Unbeknown to me I ordered Microsoft Windows Vista 64-bit for System Builders - OEM for $99.99 USD edition just two days before this limited-time upgrade deal was announced and now the package is in the mail. Luckily for me, I intend to refuse delivery and Newegg will take the items back and refund me the money. I'll be able to recoup my costs.
Strangely if I bought my Vista version after June 26, 2009 I could get Windows 7 for only $9.99 USD for the upgrade, but because I placed the order on June 24th I don't get squat.
When October 22, 2009 rolls around and they release the full version of Windows 7 then I can either update, upgrade, or at worst do a clean reinstall to the full release RTM version then. I think that this is the path that I'm going to take and save myself half costs and skip Windows Vista along the way.
I've been following the SSD developments since last year and I finally decided to save up enough money to get the Intel X25-M 80GB MLC SSD and I don't regret it. I've been posting and replying to a few threads on HardOCP forum regarding SSDs and there is just no comparison between an HDD, even VelociRaptor in RAID-0 striping, and a single SSD when it comes to random read and write speeds and also access time. Both of metrics determine the responsiveness of your system since they are the ones most heavily utilized by the operating system's disk access to it's own system drive. Lots of random reads with a bunch of random writes thrown in and some sequential read/writes for good measure.
Too many folks buy into the sequential and burst speed marketing disinformation campaigns, including the writer of this article, but fail to realize the advantage of SSDs, which is the random performance and access times. Below is a link to a great part of Anand's article about random performance. I would love to link directly to the pictures here to show you the graphs that speak more than works but I can't do it on this forum!
Look at the numbers for random 4KB read speed X25-M = 54.2 MB/s and VelociRaptor 1.55 MB/s for 3,496% difference or 35-times faster. Random 4KB write speed X25-m = 23.1 MB/s and VelociRaptor 1.63 MB/s for 1,417% difference or 14-times faster. Now consider responsivness which is measured as random 4KB read latency X25-M= 0.11 ms and VelociRaptor 6.83 ms for a 6,209% difference or 62-times faster. Now you realize the huge difference in performance that matters in orders of magnitudes of difference between hard disks and solid state disks.
Arguably much more important to any PC user than sequential read/write performance is random access performance. It's not often that you're writing large files sequentially to your disk, but you do encounter tons of small file reads/writes as you use your PC.
To measure random read/write performance I created an iometer script that peppered the drive with random requests, with an IO queue depth of 3 (to add some multitasking spice to the test). The write test was performed over an 8GB range on the drive, while the read test was performed across the whole drive. I ran the test for 3 minutes.
For the past several months I've been calling SSDs the single most noticeable upgrade you can do to your computer. Whether desktop or laptop, stick a good SSD in there and you'll notice the difference...
A big part of the problem is that once you have more installed on your system, there are more applications sending read/write requests to your IO subsystem. While our CPUs and GPUs thrive on being fed massive amounts of data in parallel, our hard drives aren't so appreciative of our multitasking demands. And this is where SSDs truly shine...
Measuring random access is very important because that's what generally happens when you go to run an application while doing other things on your computer. It's random access that feels the slowest on your machine...
The world's fastest consumer desktop hard drive, Western Digital's 300GB VelociRaptor can access a random file somewhere on its platters in about 6.83ms; that's pretty quick. Most hard drives will take closer to 8 or 9ms in this test. The Intel X25-M however? 0.11ms. The fastest SSDs can find the data you're looking for in around 0.1ms. That's an order of magnitude faster than the fastest hard drive on the market today.
The table is even more impressive when you realize that wherever the data is on your SSD, the read (and
I've worked for many of the Fortune 10 (DB, GS, CS, JP, MS, etc.) banks on the Windows server side and they are all going full steam ahead for virtualization with VMWare or Xen exactly because they have been buying way too much hardware for their backend applications for the last decade. The utilization on all of these servers hardly hits 5-10% and the vast majority of time these systems sit idle. The standard has always been rackmount servers with multiple processor/core systems with gigs of memory all sitting around being unused, mostly Compaq/HP systems with IBM xSeries servers and some Dells thrown in for good measure.
The reason that this over-capitization has been the requirement of the business line departments to choose only from four or five server models for their backend application. These standard configs are usually configured in rackmount spaces 1U, 2U, 3U, and 4U sizes and with nearly maxed out specs for each size and the size of the server determines the performance you get. You have a light web server you get a blade or a pizza box, you have a light backend application you get a 2U server with two processors or four cores even though you might have a single threaded app that was ported from MS-DOS a few years ago, you want something beefier you get the 4U server with 4 processors, 8 cores and 16 GB of RAM even though your application only runs two threads and allocates 512MB of ram maximum. I've monitored thousands of these servers through IBM Director, InsightMangager, and NetIQ for performance and 99% of the time these servers are at 2% processor and memory utilization and only once in a while for a short amount of time one or two of the cores get hit with a low-mid work load for processing and then go back to doing nothing. These were the Production servers.
Now consider the Development servers, where a bank has 500 servers dedicated for developer usage with the same specs as the production boxes and at any one time maybe a few of those servers get used for testing while the other few hundred sit around doing nothing while the developers get a new release ready for weeks at a time. The first systems to get virtualized were the development servers because they were so underutilized that it was unthinkable.
(Off topic: Funny and sad story from my days in 2007 at a top bank (CS) helping with VMWare virtualzation onto HP Blades and 3Par SAN storage for ~500 development servers. The 3Par hardware and firmware was in such a shitty state that it crashed the entire SAN frame multiple times crashing hundreds of development servers at the same time during heavy I/O load. The 3Par would play the blame game against other vendors accusing Brocade for faulty SAN fibre switches, Emulex for faulty hardware and drivers, HP Blade and IBM Blade for faulty server, and the Windows admins for incompetence. Only to find that it was their SAN interface firmware causing the crashes.)
VMWare solves the problem of running commercial backend applications on Windows servers since each application is so specific due to the requirements of the OS version, service pack, hotfixes, patches, configurations that the standard is always one-server to one-application and nobody every wanted to mix them because any issue would always be blamed on the other vendor's application on the server. There were always talks from management about providing capacity to businesses that is scalable instead of providing them with single servers with a single OS. That was five years ago and people wanted to use Windows Capacity Management features but they were a joke since they were based on per-process usage quotas and the of course nobody wanted to mix two different apps on the same box so those talks went nowhere.
That is until VMWare showed up and showed a real way to isolate each OS instance from another while it also allowed us to configure capacity requirements on each instance while letting us package all those shitty single threaded backend applications each running on a separate server onto on
My own personal theory is that Intel got things *too right* with their custom controller....
Despite using MLC flash memory, competitors have broken the 200 MB/sec sequential write speed barrier, and have done so with only 4 channel controllers. The X25-M talks to its flash across 10 parallel channels. If the X25-M was truly flash speed limited at 80 MB/sec, other MLC flash would have to be over 6x as fast to achieve stated speeds over the fewer channels available....
