What I can tell you is that our largest farm usually has 2700 concurrent users from about 8am-3pm , with, of course, a big dropoff at lunchtime. We have 4 or 5 others but they are much, much smaller. We've never been given hard numbers on the bandwidth requirements for the imaging programs but they are always complaining about speed; a good deal of it is likely caused by duplex mismatches which we are cleaning up but there are thousands of desktops and switchports to change. Part of the problem is that we have a managed services provider who's just been raping us for years and has let a bunch of stuff go to hell. But, the contract is almost up, we're giving them the heave-ho and I hope things will start improving soon. The fly-in-the-ointment is that the offsite datacenter belongs to them and we have to get our stuff out by the end-of-contract date, which is why there are no plans to add any new servers, except locally, until next year.
Our Citrix farms are already maxed out and we are paying close to $500,000 annually in Citrix licensing. Also a lot of the medical imaging workstations have instruments that need to interact with the images.
And I don't think 30kbps per client is enough anyway for visual examination of these images - they are being used for patient diagnoses. Also, most of the medical imaging workstations have been replaced in the last 18 months and are pretty beefy. Also, the Citrix farms are in a datacenter 30 miles away with a 1 gigabit fiber link while the Imaging storage is in an onsite datacenter. Spending money to buy and build a new Citrix farm and increasing the MetroLAN link would likely benefit only the medical imaging folks. Fixing and upgrading the local network helps everyone and we can't afford to do both at the same time.
3 large hospitals - average age 40 years. Hundreds of closet switches between 4 and 12 years old so the gigabit adapters in the desktop are pretty much wasted for the moment as switches support Gigabit Ethernet access ports weren't affordable until recently.
In many places, the cabling can't support anything above 100 Mbps or needs to be replaced. And we're gov't funded so we don't have infinite cash. Any money we save not putting the latest,fanciest, most overpriced , rotating-rust coated storage into the data center is money we can spend improving the last-mile ( or last 100 meters )
You're missing the point. There's a reliable, affordable midpoint between the big, cheap but, as per your experience, highly unreliable SATA drives and a server-class SAS or UltraSCSI disk and that's the Enterprise SATA drives I mentioned.
I work for a large Healthcare organisation that has a big investment in an multi-cabinet array for medical images and having Enterprise class SATA disks really hits the sweet spot for price / performance / capacity for them. And even if the SAS solution would be 5 times faster, the real bottleneck is the network and the money saved with SATA drives means that much more 1Gib or 10Gig fiber can be installed and more spindles can be added to bump up the performance, if necessary. It would be tough to say if this would work better than SAS or FibreChannel for something like databases or Exchange but since these images are large and static, sequential read access is what delivers the goods here not random I/O so SAS or SSDs aren't presently worth the investment.
And, getting back to your cheapo Dell Dimensions - yes it would be pretty ridiculous to put SAS in those boxes, especially since a reliable add-in disk controller would probably double the price, but, if you care about your customers data, the Enterprise SATA disks are an affordable compromise for their peace of mind.
Did you buy the Enterprise class SATA drives such as the WD RE line? Or the Seagate Barracuda ES. Those are typically 5-year warranty for 24x7x365 use. But they cost more than $80 for a terabyte but are well worth it. And HP will ship those in a lot of small servers such as the Proliant ML110 / 150 / 350. Our.Net and Java teams have a few handfuls of these as dev boxes and they've had to replace only a few of these over the years and have never lost a RAID.
Right now, with our CDW pricing, a 1 TB Western Digital RE3 is $175; a Seagate Cheetah NS.2 SAS 600GB is $500. The Cheetah is definitely worth more but not 3x for most of what we do.
This should have been modded Insightful. Reminds of the rebuttal to the atheist question "Who created Allah" and the response is that Allah is, by definition, uncreated. Ties it up all very neatly, wouldn't you say?
Go back to '98 / '99 and see what Rasterman's Enlightenment was doing with desktop eyecandy and semi-opaque windows. If E had caught on back then and one of the established distros had thrown some weight behind it and gotten the XFree86 clowns to perform a autocranial derectumization, Linux could have had an MacOSX-like or Vista Aero clone desktop with adequate performance on a tricked-out Pentium III almost ten years ago.
