EMC, then you're in trouble. EMC charges for the software like you mentioned, for both the Clariion and Symmetrix. That is how they make their money. And technically, if you have the opportunity to buy a used Sym, then it is a semi-illegal sale, since EMC is the only authorized person to resell a Sym. Once you buy it, you're stuck with it.
Sun stuff is pretty good - all of the necessary software to use the array on a direct connect basis is available in the box. It's not pretty, but it works. You can config it using RaidUtil.
HP would probably lean towards the EMC model more than the Sun model. Software is their big push. You might be able to get it config'd on a direct attached basis, but dunno about in a SAN w/o appropriate software.
Compaq is the same as HP, but their stuff isn't as good.
Netapp? They seem to be the most user-friendly when it comes to used equip.
The whole issue was the "building block" approach. We toiled with this at my last job - is it better to lay down the bucks for something that is so rediculiously redundant, when all he needs is disk? If he's going to be recording as much as he says, he will need to make sure that he takes some of it OUT of the DC.
With the symmetrix, that really isn't an option. It's huge, forklift upgrade required. At least with the clariion (yeah, it sucks, but it IS an option) you can remove small parts of the huge array by a single person. Unless you are a government run DC with a forlift *IN* the DC, then the Sym-frame approach really isn't going to work.
Go with a FC solution - stay away from EMC, as they will try to sell you a massive Symmetrix for your needs. Sounds like you need a building block approach, one block a day. Doesn't need to be TOO fancy, eh?
Here are some options for FC disk storage:
- Sun T3
- EMC Clariion
- Compaq Storageworks
- HP VA7400 -- my fav
Just to warn you, you're looking at something on the order of 20k/day to operate this setup... now, I'm sure the price would go down QUITE a bit if you're purchasing 8-10TB a day, but even still, it's a huge cost.
I looked at a 10TB solution from the above vendors, and the cheapest I got it was $0.0425/MB!
I, as a representative of Acme Corp. am contacted by RegistryPro, asking if I would like to register AcmeCorp.pro. I politely decline the offer, and go about my merry way dealing with AcmeCorp.com as I always have done.
Shortly thereafter, a cybersquatter registers AcmeCorp.pro. I never see it, because I'm working with AcmeCorp.com.
Some Big Cheese at Acme Corp. finds out that someone has stolen AcmeCorp.pro from us! Acme Corp. then decides that they want the domain name.
- Insert long legal battle here
What happens then??? I think we've all seen this played out in other forms.
As a general rule of thumb, Computer Engineering (which I am a student of), deals mainly with hardware as you say. But another important aspect of engineering as a whole is problem solving.
An engineering degree teaches you how to think more than anything else. Now, it's true that as a comp-eng graduate, you can go do most things that a comp-sci major can, because you take many of the same classes. But it does not work the other way.
The engineering provides you the ability to 1) determine if a problem exists and 2) find the quickest, fastest, easiest, most efficient way to the solution.
Here's a classic example:
A computer science student is given the problem to write a sorting routine for 100 items. The comp-sci major will analyze each method to determine the optimum solution for ALL potential data sets, and therefore chose the solution that fits best in the long run.
A computer engineer just sees that they need to sort some short list, opens a book, and copies down the code for X sorting routine. They necessairly care that it's the most optimal thing, but it's one more step towards their goal of building a machine that will dominate the world.
One important aspect about the performance of FC is such that it is 100MB/s sustatined. That's about to double to 200MB/s when the 2GB FC spec comes out for approval.
I'm actually looking into creating a *massive* storage area network with a hybrid SAN/NAS architecture, since a "pure" SAN simply cost too much money. Look at the stats yourself:
1 Single port HBA (card for PC) - $800
1 16 port *non-blocking* FC switch - $25,000
1 64 port "director" switch (same RU's as a 6509 approx) - $250,000
So if you were to wire, say an entire row of 1U servers, then you would need, say 40 * 15 to make the math easy, = 600 servers.
