It's worth noting that my Alienware 15 and my E7240 don't have any such cert on them. Both are still OEM builds... though the AW15 has been upgraded to Windows 10 while the E7240 is still running 7 (because I actually like to get work done on that:)
Just also tested my Venue 11 Pro and it DOES have the cert. Interesting.
That's fair, but I can name a couple of fun places around there like Scarecrow (nice pub, great food and drinks), Miller's Crossing (a bit further up Olive) and now there's Charlie Gitto's there too... though that's usually not one of my go-to's. There's also Clancy's a bit further down Clarkson (Kehr's Mill and Clayton) that is a fantastic little pub to go drink at and order enough pork to make you not want to eat for a week.
I do agree Maplewood is good too... love the Crow's Nest, but I prefer The Grove or South Grand most of the time. I have found the Loop lacking recently; it's had the heart ripped out of it by too-high rents resulting in most of the actually cool places shutting down and being replaced with strip-mall specials. Even some of the old buildings now have been razed for new multi-use ugly pieces of crap so even the architectural heart has been ripped out of it. A few mainstays remain like Blueberry Hill, but the last couple of times I've been there the food has declined a lot in quality and the place feels like it's on a slow decline to shuttering as well.
Interesting. I live in St. Louis now (have done for about 20 years) and can't say enough good things about the job market here. No, you're not going to find tech jobs in any of the big tech companies, but there are a surprising amount of programming and infrastructure jobs always available around here.
Engineering companies seem to exist all over the place here, and while yes healthcare IT is its own beast there are definitely plenty of jobs around here for that. And you'd be surprised the number (and pay) of tech jobs at some of the manufacturing firms around town.
Yes, you've got some shady neighbourhoods, but they are the exception rather than the rule. It's worth bearing in mind that St. Louis county also has the richest township per-capita in the entire country (Ladue), and many of the neighbouring towns have benefitted greatly from this. Chesterfield, Creve Couer and Des Peres spring to mind as areas that have had a sort of renaissance during the last 5-10 years.
And night life... yeah the night-life downtown isn't so hot. I agree that Laclede's Landing used to be amazing but has suffered greatly from that hulking great casino. I don't go down there... the casino itself is not nice inside (they rarely are anyway) and the area around it has become a bit of a crime cesspool despite significant police presence. The places to go in St. Louis on the weekends have moved out of the downtown area to places like South Grand and the previously scary Vandeventer / Forest Park Parkway stretch (location of the new Ikea). Not to mention places like The Grove that can be amazing for nightlife. These are all South of the city, somewhat... and I'm really pleased to see this place picking up like this.
Yes, you can also go out to the county for a very different feel... Chesterfield is still decent so long as you stay out of the Valley (the new outlet malls have really ruined it for me) and there's also some pretty decent night life around Clarkson and 40. South Lindbergh is also good for night life just as it always has been... Helen Fitzgerald's is always good for a laugh. And the CWE while not as upscale as it used to be still has a pretty popping nightlife. If you're out looking to just get laid, there's still Westport (not quite so good) or Old St. Charles (definitely high on the list of "yep, that'll work").
No, generally the wages aren't phenomenal here, but the cost of living is amazing. I have a 3000 square foot house with easy access to I-44 and I-40 in the South City area near South Grand and I paid less for it than I would've paid for a place half this size anywhere in Denver. It doesn't hurt that it's over a hundred years old and has gorgeous character. Yeah, old houses aren't for everyone but I love living in a place that has been through so much.
I don't have mod points or I'd mod you up despite being an AC.
I've lived in St. Louis for almost 20 years at this point and it's been really good to me. I earn good money, own a gorgeous 3000 square foot house in the South City area and am constantly surprised more people don't move here. It's not hard to find a tech job - no, you're not going to be working for Google or Apple or even Microsoft as a general rule (though the latter does have an office here for sales and consultant services) but there are plenty of programming and infrastructure jobs available. We have a very large engineering footprint, surprisingly so. Boeing has a huge engineering office up near the airport, and world-renowned engineering companies like Hunter, MiTek and Mark Andy are all headquartered here. Yes, they're not tech companies in the traditional sense, but they're all growing companies with pretty significant programmer and infrastructure teams that have to grow with the company.
I'm not going to say St. Louis is perfect; there's a lot of weirdness here from the segregation of county and city governments, and there's a definite segregation of population as well that tends to exacerbate the crime situation in certain areas. However, I love where I live and don't have much of an issue with crime. I also love the nightlife in town, the weather is actually quite reasonable with only a few weeks of real winter every year (yes, it gets cold but we don't get a lot of snow except in January usually) and there's always something going on that is cool and enjoyable. We have incredible parks (Forest Park is an amazing city park that's actually twice the size of Central Park) and a completely free science center and museums. There are also wonderful neighbourhoods to walk in and explore, and traffic is really almost a non-issue for anyone who's seen Denver or Austin traffic.
I will also say it's a great place to raise a family; reasonable cost of living and decent schools... mostly so long as you stay out of the city itself. But there are still some private schools that the tuition really isn't too bad, but it's worth noting most of them are religious schools if you have an issue with that.
I have used arrangements like this when traveling for business. They're referred to these days as "Crash Pads"... you can usually search some local. They're often used by airline pilots who spend a certain amount of their time per month in a particular city... they get a Crash Pad which gives them a common place to sleep (and sometimes sleep with others...) that they're familiar with, a place they can keep some personal belongings and not run a lot of the risk or expense of hotels.
I've used places like this when out of town for more than a week at a time for more than two months at a time. They're often pretty reasonable and often are just a room in a house with several similar rooms for others. They're also usually available on a month-by-month basis and in my opinion are a lot nicer than a lot of the "extended stay" places. Plus, they tend to be in pretty decent areas for bars, highways and the like... and of course you can be more selective about the area you stay in because you're not tied to "hotel alleys".
Having said all that, not sure I'd live in a communal-living place like this. I tried it recently; spent two years living in a condo thinking I would enjoy the lack of maintenance on the exterior and the social benefits of having a clubhouse, communal gym, pool etc. After two years I decided that I didn't like it... I moved back into a house and I'm far happier because I can entertain friends a lot easier, I have extra bedrooms for guests (family and friends), and since it's a 3000 square foot house I no longer feel like my girlfriend and I are competing for space with my 15 year old... who pretty much has the entire top floor of the house to himself; there are two bedrooms up there with one of them having a futon which he often uses as a sitting room for his friends. Keeps him out of my hair:)
There is also an in-between situation where you can be legally classified as a boarder/lodger even if you stay over 30 days. The distinction is if you occupy part of premises but whose occupation/residency is still under the control of the owner. For example, if you rent a room in someone's private house that doesn't have its own entrance. Or maybe the owner still vacuums your room periodically or provides laundry services for you or free breakfast, you might be a classified lodger/boarder instead of a tenant and sacrifice most tenant rights even though your stay is over 30 days...
I find this part of your (great, BTW) analysis of the laws surrounding rental properties and the like very interesting. I'm a landlord myself with a couple of single-family properties under my belt so I know all of this is accurate.
I just found this part interesting because it occurs to me that this kind of living arrangement might fall under that exact set of circumstances. If the common area is either communally maintained or maintained by the landlord it might fall under this sort of "grey area" law. Even lacking the actual presence of the landlord, it seems that if the "floor manager" either got discounted rent or was paid a salary for their work as the "social coordinator" (I hate that name BTW) then they could classify as a proxy for the landlord and therefore be classed as the "resident". Of course, the catch here is that at that point, evicting the SC would be very troublesome if they got out of hand, so vetting that person would be difficult and potentially risky to the endeavour.
