I'm pretty sure Fiber Channel works with Virtual servers, but I don't know about dedicating one card per host. I have played with iSCSI SAN's and virtual servers, and it works fairly well too. The lack of SCSI is a royal pain. I would love to setup my backup server as a virtual machine, and move it to any server with a SCSI card to restore from tape in an emergency.
If your servers become toast, due to whatever reason, you can get a simple workstation, put a ton of RAM in it, and load up your virtual systems. Of course they will be slower, but they will still be running. We don't need to carry expensive 4 hour service contracts, just next business day contracts, saving a ton of money. The nice thing for me with Virtual servers is it is device agnostic, so if I have to recover, worst case, I have only one server to worry about NIC drivers, RAID settings/drivers, etc. After that, its just loading up the virtual server files.
I agree that Dell's home user support sucks, with long hold times, heavily accented people walking through standard scripts, etc. (first, ensure the computer is plugged in, press the big button on the front,...) However, I must say that their Enterprise support rocks. I have never been on hold more than 30 seconds, and have seldom been on the phone for more than 5 minutes total. I tell them, "A hard drive died in a workstation, the diagnostic tests report this error." They say, "Ok, let me send you a new one" The majority of the 5 minute call is them getting all the shipping setup, to ensure I have a new HD the next day.
Go find someone with a Fortran Cert from the 80's that has never gotten a degree. Then go find someone with a CS degree in the 80's, that used Fortran heavily in their classes. Both have probably changed their skill sets drastically over 20 years, but I bet I know which one has the better job...
I have no modpoints either, but damn I wish I did. Truly insightful. Why are we always looking for a technical solution for a "people problem". Which is more effective:
1. Filters, blocking, etc, with services, or people, or other things that take time and money... or 2. Have a clear policy on acceptable use, fire the first person that breaks it...
Maybe its just me, but I think news of number 2 happening would spread much faster and effectively through the organization, and employees would remember it much, much longer.
Take away web sites, people will find other ones to kill time. Take those away, they'll start playing solitare on the PC. take that away, they'll start calling friends and family on the phone to chit-chat. crack down on that, they'll start hanging out in the break room too much... etc.. People that are bored need more or more interesting work, and better supervision.
I use the google apps at home, even though I have a licensed copy of office, cause I like to access it easily from work and home.. However, the one very limiting factor is the spreadsheets won't connect to databases. Lots of businesses have excel doing simple DB reporting, and this just won't work with the spreadsheet app. (yet??)
I was told by a MS Rep that the LongHorn Server will have a "headless" SKU.. IE, no gui. Made for being a virtual server, or even just a remotely managed web server. No GUI overhead.. Not sure how reliable that is, but a very interesting idea.
Could you imagine what would happen if masterlock created Padlocks that all had the same combo to start with, and required you to change them? I totally agree!+
yeah, I live just over the hill from you, in Kalamity Flats. Frustrating, isn't it? What I wouldn't give for some startup money, and a finalized wimax mobile standard. Cover the whole damn town with 2 towers, and buy lots of bandwith. Hmm.. maybe I should look into that!
My point about the fiber wasn't very clear. I was not talking about fiber to the home, I was talking about long haul, the kind of fiber big ISP's use to connect cities, and to the peering points.. The sprawl argument doesn't hold water very well. The last mile is covered for 80%+ of Americans. My point was meant to be the comparison of our speeds (for people that have Broadband) to other countries. We have X megabit connections, that really are running at X/n speeds. Even ATT, running its fiber to each house has the same issue, sure, you get a 100Mb/s connection to ATT, but at what speed do you actually connect to the internet? what about if everyone in your neighborhood that has the service was on the internet at the same time? 1 fiber can carry what now? 40Gb/s or is it more? and that is per wavelength. Even assuming a probably low 16 wavelenghts per fiber, that is 640Gb/s for each fiber. The ISP's don't want to deal with turning on another wavelength, or lighting up another fiber, because the cost. The cost is low, freaking low compared to how much they earn for each gigabyte of service they provide to a community per month.