You would need 10 director switches, and 600 HBA's.... approximately $3M (not including the interconnects). And to ignore the cost of fibre, that's saying something. And yes, I know I can use copper, but not over 15 meters, so fiber is the choice. (Plus, it looks really cool in a datacenter.)
And that is w/o storage! But let's look at that for a moment. A really cool company called Exadrive (not plugging the company here!) makes a 3RU enclosure that takes 24 ATA disks. At today's density that is 2TB. You double the density of the ATA drives, you get 4TB. Quite cool!
My problem is that I'm trying to do a 500TB system for about 10,000 machines. A pure SAN is technologically fesable, but not for a massive application.
I'm actually looking into removing the most of the switches and the HBAs by using SAN over IP. Cisco makes a product (through aquisition, no surprise) that actually takes the FC information, encapsulates it in IP, and ships it over the existing network. Granted, this is cool, but it could potentially hurt the network.
But if you're a video-creation house with Avid machines, or a massive real-time database, or some other application that warrants a full SAN, go for it. It's definetly worth the cost. But for my application...?
You should look into their NIC - As usual, the info is here.
I've met with these folks to talk about this specific card. Quite cool, as it offloads the IP stack on to the card to lessen the processor load on the actual CPU. They claim that for some applications, you will see as much as 100% performance increase.
Now, I have my doubts about that, but I can see something in the order of 30-45%. It has DMA and all sorts of other goodies that you'd expect, and it works quite well for fileservers (if that's what you're looking for.)
The one thing that I find amusing is that M$ is proposing 56,000 word briefs. I mean, c'mon! I doubt that there are 56,000 words that can be said about this!
"Bill Gates is good. Bill Gates did nothing wrong. You like Microsoft."
I mean it's garbage. Utter garbage. And to think of the dead trees! To quote the painter-guy-with-a-fro: "Little Happy Trees".
I'm not quite sure where you were using Metrocall service, but in my experience, they are TERRIBLE outside of the Metro areas.
Here are two examples:
1) I had the service in Boston. I live 17 miles outside of Boston, and the pages would make it to my pager, 50/50. As a vital means of communication, 50/50 just doesn't cut it.
2) I was travelling to Washington, D.C. and was worried if I was going to be able to receive pages there (being oncall for network problems, etc). I called their support number and they claimed that I would be able to receive pages based on my plan. And sure enough, when I was away, all hell broke loose, and I was unreachable by pager. Good thing I was carrying my cell phone, otherwise, we would have been in BIG trouble.
But that's just my opinion of using the service for 2 years.
Here at the University of Maine, our Operating Systems course (COS431) everything is Minix based. It gives you a good handle on how system calls are implemented, mutex, and more.
Our project involves building a complete operating system titled Brain2k. Part I of Brain2k is building a VM which handles specific operations, and file I/O. Part II is a process scheduler allowing 10 seperate Brain programs to run simultaneously. We haven't gotten to Parts III or IV yet.
As for our book, we are using Operating Systems by Tannebaum. It's a pretty good book, uses lots of examples like the Dining Philosopher's Problem, and more.
Well, since everyone is going to be freaking out over the Y2K show, I'll be happily watching 4 back to back episodes of Law and Order on A&E starting at 8pm EST.
What ISP is that? All things considered, your friend should be getting a routed connection with a small subnet, which should, in effect, trash NetBEUI connections since they tend to hate working over multiple subnets. That is, unless you manually stick machine names in lmhosts...
Well, I'm not so sure about that. Most people think that the whole semiconductor industry started out in California or Texas, but the truth be told, it all started in Portland out of Fairchild Semiconductor. So essentially, they were not diving into something new, rather just getting back into something old.
The worst part of the whole situation is what it's going to do to the South Portland, ME location. The news.com article also mentions that they are going to be selling a controlling interest in one of their fab processes too...
