Take a look at F5 Acopia. Create shares on all your servers with extra space, ensure you set the permissions and quota correctly, so as not to affect the core function of the server, and then use Acopia's product to merge all the servers into a single name space and present it to clients. Much like DFS, but it will also do NFS as well as CIFS, and has a very flexible policy engine to allow you to live migrate files and load balance between many servers. You'll be able to claw back all the unused space and any standard NAS client can make use of it for whatever application needs it, with no special client software required.
Additionally, one should buy a steady supply of $4.97 #2 Robertson & $3.97 #2 Philips screwdrivers , which are the most commonly required screwdrivers in the data centre, to complement your $50 'multi-tip' unit, and only lend out the cheap ones. That way the prick that steals your screwdriver isn't depriving you of anything you'll miss.
See this wiki on how to install Sun Ray Server Software on an Ubuntu system, and then acquire some SunRay2 DTU's to drive keyboards/monitors/mice.
SunRay is a very simple way to drive multiple user sessions off single device.
Enjoy.
You asked for a low power solution to do the following: "running 24/7, for things like web or FTP servers, BitTorrent, or simply to make sure I don't miss any messages on IRC or my instant messaging client".
Why not use your low-power embedded router as your 'always-on' system?
Grab a Linksys WRTSL54GS or some other supported model and install OpenWRT. From there you can install GNU screen, a torrent client, an IRC client, and an instant messaging client of your choosing. The device has a USB 2.0 port so you can attach a large external hard drive or multi-GB flash drive for your torrent downloads.
You'd have to get use to using CLI tools, or if you so choose, you can engineer something web-based using an embedded web server.
This device can remain on 24/7 and consumes about 7-10 watts. On the plus side, you can also use OpenWRT to apply QoS to your torrent downloads so you can keep rocking your FPS or webcam pauselessly on your power-sapping neon-lit dual SLI Aurora.
Repurpose one of the non-production machines in the Data Centre that you 'administer' as your new UNIX desktop, install Solaris 10 & Sun Ray Server. If you can't find a spare machine, make one by cramming it into a container on another one, see blueprint to find out how. Pick up a new/used Sun Ray for less than $300. Link the Sun Ray to your newly repurposed server. There's no new 'box' for the desktop team to manage, you get a basic UNIX desktop at your desk and if you stack the Sun Ray behind your monitor, nobody need know you've got anything new/different. You would then either use a KVM switch or RDP to your existing Windows machine.
All of this to show your IT manager how easy it can be. Then show your homework, and you could likely get one justified for every UNIX administrator in your company. Want to make the argument, compare that to what it costs your company for 25 Windows stations for the same people. I think you'll find the argument compelling. Typical lifespan of a thin client is 7-10 years, you won't need to replace it in three years as you would with typical desktops.
Typical Sun Ray cost for 25 users (assuming they would use existing monitors/keyboards, estimated numbers):
Sun Microsystems T1000 w/ 8-core CPU & 8GB RAM w/ 3-yr Support: $8500
Sun Ray 2 Display Clients + RTU + Support (3yr): $500 ea ($12,500 for 25)
Your labour & time to install/manage: $55/hr * 2 hours/week * 3 years = $17,160
Total 3-year Cost: $38,160.00
Or pick up a older used L3 switch... Cisco 2948-GL3 @ Ebay
The 3750's are nice, but they're priced out of reach for someone who is struggling trying to cobble together a router out of a PC.
If you're going to spend the money on a decent L3 switch, check out the Force10 S50, they are a smaller vendor, but the quality is tops.
If you really want to get fancy, and integrate your IP address space management with your DHCP and DNS, take a look at BlueCat Networks. They have a suite of tools, and the one you're looking for is called Proteus.
Highly integrated DNS, DHCP, and IP Address Management. It costs money, but it sounds like your shop can afford it.
Best of luck.
I've bought >20 Galaxy servers from Sun, and they have all arrived in 10 business days or less. I don't know if you're purchasing through a reliable channel partner or Sun directly, but you should work on your relationship with your vendor. If they aren't a volume customer of Sun's, they will have difficulty finding high-traffic items. The Galaxy servers are hot and the waiting list is long, my vendor gets it through their channel partner, GE Access. I've got some comments about GE Access's Integration services, as they tend to be pretty sloppy about jamming extra memory/cards/etc in the machines and their packaging is attrocious, but all in all, we get what we ordered, and we get it quickly.
