Where I work, we're a pretty heavy cisco shop.... We've got 2 CCNA's (who are both going for ccnp) and our manager is CCNP Voice. We've worked on cisco gear for years, we have experience with it and understand how it works. Cisco has the market, thats a reason, for example, why HP CLI is extremely similar. So guys like me can QUICKLY go and configure vlans or something on a switch. Saving a couple hundred on a switch if your guys have to re-learn them isn't worth while.
Would an OPENBSD rig running OOSPFD or OBGPD be cheeper? YES. Would it likely be as fast? PROBABLY (if not faster). Would anybody know how to use it? PROBABLY NOT. While it could be learned.....time has a value. The exception is if you're starting from the ground up and have IT staff and procedures of size that could actually support 'non standard' gear. AKA if you get hit by a bus and you're the only guy in your shop -- how easy would it to be to get someone up to speed on your current gear? or do you need to fly in a specialist.
TL;DR: We use the gear because we can find people who know it easily without having to fly in a specialist.
Sorry, I use my dodge ram (with Duallies, thats what we call them) to go grocery shopping, to pull my boat, to pull a horse trailer, to help friends move. But saying that I'm unsafe because I drive a pickup is pretty narrow minded. I'd imagine that I'm less dangerous than 20somethings with sportbikes or a sports cars. Oh or the soccer-moms texting&driving with a minivan full of kids. Jackass.
Wait, you're using free vmware and your client's vm's have more than 32 gigs of ram? I'm hoping that's against your best recommendations to the client (and maybe they're cheap bastards). Otherwise that's retarded.
I really REALLY want to see the size of their routing/switching equipment, let alone racks of gear for processing/encoding/streaming.
Hitting 700gigs/sec is PRETTY killer.
As the IT admin with no CS degree that has a healthy job with decent pay...Allow me to elaborate on a couple small things:
1. CS is not IT. So many newbies come out with a CS degree and think they're shit-hot at running a network. Then they dont even know how to swap the tapes out.
2. Social Networking is EVERYTHING. It's not alllll what you know, but who you know -- you may be great with GPO's and cisco gear and write a mean shell script, but if you dont have the industry connections, you're not likely to get that special job that someone knows YOU are perfect for.
3. Idiotic HR departments & Municipalities look for a degree over real experience. I've been told before that I got 2nd place in an interview to someone who had 1/10th the experience but had the degree. Subsequently he was fired a couple of months later, but ALAS the door was still closed because I didnt have my papers. Then I became an IT director for an insurance company with a healthy six figure budget. Their loss is my gain, I guess.
TL;DR: MAKE FRIENDS & KNOW YOUR SHIT. I dont demand you're a cisco god, or anything like that, but smart and willing to learn doesnt hurt. Everyone gets experience on the job, but the really good guys are eager to learn EVERYTHING, inside & out.
I'll just leave this here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outland_(film)/
It was made 3 years before I was born. But I did catch original transformers & spiderman & gi-joe. (and a-team re-runs) Ahhhh the 80's, could do no wrong..
A pretty good post. I'll back you up from a larger perspective. I've got a X3620 M3 (7376E3U) (fully loaded) sitting on my bench as a spare, go ibm go. I've got about double the workstations, and about 50tb of data on store. (Large Raid 6 arrays).
ALL DIRECT ATTACH! Where's your god now?
In a given night we will back up about 10tb of data to our backup systems in another building across site.
Although, to be honest, I'd happily run iScsi if 10Gig cards&switches werent so damned expensive. I'll wait another year or two.
Our main systems run Centos, but exchange/AD/terminal services are all members of the 2008 R2 flavour. All on esxi 4.1. I would likely curl up in a ball and die without vmware/veeam backup&replication. We previously ran hyper-v server as our hypervisor for our systems and they ran like dogs. Switched to ESXI 4.1 and it was like getting a free upgrade. I suspect that in another year or two when XEN/KVM are a little more matured/tested etc, you'll start to see larger scale admins (like myself) pushing new machines off to xen/kvm and slowly letting the old machines die off.
I've got an evga Z68 board. I'm quite happy with the 16 gigs of ram I use for it. But I guess that's because my VM's and Databases run on my SERVER, not my performance gaming machine.
I'm the sysadmin at a medium sized company, and we just ordered a bunch of USED 7206VXR's with NPE400's. Why? Because they're $1300 each and they haul ass & handle MPLS and VOICE. I'm happy with that for the price.:)
So you're a sysadmin for a Large Commercial Cluster and you've got hardware on the way and dont have answers to these questions already?