This sucks for my friends who are supposed to be working at National this summer. Doh!
Why does it not surprise me that M$ still tries to screw the rest of the world. Maybe they figure since they're "willfully" splitting up into seperate divisions, that they are now allowed to freely screw with the rest of the world. Grrrrrrrrrrr!
I guess this means I need to go out and register EVERYTHING that has to do with Skanky in order to keep my measly website operational. Bastards.
I just want to have fun with a cool name. I lucked out by getting it, but I know that eventually, I'm going to be in the same boat... especially by some porn place like skankyxxxtv.com or some other crap like that.
I went to the iMac preview deal that Apple had down in Dallas last summer at the Infomart, and at a discussion out Apple's future, there were a few things hinted at... many of which are now a reality:
1. A merge of the then-current Rhapsody project with the new OS to make OS X.
2. The "professional" G3 portable. Those are those badass laptops that they have out now.
3. The "professional" G3 desktop machine. Not the iMac, but those new servers that still have the nifty bondai blue scheme.
4. The "consumer" desktop. AKA iMac.
But the big question was the "consumer" portable. Maybe this is Apple's push back into that field. Hell, I still have one of the original Newtons! Granted, it's a momento that I whip out for laughs when people come by, but still...
I'm just sick of all of this RIAA crap. I mean, if an artist wants to put a FREE song on his or her website, why should THEY care? I mean, the artist would be losing money theoretically, not the RIAA!
Slashdot Mirror
I just want to see this whole thing brought to light as an interesting retrospective on the future VH1 hit show, I love the 2000s, 2003 edition.
I hope they bring Gilbert Godfrey back to have him give a "SCO, What the f**k!?"
EMC, then you're in trouble. EMC charges for the software like you mentioned, for both the Clariion and Symmetrix. That is how they make their money. And technically, if you have the opportunity to buy a used Sym, then it is a semi-illegal sale, since EMC is the only authorized person to resell a Sym. Once you buy it, you're stuck with it.
Sun stuff is pretty good - all of the necessary software to use the array on a direct connect basis is available in the box. It's not pretty, but it works. You can config it using RaidUtil.
HP would probably lean towards the EMC model more than the Sun model. Software is their big push. You might be able to get it config'd on a direct attached basis, but dunno about in a SAN w/o appropriate software.
Compaq is the same as HP, but their stuff isn't as good.
Netapp? They seem to be the most user-friendly when it comes to used equip.
Just my $0.02.
The whole issue was the "building block" approach. We toiled with this at my last job - is it better to lay down the bucks for something that is so rediculiously redundant, when all he needs is disk? If he's going to be recording as much as he says, he will need to make sure that he takes some of it OUT of the DC.
With the symmetrix, that really isn't an option. It's huge, forklift upgrade required. At least with the clariion (yeah, it sucks, but it IS an option) you can remove small parts of the huge array by a single person. Unless you are a government run DC with a forlift *IN* the DC, then the Sym-frame approach really isn't going to work.
Go with a FC solution - stay away from EMC, as they will try to sell you a massive Symmetrix for your needs. Sounds like you need a building block approach, one block a day. Doesn't need to be TOO fancy, eh?
Here are some options for FC disk storage:
- Sun T3
- EMC Clariion
- Compaq Storageworks
- HP VA7400 -- my fav
Just to warn you, you're looking at something on the order of 20k/day to operate this setup... now, I'm sure the price would go down QUITE a bit if you're purchasing 8-10TB a day, but even still, it's a huge cost.
I looked at a 10TB solution from the above vendors, and the cheapest I got it was $0.0425/MB!
Well, here's a problem that I forsee...
I, as a representative of Acme Corp. am contacted by RegistryPro, asking if I would like to register AcmeCorp.pro. I politely decline the offer, and go about my merry way dealing with AcmeCorp.com as I always have done.
Shortly thereafter, a cybersquatter registers AcmeCorp.pro. I never see it, because I'm working with AcmeCorp.com.
