Novell makes a GroupWise Linux client. Of course you have to be a GroupWise shop to take advantage of this, but there are corporate mail systems with a Linux client.
Old IBM mainframes were liquid cooled and it was crazy. In addition to the regular chilled water loop under the floor, you had to run chilled water lines to the processors as well. That's more water lines under the floor for people to step on, drop stuff on, and just plain leak. If you designed your data center without much additional capacity for this kind of stuff, you'll have to install a second loop just for processor cooling(this sort of thing happened in the past with mainframe cooling as well) with seperate chillers, pumps, etc.. All of this so you can buy machines that use 10 - 15% of their processing power on the data center floor!
What ended up happening in the past when things got to this point is enough IBM customers raised hell that IBM put some resources on cutting the consumption for their systems and came out with better, faster systems that consumed less energy and didn't need a dedicated chilled water line.
All Intel, AMD, IBM, and HP has to do is put their minds on how to make their crap run faster while using less electricity instead of coming up with a nifty color scheme and brand identity. This cycle has worked out dozens of times in the past and will hopefully continue. Both AMD and Intel are looking at getting a smaller wire on silicon(to suck less energy) and the think tanks are looking at getting copper out of the mix.
The more things change, the more they stay the same. I'm just waiting on the khaki racks boxes to come back. I liked it when your pants were the same color as your computers.
With fibre running everywhere, just buy a data center in iowa to house the stuff and pay a few folks to rack and run the hands-on stuff. You're in a big city for the people to administer the servers, not to house the servers. If I had my pick, I'd put the data center in Reno. Worst case is if you have to show up to work on the stuff, you get to gamble and visit the Chicken Ranch while you're gone.
Short-term this would work in Michigan, but humidity control would kill you long-term if you tried to use 15-30 degree air in the winter. You'd have to put in steam plants from hell to stay in that 40-60% range that's required for data centers.
Data Center designers have taken advantage of using outside air for cooling in northern nevada, northern california, oregon, etc. where the normal temp is in the 40-60 range; but they always build the cooling system out to handle the entire load. Server Virtualization and smart purchasing will keep you out of this mess for the time being.
HP just came out with multicore half-height blades. Their latest requirements are 30 amp, three phase power per PDU for a blade rack, with 4 pdus/rack for redundancy. That's enough power service to cover 3 modern 3000 square foot homes when you factor the energy back to 240 volts.
Getting the power to something this silly isn't the pain. COOLING something that consumes 14KW in a 4 square foot space is the challenge anyone in data center management faces. Both HP and IBM have come out with the "innovation" of heat exchangers that run off your chilled water loop. Some of us have been there and done that and don't want to try it again.
Every time someone comes to me selling density and physical consolidation, I throw them out on their ass. It's cheaper to just buy or build more traditional raised floor space and run good old fashioned 6, 4, or 2u servers than to cool a bunch of blade racks.
If you look at data centers, a High Density rack with blades takes from 10-16KW of draw for 60! or more servers with 120! or more CPUs. I know draw VS ratings is a big gap sometimes, but if this is the pattern for home computing, those of us building a new home may want to consider a raised floor environment for our home office with computer room air conditioning.
1KW = 3413 BTUs That's over 1/4 ton of cooling required for one device. (@ rated capacity)
Hopefully, someone will come out with a MR. Fusion.
The costs for improving data centers to provide more or colder air is more than just building out more square feet of data center space.
Just because HP is sells a 42U rack doesn't mean you have to cram blades into all 42Us. It's cheaper to spread the heat load across a larger area than to figure out how to put 1500 CFM out of a floor tile so the top of a blade rack gets air.
There are studies by the uptime institute that say that 50% of hardware failures happen in the top 25% of rack space because the top of the rack doesn't get any air from the floor tiles and it cycles exhaust from the rack or ambient air for cooling.
We just put in the latest blade rack from HP. 4 50 amp circuits(2 for redundancy) for a 4 square foot space is beyond silly. That's more service and electrical consumption than a 1500 square foot home after you eliminate the two circuits for redundancy.