My hunch is they expected MLC write speeds to remain relatively low across the marketplace, and like many other products in similar chains, imposed a hard limit of 80 MB/sec to their M series drives....
If an M series drive could write as fast as an E series drive, there would be considerably less market for the latter....
I just think it can go faster than 80 MB/sec.
I think that Allyn is onto something because if you look at the graph for write speed of the X25-M (MLC) it seems utterly perfect at 80 MB/s, almost like there is an artificial cap on the speed, while the one from the X25-E (SLC) series it produces a standard waveform, like Allyn pointed out, and not an artificial flat line.
I too believe that Intel is artificially capping the performance of this drive and they might decide to uncap it sometime in the future once the competitors start snapping at their heels or if enough time goes by and they decide to introduce a new SSD MLC based performance/server oriented product line and remove the cap then. This is very similar to the situation with processor multiplier locks that they remove in their performance oriented Extreme processor lines.
I frankly don't like this kind of behavior from Intel since they know that they have the upper hand so they are just doling out enough performance to beat the competitors and to satisfy the current customers but at the same time holding back to create a market for their X25-E product line with slightly higher performance.
I think the other shoe will drop sooner or later on the 80 MB/s cap.
Research
I've been doing research into Solid State Disks in the last few weeks and this article is yet another one of those for Required Reading in the course of learning about SSD. I've even wrote a detailed post with links to reviews and articles. You can read up on the linked articles to get a good primer on things.
So if they're not going to expand their limits, the only solution is to reduce the amount of bandwidth people use, thus reducing how much people 'waste' it.
The purpose of a Data Usage Cap is to increase profits out of thin air by creating a new metric for billing. You're gravely mistaken if you believe that a Data Usage Cap has anything to do with actual usage since there is no scarcity for bandwidth and there are no bottlenecks that need to be unblocked. This is all simply a marketing device being implement to increase profits and has nothing to do with capacity control.
These Data Usage Caps are just a marketing tool instituted by the company to create a new Profit Center basically out of thin air since there is no actual cost difference for the amount of data that you transfer once the infrastructure has already been built and connected. Yes, there are costs associated to bandwidth when dealing with up-stream ISP connection contracts but in these cases these Data Usage Caps include all data, even local network data, or P2P data coming from neighboring peers on the same internal Time Warner network.
These caps are the equivalent of mobile phone companies charging you usage minutes for calling your voicemail box on their own network to check your message, even though you might have a phone plan with unlimited domestic calling or unlimited mobile-to-mobile calling that should cover in-network calls. (If you didn't know this, check your own phone bill minutes usage.)
These Data Usage Caps are just there to cut off the most demanding users, most of which are computer savvy hence their large usage, and to penalize them for their usage to force them to pay substantially more or to force them to terminate their service. Currently these users are probably very few but with the growth of streaming high definition video content becoming more common these caps will start to become bottleneck for average users in the upcoming days.
This is the equivalent of medical insurance companies putting a maximum yearly usage cap on benefits, penalizing those people who are most in need for insurance coverage for catastrophic medical events to force them to suffer from lack of funds for medical services or to force them to discontinue their insurance coverage since it stops providing any coverage. (If you didn't know this, check your own medical and dental insurance cap per year.)
These data usage caps are a symptom of today's social and economic lack of respect for the consumers by the companies who service them and they are the result from the lack of consumer wisdom or caring about the service that they are getting.
Any legislation that is passed short of banning data usage caps will legitimize this practice and the days of per-minute charges will be back in the form of per-megabyte charges. If this economy continues on the path that it is going and start really hurting people in the pocket book then maybe we'll see some real action to stop these kinds of anti-consumer practices, but if the economy doesn't slide down too far then this type of behavior by companies will stick and become "the norm".
One thing about this research paper is that they used only one model MemoRight GT MR25.2 in 8/16/32 GB capacities to do their testing before 2008-11-11 publication of the paper in the United Kingdom.
I'm concerned that the research test and results are largely skewed against SSDs because they used only that one model to do all their testing with based on only one price point for the SSDs.
There is a very large difference in performance between many various SSD drives based on the original flawed JMicron JMF602 chipset (stuttering/freezing on write), newer JMF602B (smaller stuttering), Samsung's chipset, Intel's chipset (fastest random writes by 4x), and the newest Indilnix Barefoot chipset (balanced sequential/random read/write). Additionally the huge drops in prices in the last 6-12 months ($1,500->$400) is a big change in the SSD arena. These price, capacity, and performance changes are going to continue fluctuating for the next few years yielding much better drives for the consumers.
I believe that the research in the paper will be shortly obsolete, if it isn't already, given the latest products on the market and price points and the Q3/Q4 new upcoming products from Intel and others.
I'm helping a friend of mine build an all-in-one HTPC / Desktop / Gaming system and I've been doing research into SSDs for the past few weeks based on reviews and benchmarks so I wanted to share my info.
Basically there are only two drives to consider and I list them below. A good alternative at this time is to purchase smaller SSDs and create RAID-0 (stripping) sets to effectively double their performance instead of buying a single large SSD. The RAID-0 article below shows great benchmark results to this effect.
Intel X25-M
The Intel X25-M series of drives is the top performance leader right now, and the 80GB drive is barely affordable for a desktop system build if you consider the increased performance of the drive.
The new OCZ Vertex series of drives with the newer 1275 firmware is the price/performance leader and they are much more affordable than the Intel drives. When you combine two of these smaller 30/60 GB drives into RAID-0 (stripping) you get double the performance at still acceptable prices.
VLC (VideoLAN Client) media player was good up to the 0.8.6 releases and after that it took a bit of a tumble in design and lost popularity because of its tendency to crash or freeze at any minor error or corruption in the media files.
Media Player Classic Homecinema stepped in and took the reigns after that. This player includes internal decoder filters for MPEG-2 (DVD), MPEG-4 (XviD, DivX), H.264 (Blu-ray), and VC1 (Blu-ray) along with audio decoders for AC3 (Dolby Digital), DTS (Digital Theater Systems), AAC (Advanced Audio Codec), etc. It also includes native support for MKV (Matroska) and AVI (Audio Video Interleave) file formats.
The most important feature of MPC-HC is the hardware accelerated DirectX Video Acceleration (DXVA) decoder filters for the H.264 and VC1 Blu-ray codecs allowing this player to leverage ATI, nVidia, and Intel graphics cards to handle the work load with complex 720p and 1080p movies. The difference in CPU usage goes from 70-100% on software decoding with dropped frames to 5% on DXVA decoding and no dropped frames, of course this is relative to the CPU being used.
DXVAChecker is the best tool to use to determine if your video card and latest drivers support hardware acceleration. It will list the list of video streams that are accelerated such as MPEG2, WMV9, VC1, H264 along with DXVA1 (XP DX9) or 2 (Vista DX10) for the version along with the resolution such as 720x480, 1280x720, 1920x1080 that is supported.
