Hmmmm...you do realise that the Flexline storage is simply rebadged Engenio disk and that you can buy it from IBM, SGI and even Sun. Okay, so they all use their own management software but from a raw hardware level, they are the same product. The interesting thing will be to see how Sun deal with what is essentially a device which is design to hook into multiple vendors; we still have a STK Powderhorn which is attached to our IBM mainframe; we never have any issues with support and we never get into finger pointing between IBM and STK...I just wonder what will happen when we throw Sun into the loop.
I spend alot of money on storage and servers; this play makes no sense to me really. As mentioned, Stek's hardware has been OEM for a while and especially the disk from Engenio (LSI) has a number of suppliers including IBM and SGI; so it just looks like a me too play from Sun and I can't see it really helping Sun at all.
Sun need to decide what they are, are they a hardware company or are they a software company; until they decide this, the slow downwards spiral will continue.
Well, I've been ploughing through the DS8000 planning guide as it is very likely that I'll be putting at least one in our datacentre by the end of the year. The DS8000 can handle 67.5k LUNs and over 500 host log-ins per FC port. This should be enough for most people; the DS8000 architecture is designed to scale to multiple Petabytes...it'll be interesting to see EMC's response.
Well, as we back-up that sort of volume of data on a more or less nightly basis; it is not as hard as you might think. Put the database into hot-backup mode; start the flashcopy and then bring the database out of hot-backup. We do this to multiple targets as well, lets us build a reporting database and do lanless backups etc. We've been doing this for sometime now. Okay, so you need to spend some money; at some point next year, I'll probably do a tech refresh on our tapes and go to 3592; this gives me 300 gig per cart native, with compression I can get a lot more. It also gives me a road-map which takes me to a terabyte per cart.
The biggest problem is potentially logical corruption in the database; so to get round that, we run a trailing database using dataguard. This database currently lags the main production database by an hour; there is alot of debate whether it actually needs to be that far out but an hour seems to be about right at the moment. I also offsite a copies using PPRC to remote mirror to our DR site; this introduces a small amount of latency due to having to wait for the write to be committed and acked from the remote site but with PPRC over FC, we have found that the latency introduced is only slightly in excess of the latency introduced by the speed of light in fibre; we have let IBM off breaking the laws of nature, that might have been unreasonable.
Is this a conventional solution? In my experience, these days, yep. It is a fairly standard solution.
The Clio does have a headphone out but it's sound is really, really, really shoddy. I'm fairly certain that I had mine running a wireless card in the past (sold mine on Ebay). It runs off AC power as well as battery. It's a nice concept but I think that the screen lets it down a bit; it's really poor in sunlight and the sound is truly awful.
One must never assume, he's voted against proposals made by his own company in the past. I'm not sure the voting record is made public but there are people from all of the major compiler vendors on the committee and no one person dominates it. I am sorry that you feel that his employment by Microsoft means that the process is corrupt but if he was employed by another major player, would you feel the same? Do you think that all members of the ISO committees should be employed by non-compiler vendors because by your reckoning most of the people on the committee have a conflict of interest. Microsoft should be encouraged to let their employees sit on the various standards bodies!
You really have no clue about how the standards body works do you? If the standards body does not like the extensions he is suggesting, they won't get voted in. And if they do go in, obviously they are no longer proprietary because they become part of the standard. Microsoft certainly have not got it all their own way, even with Herb as chair and as lot of people have mentioned, since Herb joined them, their compiler has become much compliant simply because one of reasons for hiring him to ensure that they became more compliant and Herb probably wouldn't have joined if that wasn't part of the role.
BTW my father is one of the few truly independant members of the ISO committee, not tied to any vendor.
AIX does have DLPAR, but the problem with this is that it is only partitioning on a CPU boundary which means despite the fact it is supported on lower-end AIX boxes kind of limits it's use. However with AIX 5.3 and Power-5, DLPARing will be at a sub-CPU partition, up to 100 partitions per CPU is what I've heard. The Power-5 machines will ship with the lower end first before the replacement to the p690, certainly less than $100k per box. It will also support virtual networking etc, so that the LPARs will not have to go out onto the network and the traffic will stay within the box (much goodness). So although Zones sound good, I think that genuine virtual machines ala LPAR are better.