I've been through this too many times in the past. The simplist way to deal with this is:
1. Establish a budget that meets the paper-pusher's needs. 2. Off of that budget, outline the services, uptime, and response time you can deliver with the money you have. Spend a little time backing up what you say. 3.Publish that to the rest of your company and let them know this is the new performance standard you'll be delivering to the company. Make things that impact executives(like email, bandwidth speed, etc) the things you reduce services on the most and leave the core business needs alone. Sell it as a decision that you weren't willing to compromise the core services you provide to the business. 4. A suggested change if you don't already to it is to charge other departments for an outsourcer when employees create a problem from spyware, malware, or installing random crap on their machine. It's a good incentive for that employees manager to do something about them being an ass and it takes some of the pressure off you. We work on this stuff ourselves and use the outsourcing money to help us out with some tougher stuff elsewhere in our department. 5. Trust me on this one, once you put these rules in place other departments WILL spend their money on you.
Are we at war with eurasia or oceana? I always loose track.
Seriously, get back to work and get your product down to less than 12 security updates in a month. Once you manage that, then we can discuss a comparison.
Anyone stupid enough to shell out $40,000 for a camry with leather seats deserves to get a virus. For $30,000; I'll buy them the camry, a garmin streetpilot, and give them a swift kick in the nads. they'll feel the same and be $10,000 less in the hole.
Moved from Geek to Manager 6 years ago
on
Geeks in Management?
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Some advice...
1. You will loose some of your technical skills over time. You're spending less of your day on that sort of skill. Knowing this, identify what you cherish the most and what will make you a valued staff member at another company and keep those up-to-date.
2. Recognize that when you take manager as your title, you've walked away from some mobility opportunities. Managers aren't keen to hire former managers to staff positions and there are less manager jobs around.
3. Recognize that not everyone is as productive, smart, or responsive as you are. You'll have to set a standard of performance for the positions you manage and judge your staff by that standard and not you. Keep it in perspective, if they were as good as you; you'd be doing their job.
4. Make the workplace fun. Carnation used to put on their milk "Content Cows Give More Milk". In other words, happy people are more productive.
5. Learn to let the little things go. Just because someone brings an issue to your attention doesn't mean you have to follow through on every one. Learn to establish a split between when people see you to vent and when people see you for action.
Backdoors are a fact of life. Every major vendor I've worked with calls it a "support line", or some other method to get to the servers running their apps. Microsoft W2K SP3 and XP SP1 have a "backdoor" as part of your license agreement.
If you want something secure, put it in a filing cabinet, or write the code yourself (Of course making sure you put in an easy to remember backdoor).
The primary problem is that language evolves over time and makes the data harder and harder to interpret. Of course, in the real sense of things, not much needs to last more than 20 years in electronic format.
The information that is truly needed will be accessed and backed up more often than once every 20 years. We're not going to suddenly forget the constitution or how calculus works. Important knowledge is widely distributed an accessed frequently. Your tax returns and downloaded porn are not importaint 20 years later.
Finally, CDR's will corrupt only if they are mistreated or accessed frequently with an older CD-ROM drive. Put them in a jewel case in a cool environment and they'll last a lot longer than 20 years.
I didn't notice one word about whether or not they had X-Windows up or not. And if they did, what window manager were they using, what programs were running, etc, etc.
This "study" is about as valid as the tobacco industries on the health risks of cigarettes.
Wasn't Win98 really a bug fix for Win95?!?!?!?!?!
on
The Cost of Bug Fixes
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· Score: 1
I've looked at 98, If you have 95 OSR2 with USB support and have downloaded all the fixes posted for 95 and you loaded the active desktop with IE4, you ain't that far from 98. That is aside from the bug fixes they put in and a couple of gizmos nobody normally uses anyway. 98 is nothing but a scam anyway.
There's no compelling reason to move to 98 right now anyway. Even Microsoft Office 2000 is supposed to run on 95.