Hey, if you get your act together, you can always make a comeback. Apple did it; Linux helped make Unix relevant again outside of big iron. But, you have to be able to sell it and to deliver.
As recent consumers SSDs go, the WD 64GB is very, very average; if you try some of the faster, larger SSDs, say one based on Sandforce SF-1200 controller or even a latter-day Indilinx, that have higher random IOPs, going back to disk is unbearably slow for any operation that isn't cached in RAM.
Please don't bring this up again - I've already been through a ton of flamewars defending AMDs position where I couldn't get the opponents to agree that, while Intel has no obligation to support AMD, deliberately ignoring AMDs optimizations is bad faith.
Here are links to previous Slashdot stories on the topic
Actual data? The Wikipedia article list the sources, which are from the Federal Budget. If you can find a link that does as informative a breakdown of the data, pass it along.
The Treasury links provide data but no analysis - that's why I prefer external sites. I wasn't paying attention to the news networks on Clinton's spending - I looked at the numbers.
Federal spending is an important indicator but it doesn't tell the whole story. What matters more is the impact of that spending on the GDP. By that yardstick, Democrats again fare better than Republicans.
So, overall, Democrat presidents have contributed far less to the total debt than Republicans, especially in recent decades, yet they take the heat for it. We'll have to see the effect of the Obama administration on those statistics. It would be a real shame if he turns out to be a single-term president and I don't think he can make a turnaround from the impact of the economic meltdown by the end of his current term.
And you need to come up with a different term than Republicrat for George Bush. Not only are you wrong about Dems vs Reps on spending but Dubya was in a class all by himself. How does "Dubyite" strike you?
I jumbled 2 important events together - the '73 Oil Embargo and the Carter administration with its openness to alternative energy. I wonder if Ronnie Reagan personally removed the solar panels from the White House.
Banking on fusion is like trying to solve a debt crisis with by purchasing lottery tickets. Much as I'd love to have my very own fusion reactor, it's been a mere 10 years away - my whole life, and it still is. I fear the only fusion reactors we'll seen before 2050 will be the ones in the heavens. With the overall weak efficiences of OTEC, I don't see how you can find that practical. And it isn't workable for most latitudes. Heck, it would likely be a better use of time and money to combine an offshore wind farm with a solar PV or thermal installation and get way more bang for the buck versus OTEC.
Nuclear reprocessing? Makes sense - on paper but France has hundreds of thousands of tonnes of waste, sends some to Russia for enrichment and get only a small amount back.
And Japan? If reprocessing means 15 years construction and multi-billion dollar overruns in Rokkasho, I doubt that'll play in Peoria.
If it can't be done onsite or better yet, in-cycle or if Thorium reactors prove to be impractical, I don't support a wide-ranging expanse of new nuclear construction.
suggest you read up on compressed air storage. You do not build tanks for that! You use salt domes located under ground or other large "HUGE geological structures! I don't think you understand the scale that you need for power storage at all.
And you can and do build tanks for compressed air storage, if it's a "small" installation. But, large-scale does need geologic formations, caverns, depleted wells and aquifers but these are hardly rarities in North America. If those numbers are accurate, the per-kilowatt cost looks pretty darn good.
I am not anti-wind or anti solar. They should be developed but they can not solve our power problems today. And to just blow off real problems with some "well we can just do x" when you have no idea if x will work or what it will cost is dumb.
I've been advocating for better solutions for 30 years and the same "dumb" arguments have been raised - it can't solve our problems today; that's not a real solution, blah, blah. Here's the thing about the nuclear option - it's not only very expensive but it has a long lead time before you can get a single Joule out of it. Back in the day, it was a minimum of 10 years to get one built; even today, it's still about 4 - 7 years. At least with options like wind, you can build piecemeal and get power from the get-go. How much electricity does half a reactor provide? If a better wind turbine is developed, how difficult is it to upgrade? And, although you didn't make the case for nuclear being "emissions-free", that's utter crap. There's plenty of CO2 created in the construction of one although I imagine it's looks pretty good over a long service life but there's still the matter of toxic waste. The use of breeder reactors or of thorium fuel would make nuclear a more attractive long-term option but the former isn't widely used and the latter is still in development. Sad to say but the US fucked up large back in '73 - if the country had rallied behind Carter's agenda for alternative energy, it would have become the world's foremost energy superpower. And, here's another cost of which I have no idea - and likely neither does anyone else: What has the wasteful use of petroleum cost America?