I use my 360 all the time. It's right there on my wrist, so even while driving if I receive a notification that I've received a text message I can flip my wrist over and check the summary on my wrist to see if I need to respond to it, or if it can wait until I get to my destination. I don't need to pull my phone out of my pocket or retrieve it from my jacket that may be hanging in the back of my car (depending on where I put it). I get reminders of appointments and again I don't have to rely on my phone to do the same. In fact, because the alarm on my 360 is vibrate only I can actually turn the notifications completely off on my phone most of the time and I still know what's going on. Similarly, in a meeting when my phone rings I can immediately see who's calling at a glance and throw it off to voicemail. I also like the ability to use the microphone in my 360 to set timers, set an alarm, bring up the weather etc. For my use case, it works extremely well.
I also travel frequently enough that it's really nice when going through security and boarding the plane to have my boarding pass QR on my watch display instead of my phone. I know American Airlines app on Android Wear does this, not sure about others (I've flowing pretty much exclusively American since I got my 360 a year ago).
I'll also note that because I'm not turning my phone on every time there's a notification or I want to know the time, my battery life on my phone actually increased when I moved to a smartwatch.
As far as charging every night, that's less of a problem than you might think. I don't wear my watch to bed, so I have my Moto 360 charging base sitting on my nightstand right next to the cable for my phone. Instead of setting my watch on the nightstand itself, I set it on the charging base and voila... no problems. It's no more a chore than setting it down, really. Yes, it can be frustrating if you are traveling and forget the base, but that's also true of forgetting charging cables for any of your other devices. So far it hasn't been a problem. Battery life also isn't half bad on the 360; I can get about 30 hours of tested time out of mine... given that I charge it nightly that's pretty bloody impressive and I have no complaints about it.
I do agree though that this is still a nascent industry... people haven't really found that killer app for a smartwatch yet, but for people like me who are natural early adopters, techies and people who just like stuff like this I think there's still a market.
Interestingly, I work with pilots, real professional pilots, and they seem drawn to TAG Heuer. Don't know why, but it is what it is.
Well, there's a couple of things at work here. First there's cachet; the Tag Heuer brand is widely recognized among pilots as being "the best". Part of that in truth is the heavy marketing TH did in aviation magazines showing lots of pilots with their TH watches especially during the 1970's and 1980's (though it continues to this day along with Breitling).
Second thing at work is simple visibility. The TH watches have always been designed to be high contrast and easy to read. That's surprisingly important in a cockpit when time is the essence of navigation and you're in turbulence. Try reading your watch while swinging your arm in random directions and you get a feel for it... high contrast is key.
Now, the truth is the second thing is almost irrelevant today with navigation electronics in anything larger than about 6 or 8 seats and more than one engine... but if you're flying a single engine craft then there's always the risk of losing all your electronics in an alternator/generator failure so you're usually expected to be spending your time between nav points plotting your course on your paper map and using your watch to keep track. Since all pilots start from single engine Cessnas and the like, this idea of "I must have a watch I can read at all times" is pretty well ingrained... and those who have actually had an electrical failure en-route probably will never be separated from their watches. Especially if you're flying in instrument conditions a good map and an easy-to-read watch can actually save your life.
HP hasn't had interesting product in living memory. The closest they came was buying WebOS and making a tablet, but they couldn't even follow through on that one. I'm not sure there was a future in that anyway, but at least if they'd followed through it would be something to move forward with.
True on the consumer side, but on the enterprise/datacenter side they were producing some pretty interesting products in the last few years that were horribly marketed and/or sold. My personal favourite was the HP Moonshot which was a hyper-converged blade architecture and potentially one of the most interesting things in large-scale computing in years. However, it was hobbled by terrible marketing, and requiring you to have the solution architected (at your cost, mind) by HP's techs rather than allowing you to just buy the chassis and blades. I went through that process and it was such a pain in the ass that we ended up buying Cisco UCS (which was its own set of pains in the ass I won't get into).
I think they did ease up that requirement for architecture, but I know myself and a lot of other people were really put off by the sales technique; like they were saying we were too dumb to know our own workload requirements and therefore they wanted to charge us for their service folks times to come architect it for us. They were acting like they had no competitor... and in that sort of density they sort of didn't when it was first unveiled. But tech moves quickly, and at the time it was felt that the kind of density Moonshot was offering was a nice to have and not a necessity, so most savvy IT managers and admins went with UCS or Dell's M1000e, and later started looking at platforms like Nutanix and Simplivity for the same workloads.
Well, take into a account I grew up in Belfast. Getting mugged by thugs was a risk I ran every time I walked out the door... you learn how to deal with it. Generally, don't carry much cash and only carry one of either a debit card or credit card at any one time... that way you always have a back up. If you're approached and threatened then generally I carry a "sacrificial 20" in my wallet that I will hand to someone, showing them clearly I have nothing else in my wallet. Typically this is enough for them to leave you alone... sometimes they'll take the entire wallet but so long as you don't have too expensive a wallet they usually don't want it or will dispose of it quickly. Drivers licenses are no use to them, so often a wallet will be found with the license intact as well as credit cards because they assume you're going to cancel them as soon as you're attacked.
They're much more likely these days to want your cellphone... and I'll hand that over quite gladly. I have it insured so it'll be replaced, the storage is encrypted and the phone will lock immediately when I tap the power button. Yay... they get a 2 year old Moto X for their trouble. They're more likely to be happy with the 20.
I've walked around Ferguson, MO and Belfast with all of these "safeguards" in place. Worst I've ever had in my life was threatened at gunpoint, and so long as you treat them with respect and just hand over what they ask for it's never been an issue. The irony of course is that the attack I had happened Irvine, CA... supposedly the safest city in America in recent years (attack happened in 2013). I have been threatened once in St. Louis and handed over my $20... I just treated said attacker with respect and handed him the $20 as he asked. No fuss, no argument. That was probably a decade ago.
Generally we buy groceries two to three times a week. You can easily carry the majority of a week's groceries so long as you bring your own better quality bags rather than the rather crappy plastic bags they have at most grocery stores. Plus, there's the reusable aspect... so win on being even greener than just not using your car. To be honest we could probably do it only once a week and be fine, but my son likes to buy his own groceries; he's 15 and likes the independence, it gives him exercise, and he likes to cook for himself. As a result I usually haven't bought what he wants to cook with, so he walks up to the grocery store on his own.
Yes, there are some things a neighbourhood grocer sometimes doesn't have. I buy a very specific dog food for example in a big bag... I buy that because otherwise I have to deal with "Siberian Husky Intestinal Turmoil"... the initials say it all. This I buy once every 4 weeks or so, and the place that stocks it is about 15 miles away. I could probably do it on the bus, but since I do actually drive a lot at work I can usually drop by while I'm passing through that area or visiting a nearby customer to pick up that dog food. But as a general rule a local grocer will have what you need, and often it's more local produce like eggs, chickens etc. that come from local farms.
In addition, we have two farmer's markets weekly near here; one in Soulard (about a 2 mile walk) and one in Tower Grove Park (about a mile)... so I end up eating a lot of fresh local stuff rather than the big-box store crap.
Moving here has had a massively positive impact on my health and well-being. I eat better, I exercise more and psychologically I find it less draining than the funk I descended into while living in the 'burbs.
I live in St. Louis, specifically I live in an area called Compton Heights. What this means is that I have literally a 3 minute walk to a bus stop, maybe a 15 minute walk (or 5 minute bus ride) to the Metrolink (light rail) station. From there I can get to the airport, to the Delmar Loop (good restaurants and pubs and some esoteric shops) and so on. I'm probably 15 minutes walk from a couple of grocery stores, and like a lot of these city neighbourhoods we do also have a rather nice little "martini bar" (really a pub with some delusions of grandeur) where the locals hang out. It's also worth noting that I'm just under 3 miles walk from Busch Stadium as well if I want to watch the Cardinals play, and even closer to Chaifetz Arena for events and the like. And if I want to go for a nice long walk in a park, I have Tower Grove Park just about 20 minutes walk away.