Slashdot Mirror
Novell makes a GroupWise Linux client. Of course you have to be a GroupWise shop to take advantage of this, but there are corporate mail systems with a Linux client.
doug
Yipes!
Old IBM mainframes were liquid cooled and it was crazy. In addition to the regular chilled water loop under the floor, you had to run chilled water lines to the processors as well. That's more water lines under the floor for people to step on, drop stuff on, and just plain leak. If you designed your data center without much additional capacity for this kind of stuff, you'll have to install a second loop just for processor cooling(this sort of thing happened in the past with mainframe cooling as well) with seperate chillers, pumps, etc.. All of this so you can buy machines that use 10 - 15% of their processing power on the data center floor!
What ended up happening in the past when things got to this point is enough IBM customers raised hell that IBM put some resources on cutting the consumption for their systems and came out with better, faster systems that consumed less energy and didn't need a dedicated chilled water line.
All Intel, AMD, IBM, and HP has to do is put their minds on how to make their crap run faster while using less electricity instead of coming up with a nifty color scheme and brand identity. This cycle has worked out dozens of times in the past and will hopefully continue. Both AMD and Intel are looking at getting a smaller wire on silicon(to suck less energy) and the think tanks are looking at getting copper out of the mix.
The more things change, the more they stay the same. I'm just waiting on the khaki racks boxes to come back. I liked it when your pants were the same color as your computers.
With fibre running everywhere, just buy a data center in iowa to house the stuff and pay a few folks to rack and run the hands-on stuff. You're in a big city for the people to administer the servers, not to house the servers. If I had my pick, I'd put the data center in Reno. Worst case is if you have to show up to work on the stuff, you get to gamble and visit the Chicken Ranch while you're gone.
Short-term this would work in Michigan, but humidity control would kill you long-term if you tried to use 15-30 degree air in the winter. You'd have to put in steam plants from hell to stay in that 40-60% range that's required for data centers.
Data Center designers have taken advantage of using outside air for cooling in northern nevada, northern california, oregon, etc. where the normal temp is in the 40-60 range; but they always build the cooling system out to handle the entire load. Server Virtualization and smart purchasing will keep you out of this mess for the time being.
HP just came out with multicore half-height blades. Their latest requirements are 30 amp, three phase power per PDU for a blade rack, with 4 pdus/rack for redundancy. That's enough power service to cover 3 modern 3000 square foot homes when you factor the energy back to 240 volts.
Getting the power to something this silly isn't the pain. COOLING something that consumes 14KW in a 4 square foot space is the challenge anyone in data center management faces. Both HP and IBM have come out with the "innovation" of heat exchangers that run off your chilled water loop. Some of us have been there and done that and don't want to try it again.
Every time someone comes to me selling density and physical consolidation, I throw them out on their ass. It's cheaper to just buy or build more traditional raised floor space and run good old fashioned 6, 4, or 2u servers than to cool a bunch of blade racks.
If you look at data centers, a High Density rack with blades takes from 10-16KW of draw for 60! or more servers with 120! or more CPUs. I know draw VS ratings is a big gap sometimes, but if this is the pattern for home computing, those of us building a new home may want to consider a raised floor environment for our home office with computer room air conditioning.
1KW = 3413 BTUs That's over 1/4 ton of cooling required for one device. (@ rated capacity)
Hopefully, someone will come out with a MR. Fusion.
The costs for improving data centers to provide more or colder air is more than just building out more square feet of data center space.
Just because HP is sells a 42U rack doesn't mean you have to cram blades into all 42Us. It's cheaper to spread the heat load across a larger area than to figure out how to put 1500 CFM out of a floor tile so the top of a blade rack gets air.
There are studies by the uptime institute that say that 50% of hardware failures happen in the top 25% of rack space because the top of the rack doesn't get any air from the floor tiles and it cycles exhaust from the rack or ambient air for cooling.