I aplogize if I've misread, but something just doesnt seem to add up here.:\
I'd get it if you were saying you've got a stack of maybe dual quads and were like "hey i've got a half rack of computers, please hold my hand for HPC", but with something the magnitude you're speaking of, I--dont-even. Trollface.jpg?
ok now that I got that out of the way, I'd like to say that modern warfare 1 was brilliant, MW2 was fun but IWnet ruined it for pc gaming and killed the idea of having a LANparty. Now because of activision's "bold moves" EA has followed suit and it's neigh-on impossible to find a modern AAA shooter that allows you to have YOUR OWN (aka not rented) dedicated servers. Seriously, pc gamers helped make these companies huge, and now we're treated like we dont matter. I'm prettymuch done with both EA and Activision (ok, blizzard is the exception).. Sigh, I just wanna have a 32 person LANPARTY.:\
Its sort of funny, really. When friends say "when the zombies come i'm coming to your place" or "when the earthquake comes, I'm coming to your place" etc etc...not just a few, but all of them.:\
2 Lifted Trucks (well, one's an xj cherokee but it's mostly plate steel nowdays) - Check
Generators, Gas pumps - Check
Guns - Check (M1, M1A, AR15 (magpul bling and an acog), and an STI Edge in 40sw)
But something i'm really most proud of is my server, If human society stopped existing, I've got a backup of books, wikipedia (text only), obligatory media backups etc etc on a 10tb array in a seismic rack [2tb wd blacks and a 3ware 9550 in raid 6 fyi]. And that's relieving to know, that if a guy like me has atleast SOME of humanity's knowledge on backup, there's bound to be hundreds more just like me if the worst DOES happen.
Sorry, Rant off. TL;DR -- I just like being a little prepared, everything else are my hobbies anyway. 4x4'ing, camping and shooting.
Better come up during the summer, the winters are cold and I'm not sure you guys can deal with the swing from desert heat to canadian winters (except those living in victoria, lucky jerks)
Also, we could finally have our terrible gun laws thrown out if you guys invade, and I can take the rivets outta the 20 round mags on my M1A (30s on my AR)! Dont touch our beer though, for serious.
I've got 4 branches, my branches and core are all 7206's with NPE300's and 2x 100meg line cards. Nothing AMAZING or huge, I know, but it quite easily handles my requirements and parts are plentiful (BOUGHT THEM REFURBE'D too!), but all of my switching is procurve. Lifetime warranty/updates/support, identical cli syntax, great price. Damn right i'm using as much procurve as I can! Here's to some solid competition between hp and cisco, both are good products, but i find it hard to argue against a lifetime warranty.
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Where I work, we're a pretty heavy cisco shop.... We've got 2 CCNA's (who are both going for ccnp) and our manager is CCNP Voice. We've worked on cisco gear for years, we have experience with it and understand how it works. Cisco has the market, thats a reason, for example, why HP CLI is extremely similar. So guys like me can QUICKLY go and configure vlans or something on a switch. Saving a couple hundred on a switch if your guys have to re-learn them isn't worth while.
Would an OPENBSD rig running OOSPFD or OBGPD be cheeper? YES. Would it likely be as fast? PROBABLY (if not faster). Would anybody know how to use it? PROBABLY NOT. While it could be learned.....time has a value. The exception is if you're starting from the ground up and have IT staff and procedures of size that could actually support 'non standard' gear. AKA if you get hit by a bus and you're the only guy in your shop -- how easy would it to be to get someone up to speed on your current gear? or do you need to fly in a specialist.
TL;DR: We use the gear because we can find people who know it easily without having to fly in a specialist.
Sorry, I use my dodge ram (with Duallies, thats what we call them) to go grocery shopping, to pull my boat, to pull a horse trailer, to help friends move. But saying that I'm unsafe because I drive a pickup is pretty narrow minded. I'd imagine that I'm less dangerous than 20somethings with sportbikes or a sports cars. Oh or the soccer-moms texting&driving with a minivan full of kids. Jackass.
Wait, you're using free vmware and your client's vm's have more than 32 gigs of ram? I'm hoping that's against your best recommendations to the client (and maybe they're cheap bastards). Otherwise that's retarded.
...I thought of battlefield 3 and ripping through there in a littlebird heli? :D :\
I really REALLY want to see the size of their routing/switching equipment, let alone racks of gear for processing/encoding/streaming. Hitting 700gigs/sec is PRETTY killer.
It's a bit frustrating, but they are very stuck in the 70's that way...but they give IT a decent budget so I cant complain too much :)
As the IT admin with no CS degree that has a healthy job with decent pay...Allow me to elaborate on a couple small things:
1. CS is not IT. So many newbies come out with a CS degree and think they're shit-hot at running a network. Then they dont even know how to swap the tapes out.
2. Social Networking is EVERYTHING. It's not alllll what you know, but who you know -- you may be great with GPO's and cisco gear and write a mean shell script, but if you dont have the industry connections, you're not likely to get that special job that someone knows YOU are perfect for.