Personally, I would love to see ISP's have to publish what percentage of customers they assume to be online at the same time.. I remember in dialup days, they had a rule of thumb at many small ISP's of 1 modem for every 12 customers. that was how they determined their equipment/bandwith needs. Now, more stuff is online (I watch 24 on fox's site, since I don't have cable, VOIP, etc) and I'm curious what they assume for purchasing equipment/bandwith.
Drunk + root Prompt = Boss that finally wants to talk about disaster recovery scenarios.;)
Course, there will be a lecture about coming in drunk.. followed by your question of when are appropriate times for you to do what you want, and which times will you be on the clock... They can tell me not to go to the bar in the evening, when they are paying me to be working!
Do you have any idea how much dark fiber is running through the US? Honestly, this was a good argument about 5 years ago. I live in a town of about 50k that has 4 different companies that run fiber through it on the way between SF and Seattle. I heard somewhere that the estimate is something like 200 pairs total.. (if your going to dig up roads, you might as well lay a bunch of pairs so you don't have to dig up roads again in a few years..)..
Now, in my town, which had fiber run to all the neighborhoods by the cable company 3 years ago, I have watched my cable internet access go from $35/month for a 3Mb connection, to $45/month (because I don't have cable TV, they decided to charge me an extra $10/month to "encourage" me to purchase cable TV) This month, my rates went up to $58/month (plus taxes, modem rental, misc other fees), for a 7MB connection. Funny thing is, they don't have 7Mb service in my town yet, and never got around to upgrading their connection out of town. When my access was 3Mb/s, I was getting usually around 2Mb in the evening. Now that I have a 7Mb connection, I am getting about 1.5Mb/s in the evening. The cable company has tripled the number of customers, and doesn't want to spend the money for a faster pipe out of town. So, I am currently paying $60+ a month for a little under 2Mb/s connection.. (ie, I'm paying them almost double for slower service.) The company decided that they could pay off the cost of running the fiber and stuff by charging $35/month, otherwise they wouldn't have done it. So what exactly is that extra $25+ a month going to? They have not been upgrading their infrastructure...
Sadly, My only other broadband choices are the phone company, which I had before, but was 16 (yes that is 16!!!) hops from my DSL box just to get out on the public Internet.. (added about 95ms lag, go QWEST). and a newer Wi-Max provider, Clearwire. Clearwire blocks pretty much anything but public Web access, has a 19 page "contract agreement" with a 1 year contract, and unless you notify them in writing 30 days prior to the 1 year expiration, your automatically renewed for another 1 year contract, with something like a $180 cancellation fee.
There is an option in CounterStrike: Source, and other Source mods that use use the HL2 engine. Of course, I have never, ever had it work. Not sure why. I would love for them to fix it, cause I can vote to kick\ban anoying users, but sometimes its a guy playing that thinks he is the leader, and is constantly talking into his mic telling us what to do, so we can't hear important things like where the enemy is...
You save the document in XML. 6 months down the road, you think, gee, bob edited a document I worked on, but I don't remember which one. Because XML is basically a text flat file, you do a search for edits to your documents done by Bob. It checks all documents, including the files done in word, wordperfect that the legal team uses, OO that the engineers use, etc. Or, again, because its not a proprietary format, you send the same document out to 10 people to edit.. they all email back changes.. very, very easy to merge them back together.
How on earth do you make an anonymous purchase on the web now? mail the company cash, and they send the product to an unnamed PO box somewhere? It is far, far, far from anonymous on the web if your using paypal, or your credit or debit cards. there is no anonymous purchasing on the web..
He also runs his car off the hydrogen. That really changes the number, 1500 is something like $80/month for electric, the rest of the savings is from not buying gasoline!
While I disagree with this idea completely, the one thing I could see as a "benefit" for the soldiers would be to have scanners in the hospitals (mobile and permanent) as well as mobile scanners for medics. Might be useful if someone is badly injured or burned, can't find the dog tags (they blew away!) or something, perform a quick scan, and know that its Gunnery Sargent Hartman (the senior drill instructor!), he is allergic to penicillin, blood type 0-, and has a pin in his leg, so you can't put him through an MRI machine. Of course, you'd have to put it on the chest, or more than one location, in case of a missing limb.