FFDshow Tryouts is another codecs to look into is that is based on libavcodec and ffmpeg-mt (multi-threaded) and handles pretty much all audio and video codecs in software using CPU decoding and includes a lot of filters for audio 2.0->5.1 up-mixing, real-time AC3 encoding for surround sound, noise filtering, and video filters for noise, sharpening, and subtitle support.
CoreAVC Pro codec is the most efficient software and hardware nVidia CUDA accelerated H.264 (Blu-ray) decoding. In hardware CUDA mode it users ~15% CPU to perform decoding and in software mode it users 50-70%, relative to the CPU being used of course. This codec a bit more efficient than FFDshow in software but a lot better in CUDA mode, nVidia video card required.
Haali Media Splitter is the preferred splitter for MKV (Matroska), MP4, and AVI files. This is the recommended splitter for these file formats over the internal splitters that usually come with the players.
MPlayer Media Player is also a complete alternative that now has hardware acceleration support for nVidia video cards with the latest SVN releases.
PAR2 parity archive is not actually RAID but a parity calculating and correcting system for file distribution. A large file, like a 100MB movie, is cut up into smaller pieces like 10MB, along with a few extra pieces of parity archives attached (1, 2 or more 10MB extra pieces). So you download 10 of the actual 10MB pieces along with two of the 10MB parity archives. While uncompresssing your original pieces you find that piece 3 and 7 are corrupt. You the use the parity archives with the PAR2 application to restore the two missing pieces that were corrupted. This system works well for file distribution at the expense of sending more data and with the ability to only recover as many blocks that have errors as extra parity archive blocks that were sent out.
As for actual RAID for Memory, this technology has been around the server market for quite a long time and it has become available in regular server models offered from HP and IBM in the last few years. You can get a server model and configure the memory into a RAID1 or RAID5 like configuration allowing the memory to be fully redundant. Some of these models also offer hot-swap ability so that if the server detects a failed memory stick, you could pull out just the board that has the failed stick and replace that stick then put it back into the system while the OS is fully running.
The issue with this RAID setup is that is isn't really required unless you have super critical work running on these servers and even then you have to decide if the extra expense of losing n/2 (half) of your memory for RAID1 or n-1 (one-bank) of memory for RAID5 is worth it. For most back end servers this was unnecessary even thought they might be domain controllers or e-mail servers.
I noticed the racks swaying quite a lot during the test probably because they were bolted down to the floor as a standard procedure with data centers. I think that for the next design of their "black box" system they should also bolt them to the ceiling to prevent the swaying of the racks and this would probably also solve the grill damage problem seen on the top of the rack along with structural damage like buckling, bending, twisting in the body of the server racks.
The hard piping issue of using copper tube pipes for heat transfer with glycol or water might pose another problem, luckily copper is more malleable than other piping alternatives so the pipes would likely bend and deform easier before breaking or shearing due to the random motions.
This little problem of cables falling out happens in regular data centers all the time due to heat expansion/contraction creep, loose connectors, or accidental unplugging is an old problem but an easy one to fix. A little loop connector or cable-tie for the power cable mounted to the back of the case as seen on Compaq and HP server systems would take care of any cables falling out of the receptacles.
Here is information for the docket for this case from the US Supreme Court's web site. Feel free to show your support by joining Join the American Civil Liberties Union.
It should be interesting to see which organizations or government bodies dare to file an Amicus Briefs in support of the petitioners in this Supreme Court case. This should be a nice little flag to know who's in support of basic human and constitutional rights as they apply to children and how's towing the government party line of the Zero Tolerance policy for the War on Drugs no matter what the costs are to human rights.
I'm glad to see lawsuits moving forward against the cable companies and I hope that someone takes on DirecTV for their new practice of forcing everyone to lease the equipment even after paying a $99 or $199 purchase fee and getting hit with $4.99 lease fee a month on top of other service charges.
Eight or nine years back when DirecTV was getting started I was happy to sign up without a contract and also to purchase my own Sony SAT-T60 series 1 DirecTivo receiver for a few hundred dollars and I didn't mind the one-time expense knowing that I'd own the equipment and I could upgrade it or hack it for more storage, which is what most folks ended up doing. Now that HDTV is out I looked at upgrading my DirecTV equipment and I found their new equipment lease policy in the contract which immediately ticked me off knowing that I'd be renting the equipment and I couldn't upgrade it or hack it and that I would be paying for this stuff in perpetuity. So I contacted DirecTV and asked them about the Lease and if I had the option of right-out buying out the equipment and they sent me their form letter responses.
Basically I have no choice but to lease and now I feel like we're back to the old AT&T days when you would rent their telephone receiver for decades overpaying for it hundreds times over. They also charge you a $199 first time fee that is not the purchase price of the item and then you still get charged $4.99 a month on top of a 2-year contract.
Additionally they broke their relationship with Tivo so their current DirecTV receivers do not come with the Tivo software and there are a few complaints about their current HD DVR receivers. They recently started working again with Tivo to build a new DirecTivo HD DVR receiver that might be available sometime in 2009.
After finding out all of this I lost interest in upgrading my DirecTV for HD content and after realizing the simple fact that I do not ever watch regular TV programming anymore, I did the only sane thing and cancelled my entire DirecTV service after being a 9-year customer.
Lately most of my entertainment comes from the computer and I subscribe to the serial shows that I like to watch (Californication, Entourage, Weeds, Stargate Atlantis, etc.) which is basically what the DirecTivo was doing for me previously.
PS: I wish that someone would also go after these companies and other service providers like mobile phone carriers for the 1 to 2 year lock-in contracts.
Why is there a $4.99 lease fee on the DirecTV HD DVR equipment where there is also a $199 purchase charge?
What is the REAL purchase price of this equipment without the lease fee and can this receiver be purchased for this price?
If there is no alternative to avoid paying a monthly Lease Fee how do you expect to keep my business when I switch to HD TV this fall and my cable company offers HD DVR without Lease or FiOS becomes available in my area?
Subject
Why the Lease Fee?
Discussion Thread
Response - 08/05/2008
Dear Mr. Frost,
Thanks for writing. Many customers find leasing a receiver to be an easy, affordable alternative to purchasing one. We subsidize the cost of our HD-DVRs so the lease price of $199 is significantly lower than the $749 you'd pay to buy the same receiver elsewhere. In addition, leasing a new HD DVR gives you access to the newest HD channels that you can't get with older receivers.
To learn more about our HD DVR, visit our web site at www.directv.com/hd.
In addition, customers who are setting up their DIRECTV service for the first time, or current customers who upgrade or add a DIRECTV receiver will lease that equipment from DIRECTV instead of buying it.