Batteries are expensive and not all that reliable.
Expensive, perhaps - but unreliable? We've been relying on batteries for a long time. Lead-acid, for example.
Also they will not handle the types of surges they are talking about very well. Compressed air storage requires certain geological formations to be practical as well. Not only that they are not all that green. Every one in service uses natural gas. They used the compressed air and burn natural gas in it to power a gas turbine.
It would probably still be necessary to take wind farms offline to deal with surges but having the batteries acting as a buffer should keep the power flow smooth - I have no idea of the cost, however. I wonder how the cost would compare to something like nuclear. What geologic features are required that couldn't be built if needed?
Sulfur Sodium batteries are still in early development. They may work out but they are not here yet. And when they go wrong it will be pretty dang bad to be near. Plus the cost will really have to come down.
They've been in production use in Japan for 10 years and there's at least one large wind farm that's backed by 30 MW of NaS batteries. I can't speak much to the cost except to say that supply and demand would help with that assuming there aren't too many esoteric materials requires in the production or that the manufacturing processes are economical
I am glad you feel this is a none issue because just about every expert on the planet disagrees with you.
I'm pleased to have made your day. The funny thing about that "every expert blah-blah" is that you can always find one who will agree or disagree with whatever you say. After all, overwhelming scientific consensus on climate change hasn't convinced everyone, expert or otherwise. Thankfully, naysaying hasn't prevented smart, dedicated people from gettin' 'er done.
Plus think about it. If Sulfur Sodium battery where practical right now why wouldn't they be used for off peak storage at conventional plants? Like Compressed air storage and pumped water storage already are? Because it is too expensive. Of course they are building a big one in Texas as a UPS for a town so we will have to see how that goes.
See above for my comment about production NaS systems in Japan. Texas doesn't strike me as the experimental kind of place. If they are taking the plunge, they must be pretty darn confident.
As was pointed out elsewhere in the thread, there is no reason other methods of storage, such as compressed-air or sodium-sulfur molten-metal batteries can't be used. Really, this talk of the unreliability of green power is a non-issue. We've long used batteries to buffer supply for critical systems - that what UPSes are all about. We'd just have to have more of them but, in the long run, the electricity supply, regardless of the source, would be more reliable than ever. And there's no shortage on Earth of either sodium or sulfur.
Maybe that's something that needs to be outsourced - civil suits. The way legal firms rack up billing is as great a crime as Hollywood / RIAA accounting.
Sorry. It was a rant after a very long and stressful day. I think I was trying to come up with a command line to express "Kill them all, let God sort them out) - the redirect to/dev/null was implying oblivion. I'll try to come up with something better when I have more time and have had a bit more sleep.
this fiaSCO has been running on for nearly 8 years - what the hell is up with the courts that they keep this bullshit alive. Kill -9 all | sort >/dev/null
Slashdot Mirror
Did you know that "FTW" ("for the win") is a direct translation of "Sieg Heil"?
No, I didn't and no, it's not. The direct translation is Hail Victory.
Systems hate it when you anthromorphize them.
Do systems love it when they're not anthromorphized? Can I hurt the feelings of systems by ascribing feelings to them?
But, it does make it easier to get backing for another film . Which of the following has more impact when you're looking for financing?
Remember me? I'm the guy you Hollywood accounting fuckwads screwed out of his fair share of $330 million
OR
Remember me? I'm the guy you Hollywood accounting fuckwads screwed out of his fair share of $1.5 billion
here to ask for another loan.
What I can tell you is that our largest farm usually has 2700 concurrent users from about 8am-3pm , with, of course, a big dropoff at lunchtime. We have 4 or 5 others but they are much, much smaller.