For us, the nicest thing about virtualization is the disaster recovery. If our building burns down, we can quite literally get any PC we can find with a ton of RAM, load Virtual Server, and load the hosts right back up. Much, much faster than going and configuring all the weird drivers and raid cards, partitions, etc on a normal non-virtualized system. On the same note, if one of my servers goes down, I can quickly load up the VM on another box, which means I can take all the time in the world to get the original server back up, so I don't have to worry about the really expensive "4-hour" support plans, but the much cheaper "next-day" support plans. I also keep a VM copy of our web server handy. (Web server isn't on a VM, yet, because of the speed issues), so that when I need to take down the real, faster, web server, I change one DNS setting, and all my users notice is that the web is running a little slower...
It is about Talent. Do you have (or can get) the people that are able to perform the duties well? Can you pay them competitively? and keep them? The cost of a data center is negligible vs. the cost of downtime due to mistakes, turnover, and bureaucracy. The hosted idea is great to get rid of mundane tasks that are not part of your "core competencies", or where you simply can't get or maintain enough work for a qualified person.
You mention contracts with Service level agreements. If you want to do this "in house" you will need to create these same contracts with the business units that you need. This will give the higher ups the same finger pointing trail that they would have with a hosted solution, as well as the same assurances of reliability. Quite honestly, you would basically have to treat this new "group" as a separate company within the company. I have yet to see a case when it is cheaper over the long run to have a hosted solution, but hosted is much faster to setup and get working. Not to mention, it is awfully hard to re-negotiate, or terminate a contract when a company is holding all of your crown jewels.
They halted the diesel liberty this year, because of new deisel emmisions requirements, as well as the switch to ultra low sulfur fuel. Chrysler completely sold out of them, they went like hotcakes. My friend has one, 28MPG, go up a hill towing a small trailer at 70, in overdrive, with cruise control on, without any shifting, very, very nice. The only problem he has is convincing the gas station attendants (we're one of the only states that don't allow you to pump your own gas), that no, really, it does take diesel, see the green cap!?
Cingular charges for incoming SMS? Wow, my cell phone company, as well as all the others I know of in my area (no cingular) only charge for OUTGOING SMS messages.. Just for that reason! Cause pretty much any spammer can send an email to 1234567890@email..com and have the email forwarded as an SMS to your phone..
Of course, it makes no sense to have a blind person pay $50 for a tag for the ability to go out hunting and have meat to eat all winter long.. Heck no, make them go to the store (without a car, so bus fare or taxi, or friend) and pay $x/pound for the meat to eat over the winter. Many people in my area hunt to feed their family. No part of the animal is wasted, which is they way hunting should be done.
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I'm pretty sure Fiber Channel works with Virtual servers, but I don't know about dedicating one card per host. I have played with iSCSI SAN's and virtual servers, and it works fairly well too. The lack of SCSI is a royal pain. I would love to setup my backup server as a virtual machine, and move it to any server with a SCSI card to restore from tape in an emergency.
If your servers become toast, due to whatever reason, you can get a simple workstation, put a ton of RAM in it, and load up your virtual systems. Of course they will be slower, but they will still be running. We don't need to carry expensive 4 hour service contracts, just next business day contracts, saving a ton of money. The nice thing for me with Virtual servers is it is device agnostic, so if I have to recover, worst case, I have only one server to worry about NIC drivers, RAID settings/drivers, etc. After that, its just loading up the virtual server files.
Nearest apple store to my house, 265 miles, over a snow covered mountain range in the winter, so figure 7-8 hour drive in winter, 5 hours in summer.
Nearest Dell store: Fedex is a block away!
I agree that Dell's home user support sucks, with long hold times, heavily accented people walking through standard scripts, etc. (first, ensure the computer is plugged in, press the big button on the front, ...) However, I must say that their Enterprise support rocks. I have never been on hold more than 30 seconds, and have seldom been on the phone for more than 5 minutes total. I tell them, "A hard drive died in a workstation, the diagnostic tests report this error ." They say, "Ok, let me send you a new one" The majority of the 5 minute call is them getting all the shipping setup, to ensure I have a new HD the next day.