You continue to own your current DIRECTV equipment and any Additional Receiver Fees you pay to mirror your monthly programming to
I just hope that they invest in better LED technology and higher quality control standards than when NYC rolled out the LED based crosswalk signs for pedestrians, the ones with the orange hand and white walking figure.
Throughout the city you can see quite a few of these signs failing in sometimes very spectacular fashion, such as displaying both the hand and the walker at the same time blinking or solid. Other times multiple LEDs have become non-functional and the patterns have changed to comical designs with various fingers missing from the stop hand or body parts missing from the walking figure. I've seen tons of these broken signs but still I'm missing that elusive middle-finger gesture.
One thing that the city did very well is the progressive upgrade of the intersection lights (red, yellow, green) to LEDs. The started off with changing out only the green lights and after the change you noticed right away the super bright new green light at the intersection. At certain times of the evening the new green LEDs are so bright that is almost hurts to look at them directly, but I don't know if this is a physical thing with the human eve being more sensitive to green or with power fluctuations at that time of the day.
After the green light change they changed out the red lights and lastly they did the yellow lights. Since the changes I've seen a number of intersection lights be burnt out or non-functional and I have called them into the new consolidated city wide services line at phone number 311 and the city came and replaced them in a day or two. The failure rate for the intersection lights is a lot lower than for the crosswalk signs, and that's a great thing since the city has many more crazy dangerous drivers than insane pedestrians as it is.
Let's hope the use high quality LEDs and electronics in these new street lights.
People are not going to switch to SSDs and dump their HDDs for the simple reason that they don't have to. SSD adoption will increase overtime, slowly at first as we're seeing now, to a much faster rate until SSDs become the standard for laptops and then start drifting into performance desktop and finally into mainstream desktops.
The systems will mostly end up configured with the SSD for the main OS and program's drive and the HDDs for mass media storage internally and externally for mobility. Over many years as memory densities improve and cost become lower SSDs will become more of a standard. HDDs will be far and away more cost effective in terms of price/storage ratio and that's fine and they will have their own niche in the market for their low cost and large capacities whereas the SSDs will be high cost and lower capacities but with higher performance.
I think that this is a great thing and it shows the evolutionary process in computer technology.
Who uses floppy disks anymore when flash drives have become the standard small capacity removable media?
I forgot to mention one of the most important things about working as a systems administrator and that is the fact that this position should only be used as a stepping stone towards another type of work, such as management, engineering, project consulting, or running your own computer business. The reason for this is that as a systems administrator your job focuses on a runaround dealing mostly with resolving issues and performing tasks to enable operations on a day to day basis. This is an endless cycle of issue resolution requiring immediate attention that generates stress as a natural byproduct and over extended periods of time this stress slowly builds up that will either build you up and motivate you to learn and move to another position or it will break you down and turn you into an ineffectual administrator.
Working in fast paced and high demand environments such as enterprise sized computing in multinational firms does this to many administrators who in turn either break down or move out of administration to focus on another type of work in technology such as management roles, or try to take on project work instead of administration and operations to balance the issue resolution work with improvement and design type projects.
As a younger technologist I always looked towards systems administration as a holy panacea of positions and I always dreamt of becoming a systems administrator. After attaining my goal and after years of working as one and becoming one of the more technically senior ones in many of the departments that I worked at I always looked up towards engineering as the next position on my career track. I looked up to engineering since this position was more focused on creation of new works through design and architecture work on projects as a solution to the repetitive and stress creating work that is performed through administration.
I started working towards this goal and I picked up a short contract a while back where I was the sole engineer on the project and as responsible for the entire analysis, recommendation, design, and to a small extent the implementation of the project. I worked with a project manager to carry out this project and hand my design work to systems administrators who would carry out the work. I really enjoyed the creation part of this project since I was able to utilize my expertise and knowledge of systems administration to analyze and plan the design of the work. Then with the project manager I demonstrated the design to the business management and got the go ahead to create the design. At this point I utilized my scripting and automation skills to create a number of scripts to automate the analysis and also the implementation of the work for the project. I then deployed the implementation scripts to the systems administrators working on the project and let them handle the operation of those scripts while also giving the project manager the metrics generating scripts to monitor the work that the administrators were performing. As the project moved along I had to redevelop some scripts and tweak others due to changing requirements. At that point my work on the project was finished and the daily operations were now being handled by the administrators and the progress monitoring was being done by the project manager.
After this project was finished I was very happy with the work that I have done and I was glad to be involved in the creation of new and useful products and processes that helped other people perform their work faster, easier, and better. This was a much more challenging and enjoyable work that required my expertise on the the systems that I used to administer but also required knowledge of other systems and their interaction amongst each other thus broadening the field of knowledge that was utilized to carry out this project. Since the systems themselves are rigid in their design the hard difficulties came from the flaws in their design or implementation that basically required the solution or workaround. The soft problems
If you are naturally a computer person then a degree is optional for you in your IT career since your experience and skills will speak a lot better as to your ability to do useful work for a company. If you have the knack for computers then you will be able to go a long way just on that alone. Many of today's computer degree programs focus on theoretical knowledge and seem like they are designed for people more interested in the science part of technology such as algorithm design and computational design work and not for systems administration or engineering skills.
If you are looking to be a systems administrator then you really need relevant experience for the systems that you are going to be administrating. That means that if you are going to work with vendor's server operating system you should be an expert on that vendor's desktop system. The skills that you learn hacking away at your desktop dealing with issues leads directly into the role of administrating server operating systems.
One thing that many people scoff at is vendor certifications but I personally feel that they are a good alternative to degree coursework. The certification training teaches you the very specific knowledge required to use and manage vendor hardware and software so that you become familiar with the vendor's design principles, implementation of those principles, installation, management, and troubleshooting of the system that you are being certified in. Many folks look down on certifications since they only think of them as a piece of paper and a title but the training for the certification is the important thing because it gives you very relevant skills for that vendor's product. That training is a lot more useful and relevant to an employer and yourself when working with a specific product in your job because it teaches you how to do things exactly the way that the vendor planned. This is an important thing to know since many vendors use very strange ways of doing simple things. Degree coursework in a college only teaches you the theoretical and this knowledge, while very deep, is far too distant from a particular implementation and it takes a lot to transfer to actual useful knowledge.
I am sure that many people will with disagree with me about the value of certification and recommend a degree program instead but everyone is welcome to their own opinion.
A previous poster on this thread mentioned that systems administration should be an apprenticeship based program versus a computer science degree type program and I wholeheartedly agree. The skills required to deal with daily operations and troubleshooting of computer systems is mostly based on experience and training with a particular implementation more than deep knowledge of generalized theoretical ideology. It is much more valuable to know how a vendor implemented the debugging procedure in a system than to know the basis for a debugging in systems design when you are the one responsible for fixing a problem that is happening right now with a critical production system.