We've never been given hard numbers on the bandwidth requirements for the imaging programs but they are always complaining about speed; a good deal of it is likely caused by duplex mismatches which we are cleaning up but there are thousands of desktops and switchports to change. Part of the problem is that we have a managed services provider who's just been raping us for years and has let a bunch of stuff go to hell.
But, the contract is almost up, we're giving them the heave-ho and I hope things will start improving soon.
The fly-in-the-ointment is that the offsite datacenter belongs to them and we have to get our stuff out by the end-of-contract date, which is why there are no plans to add any new servers, except locally, until next year.
Our Citrix farms are already maxed out and we are paying close to $500,000 annually in Citrix licensing. Also a lot of the medical imaging workstations have instruments that need to interact with the images.
And I don't think 30kbps per client is enough anyway for visual examination of these images - they are being used for patient diagnoses.
Also, most of the medical imaging workstations have been replaced in the last 18 months and are pretty beefy.
Also, the Citrix farms are in a datacenter 30 miles away with a 1 gigabit fiber link while the Imaging storage is in an onsite datacenter.
Spending money to buy and build a new Citrix farm and increasing the MetroLAN link would likely benefit only the medical imaging folks.
Fixing and upgrading the local network helps everyone and we can't afford to do both at the same time.
3 large hospitals - average age 40 years. Hundreds of closet switches between 4 and 12 years old so the gigabit adapters in the desktop are pretty much wasted for the moment as switches support Gigabit Ethernet access ports weren't affordable until recently.
In many places, the cabling can't support anything above 100 Mbps or needs to be replaced. And we're gov't funded so we don't have infinite cash.
Any money we save not putting the latest,fanciest, most overpriced , rotating-rust coated storage into the data center is money we can spend improving the last-mile ( or last 100 meters )
You're missing the point. There's a reliable, affordable midpoint between the big, cheap but, as per your experience, highly unreliable SATA drives and a server-class SAS or UltraSCSI disk and that's the Enterprise SATA drives I mentioned.
I work for a large Healthcare organisation that has a big investment in an multi-cabinet array for medical images and having Enterprise class SATA disks really hits the sweet spot for price / performance / capacity for them.
And even if the SAS solution would be 5 times faster, the real bottleneck is the network and the money saved with SATA drives means that much more 1Gib or 10Gig fiber can be installed and more spindles can be added to bump up the performance, if necessary.
It would be tough to say if this would work better than SAS or FibreChannel for something like databases or Exchange but since these images are large and static, sequential read access is what delivers the goods here not random I/O so SAS or SSDs aren't presently worth the investment.
And, getting back to your cheapo Dell Dimensions - yes it would be pretty ridiculous to put SAS in those boxes, especially since a reliable add-in disk controller would probably double the price, but, if you care about your customers data, the Enterprise SATA disks are an affordable compromise for their peace of mind.
Did you buy the Enterprise class SATA drives such as the WD RE line? Or the Seagate Barracuda ES. Those are typically 5-year warranty for 24x7x365 use. But they cost more than $80 for a terabyte but are well worth it. And HP will ship those in a lot of small servers such as the Proliant ML110 / 150 / 350. .Net and Java teams have a few handfuls of these as dev boxes and they've had to replace only a few of these over the years and have never lost a RAID.
Our
Right now, with our CDW pricing, a 1 TB Western Digital RE3 is $175; a Seagate Cheetah NS.2 SAS 600GB is $500. The Cheetah is definitely worth more
but not 3x for most of what we do.
This should have been modded Insightful. Reminds of the rebuttal to the atheist question "Who created Allah" and the response is that Allah is, by definition, uncreated.
Ties it up all very neatly, wouldn't you say?
Go back to '98 / '99 and see what Rasterman's Enlightenment was doing with desktop eyecandy and semi-opaque windows. If E had caught on back then and one of the established distros had thrown some weight behind it and gotten the XFree86 clowns to perform a autocranial derectumization, Linux could have had an MacOSX-like or Vista Aero clone desktop with adequate performance on a tricked-out Pentium III almost ten years ago.
Hey, if you get your act together, you can always make a comeback. Apple did it; Linux helped make Unix relevant again outside of big iron.
But, you have to be able to sell it and to deliver.
