The database is often in one (compact) file, and if you are editing just one byte of it you will have to erase & rewrite an entire flash block when you commit your data.
Only if you buy a crappy flash drive with a crappy controller. The good ones are worth the extra money.
It's still a relatively trivial usage for today's good SSDs, even MLC ones. They can handle tens or in some cases hundreds of gigabytes of writes per day, depending on the model.
I don't think most people realize just how little data they write to their drives in normal usage.
The OP stated they have a business need for moving gigabytes of data quickly around the office. Spending the extra money on a real server's power consumption would save them thousands of dollars a day worth of their time.
Even the cost of the power is pretty minimal for this... Figure 500 watts for 24 hours is 12 kWh. At worst you pay $0.20/kWh, which is a hair over $2/day, assuming 24 hours/day usage. My linux PC NAS in the basement saturates gigE and is under 100 watts active power consumption, or about $0.40/day by california pricing.
I think those little mini NAS boxes suck for all but the simplest home applications, and they're penny-wise/pound-foolish for data-intensive business applications.
The PS3 is a pretty advanced processing platform, much like today's top-end video cards, especially when working with large sets of data doing floating point math. I'm not surprised at all that it can match the performance of 200 or so pentium-grade cores. (After all, joe blow researcher doesn't get time on one of those top-5 boxes when he signs his check for $5k.... he gets yesterday's tech)
In many industries, this eventually gets resolved as the manufacturers realize that everyone is gaming the system, so they define new metrics that are perhaps harder to game, to help distinguish the quality of their products.
One example would be the move from "response time" in LCD panels, to "grey to grey response time" which prevents advertising of just one of the hyperfast transitions. (Can't remember whether black-to-white or white-to-black is the faster one)
In comparison, the average PG&E Customer in California pays $0.114 per kWh up to their baseline usage, then it goes up to $0.3707/kWh if you triple the baseline household. The baseline is anywhere from 700kWh to 1100kWh per month, and roughly halves in the summer.
When your electricity is a fraction of the cost of other states, it really torpedos some of the savings of CFLs (though we have maybe 8 in our house now) and completely kills any sort of personal solar initiatives.
One computer costs $1,000 in hardware. One employee costs $120,000 per year, with burdening. One "mission-critical" application costs anywhere from $800 (AutoCAD 2007) to $5,000 (Inventor 11, non-pro.) One WinXP Pro license costs mere $150 even if you buy it at maximum cost, as a retail box. Now, aren't you putting the cart way ahead of the horse? A single wasted hour of any of your employees' time (or your own) will cost as much as an XP Pro license. Have your numbers straight before switching, and have very good reasons to switch.
I agree with your general point, that the OS costs are trivial compared to the applications, but I think the scale for many companies is an order of magnitude or more higher. Many companies can afford a separate platform for each application when necessary. I've worked at companies where an old box running SunOS was purchased just for running a specific version of the VHDL toolset they liked. $100k/seat for 10 engineers means that the $20k they spent on the box to run it was trivial. Whenever a group had a new application they wanted to work with, they got whatever box or platform it had to run on to try it.
I think the key to a good IT group and a good migration plan is the flexibility to support Windows, Linux, Solaris, SunOS, HP-UX, and everything in between without freaking out. Sure, the more esoteric systems will require more user assistance and can't just be supported through the IT help desk, but users demanding those applications tend to be significantly more technically savvy. Besides, what support is really necessary besides occasional patches and regular backups? The applications are how the business gets their work done, and for a lot of specialized tools, you can't pick your platform.
Wiki at some level requires the generosity of the users with their own time (or else paid to do it). After you had that exchange in email to answer a question, someone should have cut and paste the question and answer into the wiki, so that all others could read it. There's no time wasted.
Wiki doesn't have to be the QA forum, but the process needs to come full circle to get the information into the wiki if the original exchange is via another technique.
Energy density of the raw charge storing material is lower with LiPo, but it doesn't require the same packaging/metal casing, so net energy density is higher.
Something like 2.5 times as much power per weight as Li-Ion battery packs. It's revolutionized RC electrics.
Models that were designed for NiMH cells and were getting 4-5 minutes of flight time, can now get 15 or more minutes of flight.
$300 to replace an identical server motherboard, plus an hour of time. Versus a complete set of new hardware, OS install, new set of drivers on an untested platform, etc.
If the average motherboard lasts 3 years (we've probably seen less, due to bad/leaking capacitors on certain makes/models of motherboard) and you admin 150 servers in some datacenter, that'll average 1 motherboard/week.
Youtube doesn't have money, they have the promise of money. Unlike trademarks, copyright enforcement is allowed to be selective, therefore, any copyright holder can just sit back, wait for someone with deep pockets to buy youtube, then go sue them for the 440,000 downloads of "my cat bill barfs a hairball" or whatever at $150 per infringement.
I spun up a debian etch snapshot in a VM this morning and Evolution was connected to my corporate exchange server just a few minutes later. OpenOffice runs as well, just fine.
I assume those'll run nearly as well on Solaris as well as Linux, being open source.
Slashdot Mirror
What would a monopoly case have to do with it?
Just because you're the little guy who's facing a much larger competitor, doesn't give you the freedom to break licensing agreements.
The database is often in one (compact) file, and if you are editing just one byte of it you will have to erase & rewrite an entire flash block when you commit your data.
Only if you buy a crappy flash drive with a crappy controller. The good ones are worth the extra money.
It's still a relatively trivial usage for today's good SSDs, even MLC ones. They can handle tens or in some cases hundreds of gigabytes of writes per day, depending on the model.
I don't think most people realize just how little data they write to their drives in normal usage.
The Intel X25-M uses MLC and is faster than a rotating drive for most common operations, significantly faster in random IO.
Is 26-100 still wooden chairs?