I as an example started as a computer kid upgrading his Tandy in elementary school and playing computer games in high school to end up working as a computer repair guy in a retail store fixing problems with people's personal computers and installing upgrades for them. It was a logical career progression after dropping out of an unchallenging high school program. Do what comes naturally to you and you will always be paid well. The retailer had a requirement for certain number of certified technicians to work in the department so that they could advertise it so the company put me on the track to taking the first desktop hardware certification. I read the certification book and learned a few interesting facts that I never knew about systems then did the test which was not difficult since the practice at the repair shot and study of the materials paid off. I later studied and earned certifications for most of the other equipment that was being repaired there for e
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Unbeknown to me I ordered Microsoft Windows Vista 64-bit for System Builders - OEM for $99.99 USD edition just two days before this limited-time upgrade deal was announced and now the package is in the mail. Luckily for me, I intend to refuse delivery and Newegg will take the items back and refund me the money. I'll be able to recoup my costs.
Strangely if I bought my Vista version after June 26, 2009 I could get Windows 7 for only $9.99 USD for the upgrade, but because I placed the order on June 24th I don't get squat.
I just downloaded the Microsoft Windows 7 Release Candidate 64-bit version for free and got a product key that will work all the way until March 1, 2010 and then expire June 1, 2010. I'm going to install this version on a new system upgrade that I just built with Intel Core i7 920 2.6 GHz, Asus P6T, G.Skill 6GB DDR3-1600 C8 memory, and Xigmatek HDT-S1284EE cooler.
If I purchase the Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium Upgrade pre-order for $49.99 USD by July 11, 2009 then I can jump from my Windows XP to Windows 7 for only $50 USD and I get to do a clean install anyway.
When October 22, 2009 rolls around and they release the full version of Windows 7 then I can either update, upgrade, or at worst do a clean reinstall to the full release RTM version then. I think that this is the path that I'm going to take and save myself half costs and skip Windows Vista along the way.
I've been following the SSD developments since last year and I finally decided to save up enough money to get the Intel X25-M 80GB MLC SSD and I don't regret it. I've been posting and replying to a few threads on HardOCP forum regarding SSDs and there is just no comparison between an HDD, even VelociRaptor in RAID-0 striping, and a single SSD when it comes to random read and write speeds and also access time. Both of metrics determine the responsiveness of your system since they are the ones most heavily utilized by the operating system's disk access to it's own system drive. Lots of random reads with a bunch of random writes thrown in and some sequential read/writes for good measure.
Too many folks buy into the sequential and burst speed marketing disinformation campaigns, including the writer of this article, but fail to realize the advantage of SSDs, which is the random performance and access times. Below is a link to a great part of Anand's article about random performance. I would love to link directly to the pictures here to show you the graphs that speak more than works but I can't do it on this forum!
Look at the numbers for random 4KB read speed X25-M = 54.2 MB/s and VelociRaptor 1.55 MB/s for 3,496% difference or 35-times faster. Random 4KB write speed X25-m = 23.1 MB/s and VelociRaptor 1.63 MB/s for 1,417% difference or 14-times faster. Now consider responsivness which is measured as random 4KB read latency X25-M= 0.11 ms and VelociRaptor 6.83 ms for a 6,209% difference or 62-times faster. Now you realize the huge difference in performance that matters in orders of magnitudes of difference between hard disks and solid state disks.
AnandTech - The SSD Anthology: Understanding SSDs and New Drives from OCZ - Random Read/Write Performance
AnandTech - The SSD Anthology: Understanding SSDs and New Drives from OCZ - Why You Should Want an SSD
I've worked for many of the Fortune 10 (DB, GS, CS, JP, MS, etc.) banks on the Windows server side and they are all going full steam ahead for virtualization with VMWare or Xen exactly because they have been buying way too much hardware for their backend applications for the last decade. The utilization on all of these servers hardly hits 5-10% and the vast majority of time these systems sit idle. The standard has always been rackmount servers with multiple processor/core systems with gigs of memory all sitting around being unused, mostly Compaq/HP systems with IBM xSeries servers and some Dells thrown in for good measure.
The reason that this over-capitization has been the requirement of the business line departments to choose only from four or five server models for their backend application. These standard configs are usually configured in rackmount spaces 1U, 2U, 3U, and 4U sizes and with nearly maxed out specs for each size and the size of the server determines the performance you get. You have a light web server you get a blade or a pizza box, you have a light backend application you get a 2U server with two processors or four cores even though you might have a single threaded app that was ported from MS-DOS a few years ago, you want something beefier you get the 4U server with 4 processors, 8 cores and 16 GB of RAM even though your application only runs two threads and allocates 512MB of ram maximum. I've monitored thousands of these servers through IBM Director, InsightMangager, and NetIQ for performance and 99% of the time these servers are at 2% processor and memory utilization and only once in a while for a short amount of time one or two of the cores get hit with a low-mid work load for processing and then go back to doing nothing. These were the Production servers.
Now consider the Development servers, where a bank has 500 servers dedicated for developer usage with the same specs as the production boxes and at any one time maybe a few of those servers get used for testing while the other few hundred sit around doing nothing while the developers get a new release ready for weeks at a time. The first systems to get virtualized were the development servers because they were so underutilized that it was unthinkable.
(Off topic: Funny and sad story from my days in 2007 at a top bank (CS) helping with VMWare virtualzation onto HP Blades and 3Par SAN storage for ~500 development servers. The 3Par hardware and firmware was in such a shitty state that it crashed the entire SAN frame multiple times crashing hundreds of development servers at the same time during heavy I/O load. The 3Par would play the blame game against other vendors accusing Brocade for faulty SAN fibre switches, Emulex for faulty hardware and drivers, HP Blade and IBM Blade for faulty server, and the Windows admins for incompetence. Only to find that it was their SAN interface firmware causing the crashes.)
VMWare solves the problem of running commercial backend applications on Windows servers since each application is so specific due to the requirements of the OS version, service pack, hotfixes, patches, configurations that the standard is always one-server to one-application and nobody every wanted to mix them because any issue would always be blamed on the other vendor's application on the server. There were always talks from management about providing capacity to businesses that is scalable instead of providing them with single servers with a single OS. That was five years ago and people wanted to use Windows Capacity Management features but they were a joke since they were based on per-process usage quotas and the of course nobody wanted to mix two different apps on the same box so those talks went nowhere.
That is until VMWare showed up and showed a real way to isolate each OS instance from another while it also allowed us to configure capacity requirements on each instance while letting us package all those shitty single threaded backend applications each running on a separate server onto on
The most interesting thing is the last section on the last page.
PC Perspective: Intel Responds to Fragmentation with New X25-M Firmware - My Theory - It Can Write Faster
by Allyn Malventano 2009-04-13
I think that Allyn is onto something because if you look at the graph for write speed of the X25-M (MLC) it seems utterly perfect at 80 MB/s, almost like there is an artificial cap on the speed, while the one from the X25-E (SLC) series it produces a standard waveform, like Allyn pointed out, and not an artificial flat line.