If you ever reply to this, let us all know who your channel vendor was, so we can avoid them.
You can wait for Sun to release ZFS, install Solaris 10 on an X86 box (or buy a new Sun X4100) Purchase as many Promise Vtrak 15200's as you require, configure them as iSCSI targets, and then use the Solaris 10 iSCSI initiator, and mount them. Then put them in your ZFS pool.
Use your head when configuring redundancy, and glory in your new found storage availability and capacity.
1x Asus WL-500g Wireless Broadband Router 1x USB HD Chassis 1x Hard Drive (Old/New, as long as it goes in chassis) Visit: http://openwrt.org/
Assemble the USB HD chassis, Re-Flash the Asus router to run Linux using OpenWRT, attach the storage to one of the two USB ports on the router platform, configure the Linux platform to be whatever type of fileserver/access-point/bridge/nfs/cifs/web server you want it to be....
Now, all you need is a method of powering this on the road. The router platform requires 12VDC 1000mA, and the USB HD chassis vary, but are usually in the range of 5VDC 2A + 12VDC 2A. The easiest out is to use a power inverter to ramp your cars output up to 120VAC, and then use the transformer bricks from the equipment to convert it back down, but then you'd just be a lazy twat wasting your money. Pick up a book on electricity and visit an electronics component store, and build yourself some power conversion circuitry. You'll be much prouder when you don't spend $40 on an inverter, and can prove you know sort of what is going on.
The WRT router platform only requires 1000mA of 12VDC, so you could likely get away with very little in the way of power coversion.... conditioning the power to be consistent, and not affected by your lead-foot (revving the alternator), is a different story...
The software industry has gotten away with robbery for too long. Year over year they astound us with their skyrocketing costs, and as computing complexity goes up, they find more and more excuses to not deliver the support you're paying for. "We cannot support you because of X." X being any reason they can find. Upgrades, new hardware they don't have in their support matrix, virtualization. Whatever the reason, the very first order of business for those support folks when you call for help is to find a reason to not support you. And now they want more money. To pay the outsourced first level support folks that know all about how to determine if you're unsupportable, and nothing about how to support the products.
Sounds like you had environmental problems. To lose 60% of your equipment, you probably had cooling or power problems. I have been working in the field for years, and Sun equipment is rock solid.
Only when we allow a particular area to overheat do we see increased failure rates in memory and CPUs.
We -do- lose power supplies and hard drives on a regular basis, but we're talking an installed base of ~1000 servers, and we lose 1 maybe 2 power supplies a month, and 3 or 4 hard drives a month.
Properly designed and built though, these do not cause any downtime at all. Mirror your drives, and properly route power from multiple sources to multiple supplies. N+1 is your friend.
And if you found Sun unhelpful, I would suggest you didn't feed them the right information. Install Explorer on all your machines, and use their pro-active support features that you are paying for.
Yes, agreed the price is a little steep. But as an impulse I bought one of these bad-boys from slimdevices.com back in September when they released their first trial run, I've got #49 off the line. I have to say it is an amazing little unit. I had it plugged in, booted, and serving MP3's from my drive array in less that 5 minutes.
Taco said it best, this is a totally hackable unit. The server software on the PC controls everything. The SliMP3 transmits all iR commands from the remote to the server for interpretation, so you can add new functions as you see fit. I've added several, such as making each number on the remote a hot-key for playlists of different genres.
If you've ever wanted one touch access for music to match your mood, this is the unit to buy.
The bright display that is also completely programmable from the server side to display whatever you want. The UI is more intelligent than you might think, and if you've got your music stored in a proper hierachy, finding what you want is a breeze. I can get to any specific song in my collection with a few keypresses. And I can get to any genre of music with a single keypress.
It is also quiet. There are no moving parts. It sits silently atop your stereo system, and the display is bright and crisp enough to be read across the room, assuming you've got good eyes.
I don't own and Audiotron or a RioReceiver, but I'm certain that both of those products could learn a few pointers from Sean Adams and the guys at slimdevices.com.