My whole neighbourhood is eminently walkable. That's one of the reasons I moved here in the first place. It doesn't take genius city planning, just an old city. My house is 130 years old... one of the oldest in the neighbourhood and is still somewhat of a relic of its Victorian construction. There are a lot of streets around here that really weren't built with cars in mind, so walking or bicycling is the best option.
The suburbs suck though... at least for me. I lived in the burbs for years and really hated it (but my then wife loved it). It's obviously something that makes some people happy, but maybe my European upbringing (Belfast, NI) made me more of a city dweller with walkable neighbourhoods. The only downside is the crime rate here is rather bad, but to be honest I have not been affected by it myself.
Honestly, a lot depends on whether or not you want FLOSS or non-FLOSS, paid on non-paid etc. Not to mention how much actual work you want to put into your system.
I have two, both of which are nominally "free". The first is OneNote that I use for work. It syncs across all my devices and works really well for someone who uses a Windows tablet as I can both write notes with my stylus and draw diagrams. This functionality alone makes it a stand-out awesome system for me as typically in the kinds of meetings I do (with customers) it's usually frowned upon to sit there with a screen in front of you and a keyboard, but if you have a pad flat on the table and can be seen to be writing notes, drawing diagrams etc. it makes a customer feel that I am much more engaged in the conversation. Believe me, I've seen it when my peers are tapping away at their keyboards the customers tend to look to me for input or information because they feel my colleague is not engaged. Some of my colleagues use pen and paper, but I find my method works best for me... I don't run out of ink or paper... though occasionally I do find my battery in my stylus dead. Oh... and even if I lost my tablet I'd still have my notes.
For my personal stuff I used to use Evernote because it was cross-platform. I didn't need handwriting... occasionally need pictures in a note etc. I even paid for premium for a while and I do still have many of my personal notes in it... though I use the free service now.
What I'm migrating to for personal notes is OwnNote which is an app for OwnCloud. This is a FLOSS environment that is free... but to set it up you do need a server that's on the Internet or at least accessible on your local intranet. The down side is a lack of fat client apps... offline sync and the like. It means that you need to be online to write notes. Now, there's an app for Android and one for iOS, but not for Windows or Linux (that I'm aware of, anyway). This means offline usage is pretty much out. Having said that, the API is open enough and I have enough coding skills that I might throw together a fat client at some point, or I might just wait until someone else does it and contribute. It hasn't been a big problem as yet simply because I am typically online wherever I need to take notes for personal consumption.
I host mine on a server at home and I deal with the front-end connectivity by having an OpenVPN network with a Linode fronting it using NGINX. This is overly complex, yes... I also host my own mail server and web site (still!) so this makes my life easier... but you could just as easily front it on a consumer-grade home connection using DynDNS or some other similar service. Of course, the nice thing about this setup is that it also gives me DropBox/OneDrive functionality that's private and owned by me. It's nice to have ALL my documents stored in a "cloud" because I can selectively sync across all my devices, and then I have a script that backs the whole thing up twice a week to S3/Glacier. Yeah, that's also an additional cost but it's cheaper and more convenient to me than a lot of the alternatives. And yes, my S3/Glacier backups are all encrypted:)
Not specifically what you're looking for, but have you looked at some modern PC tablets? I am currently typing this on a keyboard attached to my Dell Venue 11 Pro... about the same form factor as the Surface Pro it replaced (though smaller than the Surface Pro 3/4. Great screen, ridiculous battery life... and yes you can put Linux on it.
I am currently in Windows 10 because I use OneNote a lot... but I have this set up to dual-boot to Linux as well and it works fantastically well.
Neither of them have the IOPS needed for any kind modern applications.
While I agree with just about everything else you wrote; I do take some issue with this particular statement.
Modern applications meaning what exactly? If you're talking about big data then you're right... but you don't use a traditional SAN array for big data if you're smart; you use a proper object-based storage platform and scale it that way. Traditional SAN arrays suck for those workloads. But if you're talking VDI, SQL, web farms and general purpose virtualization then I'm afraid you're wrong.
Realistically when fully kitted out in SYNTHETIC BENCHMARKS, the "low-end" SC4020 will top out at over 400,000 IOPS. Yes, real-world will be a lot lower but you can comfortably expect 150K-200K IOPS with sub millisecond latency pushing about 6GB/s in real world operations. The SC8000 is more like 300K IOPS or thereabouts in those same synthetic benchmarks, but can push a lot more data (around 20GB/s) and still get in the 150K-200K IOPS range due to the fact that it can have more than one SAS chain while the SC4020 only has one. No, it's not the "million IOPS" you get advertised by EMC and the like... but in real world I have rarely seen even the might XTremeIO get anywhere close to that... 300-400K IOPS in real world is more realistic. Yes, faster... but not amazingly faster.
Besides, "modern applications" don't actually require near as much storage IOPS as most people think. I had a customer recently asking me about SANs that ran in excess of 150K IOPS for their new primary storage. We talked about a lot of expensive options (Violin, XTremeIO and so forth) but when we actually did some monitoring of their actual application load they were hovering around 60K IOPS. Even their peak load was under 75K IOPS so they ended up in a lower cost and more expandable solutions... and ironically given this topic here they ended up with a pair of SC8000's with Dell's "Live Volume" capabilities so they could move workloads around on the fly. So much cheaper than the alternatives and fit their actual workloads perfectly... not what some marketing guy was telling them they needed. Each SC8K is storing about a half petabyte each and can scale to about 2PB each.
I find this is incredibly common... most people don't actually know what their workloads are using so they tend to buy into the marketing hype being spouted by the high-end storage vendors. Then they end up overspending for their solution... yeah they have plenty of headroom and there's no doubt in my mind that they're getting the best performance they could possibly get out of it (because their applications don't really scale), but I've been amused when I've seen 5 year old arrays being decommed that aren't even close to their actual maximum performance because some salesdroid said they needed a million IOPS.
And to Dell's credit it's not like they're sitting on their laurels waiting. It's well known they have new stuff in the pipe for Compellent... probably for announcement at the next Dell World conference. I'll be interested to see what they do with their next generation hardware... the SC8K has been a fantastic platform but it is getting a bit long in the tooth. Having said that I think they could probably continue to do more with the SC8K because I've rarely seen one exceed ~10% of the CPU utilization.
They already can't quite figure out how to merge the two systems and have been selling both. The inside story is that EQL will go away, but they never seem to go away and Compellent can't quite come up with a product as simple and cheap as EQL.
Scuttlebutt is that they're prepping to release firmware for EQL and CML that will allow cross-replication and extend the Enterprise Manager tool to also manage EQL. And the simplicity... well they did just come out with the SCv2000 which is all wizard-driven and about as dead simple to set up as the EQL. I predict we'll see that same level of simplicity making its way into the higher tier products pretty soon.
I think there's also an open question about the mid-long range future of Compellent's primary sales pitch, its automatic tiering of data between different disk speeds (like SSD, 15k and 7.2k) when the future of data storage looks increasingly like it will be all flash, at least for most of the market volume.
What does all that tiering overhead mean in a world dominated by flash? Maybe it makes sense for the absolute largest installs where petabytes are in play, but most of the Compellent installs I've seen have been a shelf of tier 1 and maybe 2 shelves of tier 3. And they're increasingly 10G iSCSI focused, passing on FC.
To me this is interesting. Thing is there's more than one type of SSD technology at play today. There's SLC, (e)MLC and now TLC (3D-NAND). Each of these have different performance stats just like spinning disk. Yeah, even the lowest end of these is 10 times as fast as even a 15K drive but the write performance statistics of each of these drive types in particular is quite different. I remember going from my Samsung SLC 64GB boot drive on my laptop (this is going back several years) to an MLC 128GB drive and despite similar read performance I was always struck by how different the write performance was. Yeah, the MLC was a lot cheaper for the capacity but the write performance suffered greatly. From what I hear, TLC suffers a similar drop in write performance compared to MLC.