I too believe that Intel is artificially capping the performance of this drive and they might decide to uncap it sometime in the future once the competitors start snapping at their heels or if enough time goes by and they decide to introduce a new SSD MLC based performance/server oriented product line and remove the cap then. This is very similar to the situation with processor multiplier locks that they remove in their performance oriented Extreme processor lines.
I frankly don't like this kind of behavior from Intel since they know that they have the upper hand so they are just doling out enough performance to beat the competitors and to satisfy the current customers but at the same time holding back to create a market for their X25-E product line with slightly higher performance.
I think the other shoe will drop sooner or later on the 80 MB/s cap.
Research
I've been doing research into Solid State Disks in the last few weeks and this article is yet another one of those for Required Reading in the course of learning about SSD. I've even wrote a detailed post with links to reviews and articles. You can read up on the linked articles to get a good primer on things.
Solid State Disk Benchmarks
The purpose of a Data Usage Cap is to increase profits out of thin air by creating a new metric for billing. You're gravely mistaken if you believe that a Data Usage Cap has anything to do with actual usage since there is no scarcity for bandwidth and there are no bottlenecks that need to be unblocked. This is all simply a marketing device being implement to increase profits and has nothing to do with capacity control.
These Data Usage Caps are just a marketing tool instituted by the company to create a new Profit Center basically out of thin air since there is no actual cost difference for the amount of data that you transfer once the infrastructure has already been built and connected. Yes, there are costs associated to bandwidth when dealing with up-stream ISP connection contracts but in these cases these Data Usage Caps include all data, even local network data, or P2P data coming from neighboring peers on the same internal Time Warner network.
These caps are the equivalent of mobile phone companies charging you usage minutes for calling your voicemail box on their own network to check your message, even though you might have a phone plan with unlimited domestic calling or unlimited mobile-to-mobile calling that should cover in-network calls. (If you didn't know this, check your own phone bill minutes usage.)
These Data Usage Caps are just there to cut off the most demanding users, most of which are computer savvy hence their large usage, and to penalize them for their usage to force them to pay substantially more or to force them to terminate their service. Currently these users are probably very few but with the growth of streaming high definition video content becoming more common these caps will start to become bottleneck for average users in the upcoming days.
This is the equivalent of medical insurance companies putting a maximum yearly usage cap on benefits, penalizing those people who are most in need for insurance coverage for catastrophic medical events to force them to suffer from lack of funds for medical services or to force them to discontinue their insurance coverage since it stops providing any coverage. (If you didn't know this, check your own medical and dental insurance cap per year.)
These data usage caps are a symptom of today's social and economic lack of respect for the consumers by the companies who service them and they are the result from the lack of consumer wisdom or caring about the service that they are getting.
Any legislation that is passed short of banning data usage caps will legitimize this practice and the days of per-minute charges will be back in the form of per-megabyte charges. If this economy continues on the path that it is going and start really hurting people in the pocket book then maybe we'll see some real action to stop these kinds of anti-consumer practices, but if the economy doesn't slide down too far then this type of behavior by companies will stick and become "the norm".
One thing about this research paper is that they used only one model MemoRight GT MR25.2 in 8/16/32 GB capacities to do their testing before 2008-11-11 publication of the paper in the United Kingdom.
I'm concerned that the research test and results are largely skewed against SSDs because they used only that one model to do all their testing with based on only one price point for the SSDs.
There is a very large difference in performance between many various SSD drives based on the original flawed JMicron JMF602 chipset (stuttering/freezing on write), newer JMF602B (smaller stuttering), Samsung's chipset, Intel's chipset (fastest random writes by 4x), and the newest Indilnix Barefoot chipset (balanced sequential/random read/write). Additionally the huge drops in prices in the last 6-12 months ($1,500->$400) is a big change in the SSD arena. These price, capacity, and performance changes are going to continue fluctuating for the next few years yielding much better drives for the consumers.
I believe that the research in the paper will be shortly obsolete, if it isn't already, given the latest products on the market and price points and the Q3/Q4 new upcoming products from Intel and others.
I'm helping a friend of mine build an all-in-one HTPC / Desktop / Gaming system and I've been doing research into SSDs for the past few weeks based on reviews and benchmarks so I wanted to share my info.
Basically there are only two drives to consider and I list them below. A good alternative at this time is to purchase smaller SSDs and create RAID-0 (stripping) sets to effectively double their performance instead of buying a single large SSD. The RAID-0 article below shows great benchmark results to this effect.
Intel X25-M
The Intel X25-M series of drives is the top performance leader right now, and the 80GB drive is barely affordable for a desktop system build if you consider the increased performance of the drive.
Intel X25-M SSDSA2MH080G1 80GB SATA Internal Solid state disk (SSD) - Retail - $383.00 USD ($ 4.7875 / per GB)
OCZ Vertex
The new OCZ Vertex series of drives with the newer 1275 firmware is the price/performance leader and they are much more affordable than the Intel drives. When you combine two of these smaller 30/60 GB drives into RAID-0 (stripping) you get double the performance at still acceptable prices.
OCZ Vertex Series OCZSSD2-1VTX30G 2.5" 30GB SATA II MLC Internal Solid state disk (SSD) - Retail - $129.00 USD ($ 4.3 / per GB)
OCZ Vertex Series OCZSSD2-1VTX60G 2.5" 60GB SATA II MLC Internal Solid state disk (SSD) - Retail - $209.00 USD ( $ 3.483 / per GB)
Reviews
Required Reading:
AnandTech - The SSD Anthology: Understanding SSDs and New Drives from OCZ
AnandTech - Intel X25-M SSD: Intel Delivers One of the World's Fastest Drives
AnandTech - The SSD Update: Vertex Gets Faster, New Indilinx Drives and Intel/MacBook Problems Resolved
RAID-0 Performance:
ExtremeTech - Intel X25 80GB Solid-State Drive Review - PCMark Vantage Disk Tests
BenchmarkReviews - OCZ Vertex SSD RAID-0 Performance
(Be Warned about BenchmarkReviews! Synthetic benchmark results only, no real-life benchmarks such as PCMark Vantage.)
VLC (VideoLAN Client) media player was good up to the 0.8.6 releases and after that it took a bit of a tumble in design and lost popularity because of its tendency to crash or freeze at any minor error or corruption in the media files.
Media Player Classic Homecinema stepped in and took the reigns after that. This player includes internal decoder filters for MPEG-2 (DVD), MPEG-4 (XviD, DivX), H.264 (Blu-ray), and VC1 (Blu-ray) along with audio decoders for AC3 (Dolby Digital), DTS (Digital Theater Systems), AAC (Advanced Audio Codec), etc. It also includes native support for MKV (Matroska) and AVI (Audio Video Interleave) file formats.