Support open source electronics. It's not often you get a piece of hardware that has an entirely open architecture and open driver/server for your perusal/hacking. No reverse-engineering is required, it's all here for you. This is an excellent precedent, and I'd like to see more devices embrace this model.
Slashdot Mirror
I use JungleDisk and the Amazon S3 service. This solution does everything you're asking for. It doesn't cost much, and you take on the S3 costs.
Take a look at F5 Acopia. Create shares on all your servers with extra space, ensure you set the permissions and quota correctly, so as not to affect the core function of the server, and then use Acopia's product to merge all the servers into a single name space and present it to clients. Much like DFS, but it will also do NFS as well as CIFS, and has a very flexible policy engine to allow you to live migrate files and load balance between many servers. You'll be able to claw back all the unused space and any standard NAS client can make use of it for whatever application needs it, with no special client software required.
Additionally, one should buy a steady supply of $4.97 #2 Robertson & $3.97 #2 Philips screwdrivers , which are the most commonly required screwdrivers in the data centre, to complement your $50 'multi-tip' unit, and only lend out the cheap ones. That way the prick that steals your screwdriver isn't depriving you of anything you'll miss.
See this wiki on how to install Sun Ray Server Software on an Ubuntu system, and then acquire some SunRay2 DTU's to drive keyboards/monitors/mice. SunRay is a very simple way to drive multiple user sessions off single device. Enjoy.
Why not use your low-power embedded router as your 'always-on' system?
Grab a Linksys WRTSL54GS or some other supported model and install OpenWRT. From there you can install GNU screen, a torrent client, an IRC client, and an instant messaging client of your choosing. The device has a USB 2.0 port so you can attach a large external hard drive or multi-GB flash drive for your torrent downloads.
You'd have to get use to using CLI tools, or if you so choose, you can engineer something web-based using an embedded web server.
This device can remain on 24/7 and consumes about 7-10 watts. On the plus side, you can also use OpenWRT to apply QoS to your torrent downloads so you can keep rocking your FPS or webcam pauselessly on your power-sapping neon-lit dual SLI Aurora.
All of this to show your IT manager how easy it can be. Then show your homework, and you could likely get one justified for every UNIX administrator in your company. Want to make the argument, compare that to what it costs your company for 25 Windows stations for the same people. I think you'll find the argument compelling. Typical lifespan of a thin client is 7-10 years, you won't need to replace it in three years as you would with typical desktops.
Typical Sun Ray cost for 25 users (assuming they would use existing monitors/keyboards, estimated numbers):
Sun Microsystems T1000 w/ 8-core CPU & 8GB RAM w/ 3-yr Support: $8500
Sun Ray 2 Display Clients + RTU + Support (3yr): $500 ea ($12,500 for 25)
Your labour & time to install/manage: $55/hr * 2 hours/week * 3 years = $17,160
Total 3-year Cost: $38,160.00
This should justify itself.
Or pick up a older used L3 switch... Cisco 2948-GL3 @ Ebay The 3750's are nice, but they're priced out of reach for someone who is struggling trying to cobble together a router out of a PC. If you're going to spend the money on a decent L3 switch, check out the Force10 S50, they are a smaller vendor, but the quality is tops.
If you really want to get fancy, and integrate your IP address space management with your DHCP and DNS, take a look at BlueCat Networks. They have a suite of tools, and the one you're looking for is called Proteus. Highly integrated DNS, DHCP, and IP Address Management. It costs money, but it sounds like your shop can afford it. Best of luck.
I've bought >20 Galaxy servers from Sun, and they have all arrived in 10 business days or less. I don't know if you're purchasing through a reliable channel partner or Sun directly, but you should work on your relationship with your vendor. If they aren't a volume customer of Sun's, they will have difficulty finding high-traffic items. The Galaxy servers are hot and the waiting list is long, my vendor gets it through their channel partner, GE Access. I've got some comments about GE Access's Integration services, as they tend to be pretty sloppy about jamming extra memory/cards/etc in the machines and their packaging is attrocious, but all in all, we get what we ordered, and we get it quickly.
If you ever reply to this, let us all know who your channel vendor was, so we can avoid them.