Go find someone with a Fortran Cert from the 80's that has never gotten a degree. Then go find someone with a CS degree in the 80's, that used Fortran heavily in their classes. Both have probably changed their skill sets drastically over 20 years, but I bet I know which one has the better job...
I have no modpoints either, but damn I wish I did. Truly insightful. Why are we always looking for a technical solution for a "people problem". Which is more effective:
1. Filters, blocking, etc, with services, or people, or other things that take time and money...
or
2. Have a clear policy on acceptable use, fire the first person that breaks it...
Maybe its just me, but I think news of number 2 happening would spread much faster and effectively through the organization, and employees would remember it much, much longer.
Take away web sites, people will find other ones to kill time. Take those away, they'll start playing solitare on the PC. take that away, they'll start calling friends and family on the phone to chit-chat. crack down on that, they'll start hanging out in the break room too much... etc.. People that are bored need more or more interesting work, and better supervision.
I use the google apps at home, even though I have a licensed copy of office, cause I like to access it easily from work and home.. However, the one very limiting factor is the spreadsheets won't connect to databases. Lots of businesses have excel doing simple DB reporting, and this just won't work with the spreadsheet app. (yet??)
I was told by a MS Rep that the LongHorn Server will have a "headless" SKU.. IE, no gui. Made for being a virtual server, or even just a remotely managed web server. No GUI overhead.. Not sure how reliable that is, but a very interesting idea.
Could you imagine what would happen if masterlock created Padlocks that all had the same combo to start with, and required you to change them? I totally agree!+
yeah, I live just over the hill from you, in Kalamity Flats. Frustrating, isn't it? What I wouldn't give for some startup money, and a finalized wimax mobile standard. Cover the whole damn town with 2 towers, and buy lots of bandwith. Hmm.. maybe I should look into that!
Personally, I would love to see ISP's have to publish what percentage of customers they assume to be online at the same time.. I remember in dialup days, they had a rule of thumb at many small ISP's of 1 modem for every 12 customers. that was how they determined their equipment/bandwith needs. Now, more stuff is online (I watch 24 on fox's site, since I don't have cable, VOIP, etc) and I'm curious what they assume for purchasing equipment/bandwith.
Drunk + root Prompt = Boss that finally wants to talk about disaster recovery scenarios. ;)
Course, there will be a lecture about coming in drunk.. followed by your question of when are appropriate times for you to do what you want, and which times will you be on the clock... They can tell me not to go to the bar in the evening, when they are paying me to be working!
Now, in my town, which had fiber run to all the neighborhoods by the cable company 3 years ago, I have watched my cable internet access go from $35/month for a 3Mb connection, to $45/month (because I don't have cable TV, they decided to charge me an extra $10/month to "encourage" me to purchase cable TV) This month, my rates went up to $58/month (plus taxes, modem rental, misc other fees), for a 7MB connection. Funny thing is, they don't have 7Mb service in my town yet, and never got around to upgrading their connection out of town. When my access was 3Mb/s, I was getting usually around 2Mb in the evening. Now that I have a 7Mb connection, I am getting about 1.5Mb/s in the evening. The cable company has tripled the number of customers, and doesn't want to spend the money for a faster pipe out of town. So, I am currently paying $60+ a month for a little under 2Mb/s connection.. (ie, I'm paying them almost double for slower service.) The company decided that they could pay off the cost of running the fiber and stuff by charging $35/month, otherwise they wouldn't have done it. So what exactly is that extra $25+ a month going to? They have not been upgrading their infrastructure...
Sadly, My only other broadband choices are the phone company, which I had before, but was 16 (yes that is 16!!!) hops from my DSL box just to get out on the public Internet.. (added about 95ms lag, go QWEST). and a newer Wi-Max provider, Clearwire. Clearwire blocks pretty much anything but public Web access, has a 19 page "contract agreement" with a 1 year contract, and unless you notify them in writing 30 days prior to the 1 year expiration, your automatically renewed for another 1 year contract, with something like a $180 cancellation fee.