The auto tiering if configured correctly can certainly make for an interesting performance story. Put SLC at the top where you want fast writes and allow it to trickle down to MLC and/or TLC... just like 15K->10K->7K. There's a question mark over whether current controllers can really take advantage of the potential performance in this kind of setup, but we're seeing controller performance increasing over generations anyway.
The fact that we can now buy TLC drives at enterprise level for about the same price as 15K per GB is incredibly interesting to me and I think will really shake up the industry.
I can't figure out how they'd blend in EMC to this mix.
What they're probably after is controlling interest in VMware. This would give them a complete vertical play for virtualization, being able to supply compute, networking, storage and hypervisor. They would probably also be in a position to further a lot of network and storage virtualization with control over both sides of the equation, hardware an software.
I do wonder if there's a possible anti-trust question here. I also wonder how Microsoft would feel about it as well.
Ding ding ding! I think we have a winner... even though I have no information here I would guess this is almost certainly the play here. That and RSA would give Dell an even stronger foothold in the Enterprise than they already have. I have to admit they've been making some REALLY interesting changes in their portfolio, support and even sales organizations lately that I think make them a company to watch. Even in networking... they've shit-canned the atrocious Powerconnect line of switches (that some people loved) and replaced with a whole new line of switching from low end to high... and it's really good stuff! I myself just recently replaced my home core switch with an X1018; a low-end half-rack web-managed sw
If you need a smaller array you should check out the SC4020 as well. Runs the same code base as the SC8000 on smaller hardware platform (slower CPU's, less memory) and in some benchmarks (read: not real world typically) can actually outperform the SC8K when fully kitted out due to an internal IPC connection instead of external. You can also happily replicate between the two so the 4020 makes for a great cost-effective DR site replication target when budget is limited. Or a remote datacenter SAN you can replicate to "the mothership".
Given all this though, I'm surprised to hear that Dell would be even slightly interested in EMC. I've run EMC's and I've run Compellents (and HP's, and NetApps), and quite frankly the SC8K/SC4K family are the best arrays I've ever used.
Dell already owns Equallogic which covers the low to mid-range of the storage market pretty well in Dell's offerings.
Dell ALSO owns Compellent which covers the mid to high range of the storage market too.
The only asset that EMC has that Dell I think might want would be VMware and the installed base of EMC. EMC still sell some nice arrays, but they're pretty spendy for what you get.
At least go with Dell. Dell will sell you an MD3860i with 60 6TB hard drives for not much more than what you paid for the your Synology. Performance is just as good as the Synology, you'll get next day on site support from a Dell tech, and a smaller rack/power/cooling footprint as well.
Seconded... though having recently seen a lot of quotes you could do worse than the Dell SCv2000 which is the newer replacement for the MD3860i using the Compellent code. It's faster and cheaper than the MD, mostly because Dell no longer has to pay the Netapp tax for every MD (the MD's are based on an LSI chipset that's owned by Netapp)
There's a reason nobody builds deskside compute servers with today's technology. Density, power, and cooling.
And the fact that a deskside system is highly unlikely to be utilized 100% of the time... probably more like 10% of the time. In that case it's more cost-effective to farm it out to a bigger cluster in a server room, or run it in some AWS/Azure nodes for the time it needs and then shut it down.
The fact that there are many more high performance computing resources available relatively cheaply is as good a reason as any not to do deskside compute on a large scale.
I wish you hadn't posted AC, and I wish I had mod points!
This is the right answer. The workloads aren't clear because we don't know what OP is trying to accomplish with this setup. Is he building an HPC cluster to do engineering analysis, or is he building it because he has convinced his management that it's cool? If the latter... well, he'll be looking for a new job after he builds it and it does nothing to help his customer (his employer).
Start with the application. What are its workload characteristics? What kind of backend does it need? Then look at the backend. What are ITS workload characteristics. Only then should you look at hardware. Answers to the first two will answer what hardware you need, but even then there are a lot of moving parts to take into account. How many nodes? How much CPU per node? Highly parallel or high speed? How much memory per node? Storage infrastructure? Output type?
This is a terrible AskSlashdot question because it requires an intimate knowledge of the workload being proposed. I am a consultant for a living so I do exactly this process above every single day. Any answers will literally just be spitballing because the information we have available is so vague... and any actual answers are guaranteed virtually useless and a quick way for OP to lose his job.
I know this is old now, but honestly you're overthinking this.
First, as others have mentioned here you can use TeamViewer to do remote desktop support, and it's free. No need to upgrade to Windows 7 Ultimate or anything else for that matter. I've used it on OSX, Windows and Linux and it works like a champ. I've supported family and friends... and even had a commercial license for TeamViewer for a while because it really is so easy to use and maintain that I found it invaluable. I don't do that job any more, but I still maintain TeamViewer on my computers in my house so I can get into them and manage/maintain them while I'm on a business trip. Same on my son's laptop so if he has a problem I can support him remotely.
Now of course comes to your son. Don't. Seriously... kids are going to be kids, and they're going to work around any controls you put on a computer. The only thing you are LEGALLY required to do is to control what he has access to at YOUR home. Once he's off your network, anything he does is the responsibility of the party that owns the network he's using. Yes, he should be held responsible by you as a parent, but legally there's nothing forcing you to do this. Plus, kids are going to find workarounds regardless; my son is 15 so you can imagine the battles I've had with him over the years. As it stands now, I manage his Internet access at home using a Sonicwall TZ-215 firewall that has Gateway Anti-Virus and some content controls turned on. Honestly, I don't block porn... he's 15... but I do block some categories I personally find distasteful; hate speech and the like. If he needs something for a particular essay he's doing for school that's blocked, he can ask me to unblock it and he does. This way there's mutual trust going on, which to be honest is the RIGHT way to parent.
I also don't check the logs to see where he's going on the web. Just so long as he's not doing anything illegal (and yes, I do block bittorrent for that reason) that could get me in legal hot water I don't particularly concern myself with it. I check his laptop for malware and to make sure updates are in place periodically, but beyond that I don't see the need to get overly stressed about it. Besides, we have an understanding that if he does anything bad that gets his computer malware that's going to be too much trouble to clean up (like more than 30 minutes of work on my part) then his machine gets re-imaged and he gets to reinstall everything, restore his own files etc. I make him responsible for his backups as well.
Is my system perfect? No, but it works. And right now I have a 15 year old boy who may or may not go on porn sites occasionally (I really don't care), plays games occasionally... but generally is a well-behaved kid when it comes to technology.
I guess what I don't get about your requirements; if your primary reason for the site B connection is supporting your parents, then why backhaul all the Internet traffic across your own network? With a decent managed firewall you can do all the controls you like, and there are web-managed options as well. Some of them even support OpenVPN natively or some IPSec variant that you can create a virtual private network for managing stuff. If you really want content controls on your parents network then you really need to review what you're trying to accomplish here. You don't have to get something as fancy as a Sonicwall, there are plenty of other cheaper options but that is certainly one.
I do have a VPN as well as my TeamViewer connections... honestly SSH is easier to manage my Linux boxes than TeamViewer most of the time because I don't need a GUI. As a result, all my Linux boxes partake in an OpenVPN network against a hub system hosted on Linode (where my web server is also hosted). I have the OpenVPN client on my laptops so when I'm out and about I can join the network and SSH to any of the systems no matter where I am (I keep a HOSTS file with all the IP's). Bonus; I can host my own mail server on my home box without using the storage on the L
Slashdot Mirror
It's worth noting that my Alienware 15 and my E7240 don't have any such cert on them. Both are still OEM builds... though the AW15 has been upgraded to Windows 10 while the E7240 is still running 7 (because I actually like to get work done on that :)
Just also tested my Venue 11 Pro and it DOES have the cert. Interesting.