Well, I've just come back from a visit to our Indian support office and also a workshop with our outsourced developers. It is interesting talking to some of the more senior guys out there who are beginning to get concerned about the situation out there. Firstly within programming you have rapid wage inflation, so the outsourcing companies who were used to margins of over 100%, now have margins of between 30-40%; still large margins but it kind of affects their ability to invest in the infrastructure they need. And believe it, they do need to invest in upgrading their infrastructure; powercuts, three or four times a day; telephone lines which are unbelievably variable in quality; let alone physical infrastructure like transport, sewerage etc.
Secondly, and this is from a senior manager within one of India's largest outsourcing companies, their code sucks! 40 defects per function point as opposed to 5 if you use an Israelli developer as opposed to 1 if you use a Vietnamese developer.
Thirdly, at the moment they are only producing software developers and good sysadmins, support staff etc are as rare as rocking horse-crap. The education system trains but does not educate, so innovation does not come easily.
So although at the moment, things look a little bleak in the Western IT industry, it could all change or at least the opportunities will change. And hell, it only takes a war between India and Pakistan to mess everybody's outsourcing strategy up.
Obviously Solaris v10 will be actually be Sun rebadged version of Linux! At which point IBM will probably sue Sun as it is has parts of IBM code in and as SCO can retroactively decide to that the code that they shipped under GPL is no really under the GPL. At some point, it will be shown that DEC misused trade secrets at some point and code which was misappropriated then made it's way into VMS which then somehow made it into NT and the only operating system that we can actually use is DOS.
Actually, I thought it was Income Tax which was to pay for the Napoleonic Wars...And I am all in favour of using it to pay for its original cause, kicking France's butt!! In fact, I'm sure that America would contribute as well.....
I *know* that IBM has looked at buying Sun in the past, in the same way that they have looked at Apple. If you look at IBM's big aquisitions over the past ten years or so, they have purchased companies which have key technologies that they are lacking or just lagging behind. I'm not sure that purchasing Sun actually gets them that much except the control of Java. I don't think that they'd want another Unix (but I'm not a big Solaris fan) and they probably don't really want Sparc technology. Purchasing Sun to get control of Java seems extreme.
The more interesting rumour/suggestion is that IBM buy EMC. If they bought EMC, they would have even more dominance in the data centre..
Ask them what they hate most about their job, if they answer anything but users, they are lying! Actually, there is one thing worse than ordinary users, that is programmers who think that they know enough to sysadmin....
The picture you paint could occur with Unix as well. The real problem that I've come across is the lack of thought and design before implementation. If you think about scalablity before you implement, you could probably come up with something which even ran on Windows. If you sit down before you implement and assume that your systems will grow like topsy, your storage requirements will run rampant and design around that you might get your initial design right.
If your initial design is right, you should be able to start on a Windows system (shudder) and migrate easily to a Unix platform and from there to a S/390 or whatever.
Of course doing it right will probably cost more to start with and convincing your finance people is often next to impossible but you can only try.
I can see more than two problems with this box unfortunately. Sure it looks great but it lacks alot. Memory expandibility, only two network ports, no SMP support, no SCSI, certainly no fibre, no gigabit ethernet. Perhaps they are cheap enough to buy and throw away but if I were building a web-farm, I'd have to think twice about putting these in.
Hopefully that will not change. One of the design decisions made very early on was that it should be usable by as many browsers as possible and should not rely on a specific browser. The whole idea was that it should be Internet banking not MS/IE or Netscape Banking. I was quite involved in the original design work and know that the whole design-team heavily backed that idea. I've now moved on but I know a great number of the original players are still there and I don't expect things to have changed much.
It also helped that the design was done very early on before MS and Netscape really started botching things up. However making things as standards compliant as possible is sometimes alot harder than people realise and can really slow down initial roll-outs.
Ever since I started using AIX (3.2.5) it has supported booting from tape, disk, cd and network. And hey if you were really perverse you could boot AIX from floppy. Okay AIX can be a bit picky about what type of CD it boots from i.e non-IBM badged CDs can be a bit challenging; but in general it works.
Of all the unices I've used, AIX is just about the easiest to administer and once the ODM has gone; it will be even better (well unless they replace with something worse; like the SDR...aaargh!!)
