Well, for a start AOL actually *PAY* to have those CDs distributed and therefore, presumably, there is a limit to how many they send in one go - 5 million _does_ cost more to send than 500.
While I am personally sick of a) fixing customer pcs infected with the AOL Dialler virus and b) sick of throwing the damned things out, at least AOL absorb a significant portion of the cost of their mailings.
> But that doesn't mean that anyone who in associated with the same political party is equally crooked.
Oh come on! These are *politicians* we are talking about. Of course they are all equally crooked.
The only way to get non crooked politicians is to immediately ban anyone wanting to hold and public office from doing so. I'm afraid I have no idea what you'd replace them with though although some form of jury-style selection might work. Of course, this will never happen as the politicians will have to vote themselves out of a job!
Already available on the IBM HS20 Blade servers. 1GB, 2GB or 4GB flash drives. The cost is pretty high though - the 1GB lists at uk£881, the 2GB at £1388 and the 4GB at £2152
The IBM x336 actually has 2 PCI slots plus a third dedicated PCI-like slot for the out-of-band management card. It has 2 Xeon processors (up to 3.6GHz) and 8 memory slots. Add in hot-swap PSUs, 4 (2.5") SCSI disks with onboard RAID, onboard dual gigabit ethernet ports and a built-in KVM switch solution and that's a pretty neat package for a 1U server. Of course, the 346 which is 2U can do all of that and some (5 PCI slots and 6x 3.5" SCSI hotswap or 4x hotswap plus a half high tape iirc but no KVM)
The IBM xSeries 336 and the IBM HS20 blade servers both have the option to ship with 2.5" U320 10k rpm SCSI hotswap disks. The 336 has been available for a couple of months now. From what I've heard from my IBM contacts, performance is comparable to the equivalent 3.5" SCSI units.
IBM List prices (sorry I only have the UK pricing) is £277 for the 36.4GB and £450 for the 73.4GB units which compares to £179 and £280 for the equivalent 3.5" drives. Of course, no-one actually pays IBM list prices so you are looking at probably 5% off that for a standard "single server purchase" or anywhere up to about 40% for special bid pricing.
From past experience, if they can come up with something it will perform much worse and then they will just refuse to release meaningful benchmarks and ban their resellers (i.e. the likes of Dell) from doing so either. If you look at the Storage Performance Council website, you will notice a lack of EMC benchmarks you will notice one glaring omission - EMC! This is because their performance wasn't up to spec and they threw their toys out of the pram...
A LUN (logical unit number) is specific to the host and is effectively the physical disk number. The number of LUNs supported is very much dependant on the OS (Windows/Solaris support 256 and Linux supports 128 due to RDAC limitations currently).
Storage partitioning is configured at the storage device level and is a logical grouping of logical drives, host groups and hosts to control access and improve performance. The number of partitions supported depends on how much you want to pay IBM:) A standard FAStT600 supports 1 storage partition, a FAStT600 Turbo will support up to 4 and a FAStT900 will support up to 8 iirc.
The IBM FAStT range have just been renamed to DS4x00 (the 600 is the DS4300, 700 is the DS4400 and 900 is the DS4500). Saying that, they are all rebadged LSI Logic (Engenio) devices anyway. The DS6000 and DS8000 products are basically a refresh/replacement of the old ESS product set.
You mention the ability to do server-free backups - this can also be done on the FAStT (DS4x00) products if you pay the extra for the Premium Features such as Flashcopy, Logical Drive Copy and Remote Mirroring which are available on the 600 Turbo, 700 and 900 models.
Alex (currently actually on an IBM DS4x00 training course!)
As you've probably already discovered from reading this thread, there are several RAID levels to choose from depending on whether you choose SCSI, IDE, SATA, FC or whatever disks.
Before I continue I'd probably better own up that I work for an IBM reseller so I'm using their standard terminology for RAID levels but the other major vendors (HPaq/Dell/Adaptec/etc) have similar things available but may call it something different (aren't standards great!)
There are numerous RAID levels but the most common are RAID-0,1,5 and, more recently, RAID-1E, RAID-50 and RAID-5E. There are also several RAID-x0 options (RAID-00, 10, 1E0 and 50)
RAID-0 also known as data striping. It is well-suited for program libraries requiring rapid loading of large tables, or more generally, applications requiring fast access to read-only data, or fast writing. RAID 0 is only designed to increase performance; there is no redundancy, so any disk failures require reloading from backups. Select RAID Level 0 for applications that would benefit from the increased performance capabilities of this RAID Level. Never use this level for critical applications that require high availability.