Time zones are a thing.
That's fair, but I can name a couple of fun places around there like Scarecrow (nice pub, great food and drinks), Miller's Crossing (a bit further up Olive) and now there's Charlie Gitto's there too... though that's usually not one of my go-to's. There's also Clancy's a bit further down Clarkson (Kehr's Mill and Clayton) that is a fantastic little pub to go drink at and order enough pork to make you not want to eat for a week.
I do agree Maplewood is good too... love the Crow's Nest, but I prefer The Grove or South Grand most of the time. I have found the Loop lacking recently; it's had the heart ripped out of it by too-high rents resulting in most of the actually cool places shutting down and being replaced with strip-mall specials. Even some of the old buildings now have been razed for new multi-use ugly pieces of crap so even the architectural heart has been ripped out of it. A few mainstays remain like Blueberry Hill, but the last couple of times I've been there the food has declined a lot in quality and the place feels like it's on a slow decline to shuttering as well.
Interesting. I live in St. Louis now (have done for about 20 years) and can't say enough good things about the job market here. No, you're not going to find tech jobs in any of the big tech companies, but there are a surprising amount of programming and infrastructure jobs always available around here.
Engineering companies seem to exist all over the place here, and while yes healthcare IT is its own beast there are definitely plenty of jobs around here for that. And you'd be surprised the number (and pay) of tech jobs at some of the manufacturing firms around town.
Yes, you've got some shady neighbourhoods, but they are the exception rather than the rule. It's worth bearing in mind that St. Louis county also has the richest township per-capita in the entire country (Ladue), and many of the neighbouring towns have benefitted greatly from this. Chesterfield, Creve Couer and Des Peres spring to mind as areas that have had a sort of renaissance during the last 5-10 years.
And night life... yeah the night-life downtown isn't so hot. I agree that Laclede's Landing used to be amazing but has suffered greatly from that hulking great casino. I don't go down there... the casino itself is not nice inside (they rarely are anyway) and the area around it has become a bit of a crime cesspool despite significant police presence. The places to go in St. Louis on the weekends have moved out of the downtown area to places like South Grand and the previously scary Vandeventer / Forest Park Parkway stretch (location of the new Ikea). Not to mention places like The Grove that can be amazing for nightlife. These are all South of the city, somewhat... and I'm really pleased to see this place picking up like this.
Yes, you can also go out to the county for a very different feel... Chesterfield is still decent so long as you stay out of the Valley (the new outlet malls have really ruined it for me) and there's also some pretty decent night life around Clarkson and 40. South Lindbergh is also good for night life just as it always has been... Helen Fitzgerald's is always good for a laugh. And the CWE while not as upscale as it used to be still has a pretty popping nightlife. If you're out looking to just get laid, there's still Westport (not quite so good) or Old St. Charles (definitely high on the list of "yep, that'll work").
No, generally the wages aren't phenomenal here, but the cost of living is amazing. I have a 3000 square foot house with easy access to I-44 and I-40 in the South City area near South Grand and I paid less for it than I would've paid for a place half this size anywhere in Denver. It doesn't hurt that it's over a hundred years old and has gorgeous character. Yeah, old houses aren't for everyone but I love living in a place that has been through so much.
I don't have mod points or I'd mod you up despite being an AC.
I've lived in St. Louis for almost 20 years at this point and it's been really good to me. I earn good money, own a gorgeous 3000 square foot house in the South City area and am constantly surprised more people don't move here. It's not hard to find a tech job - no, you're not going to be working for Google or Apple or even Microsoft as a general rule (though the latter does have an office here for sales and consultant services) but there are plenty of programming and infrastructure jobs available. We have a very large engineering footprint, surprisingly so. Boeing has a huge engineering office up near the airport, and world-renowned engineering companies like Hunter, MiTek and Mark Andy are all headquartered here. Yes, they're not tech companies in the traditional sense, but they're all growing companies with pretty significant programmer and infrastructure teams that have to grow with the company.
I'm not going to say St. Louis is perfect; there's a lot of weirdness here from the segregation of county and city governments, and there's a definite segregation of population as well that tends to exacerbate the crime situation in certain areas. However, I love where I live and don't have much of an issue with crime. I also love the nightlife in town, the weather is actually quite reasonable with only a few weeks of real winter every year (yes, it gets cold but we don't get a lot of snow except in January usually) and there's always something going on that is cool and enjoyable. We have incredible parks (Forest Park is an amazing city park that's actually twice the size of Central Park) and a completely free science center and museums. There are also wonderful neighbourhoods to walk in and explore, and traffic is really almost a non-issue for anyone who's seen Denver or Austin traffic.
I will also say it's a great place to raise a family; reasonable cost of living and decent schools... mostly so long as you stay out of the city itself. But there are still some private schools that the tuition really isn't too bad, but it's worth noting most of them are religious schools if you have an issue with that.
I have used arrangements like this when traveling for business. They're referred to these days as "Crash Pads"... you can usually search some local. They're often used by airline pilots who spend a certain amount of their time per month in a particular city... they get a Crash Pad which gives them a common place to sleep (and sometimes sleep with others...) that they're familiar with, a place they can keep some personal belongings and not run a lot of the risk or expense of hotels.
I've used places like this when out of town for more than a week at a time for more than two months at a time. They're often pretty reasonable and often are just a room in a house with several similar rooms for others. They're also usually available on a month-by-month basis and in my opinion are a lot nicer than a lot of the "extended stay" places. Plus, they tend to be in pretty decent areas for bars, highways and the like... and of course you can be more selective about the area you stay in because you're not tied to "hotel alleys".
Having said all that, not sure I'd live in a communal-living place like this. I tried it recently; spent two years living in a condo thinking I would enjoy the lack of maintenance on the exterior and the social benefits of having a clubhouse, communal gym, pool etc. After two years I decided that I didn't like it... I moved back into a house and I'm far happier because I can entertain friends a lot easier, I have extra bedrooms for guests (family and friends), and since it's a 3000 square foot house I no longer feel like my girlfriend and I are competing for space with my 15 year old... who pretty much has the entire top floor of the house to himself; there are two bedrooms up there with one of them having a futon which he often uses as a sitting room for his friends. Keeps him out of my hair :)
There is also an in-between situation where you can be legally classified as a boarder/lodger even if you stay over 30 days. The distinction is if you occupy part of premises but whose occupation/residency is still under the control of the owner. For example, if you rent a room in someone's private house that doesn't have its own entrance. Or maybe the owner still vacuums your room periodically or provides laundry services for you or free breakfast, you might be a classified lodger/boarder instead of a tenant and sacrifice most tenant rights even though your stay is over 30 days...
I find this part of your (great, BTW) analysis of the laws surrounding rental properties and the like very interesting. I'm a landlord myself with a couple of single-family properties under my belt so I know all of this is accurate.
I just found this part interesting because it occurs to me that this kind of living arrangement might fall under that exact set of circumstances. If the common area is either communally maintained or maintained by the landlord it might fall under this sort of "grey area" law. Even lacking the actual presence of the landlord, it seems that if the "floor manager" either got discounted rent or was paid a salary for their work as the "social coordinator" (I hate that name BTW) then they could classify as a proxy for the landlord and therefore be classed as the "resident". Of course, the catch here is that at that point, evicting the SC would be very troublesome if they got out of hand, so vetting that person would be difficult and potentially risky to the endeavour.
What are your thoughts on that?
It depends a lot on your use case.