SMIT is also going, well, the graphical version is and being replaced by the evil that is WSM, or whatever they have decided to call it. However the good news is SMITTY is staying for the time being and the even better news is that the ODM is almost certainly going come Monteray/AIX version 5, or whatever they finally decide to call it!!
The chip doesn't actually matter, whether it's 32 bit or 64 bit, the filesystems in AIX have the same limit. In AIX 4.2, the maximum size of a file was increased from 2 Gbytes to 64 Gbytes. This doe pale against some of the competing operating systems but I've not yet had a commercial customer complain. I've known some scientific customers who have hit the limit. And it probably is a good thing that Linux will access to some very good implementatons of journalled file-systems and a least a couple that have proved themselves over the years in some commercial environments.
Well, I assume that they are using the new Power 3 High Nodes, which is presently an 8-Way SMP box. Okay, we all know (well those people who deal with SP and RS) that this will go up fairly shortly. Can an SP run linux, well, yes...I've seen it done. Absolutely no reason why it shouldn't. Unfortunately, there are no drivers, at present, for the switch, which is the clever bit. I guess someone might write some, I'd be surprised if someone didn't.
BTW, has anyone written linux drivers for the SSA adapters, either Intel or RS.
As we see more convergence in portable devices, hey we've already got digital cameras which can be used as arcade machine emulators, the RIAA are going to struggle more and more. Are they really going to be able tell someone what they use their handheld device for? And are they really going to be able to stop people using their pdas etc to exchange data. No, didn't think so.
Of course you can be sued for saying something defamatory about a person or a company. If I was to say that Microsoft uses child slave labour to produce their products, they could sue. If I was to express the opinion that NT is the shoddiest operating system ever, they couldn't. But I were to say that NT is full of code ripped off from other operating systems, I would possibly be on shakey ground. Expressing an opinion is on thing, presenting an opinion as fact is another thing entirely.
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Hmmmm...you do realise that the Flexline storage is simply rebadged Engenio disk and that you can buy it from IBM, SGI and even Sun. Okay, so they all use their own management software but from a raw hardware level, they are the same product. The interesting thing will be to see how Sun deal with what is essentially a device which is design to hook into multiple vendors; we still have a STK Powderhorn which is attached to our IBM mainframe; we never have any issues with support and we never get into finger pointing between IBM and STK...I just wonder what will happen when we throw Sun into the loop.
I spend alot of money on storage and servers; this play makes no sense to me really. As mentioned, Stek's hardware has been OEM for a while and especially the disk from Engenio (LSI) has a number of suppliers including IBM and SGI; so it just looks like a me too play from Sun and I can't see it really helping Sun at all.
Sun need to decide what they are, are they a hardware company or are they a software company; until they decide this, the slow downwards spiral will continue.
Well, I've been ploughing through the DS8000 planning guide as it is very likely that I'll be putting at least one in our datacentre by the end of the year. The DS8000 can handle 67.5k LUNs and over 500 host log-ins per FC port. This should be enough for most people; the DS8000 architecture is designed to scale to multiple Petabytes...it'll be interesting to see EMC's response.
Well, as we back-up that sort of volume of data on a more or less nightly basis; it is not as hard as you might think. Put the database into hot-backup mode; start the flashcopy and then bring the database out of hot-backup. We do this to multiple targets as well, lets us build a reporting database and do lanless backups etc. We've been doing this for sometime now. Okay, so you need to spend some money; at some point next year, I'll probably do a tech refresh on our tapes and go to 3592; this gives me 300 gig per cart native, with compression I can get a lot more. It also gives me a road-map which takes me to a terabyte per cart.
The biggest problem is potentially logical corruption in the database; so to get round that, we run a trailing database using dataguard. This database currently lags the main production database by an hour; there is alot of debate whether it actually needs to be that far out but an hour seems to be about right at the moment. I also offsite a copies using PPRC to remote mirror to our DR site; this introduces a small amount of latency due to having to wait for the write to be committed and acked from the remote site but with PPRC over FC, we have found that the latency introduced is only slightly in excess of the latency introduced by the speed of light in fibre; we have let IBM off breaking the laws of nature, that might have been unreasonable.