As recent consumers SSDs go, the WD 64GB is very, very average; if you try some of the faster, larger SSDs, say one based on Sandforce SF-1200 controller or even a latter-day Indilinx, that have higher random IOPs, going back to disk is unbearably slow for any operation that isn't cached in RAM.
Please don't bring this up again - I've already been through a ton of flamewars defending AMDs position where I couldn't get the opponents to agree that, while Intel has no obligation to support AMD, deliberately ignoring AMDs optimizations is bad faith.
Here are links to previous Slashdot stories on the topic
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/09/12/16/1816245/US-FTC-Sues-Intel-For-Anti-Competitive-Practices?art_pos=1
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/05/07/12/1320202/AMD-Alleges-Intel-Compilers-Create-Slower-AMD-Code?art_pos=5
Actual data? The Wikipedia article list the sources, which are from the Federal Budget.
If you can find a link that does as informative a breakdown of the data, pass it along.
Here's another non-gov link - this one on presidential deficits : http://home.adelphi.edu/sbloch/deficits.html
The Treasury links provide data but no analysis - that's why I prefer external sites.
I wasn't paying attention to the news networks on Clinton's spending - I looked at the numbers.
Federal spending is an important indicator but it doesn't tell the whole story. What matters more is the impact of that spending on the GDP.
By that yardstick, Democrats again fare better than Republicans.
So, overall, Democrat presidents have contributed far less to the total debt than Republicans, especially in recent decades, yet they take the heat for it.
We'll have to see the effect of the Obama administration on those statistics. It would be a real shame if he turns out to be a single-term president and I don't think he can make a turnaround from the impact of the economic meltdown by the end of his current term.
And you need to come up with a different term than Republicrat for George Bush. Not only are you wrong about Dems vs Reps on spending but Dubya was in a class all by himself.
How does "Dubyite" strike you?
Stop listening to the whackjobs at Fox News or turn off the radio when Rush Limbaugh is spewing his bullshit and have a look at the following chart :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_debt_by_U.S._presidential_terms
Now, what were you saying about Democrat spending?
Here's another - If houses were built the way software is built, the first termite would've destroyed civilization
I jumbled 2 important events together - the '73 Oil Embargo and the Carter administration with its openness to alternative energy. I wonder if Ronnie Reagan personally removed the solar panels from the White House.
Banking on fusion is like trying to solve a debt crisis with by purchasing lottery tickets. Much as I'd love to have my very own fusion reactor, it's been a mere 10 years away - my whole life, and it still is.
I fear the only fusion reactors we'll seen before
2050 will be the ones in the heavens.
With the overall weak efficiences of OTEC, I don't see how you can find that practical. And it isn't workable for most latitudes. Heck, it would likely be a better use of time and money to combine an offshore wind farm with a solar PV or thermal installation and get way more bang for the buck versus OTEC.
Nuclear reprocessing? Makes sense - on paper but France has hundreds of thousands of tonnes of waste, sends some to Russia for enrichment and get only a small amount back.
And Japan? If reprocessing means 15 years construction and multi-billion dollar overruns in Rokkasho, I doubt that'll play in Peoria.
If it can't be done onsite or better yet, in-cycle
or if Thorium reactors prove to be impractical, I don't support a wide-ranging expanse of new nuclear construction.
1.) About fucking time, morons
2.) Okay, i feel a bit safer
3.) Who cares? I've not used Acrobat in several years.
Sumatra, PDF X-change or Foxit works as well or better.
suggest you read up on compressed air storage. You do not build tanks for that! You use salt domes located under ground or other large "HUGE geological structures! I don't think you understand the scale that you need for power storage at all.
I misunderstood how compressed air storage is being used but it's not as problematic as you think. See a recent Princeton report here:
http://www.princeton.edu/pei/energy/publications/texts/SuccarWilliams_PEI_CAES_2008April8.pdf
And you can and do build tanks for compressed air storage, if it's a "small" installation. But, large-scale does need geologic formations, caverns, depleted wells and aquifers but these are hardly rarities in North America.
If those numbers are accurate, the per-kilowatt cost looks pretty darn good.
