability review of the product after I’ve done more work on it, but here are my two major pet peeves:
- Configuring backup sucked!
- Using EMC Retrospect for backup sucks too!
I know this sounds like a weak review, I absolutely agree it is, but I promise after you spend an hour of frustration trying to figure out how to setup a backup, run the backup and perform a simple restore you will know what I mean. From an interaction design viewpoint I believe when you are working with complex products (complex defined as how often do you see a NAS device in the average person’s home) such as Lifeline you should always be pursuing the “less is more” mantra. The least amount of steps, buttons, dialogue boxes and menus you offer the user the more enjoyment the user will find using your product.
I have had a Lifeline box in our office for two weeks now and on occasion I will remember it is there for me to use. If EMC wants to live up to it’s name “Lifeline” it needs figure out how to make the product seamlessly fit into the life of computer users. I don’t believe it does this.
I promise to write more on this product.
Disclaimer: I work for EMC so the review is subject to my opinion and does not reflect that of my employer. Also, if you are on the Lifeline or Retrospect team I don’t mean to offend you. I promise my work will benefit you in the near future :)
A week ago we had an email sent out from our support team informing business customers that we’ll be requiring a forced upgrade to client version 1.8.6.21. Ouch! It didn’t take more than an hour before support was inundated with phone calls and emails frustrated w/ this arbitrary and ill informed decision.
What’s the problem with this? The email was sent out on Thursday for an upgrade on Saturday. IT admins don’t like upgrading software, especially software that runs on their servers, w/o testing the software before deploying into production.
Who’s to blame for the flub? Errrrr… I’m going to say me. I should have baby sat this announcement from start to finish. Though, it came from support, it has direct impact on customers relating to the client. It would be easy to blame others, but it accomplishes nothing (okay maybe little).
So why the forced upgrade? We often add new features to our software in our data centers, but on occasion those features won’t be compatible w/ older versions of our client (some of these features include garbage collection, archive, compression etc).
This upgrade will continue, but notification was sent out to customers apologizing for the flub and pushing the upgrade back two weeks.
So lesson learned; if it involves the product and it will have an effect on our customers I need to babysit it from start to finish. Mozy continues to grow at an exceptional speed and with growth come a few growing pains. This probably won’t be the last time for Mozy, but it will be the last time for me.
Here’s the quick update: I still love my job two months later. I’m learning, working and accomplishing so many different things that it keeps my attention, which is great.
Mozy for Mac is coming along slowly, but the next major release will include much better support for bundles both in the client and on the web. We should also have the bad memory management/leak we’ve been seeing more of lately fixed. Also some nominal optimization items like uploading smallest files first; this help if you are like me and loose your wireless connection while backing up files. Tons more Mac features, enhancements and bug fixes to come!
Something really cool I’ve been working on, and I’m not sure what the EMC policy in regards to talking about this, but I think it’s okay since both products are publicly available. EMC LifeLine is backup software for NAS appliances for the consumer and SOHO markets; projected shipping is early next year. Naturally we are working on some integration points for Mozy online backup service and LifeLine. We are still in the early stages of discovery, but the project is going to be lots of awesome! I hope to get an Intel appliance in the next couple of weeks to play with.
What else… Oh… I saw a trash-Mozy comparison chart from a former Evault customer, who said their sales team was pimping the data sheet pretty hard, but didn’t convince them from leaving their service. I know we have tons of improvement in regards to our service, so I don’t have room to boast, but I think they are going to have to come up with a lot more to knock us off.
We’ve been doing a lot of work on the DVD restore service; Tom, one of our engineers, is doing one hell of a job to iron out the kinks while maintaining all the orders coming in!
Web restores are going to be so much smoother, especially for IE users, in the next week or two.
There is still so much IxD work to do….grrrr!
Want a job? Go check out jobs.mozy.com
This morning I talked to a couple of mac heads from school, who were planning there 6 pm run to the Apple store to get their copy of Leopard, and they wanted to know if I would be doing the same thing. Ummm I think not I responded with an air of arrogance (ewwwhh I think I beginning to be just like them). I had a hunch that my pre-order from apple.com would already be on my desk. And it was!
The install was easier than Vista; the anticipation was greater than vista, and results were oh so sweet. I’ll play w/ it more tonight and write a review.
The anticipated release of Mac OS X Leopard is seven days away, and in true form Mozy’s beta 0.7 is compatible with the early developer release of the operating system. We’ll run another set of smoke tests once Leopard is released, but for all intensive purposes I feel confident we’ll be ready for the release.
If you are planning on upgrading and you use Mozy I would suggest making sure you are using 0.7 before you upgrade. Apple has some known issues w/ its installer, so avoid upgrading Mozy after upgrading Leopard.
So we are doing a stack of things to get the Mozy client for Mac out of beta and in production. First things first the engineers have focused on the restore process. We have over 30,000 Macs being backed up, and many of us (myself included) have complained how long it takes to do a restore from the account admin on the web. Some restores were taking days to build, and others were not even getting to the build process. This should be fixed. I’ve a variety of tests and the performance seems to be much improved. Having said that if anyone out there still has a problem please let me know!
One of the next features I would like to add in the restore process is the function to keep a web restore available for download for an additional 12-24 hours after it has been downloaded. Some users have complained that the restore disappears before it has even finished downloading ( a particular issue if you are using a download manager).
We are also working on client support for Leopard, and hope to have that ready before the end of the week. That will be released in beta too.