RAID-1 RAID 1 is also known as disk mirroring. It is most suited to applications that require high data availability, good read response times, and where cost is a secondary issue. The response time for writes can be somewhat slower than for a single disk, depending on the write policy; the writes can either be executed in parallel for speed or serially for safety. Select RAID Level 1 for applications with a high percentage of read operations and where the cost is not the major concern.
RAID-2 and RAID-3 - RAID 3 and RAID 2 are parallel process array mechanisms, where all drives in the array operate in unison. Similar to data striping, information to be written to disk is split into chunks (a fixed amount of data), and each chunk is written out to the same physical position on separate disks (in parallel). More advanced versions of RAID 2 and 3 synchronize the disk spindles so that the reads and writes can truly occur simultaneously (minimizing rotational latency buildups between disks). This architecture requires parity information to be written for each stripe of data; the difference between RAID 2 and RAID 3 is that RAID 2 can utilize multiple disk drives for parity, while RAID 3 can use only one. The LVM does not support Raid 3; therefore, a RAID 3 array must be used as a raw device from the host system.
Performance is very good for large amounts of data but poor for small requests because every drive is always involved, and there can be no overlapped or independent operation. It is well-suited for large data objects such as CAD/CAM or image files, or applications requiring sequential access to large data files. Select RAID 3 for applications that process large blocks of data. RAID 3 provides redundancy without the high overhead incurred by mirroring in RAID 1.
RAID-4 RAID 4 addresses some of the disadvantages of RAID 3 by using larger chunks of data and striping the data across all of the drives except the one reserved for parity. Write requests require a read/modify/update cycle that creates a bottleneck at the single parity drive. Therefore, RAID 4 is not used as often as RAID 5, which implements the same process, but without the parity volume bottleneck.
RAID-5 RAID 5, as has been mentioned, is very similar to RAID 4. The difference is that the parity information is distributed across the same disks used for the data, thereby eliminating the bottleneck. Parity data is never stored on the same drive as the chunks that it protects. This means that concurrent read and write operations can now be performed, and there are performance increases due to the availability of an extra disk (the disk previously used for parity). There are other enhancements possible to further increase data transfer rates, such as caching simultaneous reads from the disks and transferring that inform
Amen to the banning of phones in lots of places but surely just because there is an _incredibly_ _slight_ chance of something bad happening is no reason to legislate against something or we'd all end up never doing anything at all. Does the chance of getting run down when crossing the street stop you from doing so? I can guarantee more people are injured/killed crossing the street than in mobile phone related gas station explosions but its not illegal to cross. How about flying? Lots of people fly (they say that statistically its the safest form of transport) and some die in horrible air crashes each year - again more than those who die in mobile phone/gas station disasters but lots of us still do it.
Most "accidents" can be prevented by a nanny state through the judicious use of legislation - hey, lets ban everything that has even a slight chance of being dangerous - but I thank god (figuratively at least) that I don't live in one, at least not yet!
Just how statistically probable does something need to be in order for you to want it banned? Lets look at the probability of a mobile phone/gas station disaster... I'll take your figure of 100 accidents and say that you mean per year (you didn't specify) - this seems a little high but we'll take this figure to start. Next, we'll estimate how many people in the world own or drive both cars and mobile phones - This article suggests that worldwide, the number of cars in use are somewhere between 580 (1990) and 816 (2010 est.) million - lets be conservative and say it has not increased at all since 1990. Finally we need to know how frequently they are refuelled. Lets estimate that, on average, a car uses one tank of gas per fortnight (lets in fact round down to two tanks per month). That makes 24 visits to the gas station per vehicle per month.
Now we'll estimate the number of car owner/drivers who also own mobile phones. A quick google leads to this article which in turn references several other sources. It would appear that both Europe and North America (the majority car owning nations) are reaching the stage where everyone who wants a mobile phone has one - lets call this around 70% of both car owners and mobile phone owners. so:
(580 million car/owners x 70%) x 24 fill-ups = 9.7 BILLION visits to the gas station annually.
So if there are 100 incidents, the probability is 1 in 97,000,000. Lets put that in perspective - the chance of winning the Canadian lottery is 1 in 13,983,816 and the chance of dying in a plane crash is 1 in 11,000,000 and the chance of dying in a car accident is (from the same source) 1 in 5,000.