You can wait for Sun to release ZFS, install Solaris 10 on an X86 box (or buy a new Sun X4100) Purchase as many Promise Vtrak 15200's as you require, configure them as iSCSI targets, and then use the Solaris 10 iSCSI initiator, and mount them. Then put them in your ZFS pool.
Use your head when configuring redundancy, and glory in your new found storage availability and capacity.
Good luck!
Pick yourself up the following:
1x Asus WL-500g Wireless Broadband Router
1x USB HD Chassis
1x Hard Drive (Old/New, as long as it goes in chassis)
Visit: http://openwrt.org/
Assemble the USB HD chassis, Re-Flash the Asus router to run Linux using OpenWRT, attach the storage to one of the two USB ports on the router platform, configure the Linux platform to be whatever type of fileserver/access-point/bridge/nfs/cifs/web server you want it to be....
Now, all you need is a method of powering this on the road. The router platform requires 12VDC 1000mA, and the USB HD chassis vary, but are usually in the range of 5VDC 2A + 12VDC 2A. The easiest out is to use a power inverter to ramp your cars output up to 120VAC, and then use the transformer bricks from the equipment to convert it back down, but then you'd just be a lazy twat wasting your money. Pick up a book on electricity and visit an electronics component store, and build yourself some power conversion circuitry. You'll be much prouder when you don't spend $40 on an inverter, and can prove you know sort of what is going on.
Voila. You've got yourself
The WRT router platform only requires 1000mA of 12VDC, so you could likely get away with very little in the way of power coversion.... conditioning the power to be consistent, and not affected by your lead-foot (revving the alternator), is a different story...
Anyone have any ideas on this?
The software industry has gotten away with robbery for too long. Year over year they astound us with their skyrocketing costs, and as computing complexity goes up, they find more and more excuses to not deliver the support you're paying for. "We cannot support you because of X." X being any reason they can find. Upgrades, new hardware they don't have in their support matrix, virtualization. Whatever the reason, the very first order of business for those support folks when you call for help is to find a reason to not support you. And now they want more money. To pay the outsourced first level support folks that know all about how to determine if you're unsupportable, and nothing about how to support the products.
Ridiculous.
Sounds like you had environmental problems. To lose 60% of your equipment, you probably had cooling or power problems. I have been working in the field for years, and Sun equipment is rock solid.
Only when we allow a particular area to overheat do we see increased failure rates in memory and CPUs.
We -do- lose power supplies and hard drives on a regular basis, but we're talking an installed base of ~1000 servers, and we lose 1 maybe 2 power supplies a month, and 3 or 4 hard drives a month.
Properly designed and built though, these do not cause any downtime at all. Mirror your drives, and properly route power from multiple sources to multiple supplies. N+1 is your friend.
And if you found Sun unhelpful, I would suggest you didn't feed them the right information. Install Explorer on all your machines, and use their pro-active support features that you are paying for.
That's $16 CANADIAN... Which is about a $10 USD.
So they're right on the money, now buy one.
Yes, agreed the price is a little steep. But as an impulse I bought one of these bad-boys from slimdevices.com back in September when they released their first trial run, I've got #49 off the line. I have to say it is an amazing little unit. I had it plugged in, booted, and serving MP3's from my drive array in less that 5 minutes.
Taco said it best, this is a totally hackable unit. The server software on the PC controls everything. The SliMP3 transmits all iR commands from the remote to the server for interpretation, so you can add new functions as you see fit. I've added several, such as making each number on the remote a hot-key for playlists of different genres.
If you've ever wanted one touch access for music to match your mood, this is the unit to buy.
The bright display that is also completely programmable from the server side to display whatever you want. The UI is more intelligent than you might think, and if you've got your music stored in a proper hierachy, finding what you want is a breeze. I can get to any specific song in my collection with a few keypresses. And I can get to any genre of music with a single keypress.
It is also quiet. There are no moving parts. It sits silently atop your stereo system, and the display is bright and crisp enough to be read across the room, assuming you've got good eyes.
I don't own and Audiotron or a RioReceiver, but I'm certain that both of those products could learn a few pointers from Sean Adams and the guys at slimdevices.com.
Support open source electronics. It's not often you get a piece of hardware that has an entirely open architecture and open driver/server for your perusal/hacking. No reverse-engineering is required, it's all here for you. This is an excellent precedent, and I'd like to see more devices embrace this model.