I use my 360 all the time. It's right there on my wrist, so even while driving if I receive a notification that I've received a text message I can flip my wrist over and check the summary on my wrist to see if I need to respond to it, or if it can wait until I get to my destination. I don't need to pull my phone out of my pocket or retrieve it from my jacket that may be hanging in the back of my car (depending on where I put it). I get reminders of appointments and again I don't have to rely on my phone to do the same. In fact, because the alarm on my 360 is vibrate only I can actually turn the notifications completely off on my phone most of the time and I still know what's going on. Similarly, in a meeting when my phone rings I can immediately see who's calling at a glance and throw it off to voicemail. I also like the ability to use the microphone in my 360 to set timers, set an alarm, bring up the weather etc. For my use case, it works extremely well.
I also travel frequently enough that it's really nice when going through security and boarding the plane to have my boarding pass QR on my watch display instead of my phone. I know American Airlines app on Android Wear does this, not sure about others (I've flowing pretty much exclusively American since I got my 360 a year ago).
I'll also note that because I'm not turning my phone on every time there's a notification or I want to know the time, my battery life on my phone actually increased when I moved to a smartwatch.
As far as charging every night, that's less of a problem than you might think. I don't wear my watch to bed, so I have my Moto 360 charging base sitting on my nightstand right next to the cable for my phone. Instead of setting my watch on the nightstand itself, I set it on the charging base and voila... no problems. It's no more a chore than setting it down, really. Yes, it can be frustrating if you are traveling and forget the base, but that's also true of forgetting charging cables for any of your other devices. So far it hasn't been a problem. Battery life also isn't half bad on the 360; I can get about 30 hours of tested time out of mine... given that I charge it nightly that's pretty bloody impressive and I have no complaints about it.
I do agree though that this is still a nascent industry... people haven't really found that killer app for a smartwatch yet, but for people like me who are natural early adopters, techies and people who just like stuff like this I think there's still a market.
Interestingly, I work with pilots, real professional pilots, and they seem drawn to TAG Heuer. Don't know why, but it is what it is.
Well, there's a couple of things at work here. First there's cachet; the Tag Heuer brand is widely recognized among pilots as being "the best". Part of that in truth is the heavy marketing TH did in aviation magazines showing lots of pilots with their TH watches especially during the 1970's and 1980's (though it continues to this day along with Breitling).
Second thing at work is simple visibility. The TH watches have always been designed to be high contrast and easy to read. That's surprisingly important in a cockpit when time is the essence of navigation and you're in turbulence. Try reading your watch while swinging your arm in random directions and you get a feel for it... high contrast is key.
Now, the truth is the second thing is almost irrelevant today with navigation electronics in anything larger than about 6 or 8 seats and more than one engine... but if you're flying a single engine craft then there's always the risk of losing all your electronics in an alternator/generator failure so you're usually expected to be spending your time between nav points plotting your course on your paper map and using your watch to keep track. Since all pilots start from single engine Cessnas and the like, this idea of "I must have a watch I can read at all times" is pretty well ingrained... and those who have actually had an electrical failure en-route probably will never be separated from their watches. Especially if you're flying in instrument conditions a good map and an easy-to-read watch can actually save your life.
HP hasn't had interesting product in living memory. The closest they came was buying WebOS and making a tablet, but they couldn't even follow through on that one. I'm not sure there was a future in that anyway, but at least if they'd followed through it would be something to move forward with.
True on the consumer side, but on the enterprise/datacenter side they were producing some pretty interesting products in the last few years that were horribly marketed and/or sold. My personal favourite was the HP Moonshot which was a hyper-converged blade architecture and potentially one of the most interesting things in large-scale computing in years. However, it was hobbled by terrible marketing, and requiring you to have the solution architected (at your cost, mind) by HP's techs rather than allowing you to just buy the chassis and blades. I went through that process and it was such a pain in the ass that we ended up buying Cisco UCS (which was its own set of pains in the ass I won't get into).
I think they did ease up that requirement for architecture, but I know myself and a lot of other people were really put off by the sales technique; like they were saying we were too dumb to know our own workload requirements and therefore they wanted to charge us for their service folks times to come architect it for us. They were acting like they had no competitor... and in that sort of density they sort of didn't when it was first unveiled. But tech moves quickly, and at the time it was felt that the kind of density Moonshot was offering was a nice to have and not a necessity, so most savvy IT managers and admins went with UCS or Dell's M1000e, and later started looking at platforms like Nutanix and Simplivity for the same workloads.
Well, take into a account I grew up in Belfast. Getting mugged by thugs was a risk I ran every time I walked out the door... you learn how to deal with it. Generally, don't carry much cash and only carry one of either a debit card or credit card at any one time... that way you always have a back up. If you're approached and threatened then generally I carry a "sacrificial 20" in my wallet that I will hand to someone, showing them clearly I have nothing else in my wallet. Typically this is enough for them to leave you alone... sometimes they'll take the entire wallet but so long as you don't have too expensive a wallet they usually don't want it or will dispose of it quickly. Drivers licenses are no use to them, so often a wallet will be found with the license intact as well as credit cards because they assume you're going to cancel them as soon as you're attacked.
They're much more likely these days to want your cellphone... and I'll hand that over quite gladly. I have it insured so it'll be replaced, the storage is encrypted and the phone will lock immediately when I tap the power button. Yay... they get a 2 year old Moto X for their trouble. They're more likely to be happy with the 20.
I've walked around Ferguson, MO and Belfast with all of these "safeguards" in place. Worst I've ever had in my life was threatened at gunpoint, and so long as you treat them with respect and just hand over what they ask for it's never been an issue. The irony of course is that the attack I had happened Irvine, CA... supposedly the safest city in America in recent years (attack happened in 2013). I have been threatened once in St. Louis and handed over my $20... I just treated said attacker with respect and handed him the $20 as he asked. No fuss, no argument. That was probably a decade ago.
A bit of both.
Generally we buy groceries two to three times a week. You can easily carry the majority of a week's groceries so long as you bring your own better quality bags rather than the rather crappy plastic bags they have at most grocery stores. Plus, there's the reusable aspect... so win on being even greener than just not using your car. To be honest we could probably do it only once a week and be fine, but my son likes to buy his own groceries; he's 15 and likes the independence, it gives him exercise, and he likes to cook for himself. As a result I usually haven't bought what he wants to cook with, so he walks up to the grocery store on his own.
Yes, there are some things a neighbourhood grocer sometimes doesn't have. I buy a very specific dog food for example in a big bag... I buy that because otherwise I have to deal with "Siberian Husky Intestinal Turmoil"... the initials say it all. This I buy once every 4 weeks or so, and the place that stocks it is about 15 miles away. I could probably do it on the bus, but since I do actually drive a lot at work I can usually drop by while I'm passing through that area or visiting a nearby customer to pick up that dog food. But as a general rule a local grocer will have what you need, and often it's more local produce like eggs, chickens etc. that come from local farms.
In addition, we have two farmer's markets weekly near here; one in Soulard (about a 2 mile walk) and one in Tower Grove Park (about a mile)... so I end up eating a lot of fresh local stuff rather than the big-box store crap.
Moving here has had a massively positive impact on my health and well-being. I eat better, I exercise more and psychologically I find it less draining than the funk I descended into while living in the 'burbs.
Right... this is not exactly new.
I live in St. Louis, specifically I live in an area called Compton Heights. What this means is that I have literally a 3 minute walk to a bus stop, maybe a 15 minute walk (or 5 minute bus ride) to the Metrolink (light rail) station. From there I can get to the airport, to the Delmar Loop (good restaurants and pubs and some esoteric shops) and so on. I'm probably 15 minutes walk from a couple of grocery stores, and like a lot of these city neighbourhoods we do also have a rather nice little "martini bar" (really a pub with some delusions of grandeur) where the locals hang out. It's also worth noting that I'm just under 3 miles walk from Busch Stadium as well if I want to watch the Cardinals play, and even closer to Chaifetz Arena for events and the like. And if I want to go for a nice long walk in a park, I have Tower Grove Park just about 20 minutes walk away.