So, statistically, its far safer to talk on your mobile phone whilst filling up than it was to drive to the gas station in the first place - by a huge margin!
Maybe we don't need to ban mobile phones at forecourts, maybe we need to ban cars:)
How likely is it though as I don't remember seeing a single case of a petrol station catching fire as a result of someone using a mobile phone and I regularly see people using mobiles on the forecourt...
If you're going to go around wildly disagreeing me (not that I mind - I am usually wrong;) ) then at least read the link I posted which thoroughly refutes the mobile phone/exploding gas station hypothesis. As you are un[able|willing] to follow the link I was going to summarise bits of it below but to be honest, its hard to pick out bits that aren't relevant so I suggest going back and re-reading the linked article
Sorry, not meaning to have a go but the risk has nothing to do with the field strength and therefore your arguements about the inverse square law are entirely superfluous. If we were discussing the (alleged) cancer-giving properties of EM radiation given out by mobiles then your arguement would be correct but we are not - we are discussing the possibility of fire and/or explosion as a result of using a mobile phone on a gas station forecourt and that needs three things:
1. A source of fuel 2. A source of oxygen 3. A source of ignition
1 and 2 are obviously there but how does a mobile phone battery provide a naked spark? Just go get your phone, and look at the design of it - it is very difficult to imagine a situation where the battery contacts can short out in such a way as to produce a sufficiently large spark to cause a fuel/air mixture such as that likely at a gas station to ignite.
Why not have the DM just do all the rolls and let (or not) the players know what the results are. Some of the best D&D games I played were done with no player dice rolling whatever. It makes for far better storytelling if the DM can frig the numbers every now and again in order to improve the story.
Things that I have noticed personally are elements of resource management from RTS's applying to efficient living in the real world.
Yeah, I've found that too. In fact, I've got the kids out back in the yard collecting food and my wife is chopping up a tree for the wood. Meanwhile I've got the dog digging in the basement for gold and I'm nearly finished building a new wonder on the patio:)
I can almost guarantee that the "special hardware" is a version of the IBM SP-Switch which was originally designed to run large RS6000 clusters and is now also available on the Netfinity.
Have a look at http://www.pc.ibm.com/us/netfinity/sp_switch.html for more details...
Slashdot Mirror
Well, for a start AOL actually *PAY* to have those CDs distributed and therefore, presumably, there is a limit to how many they send in one go - 5 million _does_ cost more to send than 500.
While I am personally sick of a) fixing customer pcs infected with the AOL Dialler virus and b) sick of throwing the damned things out, at least AOL absorb a significant portion of the cost of their mailings.
> But that doesn't mean that anyone who in associated with the same political party is equally crooked.
Oh come on! These are *politicians* we are talking about. Of course they are all equally crooked.
The only way to get non crooked politicians is to immediately ban anyone wanting to hold and public office from doing so. I'm afraid I have no idea what you'd replace them with though although some form of jury-style selection might work. Of course, this will never happen as the politicians will have to vote themselves out of a job!
Already available on the IBM HS20 Blade servers. 1GB, 2GB or 4GB flash drives. The cost is pretty high though - the 1GB lists at uk£881, the 2GB at £1388 and the 4GB at £2152
The IBM x336 actually has 2 PCI slots plus a third dedicated PCI-like slot for the out-of-band management card. It has 2 Xeon processors (up to 3.6GHz) and 8 memory slots. Add in hot-swap PSUs, 4 (2.5") SCSI disks with onboard RAID, onboard dual gigabit ethernet ports and a built-in KVM switch solution and that's a pretty neat package for a 1U server. Of course, the 346 which is 2U can do all of that and some (5 PCI slots and 6x 3.5" SCSI hotswap or 4x hotswap plus a half high tape iirc but no KVM)
been there. done that. It works as advertised. Next question... lol
The IBM xSeries 336 and the IBM HS20 blade servers both have the option to ship with 2.5" U320 10k rpm SCSI hotswap disks. The 336 has been available for a couple of months now. From what I've heard from my IBM contacts, performance is comparable to the equivalent 3.5" SCSI units.
IBM List prices (sorry I only have the UK pricing) is £277 for the 36.4GB and £450 for the 73.4GB units which compares to £179 and £280 for the equivalent 3.5" drives. Of course, no-one actually pays IBM list prices so you are looking at probably 5% off that for a standard "single server purchase" or anywhere up to about 40% for special bid pricing.