I am not anti-wind or anti solar. They should be developed but they can not solve our power problems today. And to just blow off real problems with some "well we can just do x" when you have no idea if x will work or what it will cost is dumb.
I've been advocating for better solutions for 30 years and the same "dumb" arguments have been raised - it can't solve our problems today; that's not a real solution, blah, blah.
Here's the thing about the nuclear option - it's not only very expensive but it has a long lead time before you can get a single Joule out of it.
Back in the day, it was a minimum of 10 years to get one built; even today, it's still about 4 - 7 years.
At least with options like wind, you can build piecemeal and get power from the get-go. How much electricity does half a reactor provide?
If a better wind turbine is developed, how difficult is it to upgrade?
And, although you didn't make the case for nuclear being "emissions-free", that's utter crap.
There's plenty of CO2 created in the construction of one although I imagine it's looks pretty good over a long service life but there's still the matter of toxic waste.
The use of breeder reactors or of thorium fuel would make nuclear a more attractive long-term option but the former isn't widely used and the latter is still in development.
Sad to say but the US fucked up large back in '73 - if the country had rallied behind Carter's agenda for alternative energy, it would have become the world's foremost energy superpower.
And, here's another cost of which I have no idea - and likely neither does anyone else:
What has the wasteful use of petroleum cost America?
Batteries are expensive and not all that reliable.
Expensive, perhaps - but unreliable? We've been relying on batteries for a long time. Lead-acid, for example.
Also they will not handle the types of surges they are talking about very well. Compressed air storage requires certain geological formations to be practical as well. Not only that they are not all that green. Every one in service uses natural gas. They used the compressed air and burn natural gas in it to power a gas turbine.
It would probably still be necessary to take wind farms offline to deal with surges but having the batteries acting as a buffer should keep the power flow smooth - I have no idea of the cost, however. I wonder how the cost would compare to something like nuclear.
What geologic features are required that couldn't be built if needed?
Sulfur Sodium batteries are still in early development. They may work out but they are not here yet. And when they go wrong it will be pretty dang bad to be near.
Plus the cost will really have to come down.
They've been in production use in Japan for 10 years and there's at least one large wind farm that's backed by 30 MW of NaS batteries.
I can't speak much to the cost except to say that supply and demand would help with that assuming there aren't too many esoteric materials requires in the production or that the manufacturing processes are economical
I am glad you feel this is a none issue because just about every expert on the planet disagrees with you.
I'm pleased to have made your day. The funny thing about that "every expert blah-blah" is that you can always find one who will agree or disagree with whatever you say. After all, overwhelming scientific consensus on climate change hasn't convinced everyone, expert or otherwise.
Thankfully, naysaying hasn't prevented smart, dedicated people from gettin' 'er done.
Plus think about it. If Sulfur Sodium battery where practical right now why wouldn't they be used for off peak storage at conventional plants? Like Compressed air storage and pumped water storage already are?
Because it is too expensive.
Of course they are building a big one in Texas as a UPS for a town so we will have to see how that goes.
See above for my comment about production NaS systems in Japan. Texas doesn't strike me as the experimental kind of place. If they are taking the plunge, they must be pretty darn confident.
As was pointed out elsewhere in the thread, there is no reason other methods of storage, such as compressed-air or sodium-sulfur molten-metal batteries can't be used.
Really, this talk of the unreliability of green power is a non-issue. We've long used batteries to buffer supply for critical systems - that what UPSes are all about.
We'd just have to have more of them but, in the long run, the electricity supply, regardless of the source, would be more reliable than ever.
And there's no shortage on Earth of either sodium or sulfur.
Maybe that's something that needs to be outsourced - civil suits. The way legal firms rack up billing is as great a crime as Hollywood / RIAA accounting.
Sorry. It was a rant after a very long and stressful day. I think I was trying to come up with a command line to express "Kill them all, let God sort them out) - the redirect to /dev/null was implying oblivion.
I'll try to come up with something better when I have more time and have had a bit more sleep.
this fiaSCO has been running on for nearly 8 years - what the hell is up with the courts that they keep this bullshit alive. /dev/null
Kill -9 all | sort >
At least now your trip to the proctologist is covered.