My whole neighbourhood is eminently walkable. That's one of the reasons I moved here in the first place. It doesn't take genius city planning, just an old city. My house is 130 years old... one of the oldest in the neighbourhood and is still somewhat of a relic of its Victorian construction. There are a lot of streets around here that really weren't built with cars in mind, so walking or bicycling is the best option.
The suburbs suck though... at least for me. I lived in the burbs for years and really hated it (but my then wife loved it). It's obviously something that makes some people happy, but maybe my European upbringing (Belfast, NI) made me more of a city dweller with walkable neighbourhoods. The only downside is the crime rate here is rather bad, but to be honest I have not been affected by it myself.
Honestly, a lot depends on whether or not you want FLOSS or non-FLOSS, paid on non-paid etc. Not to mention how much actual work you want to put into your system.
I have two, both of which are nominally "free". The first is OneNote that I use for work. It syncs across all my devices and works really well for someone who uses a Windows tablet as I can both write notes with my stylus and draw diagrams. This functionality alone makes it a stand-out awesome system for me as typically in the kinds of meetings I do (with customers) it's usually frowned upon to sit there with a screen in front of you and a keyboard, but if you have a pad flat on the table and can be seen to be writing notes, drawing diagrams etc. it makes a customer feel that I am much more engaged in the conversation. Believe me, I've seen it when my peers are tapping away at their keyboards the customers tend to look to me for input or information because they feel my colleague is not engaged. Some of my colleagues use pen and paper, but I find my method works best for me... I don't run out of ink or paper... though occasionally I do find my battery in my stylus dead. Oh... and even if I lost my tablet I'd still have my notes.
For my personal stuff I used to use Evernote because it was cross-platform. I didn't need handwriting... occasionally need pictures in a note etc. I even paid for premium for a while and I do still have many of my personal notes in it... though I use the free service now.
What I'm migrating to for personal notes is OwnNote which is an app for OwnCloud. This is a FLOSS environment that is free... but to set it up you do need a server that's on the Internet or at least accessible on your local intranet. The down side is a lack of fat client apps... offline sync and the like. It means that you need to be online to write notes. Now, there's an app for Android and one for iOS, but not for Windows or Linux (that I'm aware of, anyway). This means offline usage is pretty much out. Having said that, the API is open enough and I have enough coding skills that I might throw together a fat client at some point, or I might just wait until someone else does it and contribute. It hasn't been a big problem as yet simply because I am typically online wherever I need to take notes for personal consumption.
I host mine on a server at home and I deal with the front-end connectivity by having an OpenVPN network with a Linode fronting it using NGINX. This is overly complex, yes... I also host my own mail server and web site (still!) so this makes my life easier... but you could just as easily front it on a consumer-grade home connection using DynDNS or some other similar service. Of course, the nice thing about this setup is that it also gives me DropBox/OneDrive functionality that's private and owned by me. It's nice to have ALL my documents stored in a "cloud" because I can selectively sync across all my devices, and then I have a script that backs the whole thing up twice a week to S3/Glacier. Yeah, that's also an additional cost but it's cheaper and more convenient to me than a lot of the alternatives. And yes, my S3/Glacier backups are all encrypted :)
Not specifically what you're looking for, but have you looked at some modern PC tablets? I am currently typing this on a keyboard attached to my Dell Venue 11 Pro... about the same form factor as the Surface Pro it replaced (though smaller than the Surface Pro 3/4. Great screen, ridiculous battery life... and yes you can put Linux on it.
I am currently in Windows 10 because I use OneNote a lot... but I have this set up to dual-boot to Linux as well and it works fantastically well.
Neither of them have the IOPS needed for any kind modern applications.
While I agree with just about everything else you wrote; I do take some issue with this particular statement.
Modern applications meaning what exactly? If you're talking about big data then you're right... but you don't use a traditional SAN array for big data if you're smart; you use a proper object-based storage platform and scale it that way. Traditional SAN arrays suck for those workloads. But if you're talking VDI, SQL, web farms and general purpose virtualization then I'm afraid you're wrong.
Realistically when fully kitted out in SYNTHETIC BENCHMARKS, the "low-end" SC4020 will top out at over 400,000 IOPS. Yes, real-world will be a lot lower but you can comfortably expect 150K-200K IOPS with sub millisecond latency pushing about 6GB/s in real world operations. The SC8000 is more like 300K IOPS or thereabouts in those same synthetic benchmarks, but can push a lot more data (around 20GB/s) and still get in the 150K-200K IOPS range due to the fact that it can have more than one SAS chain while the SC4020 only has one. No, it's not the "million IOPS" you get advertised by EMC and the like... but in real world I have rarely seen even the might XTremeIO get anywhere close to that... 300-400K IOPS in real world is more realistic. Yes, faster... but not amazingly faster.
Besides, "modern applications" don't actually require near as much storage IOPS as most people think. I had a customer recently asking me about SANs that ran in excess of 150K IOPS for their new primary storage. We talked about a lot of expensive options (Violin, XTremeIO and so forth) but when we actually did some monitoring of their actual application load they were hovering around 60K IOPS. Even their peak load was under 75K IOPS so they ended up in a lower cost and more expandable solutions... and ironically given this topic here they ended up with a pair of SC8000's with Dell's "Live Volume" capabilities so they could move workloads around on the fly. So much cheaper than the alternatives and fit their actual workloads perfectly... not what some marketing guy was telling them they needed. Each SC8K is storing about a half petabyte each and can scale to about 2PB each.
I find this is incredibly common... most people don't actually know what their workloads are using so they tend to buy into the marketing hype being spouted by the high-end storage vendors. Then they end up overspending for their solution... yeah they have plenty of headroom and there's no doubt in my mind that they're getting the best performance they could possibly get out of it (because their applications don't really scale), but I've been amused when I've seen 5 year old arrays being decommed that aren't even close to their actual maximum performance because some salesdroid said they needed a million IOPS.
And to Dell's credit it's not like they're sitting on their laurels waiting. It's well known they have new stuff in the pipe for Compellent... probably for announcement at the next Dell World conference. I'll be interested to see what they do with their next generation hardware... the SC8K has been a fantastic platform but it is getting a bit long in the tooth. Having said that I think they could probably continue to do more with the SC8K because I've rarely seen one exceed ~10% of the CPU utilization.
Technically you can install Windows 10 on Dell's current Compellent SANs. They're just Intel boxes.
On the flip-side I'd TOTALLY buy an Alienware SAN :D
They already can't quite figure out how to merge the two systems and have been selling both. The inside story is that EQL will go away, but they never seem to go away and Compellent can't quite come up with a product as simple and cheap as EQL.
Scuttlebutt is that they're prepping to release firmware for EQL and CML that will allow cross-replication and extend the Enterprise Manager tool to also manage EQL. And the simplicity... well they did just come out with the SCv2000 which is all wizard-driven and about as dead simple to set up as the EQL. I predict we'll see that same level of simplicity making its way into the higher tier products pretty soon.
I think there's also an open question about the mid-long range future of Compellent's primary sales pitch, its automatic tiering of data between different disk speeds (like SSD, 15k and 7.2k) when the future of data storage looks increasingly like it will be all flash, at least for most of the market volume.
What does all that tiering overhead mean in a world dominated by flash? Maybe it makes sense for the absolute largest installs where petabytes are in play, but most of the Compellent installs I've seen have been a shelf of tier 1 and maybe 2 shelves of tier 3. And they're increasingly 10G iSCSI focused, passing on FC.