From past experience, if they can come up with something it will perform much worse and then they will just refuse to release meaningful benchmarks and ban their resellers (i.e. the likes of Dell) from doing so either. If you look at the Storage Performance Council website, you will notice a lack of EMC benchmarks you will notice one glaring omission - EMC! This is because their performance wasn't up to spec and they threw their toys out of the pram...
Just a quick one - Partitions != LUNs.
:) A standard FAStT600 supports 1 storage partition, a FAStT600 Turbo will support up to 4 and a FAStT900 will support up to 8 iirc.
A LUN (logical unit number) is specific to the host and is effectively the physical disk number. The number of LUNs supported is very much dependant on the OS (Windows/Solaris support 256 and Linux supports 128 due to RDAC limitations currently).
Storage partitioning is configured at the storage device level and is a logical grouping of logical drives, host groups and hosts to control access and improve performance. The number of partitions supported depends on how much you want to pay IBM
The IBM FAStT range have just been renamed to DS4x00 (the 600 is the DS4300, 700 is the DS4400 and 900 is the DS4500). Saying that, they are all rebadged LSI Logic (Engenio) devices anyway. The DS6000 and DS8000 products are basically a refresh/replacement of the old ESS product set.
You mention the ability to do server-free backups - this can also be done on the FAStT (DS4x00) products if you pay the extra for the Premium Features such as Flashcopy, Logical Drive Copy and Remote Mirroring which are available on the 600 Turbo, 700 and 900 models.
Alex (currently actually on an IBM DS4x00 training course!)
What a complete load of bullshit. On what evidence do you base your statements?
Before I continue I'd probably better own up that I work for an IBM reseller so I'm using their standard terminology for RAID levels but the other major vendors (HPaq/Dell/Adaptec/etc) have similar things available but may call it something different (aren't standards great!)
There are numerous RAID levels but the most common are RAID-0,1,5 and, more recently, RAID-1E, RAID-50 and RAID-5E. There are also several RAID-x0 options (RAID-00, 10, 1E0 and 50)
RAID-0 also known as data striping. It is well-suited for program libraries requiring rapid loading of large tables, or more generally, applications requiring fast access to read-only data, or fast writing. RAID 0 is only designed to increase performance; there is no redundancy, so any disk failures require reloading from backups. Select RAID Level 0 for applications that would benefit from the increased performance capabilities of this RAID Level. Never use this level for critical applications that require high availability.
RAID-1 RAID 1 is also known as disk mirroring. It is most suited to applications that require high data availability, good read response times, and where cost is a secondary issue. The response time for writes can be somewhat slower than for a single disk, depending on the write policy; the writes can either be executed in parallel for speed or serially for safety. Select RAID Level 1 for applications with a high percentage of read operations and where the cost is not the major concern.
RAID-2 and RAID-3 - RAID 3 and RAID 2 are parallel process array mechanisms, where all drives in the array operate in unison. Similar to data striping, information to be written to disk is split into chunks (a fixed amount of data), and each chunk is written out to the same physical position on separate disks (in parallel). More advanced versions of RAID 2 and 3 synchronize the disk spindles so that the reads and writes can truly occur simultaneously (minimizing rotational latency buildups between disks). This architecture requires parity information to be written for each stripe of data; the difference between RAID 2 and RAID 3 is that RAID 2 can utilize multiple disk drives for parity, while RAID 3 can use only one. The LVM does not support Raid 3; therefore, a RAID 3 array must be used as a raw device from the host system.
Performance is very good for large amounts of data but poor for small requests because every drive is always involved, and there can be no overlapped or independent operation. It is well-suited for large data objects such as CAD/CAM or image files, or applications requiring sequential access to large data files. Select RAID 3 for applications that process large blocks of data. RAID 3 provides redundancy without the high overhead incurred by mirroring in RAID 1.
RAID-4 RAID 4 addresses some of the disadvantages of RAID 3 by using larger chunks of data and striping the data across all of the drives except the one reserved for parity. Write requests require a read/modify/update cycle that creates a bottleneck at the single parity drive. Therefore, RAID 4 is not used as often as RAID 5, which implements the same process, but without the parity volume bottleneck.