There is an option in CounterStrike: Source, and other Source mods that use use the HL2 engine. Of course, I have never, ever had it work. Not sure why. I would love for them to fix it, cause I can vote to kick\ban anoying users, but sometimes its a guy playing that thinks he is the leader, and is constantly talking into his mic telling us what to do, so we can't hear important things like where the enemy is...
You save the document in XML. 6 months down the road, you think, gee, bob edited a document I worked on, but I don't remember which one. Because XML is basically a text flat file, you do a search for edits to your documents done by Bob. It checks all documents, including the files done in word, wordperfect that the legal team uses, OO that the engineers use, etc. Or, again, because its not a proprietary format, you send the same document out to 10 people to edit.. they all email back changes.. very, very easy to merge them back together.
How on earth do you make an anonymous purchase on the web now? mail the company cash, and they send the product to an unnamed PO box somewhere? It is far, far, far from anonymous on the web if your using paypal, or your credit or debit cards. there is no anonymous purchasing on the web..
He also runs his car off the hydrogen. That really changes the number, 1500 is something like $80/month for electric, the rest of the savings is from not buying gasoline!
While I disagree with this idea completely, the one thing I could see as a "benefit" for the soldiers would be to have scanners in the hospitals (mobile and permanent) as well as mobile scanners for medics. Might be useful if someone is badly injured or burned, can't find the dog tags (they blew away!) or something, perform a quick scan, and know that its Gunnery Sargent Hartman (the senior drill instructor!), he is allergic to penicillin, blood type 0-, and has a pin in his leg, so you can't put him through an MRI machine. Of course, you'd have to put it on the chest, or more than one location, in case of a missing limb.
For us, the nicest thing about virtualization is the disaster recovery. If our building burns down, we can quite literally get any PC we can find with a ton of RAM, load Virtual Server, and load the hosts right back up. Much, much faster than going and configuring all the weird drivers and raid cards, partitions, etc on a normal non-virtualized system. On the same note, if one of my servers goes down, I can quickly load up the VM on another box, which means I can take all the time in the world to get the original server back up, so I don't have to worry about the really expensive "4-hour" support plans, but the much cheaper "next-day" support plans. I also keep a VM copy of our web server handy. (Web server isn't on a VM, yet, because of the speed issues), so that when I need to take down the real, faster, web server, I change one DNS setting, and all my users notice is that the web is running a little slower...
You mention contracts with Service level agreements. If you want to do this "in house" you will need to create these same contracts with the business units that you need. This will give the higher ups the same finger pointing trail that they would have with a hosted solution, as well as the same assurances of reliability. Quite honestly, you would basically have to treat this new "group" as a separate company within the company. I have yet to see a case when it is cheaper over the long run to have a hosted solution, but hosted is much faster to setup and get working. Not to mention, it is awfully hard to re-negotiate, or terminate a contract when a company is holding all of your crown jewels.
They halted the diesel liberty this year, because of new deisel emmisions requirements, as well as the switch to ultra low sulfur fuel. Chrysler completely sold out of them, they went like hotcakes. My friend has one, 28MPG, go up a hill towing a small trailer at 70, in overdrive, with cruise control on, without any shifting, very, very nice. The only problem he has is convincing the gas station attendants (we're one of the only states that don't allow you to pump your own gas), that no, really, it does take diesel, see the green cap!?
Cingular charges for incoming SMS? Wow, my cell phone company, as well as all the others I know of in my area (no cingular) only charge for OUTGOING SMS messages.. Just for that reason! Cause pretty much any spammer can send an email to 1234567890@email..com and have the email forwarded as an SMS to your phone..
Just think eastern Europe and Russia During the Cold war...
"Show me your papers, Comrade"
Thats the equivalent of powering 1.3 Libraries of Congress. Or a string of AA batteries that would wrap around the library of congress 3 times!
Of course, it makes no sense to have a blind person pay $50 for a tag for the ability to go out hunting and have meat to eat all winter long.. Heck no, make them go to the store (without a car, so bus fare or taxi, or friend) and pay $x/pound for the meat to eat over the winter. Many people in my area hunt to feed their family. No part of the animal is wasted, which is they way hunting should be done.