The most important feature of MPC-HC is the hardware accelerated DirectX Video Acceleration (DXVA) decoder filters for the H.264 and VC1 Blu-ray codecs allowing this player to leverage ATI, nVidia, and Intel graphics cards to handle the work load with complex 720p and 1080p movies. The difference in CPU usage goes from 70-100% on software decoding with dropped frames to 5% on DXVA decoding and no dropped frames, of course this is relative to the CPU being used.
DXVAChecker is the best tool to use to determine if your video card and latest drivers support hardware acceleration. It will list the list of video streams that are accelerated such as MPEG2, WMV9, VC1, H264 along with DXVA1 (XP DX9) or 2 (Vista DX10) for the version along with the resolution such as 720x480, 1280x720, 1920x1080 that is supported.
FFDshow Tryouts is another codecs to look into is that is based on libavcodec and ffmpeg-mt (multi-threaded) and handles pretty much all audio and video codecs in software using CPU decoding and includes a lot of filters for audio 2.0->5.1 up-mixing, real-time AC3 encoding for surround sound, noise filtering, and video filters for noise, sharpening, and subtitle support.
CoreAVC Pro codec is the most efficient software and hardware nVidia CUDA accelerated H.264 (Blu-ray) decoding. In hardware CUDA mode it users ~15% CPU to perform decoding and in software mode it users 50-70%, relative to the CPU being used of course. This codec a bit more efficient than FFDshow in software but a lot better in CUDA mode, nVidia video card required.
Haali Media Splitter is the preferred splitter for MKV (Matroska), MP4, and AVI files. This is the recommended splitter for these file formats over the internal splitters that usually come with the players.
MPlayer Media Player is also a complete alternative that now has hardware acceleration support for nVidia video cards with the latest SVN releases.
PAR2 parity archive is not actually RAID but a parity calculating and correcting system for file distribution. A large file, like a 100MB movie, is cut up into smaller pieces like 10MB, along with a few extra pieces of parity archives attached (1, 2 or more 10MB extra pieces). So you download 10 of the actual 10MB pieces along with two of the 10MB parity archives. While uncompresssing your original pieces you find that piece 3 and 7 are corrupt. You the use the parity archives with the PAR2 application to restore the two missing pieces that were corrupted. This system works well for file distribution at the expense of sending more data and with the ability to only recover as many blocks that have errors as extra parity archive blocks that were sent out.
As for actual RAID for Memory, this technology has been around the server market for quite a long time and it has become available in regular server models offered from HP and IBM in the last few years. You can get a server model and configure the memory into a RAID1 or RAID5 like configuration allowing the memory to be fully redundant. Some of these models also offer hot-swap ability so that if the server detects a failed memory stick, you could pull out just the board that has the failed stick and replace that stick then put it back into the system while the OS is fully running.
The issue with this RAID setup is that is isn't really required unless you have super critical work running on these servers and even then you have to decide if the extra expense of losing n/2 (half) of your memory for RAID1 or n-1 (one-bank) of memory for RAID5 is worth it. For most back end servers this was unnecessary even thought they might be domain controllers or e-mail servers.
I noticed the racks swaying quite a lot during the test probably because they were bolted down to the floor as a standard procedure with data centers. I think that for the next design of their "black box" system they should also bolt them to the ceiling to prevent the swaying of the racks and this would probably also solve the grill damage problem seen on the top of the rack along with structural damage like buckling, bending, twisting in the body of the server racks.
The hard piping issue of using copper tube pipes for heat transfer with glycol or water might pose another problem, luckily copper is more malleable than other piping alternatives so the pipes would likely bend and deform easier before breaking or shearing due to the random motions.
This little problem of cables falling out happens in regular data centers all the time due to heat expansion/contraction creep, loose connectors, or accidental unplugging is an old problem but an easy one to fix. A little loop connector or cable-tie for the power cable mounted to the back of the case as seen on Compaq and HP server systems would take care of any cables falling out of the receptacles.
Here is information for the docket for this case from the US Supreme Court's web site. Feel free to show your support by joining Join the American Civil Liberties Union.
US Supreme Court - Docket - 08-479
It should be interesting to see which organizations or government bodies dare to file an Amicus Briefs in support of the petitioners in this Supreme Court case. This should be a nice little flag to know who's in support of basic human and constitutional rights as they apply to children and how's towing the government party line of the Zero Tolerance policy for the War on Drugs no matter what the costs are to human rights.
I'm glad to see lawsuits moving forward against the cable companies and I hope that someone takes on DirecTV for their new practice of forcing everyone to lease the equipment even after paying a $99 or $199 purchase fee and getting hit with $4.99 lease fee a month on top of other service charges.
Eight or nine years back when DirecTV was getting started I was happy to sign up without a contract and also to purchase my own Sony SAT-T60 series 1 DirecTivo receiver for a few hundred dollars and I didn't mind the one-time expense knowing that I'd own the equipment and I could upgrade it or hack it for more storage, which is what most folks ended up doing. Now that HDTV is out I looked at upgrading my DirecTV equipment and I found their new equipment lease policy in the contract which immediately ticked me off knowing that I'd be renting the equipment and I couldn't upgrade it or hack it and that I would be paying for this stuff in perpetuity. So I contacted DirecTV and asked them about the Lease and if I had the option of right-out buying out the equipment and they sent me their form letter responses.
Basically I have no choice but to lease and now I feel like we're back to the old AT&T days when you would rent their telephone receiver for decades overpaying for it hundreds times over. They also charge you a $199 first time fee that is not the purchase price of the item and then you still get charged $4.99 a month on top of a 2-year contract.
Additionally they broke their relationship with Tivo so their current DirecTV receivers do not come with the Tivo software and there are a few complaints about their current HD DVR receivers. They recently started working again with Tivo to build a new DirecTivo HD DVR receiver that might be available sometime in 2009.
After finding out all of this I lost interest in upgrading my DirecTV for HD content and after realizing the simple fact that I do not ever watch regular TV programming anymore, I did the only sane thing and cancelled my entire DirecTV service after being a 9-year customer.
Lately most of my entertainment comes from the computer and I subscribe to the serial shows that I like to watch (Californication, Entourage, Weeds, Stargate Atlantis, etc.) which is basically what the DirecTivo was doing for me previously.
PS: I wish that someone would also go after these companies and other service providers like mobile phone carriers for the 1 to 2 year lock-in contracts.
DirecTV Receivers
Here's a link to a story regarding the Crosswalk Sign replacements in NYC to the new LED signs. Includes pictures.
Social Design Notes - Crosswalk Usability - 2004-04-08
I just hope that they invest in better LED technology and higher quality control standards than when NYC rolled out the LED based crosswalk signs for pedestrians, the ones with the orange hand and white walking figure.
Throughout the city you can see quite a few of these signs failing in sometimes very spectacular fashion, such as displaying both the hand and the walker at the same time blinking or solid. Other times multiple LEDs have become non-functional and the patterns have changed to comical designs with various fingers missing from the stop hand or body parts missing from the walking figure. I've seen tons of these broken signs but still I'm missing that elusive middle-finger gesture.