RAID-5 RAID 5, as has been mentioned, is very similar to RAID 4. The difference is that the parity information is distributed across the same disks used for the data, thereby eliminating the bottleneck. Parity data is never stored on the same drive as the chunks that it protects. This means that concurrent read and write operations can now be performed, and there are performance increases due to the availability of an extra disk (the disk previously used for parity). There are other enhancements possible to further increase data transfer rates, such as caching simultaneous reads from the disks and transferring that inform
Amen to the banning of phones in lots of places but surely just because there is an _incredibly_ _slight_ chance of something bad happening is no reason to legislate against something or we'd all end up never doing anything at all. Does the chance of getting run down when crossing the street stop you from doing so? I can guarantee more people are injured/killed crossing the street than in mobile phone related gas station explosions but its not illegal to cross. How about flying? Lots of people fly (they say that statistically its the safest form of transport) and some die in horrible air crashes each year - again more than those who die in mobile phone/gas station disasters but lots of us still do it.
:)
Most "accidents" can be prevented by a nanny state through the judicious use of legislation - hey, lets ban everything that has even a slight chance of being dangerous - but I thank god (figuratively at least) that I don't live in one, at least not yet!
Just how statistically probable does something need to be in order for you to want it banned? Lets look at the probability of a mobile phone/gas station disaster... I'll take your figure of 100 accidents and say that you mean per year (you didn't specify) - this seems a little high but we'll take this figure to start. Next, we'll estimate how many people in the world own or drive both cars and mobile phones - This article suggests that worldwide, the number of cars in use are somewhere between 580 (1990) and 816 (2010 est.) million - lets be conservative and say it has not increased at all since 1990. Finally we need to know how frequently they are refuelled. Lets estimate that, on average, a car uses one tank of gas per fortnight (lets in fact round down to two tanks per month). That makes 24 visits to the gas station per vehicle per month.
Now we'll estimate the number of car owner/drivers who also own mobile phones. A quick google leads to this article which in turn references several other sources. It would appear that both Europe and North America (the majority car owning nations) are reaching the stage where everyone who wants a mobile phone has one - lets call this around 70% of both car owners and mobile phone owners. so:
(580 million car/owners x 70%) x 24 fill-ups = 9.7 BILLION visits to the gas station annually.
So if there are 100 incidents, the probability is 1 in 97,000,000. Lets put that in perspective - the chance of winning the Canadian lottery is 1 in 13,983,816 and the chance of dying in a plane crash is 1 in 11,000,000 and the chance of dying in a car accident is (from the same source) 1 in 5,000.
So, statistically, its far safer to talk on your mobile phone whilst filling up than it was to drive to the gas station in the first place - by a huge margin!
Maybe we don't need to ban mobile phones at forecourts, maybe we need to ban cars
I bow to your superior knowledge on the matter .
How likely is it though as I don't remember seeing a single case of a petrol station catching fire as a result of someone using a mobile phone and I regularly see people using mobiles on the forecourt...
Sorry, not meaning to have a go but the risk has nothing to do with the field strength and therefore your arguements about the inverse square law are entirely superfluous. If we were discussing the (alleged) cancer-giving properties of EM radiation given out by mobiles then your arguement would be correct but we are not - we are discussing the possibility of fire and/or explosion as a result of using a mobile phone on a gas station forecourt and that needs three things:
1. A source of fuel
2. A source of oxygen
3. A source of ignition
1 and 2 are obviously there but how does a mobile phone battery provide a naked spark? Just go get your phone, and look at the design of it - it is very difficult to imagine a situation where the battery contacts can short out in such a way as to produce a sufficiently large spark to cause a fuel/air mixture such as that likely at a gas station to ignite.
Thats interesting because in the UK, Shell Texaco (and maybe others) will quite happily allow the mobile phone networks to install base stations in their signs. See here, here and for an interesting scientific refutation of the issue, here (note - link to pdf doc). Sounds like a case of double standards to me.
Why not have the DM just do all the rolls and let (or not) the players know what the results are. Some of the best D&D games I played were done with no player dice rolling whatever. It makes for far better storytelling if the DM can frig the numbers every now and again in order to improve the story.
Things that I have noticed personally are elements of resource management from RTS's applying to efficient living in the real world. Yeah, I've found that too. In fact, I've got the kids out back in the yard collecting food and my wife is chopping up a tree for the wood. Meanwhile I've got the dog digging in the basement for gold and I'm nearly finished building a new wonder on the patio :)
I can almost guarantee that the "special hardware" is a version of the IBM SP-Switch which was originally designed to run large RS6000 clusters and is now also available on the Netfinity.
:)
Have a look at http://www.pc.ibm.com/us/netfinity/sp_switch.html
for more details...
(ok, I own up... I work for an IBM Reseller