Is this a conventional solution? In my experience, these days, yep. It is a fairly standard solution.
The Clio does have a headphone out but it's sound is really, really, really shoddy. I'm fairly certain that I had mine running a wireless card in the past (sold mine on Ebay). It runs off AC power as well as battery. It's a nice concept but I think that the screen lets it down a bit; it's really poor in sunlight and the sound is truly awful.
One must never assume, he's voted against proposals made by his own company in the past. I'm not sure the voting record is made public but there are people from all of the major compiler vendors on the committee and no one person dominates it. I am sorry that you feel that his employment by Microsoft means that the process is corrupt but if he was employed by another major player, would you feel the same? Do you think that all members of the ISO committees should be employed by non-compiler vendors because by your reckoning most of the people on the committee have a conflict of interest. Microsoft should be encouraged to let their employees sit on the various standards bodies!
You really have no clue about how the standards body works do you? If the standards body does not like the extensions he is suggesting, they won't get voted in. And if they do go in, obviously they are no longer proprietary because they become part of the standard. Microsoft certainly have not got it all their own way, even with Herb as chair and as lot of people have mentioned, since Herb joined them, their compiler has become much compliant simply because one of reasons for hiring him to ensure that they became more compliant and Herb probably wouldn't have joined if that wasn't part of the role.
BTW my father is one of the few truly independant members of the ISO committee, not tied to any vendor.
Hmmmm, heard of a company called IBM? Ever read an IBM Redbook, ever looked what they used to generate them....That'd be FrameMaker.
AIX does have DLPAR, but the problem with this is that it is only partitioning on a CPU boundary which means despite the fact it is supported on lower-end AIX boxes kind of limits it's use. However with AIX 5.3 and Power-5, DLPARing will be at a sub-CPU partition, up to 100 partitions per CPU is what I've heard. The Power-5 machines will ship with the lower end first before the replacement to the p690, certainly less than $100k per box. It will also support virtual networking etc, so that the LPARs will not have to go out onto the network and the traffic will stay within the box (much goodness). So although Zones sound good, I think that genuine virtual machines ala LPAR are better.
Well, I've just come back from a visit to our Indian support office and also a workshop with our outsourced developers. It is interesting talking to some of the more senior guys out there who are beginning to get concerned about the situation out there. Firstly within programming you have rapid wage inflation, so the outsourcing companies who were used to margins of over 100%, now have margins of between 30-40%; still large margins but it kind of affects their ability to invest in the infrastructure they need. And believe it, they do need to invest in upgrading their infrastructure; powercuts, three or four times a day; telephone lines which are unbelievably variable in quality; let alone physical infrastructure like transport, sewerage etc.
Secondly, and this is from a senior manager within one of India's largest outsourcing companies, their code sucks! 40 defects per function point as opposed to 5 if you use an Israelli developer as opposed to 1 if you use a Vietnamese developer.
Thirdly, at the moment they are only producing software developers and good sysadmins, support staff etc are as rare as rocking horse-crap. The education system trains but does not educate, so innovation does not come easily.
So although at the moment, things look a little bleak in the Western IT industry, it could all change or at least the opportunities will change. And hell, it only takes a war between India and Pakistan to mess everybody's outsourcing strategy up.
Obviously Solaris v10 will be actually be Sun rebadged version of Linux! At which point IBM will probably sue Sun as it is has parts of IBM code in and as SCO can retroactively decide to that the code that they shipped under GPL is no really under the GPL. At some point, it will be shown that DEC misused trade secrets at some point and code which was misappropriated then made it's way into VMS which then somehow made it into NT and the only operating system that we can actually use is DOS.
Actually, I thought it was Income Tax which was to pay for the Napoleonic Wars...And I am all in favour of using it to pay for its original cause, kicking France's butt!! In fact, I'm sure that America would contribute as well.....
http://www.firewiremax.com/usbfir13come.html
Not that I've tried it....but took all of 30 seconds on Google to find one....
I *know* that IBM has looked at buying Sun in the past, in the same way that they have looked at Apple. If you look at IBM's big aquisitions over the past ten years or so, they have purchased companies which have key technologies that they are lacking or just lagging behind. I'm not sure that purchasing Sun actually gets them that much except the control of Java. I don't think that they'd want another Unix (but I'm not a big Solaris fan) and they probably don't really want Sparc technology. Purchasing Sun to get control of Java seems extreme.