To me this is interesting. Thing is there's more than one type of SSD technology at play today. There's SLC, (e)MLC and now TLC (3D-NAND). Each of these have different performance stats just like spinning disk. Yeah, even the lowest end of these is 10 times as fast as even a 15K drive but the write performance statistics of each of these drive types in particular is quite different. I remember going from my Samsung SLC 64GB boot drive on my laptop (this is going back several years) to an MLC 128GB drive and despite similar read performance I was always struck by how different the write performance was. Yeah, the MLC was a lot cheaper for the capacity but the write performance suffered greatly. From what I hear, TLC suffers a similar drop in write performance compared to MLC.
The auto tiering if configured correctly can certainly make for an interesting performance story. Put SLC at the top where you want fast writes and allow it to trickle down to MLC and/or TLC... just like 15K->10K->7K. There's a question mark over whether current controllers can really take advantage of the potential performance in this kind of setup, but we're seeing controller performance increasing over generations anyway.
The fact that we can now buy TLC drives at enterprise level for about the same price as 15K per GB is incredibly interesting to me and I think will really shake up the industry.
I can't figure out how they'd blend in EMC to this mix.
What they're probably after is controlling interest in VMware. This would give them a complete vertical play for virtualization, being able to supply compute, networking, storage and hypervisor. They would probably also be in a position to further a lot of network and storage virtualization with control over both sides of the equation, hardware an software.
I do wonder if there's a possible anti-trust question here. I also wonder how Microsoft would feel about it as well.
Ding ding ding! I think we have a winner... even though I have no information here I would guess this is almost certainly the play here. That and RSA would give Dell an even stronger foothold in the Enterprise than they already have. I have to admit they've been making some REALLY interesting changes in their portfolio, support and even sales organizations lately that I think make them a company to watch. Even in networking... they've shit-canned the atrocious Powerconnect line of switches (that some people loved) and replaced with a whole new line of switching from low end to high... and it's really good stuff! I myself just recently replaced my home core switch with an X1018; a low-end half-rack web-managed sw
If you need a smaller array you should check out the SC4020 as well. Runs the same code base as the SC8000 on smaller hardware platform (slower CPU's, less memory) and in some benchmarks (read: not real world typically) can actually outperform the SC8K when fully kitted out due to an internal IPC connection instead of external. You can also happily replicate between the two so the 4020 makes for a great cost-effective DR site replication target when budget is limited. Or a remote datacenter SAN you can replicate to "the mothership".
Given all this though, I'm surprised to hear that Dell would be even slightly interested in EMC. I've run EMC's and I've run Compellents (and HP's, and NetApps), and quite frankly the SC8K/SC4K family are the best arrays I've ever used.
Dell already owns Equallogic which covers the low to mid-range of the storage market pretty well in Dell's offerings.
Dell ALSO owns Compellent which covers the mid to high range of the storage market too.
The only asset that EMC has that Dell I think might want would be VMware and the installed base of EMC. EMC still sell some nice arrays, but they're pretty spendy for what you get.
Sprint.
Not a service; the company.
At least go with Dell. Dell will sell you an MD3860i with 60 6TB hard drives for not much more than what you paid for the your Synology. Performance is just as good as the Synology, you'll get next day on site support from a Dell tech, and a smaller rack/power/cooling footprint as well.
Seconded... though having recently seen a lot of quotes you could do worse than the Dell SCv2000 which is the newer replacement for the MD3860i using the Compellent code. It's faster and cheaper than the MD, mostly because Dell no longer has to pay the Netapp tax for every MD (the MD's are based on an LSI chipset that's owned by Netapp)
There's a reason nobody builds deskside compute servers with today's technology. Density, power, and cooling.
And the fact that a deskside system is highly unlikely to be utilized 100% of the time... probably more like 10% of the time. In that case it's more cost-effective to farm it out to a bigger cluster in a server room, or run it in some AWS/Azure nodes for the time it needs and then shut it down.
The fact that there are many more high performance computing resources available relatively cheaply is as good a reason as any not to do deskside compute on a large scale.
I wish you hadn't posted AC, and I wish I had mod points!
This is the right answer. The workloads aren't clear because we don't know what OP is trying to accomplish with this setup. Is he building an HPC cluster to do engineering analysis, or is he building it because he has convinced his management that it's cool? If the latter... well, he'll be looking for a new job after he builds it and it does nothing to help his customer (his employer).
Start with the application. What are its workload characteristics? What kind of backend does it need?
Then look at the backend. What are ITS workload characteristics.
Only then should you look at hardware. Answers to the first two will answer what hardware you need, but even then there are a lot of moving parts to take into account. How many nodes? How much CPU per node? Highly parallel or high speed? How much memory per node? Storage infrastructure? Output type?
This is a terrible AskSlashdot question because it requires an intimate knowledge of the workload being proposed. I am a consultant for a living so I do exactly this process above every single day. Any answers will literally just be spitballing because the information we have available is so vague... and any actual answers are guaranteed virtually useless and a quick way for OP to lose his job.
I know this is old now, but honestly you're overthinking this.
First, as others have mentioned here you can use TeamViewer to do remote desktop support, and it's free. No need to upgrade to Windows 7 Ultimate or anything else for that matter. I've used it on OSX, Windows and Linux and it works like a champ. I've supported family and friends... and even had a commercial license for TeamViewer for a while because it really is so easy to use and maintain that I found it invaluable. I don't do that job any more, but I still maintain TeamViewer on my computers in my house so I can get into them and manage/maintain them while I'm on a business trip. Same on my son's laptop so if he has a problem I can support him remotely.
Now of course comes to your son. Don't. Seriously... kids are going to be kids, and they're going to work around any controls you put on a computer. The only thing you are LEGALLY required to do is to control what he has access to at YOUR home. Once he's off your network, anything he does is the responsibility of the party that owns the network he's using. Yes, he should be held responsible by you as a parent, but legally there's nothing forcing you to do this. Plus, kids are going to find workarounds regardless; my son is 15 so you can imagine the battles I've had with him over the years. As it stands now, I manage his Internet access at home using a Sonicwall TZ-215 firewall that has Gateway Anti-Virus and some content controls turned on. Honestly, I don't block porn... he's 15... but I do block some categories I personally find distasteful; hate speech and the like. If he needs something for a particular essay he's doing for school that's blocked, he can ask me to unblock it and he does. This way there's mutual trust going on, which to be honest is the RIGHT way to parent.
I also don't check the logs to see where he's going on the web. Just so long as he's not doing anything illegal (and yes, I do block bittorrent for that reason) that could get me in legal hot water I don't particularly concern myself with it. I check his laptop for malware and to make sure updates are in place periodically, but beyond that I don't see the need to get overly stressed about it. Besides, we have an understanding that if he does anything bad that gets his computer malware that's going to be too much trouble to clean up (like more than 30 minutes of work on my part) then his machine gets re-imaged and he gets to reinstall everything, restore his own files etc. I make him responsible for his backups as well.
Is my system perfect? No, but it works. And right now I have a 15 year old boy who may or may not go on porn sites occasionally (I really don't care), plays games occasionally... but generally is a well-behaved kid when it comes to technology.
I guess what I don't get about your requirements; if your primary reason for the site B connection is supporting your parents, then why backhaul all the Internet traffic across your own network? With a decent managed firewall you can do all the controls you like, and there are web-managed options as well. Some of them even support OpenVPN natively or some IPSec variant that you can create a virtual private network for managing stuff. If you really want content controls on your parents network then you really need to review what you're trying to accomplish here. You don't have to get something as fancy as a Sonicwall, there are plenty of other cheaper options but that is certainly one.
I do have a VPN as well as my TeamViewer connections... honestly SSH is easier to manage my Linux boxes than TeamViewer most of the time because I don't need a GUI. As a result, all my Linux boxes partake in an OpenVPN network against a hub system hosted on Linode (where my web server is also hosted). I have the OpenVPN client on my laptops so when I'm out and about I can join the network and SSH to any of the systems no matter where I am (I keep a HOSTS file with all the IP's). Bonus; I can host my own mail server on my home box without using the storage on the L