One thing that the city did very well is the progressive upgrade of the intersection lights (red, yellow, green) to LEDs. The started off with changing out only the green lights and after the change you noticed right away the super bright new green light at the intersection. At certain times of the evening the new green LEDs are so bright that is almost hurts to look at them directly, but I don't know if this is a physical thing with the human eve being more sensitive to green or with power fluctuations at that time of the day.
After the green light change they changed out the red lights and lastly they did the yellow lights. Since the changes I've seen a number of intersection lights be burnt out or non-functional and I have called them into the new consolidated city wide services line at phone number 311 and the city came and replaced them in a day or two. The failure rate for the intersection lights is a lot lower than for the crosswalk signs, and that's a great thing since the city has many more crazy dangerous drivers than insane pedestrians as it is.
Let's hope the use high quality LEDs and electronics in these new street lights.
People are not going to switch to SSDs and dump their HDDs for the simple reason that they don't have to. SSD adoption will increase overtime, slowly at first as we're seeing now, to a much faster rate until SSDs become the standard for laptops and then start drifting into performance desktop and finally into mainstream desktops.
The systems will mostly end up configured with the SSD for the main OS and program's drive and the HDDs for mass media storage internally and externally for mobility. Over many years as memory densities improve and cost become lower SSDs will become more of a standard. HDDs will be far and away more cost effective in terms of price/storage ratio and that's fine and they will have their own niche in the market for their low cost and large capacities whereas the SSDs will be high cost and lower capacities but with higher performance.
I think that this is a great thing and it shows the evolutionary process in computer technology.
Who uses floppy disks anymore when flash drives have become the standard small capacity removable media?
I forgot to mention one of the most important things about working as a systems administrator and that is the fact that this position should only be used as a stepping stone towards another type of work, such as management, engineering, project consulting, or running your own computer business. The reason for this is that as a systems administrator your job focuses on a runaround dealing mostly with resolving issues and performing tasks to enable operations on a day to day basis. This is an endless cycle of issue resolution requiring immediate attention that generates stress as a natural byproduct and over extended periods of time this stress slowly builds up that will either build you up and motivate you to learn and move to another position or it will break you down and turn you into an ineffectual administrator.
Working in fast paced and high demand environments such as enterprise sized computing in multinational firms does this to many administrators who in turn either break down or move out of administration to focus on another type of work in technology such as management roles, or try to take on project work instead of administration and operations to balance the issue resolution work with improvement and design type projects.
As a younger technologist I always looked towards systems administration as a holy panacea of positions and I always dreamt of becoming a systems administrator. After attaining my goal and after years of working as one and becoming one of the more technically senior ones in many of the departments that I worked at I always looked up towards engineering as the next position on my career track. I looked up to engineering since this position was more focused on creation of new works through design and architecture work on projects as a solution to the repetitive and stress creating work that is performed through administration.
I started working towards this goal and I picked up a short contract a while back where I was the sole engineer on the project and as responsible for the entire analysis, recommendation, design, and to a small extent the implementation of the project. I worked with a project manager to carry out this project and hand my design work to systems administrators who would carry out the work. I really enjoyed the creation part of this project since I was able to utilize my expertise and knowledge of systems administration to analyze and plan the design of the work. Then with the project manager I demonstrated the design to the business management and got the go ahead to create the design. At this point I utilized my scripting and automation skills to create a number of scripts to automate the analysis and also the implementation of the work for the project. I then deployed the implementation scripts to the systems administrators working on the project and let them handle the operation of those scripts while also giving the project manager the metrics generating scripts to monitor the work that the administrators were performing. As the project moved along I had to redevelop some scripts and tweak others due to changing requirements. At that point my work on the project was finished and the daily operations were now being handled by the administrators and the progress monitoring was being done by the project manager.
After this project was finished I was very happy with the work that I have done and I was glad to be involved in the creation of new and useful products and processes that helped other people perform their work faster, easier, and better. This was a much more challenging and enjoyable work that required my expertise on the the systems that I used to administer but also required knowledge of other systems and their interaction amongst each other thus broadening the field of knowledge that was utilized to carry out this project. Since the systems themselves are rigid in their design the hard difficulties came from the flaws in their design or implementation that basically required the solution or workaround. The soft problems
If you are naturally a computer person then a degree is optional for you in your IT career since your experience and skills will speak a lot better as to your ability to do useful work for a company. If you have the knack for computers then you will be able to go a long way just on that alone. Many of today's computer degree programs focus on theoretical knowledge and seem like they are designed for people more interested in the science part of technology such as algorithm design and computational design work and not for systems administration or engineering skills.
If you are looking to be a systems administrator then you really need relevant experience for the systems that you are going to be administrating. That means that if you are going to work with vendor's server operating system you should be an expert on that vendor's desktop system. The skills that you learn hacking away at your desktop dealing with issues leads directly into the role of administrating server operating systems.
One thing that many people scoff at is vendor certifications but I personally feel that they are a good alternative to degree coursework. The certification training teaches you the very specific knowledge required to use and manage vendor hardware and software so that you become familiar with the vendor's design principles, implementation of those principles, installation, management, and troubleshooting of the system that you are being certified in. Many folks look down on certifications since they only think of them as a piece of paper and a title but the training for the certification is the important thing because it gives you very relevant skills for that vendor's product. That training is a lot more useful and relevant to an employer and yourself when working with a specific product in your job because it teaches you how to do things exactly the way that the vendor planned. This is an important thing to know since many vendors use very strange ways of doing simple things. Degree coursework in a college only teaches you the theoretical and this knowledge, while very deep, is far too distant from a particular implementation and it takes a lot to transfer to actual useful knowledge.
I am sure that many people will with disagree with me about the value of certification and recommend a degree program instead but everyone is welcome to their own opinion.
A previous poster on this thread mentioned that systems administration should be an apprenticeship based program versus a computer science degree type program and I wholeheartedly agree. The skills required to deal with daily operations and troubleshooting of computer systems is mostly based on experience and training with a particular implementation more than deep knowledge of generalized theoretical ideology. It is much more valuable to know how a vendor implemented the debugging procedure in a system than to know the basis for a debugging in systems design when you are the one responsible for fixing a problem that is happening right now with a critical production system.
I as an example started as a computer kid upgrading his Tandy in elementary school and playing computer games in high school to end up working as a computer repair guy in a retail store fixing problems with people's personal computers and installing upgrades for them. It was a logical career progression after dropping out of an unchallenging high school program. Do what comes naturally to you and you will always be paid well. The retailer had a requirement for certain number of certified technicians to work in the department so that they could advertise it so the company put me on the track to taking the first desktop hardware certification. I read the certification book and learned a few interesting facts that I never knew about systems then did the test which was not difficult since the practice at the repair shot and study of the materials paid off. I later studied and earned certifications for most of the other equipment that was being repaired there for e