We just put in the latest blade rack from HP. 4 50 amp circuits(2 for redundancy) for a 4 square foot space is beyond silly. That's more service and electrical consumption than a 1500 square foot home after you eliminate the two circuits for redundancy.
I've been through this too many times in the past. The simplist way to deal with this is:
1. Establish a budget that meets the paper-pusher's needs.
2. Off of that budget, outline the services, uptime, and response time you can deliver with the money you have. Spend a little time backing up what you say.
3.Publish that to the rest of your company and let them know this is the new performance standard you'll be delivering to the company. Make things that impact executives(like email, bandwidth speed, etc) the things you reduce services on the most and leave the core business needs alone. Sell it as a decision that you weren't willing to compromise the core services you provide to the business.
4. A suggested change if you don't already to it is to charge other departments for an outsourcer when employees create a problem from spyware, malware, or installing random crap on their machine. It's a good incentive for that employees manager to do something about them being an ass and it takes some of the pressure off you. We work on this stuff ourselves and use the outsourcing money to help us out with some tougher stuff elsewhere in our department.
5. Trust me on this one, once you put these rules in place other departments WILL spend their money on you.
Are we at war with eurasia or oceana? I always loose track.
Seriously, get back to work and get your product down to less than 12 security updates in a month. Once you manage that, then we can discuss a comparison.
Anyone stupid enough to shell out $40,000 for a camry with leather seats deserves to get a virus. For $30,000; I'll buy them the camry, a garmin streetpilot, and give them a swift kick in the nads. they'll feel the same and be $10,000 less in the hole.
Some advice...
1. You will loose some of your technical skills over time. You're spending less of your day on that sort of skill. Knowing this, identify what you cherish the most and what will make you a valued staff member at another company and keep those up-to-date.
2. Recognize that when you take manager as your title, you've walked away from some mobility opportunities. Managers aren't keen to hire former managers to staff positions and there are less manager jobs around.
3. Recognize that not everyone is as productive, smart, or responsive as you are. You'll have to set a standard of performance for the positions you manage and judge your staff by that standard and not you. Keep it in perspective, if they were as good as you; you'd be doing their job.
4. Make the workplace fun. Carnation used to put on their milk "Content Cows Give More Milk". In other words, happy people are more productive.
5. Learn to let the little things go. Just because someone brings an issue to your attention doesn't mean you have to follow through on every one. Learn to establish a split between when people see you to vent and when people see you for action.
Backdoors are a fact of life. Every major vendor I've worked with calls it a "support line", or some other method to get to the servers running their apps. Microsoft W2K SP3 and XP SP1 have a "backdoor" as part of your license agreement.
If you want something secure, put it in a filing cabinet, or write the code yourself (Of course making sure you put in an easy to remember backdoor).
The primary problem is that language evolves over time and makes the data harder and harder to interpret. Of course, in the real sense of things, not much needs to last more than 20 years in electronic format.
The information that is truly needed will be accessed and backed up more often than once every 20 years. We're not going to suddenly forget the constitution or how calculus works. Important knowledge is widely distributed an accessed frequently. Your tax returns and downloaded porn are not importaint 20 years later.
Finally, CDR's will corrupt only if they are mistreated or accessed frequently with an older CD-ROM drive. Put them in a jewel case in a cool environment and they'll last a lot longer than 20 years.
Cheapbytes.com has the 6.0 cd's for $2, $7 with the archive CDs. Shipping is more in the realm of believability, around $5.
I didn't notice one word about whether or not they had X-Windows up or not. And if they did, what window manager were they using, what programs were running, etc, etc.
This "study" is about as valid as the tobacco industries on the health risks of cigarettes.
I've looked at 98, If you have 95 OSR2 with USB support and have downloaded all the fixes posted for 95 and you loaded the active desktop with IE4, you ain't that far from 98. That is aside from the bug fixes they put in and a couple of gizmos nobody normally uses anyway. 98 is nothing but a scam anyway.
There's no compelling reason to move to 98 right now anyway. Even Microsoft Office 2000 is supposed to run on 95.