Some Big Cheese at Acme Corp. finds out that someone has stolen AcmeCorp.pro from us! Acme Corp. then decides that they want the domain name.
- Insert long legal battle here
What happens then??? I think we've all seen this played out in other forms.
As a general rule of thumb, Computer Engineering (which I am a student of), deals mainly with hardware as you say. But another important aspect of engineering as a whole is problem solving.
An engineering degree teaches you how to think more than anything else. Now, it's true that as a comp-eng graduate, you can go do most things that a comp-sci major can, because you take many of the same classes. But it does not work the other way.
The engineering provides you the ability to 1) determine if a problem exists and 2) find the quickest, fastest, easiest, most efficient way to the solution.
Here's a classic example:
A computer science student is given the problem to write a sorting routine for 100 items. The comp-sci major will analyze each method to determine the optimum solution for ALL potential data sets, and therefore chose the solution that fits best in the long run.
A computer engineer just sees that they need to sort some short list, opens a book, and copies down the code for X sorting routine. They necessairly care that it's the most optimal thing, but it's one more step towards their goal of building a machine that will dominate the world.
One important aspect about the performance of FC is such that it is 100MB/s sustatined. That's about to double to 200MB/s when the 2GB FC spec comes out for approval.
I'm actually looking into creating a *massive* storage area network with a hybrid SAN/NAS architecture, since a "pure" SAN simply cost too much money. Look at the stats yourself:
1 Single port HBA (card for PC) - $800
1 16 port *non-blocking* FC switch - $25,000
1 64 port "director" switch (same RU's as a 6509 approx) - $250,000
So if you were to wire, say an entire row of 1U servers, then you would need, say 40 * 15 to make the math easy, = 600 servers.
You would need 10 director switches, and 600 HBA's.... approximately $3M (not including the interconnects). And to ignore the cost of fibre, that's saying something. And yes, I know I can use copper, but not over 15 meters, so fiber is the choice. (Plus, it looks really cool in a datacenter.)
And that is w/o storage! But let's look at that for a moment. A really cool company called Exadrive (not plugging the company here!) makes a 3RU enclosure that takes 24 ATA disks. At today's density that is 2TB. You double the density of the ATA drives, you get 4TB. Quite cool!
My problem is that I'm trying to do a 500TB system for about 10,000 machines. A pure SAN is technologically fesable, but not for a massive application.
I'm actually looking into removing the most of the switches and the HBAs by using SAN over IP. Cisco makes a product (through aquisition, no surprise) that actually takes the FC information, encapsulates it in IP, and ships it over the existing network. Granted, this is cool, but it could potentially hurt the network.
But if you're a video-creation house with Avid machines, or a massive real-time database, or some other application that warrants a full SAN, go for it. It's definetly worth the cost. But for my application...?
I don't know about you folks, but all of the desktop flatscreen LCDs that I've seen have terrible font quality! Everything is all blurry!
If I have to use one, it must be set at 800x600 just to half-read the text on the screen. My laptop has better quality fonts at 800x600.
I guess all of my songs will have to become 3l33t!
Mmmmm, br1tn3y sp34rs - 00ps 1 d1d 1t 4g41n
You should look into their NIC - As usual, the info is here.
I've met with these folks to talk about this specific card. Quite cool, as it offloads the IP stack on to the card to lessen the processor load on the actual CPU. They claim that for some applications, you will see as much as 100% performance increase.
Now, I have my doubts about that, but I can see something in the order of 30-45%. It has DMA and all sorts of other goodies that you'd expect, and it works quite well for fileservers (if that's what you're looking for.)
-Erk
Fuzzy logic toilets. Think about that one!
The one thing that I find amusing is that M$ is proposing 56,000 word briefs. I mean, c'mon! I doubt that there are 56,000 words that can be said about this!
"Bill Gates is good. Bill Gates did nothing wrong. You like Microsoft."