Did you know gullible isn't in the dictionary?
The OP stated they have a business need for moving gigabytes of data quickly around the office. Spending the extra money on a real server's power consumption would save them thousands of dollars a day worth of their time.
Even the cost of the power is pretty minimal for this... Figure 500 watts for 24 hours is 12 kWh. At worst you pay $0.20/kWh, which is a hair over $2/day, assuming 24 hours/day usage. My linux PC NAS in the basement saturates gigE and is under 100 watts active power consumption, or about $0.40/day by california pricing.
I think those little mini NAS boxes suck for all but the simplest home applications, and they're penny-wise/pound-foolish for data-intensive business applications.
I've used monoprice.com for a lot of my HD cabling, they all seem to be of excellent quality, and order processing is fast.
Please mod the parent up.
The PS3 is a pretty advanced processing platform, much like today's top-end video cards, especially when working with large sets of data doing floating point math. I'm not surprised at all that it can match the performance of 200 or so pentium-grade cores. (After all, joe blow researcher doesn't get time on one of those top-5 boxes when he signs his check for $5k.... he gets yesterday's tech)
In many industries, this eventually gets resolved as the manufacturers realize that everyone is gaming the system, so they define new metrics that are perhaps harder to game, to help distinguish the quality of their products.
One example would be the move from "response time" in LCD panels, to "grey to grey response time" which prevents advertising of just one of the hyperfast transitions. (Can't remember whether black-to-white or white-to-black is the faster one)
I'm guessing "Gaming application" would translate to speeding the cluster server-side, not something like a PS4 or WiiII.
Halving the number of disks they need for the same performance might allow for double the players per hardware investment.
--eric
If you never use more than a few hundred meg on a relay, why not just add a $30 stick of RAM, and get a million ops/sec?
you do realize that with the power consumption of a PS3, your folding is spending a few dollars a month right?
remote swap on a shared resource is a disaster under load
It also affects the equation because Colorado has some of the cheapest electricty in the country.
. pdf ...the average Residential price for electricity in the US in the first 9 months of 2006 was $0.1047/kWh, while in Colorado we pay $0.05546/kWh.
According to the Energy Information Administration of the DOE:
http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/mer/pdf/pages/sec9_14
In comparison, the average PG&E Customer in California pays $0.114 per kWh up to their baseline usage, then it goes up to $0.3707/kWh if you triple the baseline household. The baseline is anywhere from 700kWh to 1100kWh per month, and roughly halves in the summer.
When your electricity is a fraction of the cost of other states, it really torpedos some of the savings of CFLs (though we have maybe 8 in our house now) and completely kills any sort of personal solar initiatives.
One computer costs $1,000 in hardware. One employee costs $120,000 per year, with burdening. One "mission-critical" application costs anywhere from $800 (AutoCAD 2007) to $5,000 (Inventor 11, non-pro.) One WinXP Pro license costs mere $150 even if you buy it at maximum cost, as a retail box. Now, aren't you putting the cart way ahead of the horse? A single wasted hour of any of your employees' time (or your own) will cost as much as an XP Pro license. Have your numbers straight before switching, and have very good reasons to switch.
I agree with your general point, that the OS costs are trivial compared to the applications, but I think the scale for many companies is an order of magnitude or more higher. Many companies can afford a separate platform for each application when necessary. I've worked at companies where an old box running SunOS was purchased just for running a specific version of the VHDL toolset they liked. $100k/seat for 10 engineers means that the $20k they spent on the box to run it was trivial. Whenever a group had a new application they wanted to work with, they got whatever box or platform it had to run on to try it.
I think the key to a good IT group and a good migration plan is the flexibility to support Windows, Linux, Solaris, SunOS, HP-UX, and everything in between without freaking out. Sure, the more esoteric systems will require more user assistance and can't just be supported through the IT help desk, but users demanding those applications tend to be significantly more technically savvy. Besides, what support is really necessary besides occasional patches and regular backups? The applications are how the business gets their work done, and for a lot of specialized tools, you can't pick your platform.
Whoring, but for people too lazy to google, that macro and others are documented here:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Word_macros
Sounds like someone was lazy.
Wiki at some level requires the generosity of the users with their own time (or else paid to do it). After you had that exchange in email to answer a question, someone should have cut and paste the question and answer into the wiki, so that all others could read it. There's no time wasted.
Wiki doesn't have to be the QA forum, but the process needs to come full circle to get the information into the wiki if the original exchange is via another technique.
exactly.
Energy density of the raw charge storing material is lower with LiPo, but it doesn't require the same packaging/metal casing, so net energy density is higher.
Something like 2.5 times as much power per weight as Li-Ion battery packs. It's revolutionized RC electrics.
Models that were designed for NiMH cells and were getting 4-5 minutes of flight time, can now get 15 or more minutes of flight.
$300 to replace an identical server motherboard, plus an hour of time. Versus a complete set of new hardware, OS install, new set of drivers on an untested platform, etc.
No thanks.
If the average motherboard lasts 3 years (we've probably seen less, due to bad/leaking capacitors on certain makes/models of motherboard) and you admin 150 servers in some datacenter, that'll average 1 motherboard/week.
google aggressively removes copyrighted material as well
Youtube doesn't have money, they have the promise of money. Unlike trademarks, copyright enforcement is allowed to be selective, therefore, any copyright holder can just sit back, wait for someone with deep pockets to buy youtube, then go sue them for the 440,000 downloads of "my cat bill barfs a hairball" or whatever at $150 per infringement.
I spun up a debian etch snapshot in a VM this morning and Evolution was connected to my corporate exchange server just a few minutes later. OpenOffice runs as well, just fine.
I assume those'll run nearly as well on Solaris as well as Linux, being open source.
I can't wait for my autosnipers to be $50