The more interesting rumour/suggestion is that IBM buy EMC. If they bought EMC, they would have even more dominance in the data centre..
Ask them what they hate most about their job, if they answer anything but users, they are lying! Actually, there is one thing worse than ordinary users, that is programmers who think that they know enough to sysadmin....
The picture you paint could occur with Unix as well. The real problem that I've come across is the lack of thought and design before implementation. If you think about scalablity before you implement, you could probably come up with something which even ran on Windows. If you sit down before you implement and assume that your systems will grow like topsy, your storage requirements will run rampant and design around that you might get your initial design right.
If your initial design is right, you should be able to start on a Windows system (shudder) and migrate easily to a Unix platform and from there to a S/390 or whatever.
Of course doing it right will probably cost more to start with and convincing your finance people is often next to impossible but you can only try.
I can see more than two problems with this box unfortunately. Sure it looks great but it lacks alot. Memory expandibility, only two network ports, no SMP support, no SCSI, certainly no fibre, no gigabit ethernet. Perhaps they are cheap enough to buy and throw away but if I were building a web-farm, I'd have to think twice about putting these in.
Hopefully that will not change. One of the design decisions made very early on was that it should be usable by as many browsers as possible and should not rely on a specific browser. The whole idea was that it should be Internet banking not MS/IE or Netscape Banking. I was quite involved in the original design work and know that the whole design-team heavily backed that idea. I've now moved on but I know a great number of the original players are still there and I don't expect things to have changed much.
It also helped that the design was done very early on before MS and Netscape really started botching things up. However making things as standards compliant as possible is sometimes alot harder than people realise and can really slow down initial roll-outs.
Ever since I started using AIX (3.2.5) it has supported booting from tape, disk, cd and network. And hey if you were really perverse you could boot AIX from floppy. Okay AIX can be a bit picky about what type of CD it boots from i.e non-IBM badged CDs can be a bit challenging; but in general it works.
Of all the unices I've used, AIX is just about the easiest to administer and once the ODM has gone; it will be even better (well unless they replace with something worse; like the SDR...aaargh!!)
SMIT is also going, well, the graphical version is and being replaced by the evil that is WSM, or whatever they have decided to call it. However the good news is SMITTY is staying for the time being and the even better news is that the ODM is almost certainly going come Monteray/AIX version 5, or whatever they finally decide to call it!!
The chip doesn't actually matter, whether it's 32 bit or 64 bit, the filesystems in AIX have the same limit. In AIX 4.2, the maximum size of a file was increased from 2 Gbytes to 64 Gbytes. This doe pale against some of the competing operating systems but I've not yet had a commercial customer complain. I've known some scientific customers who have hit the limit. And it probably is a good thing that Linux will access to some very good implementatons of journalled file-systems and a least a couple that have proved themselves over the years in some commercial environments.
Well, I assume that they are using the new Power 3 High Nodes, which is presently an 8-Way SMP box. Okay, we all know (well those people who deal with SP and RS) that this will go up fairly shortly. Can an SP run linux, well, yes...I've seen it done. Absolutely no reason why it shouldn't. Unfortunately, there are no drivers, at present, for the switch, which is the clever bit. I guess someone might write some, I'd be surprised if someone didn't.
BTW, has anyone written linux drivers for the SSA adapters, either Intel or RS.
As we see more convergence in portable devices, hey we've already got digital cameras which can be used as arcade machine emulators, the RIAA are going to struggle more and more. Are they really going to be able tell someone what they use their handheld device for? And are they really going to be able to stop people using their pdas etc to exchange data. No, didn't think so.
Dave Cutler is the OS architect behind NT and before that VMS. I believe he is currently heading up the NT-64 project.
Of course you can be sued for saying something defamatory about a person or a company. If I was to say that Microsoft uses child slave labour to produce their products, they could sue. If I was to express the opinion that NT is the shoddiest operating system ever, they couldn't. But I were to say that NT is full of code ripped off from other operating systems, I would possibly be on shakey ground. Expressing an opinion is on thing, presenting an opinion as fact is another thing entirely.