I mean it's garbage. Utter garbage. And to think of the dead trees! To quote the painter-guy-with-a-fro: "Little Happy Trees".
I'm not quite sure where you were using Metrocall service, but in my experience, they are TERRIBLE outside of the Metro areas.
Here are two examples:
1) I had the service in Boston. I live 17 miles outside of Boston, and the pages would make it to my pager, 50/50. As a vital means of communication, 50/50 just doesn't cut it.
2) I was travelling to Washington, D.C. and was worried if I was going to be able to receive pages there (being oncall for network problems, etc). I called their support number and they claimed that I would be able to receive pages based on my plan. And sure enough, when I was away, all hell broke loose, and I was unreachable by pager. Good thing I was carrying my cell phone, otherwise, we would have been in BIG trouble.
But that's just my opinion of using the service for 2 years.
Here at the University of Maine, our Operating Systems course (COS431) everything is Minix based. It gives you a good handle on how system calls are implemented, mutex, and more.
Our project involves building a complete operating system titled Brain2k. Part I of Brain2k is building a VM which handles specific operations, and file I/O. Part II is a process scheduler allowing 10 seperate Brain programs to run simultaneously. We haven't gotten to Parts III or IV yet.
As for our book, we are using Operating Systems by Tannebaum. It's a pretty good book, uses lots of examples like the Dining Philosopher's Problem, and more.
If you have more questions, please email me!
Well, since everyone is going to be freaking out over the Y2K show, I'll be happily watching 4 back to back episodes of Law and Order on A&E starting at 8pm EST.
Long live Ben Stone!
What ISP is that? All things considered, your friend should be getting a routed connection with a small subnet, which should, in effect, trash NetBEUI connections since they tend to hate working over multiple subnets. That is, unless you manually stick machine names in lmhosts...
Well, I'm not so sure about that. Most people think that the whole semiconductor industry started out in California or Texas, but the truth be told, it all started in Portland out of Fairchild Semiconductor. So essentially, they were not diving into something new, rather just getting back into something old.
The worst part of the whole situation is what it's going to do to the South Portland, ME location. The news.com article also mentions that they are going to be selling a controlling interest in one of their fab processes too...
This sucks for my friends who are supposed to be working at National this summer. Doh!
Well, how about this...
Doh!
Why does it not surprise me that M$ still tries to screw the rest of the world. Maybe they figure since they're "willfully" splitting up into seperate divisions, that they are now allowed to freely screw with the rest of the world. Grrrrrrrrrrr!
I guess this means I need to go out and register EVERYTHING that has to do with Skanky in order to keep my measly website operational. Bastards.
I just want to have fun with a cool name. I lucked out by getting it, but I know that eventually, I'm going to be in the same boat... especially by some porn place like skankyxxxtv.com or some other crap like that.
Solidarity!
I went to the iMac preview deal that Apple had down in Dallas last summer at the Infomart, and at a discussion out Apple's future, there were a few things hinted at... many of which are now a reality:
1. A merge of the then-current Rhapsody project with the new OS to make OS X.
2. The "professional" G3 portable. Those are those badass laptops that they have out now.
3. The "professional" G3 desktop machine. Not the iMac, but those new servers that still have the nifty bondai blue scheme.
4. The "consumer" desktop. AKA iMac.
But the big question was the "consumer" portable. Maybe this is Apple's push back into that field. Hell, I still have one of the original Newtons! Granted, it's a momento that I whip out for laughs when people come by, but still...
I want one! Maybe this would be a good PDA to get considering I still have an original Newton! Yeah!
I'm just sick of all of this RIAA crap. I mean, if an artist wants to put a FREE song on his or her website, why should THEY care? I mean, the artist would be losing money theoretically, not the RIAA!
I just want it all to end. Mp3 forever!
Any idea if I can go down to the local Kay Bee Toys and pick one up yet? ;)
I would like to see Windows handle that. Linux forever!