3. Idiotic HR departments & Municipalities look for a degree over real experience. I've been told before that I got 2nd place in an interview to someone who had 1/10th the experience but had the degree. Subsequently he was fired a couple of months later, but ALAS the door was still closed because I didnt have my papers. Then I became an IT director for an insurance company with a healthy six figure budget. Their loss is my gain, I guess.
TL;DR: MAKE FRIENDS & KNOW YOUR SHIT. I dont demand you're a cisco god, or anything like that, but smart and willing to learn doesnt hurt. Everyone gets experience on the job, but the really good guys are eager to learn EVERYTHING, inside & out.
I'll just leave this here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outland_(film)/
It was made 3 years before I was born. But I did catch original transformers & spiderman & gi-joe. (and a-team re-runs) Ahhhh the 80's, could do no wrong..
In a given night we will back up about 10tb of data to our backup systems in another building across site.
Although, to be honest, I'd happily run iScsi if 10Gig cards&switches werent so damned expensive. I'll wait another year or two. Our main systems run Centos, but exchange/AD/terminal services are all members of the 2008 R2 flavour. All on esxi 4.1. I would likely curl up in a ball and die without vmware/veeam backup&replication. We previously ran hyper-v server as our hypervisor for our systems and they ran like dogs. Switched to ESXI 4.1 and it was like getting a free upgrade. I suspect that in another year or two when XEN/KVM are a little more matured/tested etc, you'll start to see larger scale admins (like myself) pushing new machines off to xen/kvm and slowly letting the old machines die off.
I've got an evga Z68 board. I'm quite happy with the 16 gigs of ram I use for it. But I guess that's because my VM's and Databases run on my SERVER, not my performance gaming machine.
amazon has gpu instances :)
for raw horsepower on the short - medium term, use AWS http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/
ec2 should do well for this, imho :)
I'm the sysadmin at a medium sized company, and we just ordered a bunch of USED 7206VXR's with NPE400's. Why? Because they're $1300 each and they haul ass & handle MPLS and VOICE. I'm happy with that for the price. :)
Wow, he just TROLLED THE CRAP out of slashdot. We mad, bros!
I aplogize if I've misread, but something just doesnt seem to add up here. :\
I'd get it if you were saying you've got a stack of maybe dual quads and were like "hey i've got a half rack of computers, please hold my hand for HPC", but with something the magnitude you're speaking of, I--dont-even. Trollface.jpg?
ok now that I got that out of the way, I'd like to say that modern warfare 1 was brilliant, MW2 was fun but IWnet ruined it for pc gaming and killed the idea of having a LANparty. Now because of activision's "bold moves" EA has followed suit and it's neigh-on impossible to find a modern AAA shooter that allows you to have YOUR OWN (aka not rented) dedicated servers. Seriously, pc gamers helped make these companies huge, and now we're treated like we dont matter. I'm prettymuch done with both EA and Activision (ok, blizzard is the exception).. Sigh, I just wanna have a 32 person LANPARTY. :\
Dude, this isnt your 1980's dodge van with the tinted/teardrop windows and shag carpet. And you dont have a puppy or free candy. Therefore not legit.
WOO WOO!
2 Lifted Trucks (well, one's an xj cherokee but it's mostly plate steel nowdays) - Check
Generators, Gas pumps - Check
Guns - Check (M1, M1A, AR15 (magpul bling and an acog), and an STI Edge in 40sw)
But something i'm really most proud of is my server, If human society stopped existing, I've got a backup of books, wikipedia (text only), obligatory media backups etc etc on a 10tb array in a seismic rack [2tb wd blacks and a 3ware 9550 in raid 6 fyi]. And that's relieving to know, that if a guy like me has atleast SOME of humanity's knowledge on backup, there's bound to be hundreds more just like me if the worst DOES happen.
Sorry, Rant off. TL;DR -- I just like being a little prepared, everything else are my hobbies anyway. 4x4'ing, camping and shooting.
I should have been more clear, I OK'd it with the owners since they were sitting there idle anyway. :)
Also, we could finally have our terrible gun laws thrown out if you guys invade, and I can take the rivets outta the 20 round mags on my M1A (30s on my AR)! Dont touch our beer though, for serious.
woohoo? :D
Forgive me father, for I have sinned, I'm still running 12.1 on my 7206. And my ACL's look like a massacre.
I've seen the light, the lord told me to switch to procurve. Hallelujah
100% stable, takes a beating, super fast
makes wrt54GL's and friends look like ameteur hour.
I've got 4 branches, my branches and core are all 7206's with NPE300's and 2x 100meg line cards. Nothing AMAZING or huge, I know, but it quite easily handles my requirements and parts are plentiful (BOUGHT THEM REFURBE'D too!), but all of my switching is procurve. Lifetime warranty/updates/support, identical cli syntax, great price. Damn right i'm using as much procurve as I can! Here's to some solid competition between hp and cisco, both are good products, but i find it hard to argue against a lifetime warranty.