The other downside to large scale photo-electrics are the vast quantity of toxins used in their production and the rare elements used in their production. Neither or those are going away anytime soon.
So you are proposing burning oil until we have little left and then burning oil sands and oil shale? Wow, that's incredibly short sighted. We need sustainable alternatives and the sooner the better. Continuing to rely on stored solar energy is a bad long term strategy even if there are zero environmental problems from doing so (highly unlikely).
They don't have to pick winners, just raise the floor price of dino-gas and let everyone else compete. That is what they should have done instead of the stupidity that was the farm belt subsidy disguised as energy alternative that we got. It would have encouraged alternative energy sources at a lower cost to the taxpayers and without encouraging an 'alternative' that consumed oil at near 1:1 levels.
Uh, fuel is transferable and the US accounts for what 40% of world consumption, so as long as we do not have a price floor alternatives have to compete with artificially cheap dino-gas (add the cost of 2 gulf wars and our support for Israel to the last two decades consumption and you get a much higher price per gallon, not to mention the environmental externalities that aren't priced into the pump price.)
The problem is that if you allow the price of energy to fluctuate below the cost of production of alternatives the alternatives will never take off because your ROI potentially goes negative. Since we know that oil will run out in the future it makes more sense to start allowing alternatives to flourish now while we have known reserves then to wait until the natural price floor encourages them (ie it might be too late with a horrible economic collapse and resulting war if we wait too long). Not to mention the likely environmental effects of continuing to burn fossil fuels until they are near exhausted.
Btw I said nothing of pouring tax dollars down a social rat-hole, I actually advocated increased taxes in one area with an offsetting credit in another which is tax neutral to some level of consumption and tax positive above that level (ie discouraging the unwanted behavior while not disproportionately affecting the economically disadvantaged.)
The solution to that is simple, you put in an algicide that your GE strain is engineered to resist. This of course requires fairly heavy quantities of algicide and monitoring to make sure that you haven't crossed that trait into natural species (monitor and destroy any reactors containing cross species).
It's per core/CPU in the machine unless you have hard zoning ala vmware or Solaris hard zones. If you application can possibly use more resources you have to license at the highwater mark for resources consumed (eg Solaris soft zones are supposed to be tracked with an audit trail and paid at the most resources consumed). Before we found out that our DR licensing is gratis because we don't do live failover and test DR less than 6 times a year we had four dual core processors in the box but were using boot.ini parameters to only use 4 cores with the understanding that we would change it if the production box became unavailable.
We simply need to tax fuel enough to establish a price floor that will encourage alternative investments. The Europeans are already there so now the US just needs to start increasing the tax rate at say 25c per gallon per quarter and we will be there in a few years. You'd need to increase the standard deduction to balance out the regressive nature of such a use based tax but it would encourage alternative fuel generation AND curb demand at the same time, a win-win situation.
So we need something that can keep up with an ICH-10R but can do RAID5/10 and has BBWC. For $500-1500 someone should be able to do that no problem, it just hasn't been a priority before because you couldn't get enough IOPS out of attached devices for the controller to be the limiting factor (16x15k SFF's still can't do as many 4k random IOPS as a single x-25e). Btw I've found the same thing but using the ICH8R, it can smoke any of the RAID controllers I have available for pure IOPS when coupled with the x-25e.
Your Oracle guys will have more meaningful statistics like average and worst case service latency, to a DBA they don't care if they can only get 20% saturation on the link because the storage can't handle the random IOPS. I don't have much of a problem because average service time is right at average spindle speed and worst case when we aren't experiencing a fail-over event is ~2x average service time. We have also benchmarked the array and shown that it will do ~10x more 4k random IOPS then we see the DB push on an average day. After we did all that benchmarking and statistics gathering the DBA's went back and worked with the 3rd party application guys to do some serious tuning on the SQL they were generating resulting in some reports going from 5 minutes to under 15 seconds to run.
Nope, my prices are not mixed up, we are buying an EVA with a significant number of shelves and are hence getting a decent discount, that brings the price per 450GB drive down to ~$1k. When you are buying something in that price range paying anything near list is just not doing your homework. We had competitive bids from all of the big boys except EMC (don't like to micromanage storage and their 5 year costs are so obscene as to be non-starters) and we let all the vendors know it was a competitive bid. HP came out with the right mix of features/price/performance and support.
I have a quote that we're about to execute that includes a bunch of 450GB 15k FC drives for ~$1,000 which is within spitting distance of $2/GB. Yes, on a $/IOP basis SLC does in fact beat FC drives even today, but the percentage of my storage that needs IOPS over everything is very low so I have built a balanced array which gives me the best combination of features/price/storage/IOPS. Other people will have other requirements, and there are some that needs IOPS no matter the cost, but I think those are still a small enough minority that they are not what will be driving the industry at large. For me the frontend cache is generally enough to keep my database servers happy with their log volumes writing at sub ms times, we just pin our most frequently used tables in memory which negates any need for super fast read cache =)
Put a Netapp filer in front of something like this, of course the filer would definitely be the limiting factor for IOPS in such a configuration as even the biggest ones aren't rated for near a million IOPS.
Consumer drives can peak at those kind of rates but they would fall over in a month or six if they were asked to sustain writes at anywhere near those rates. The only inexpensive SSD I would (and have) trusted my data to is the Intel x-25e and it comes in at $15/GB which doesn't compare very favorably for most loads with the still expensive $2/GB for FC HDD's. Things may change in a few generations when SLC rates come down to the $3/GB range, but high end HDD's will probably be at 25c per GB by then.
You miss the real world cost of using software raid, licensing. Most applications that justify $500 RAID controllers are licensed on a per cpu or per core model which means using the cpu to accelerate I/O is really freaking expensive. Oracle enterprise lists for $60k/2 cores on linux and windows which means if you max out a core doing I/O you have spent $30k to do I/O, you better be getting some phenomenal rates for that kind of money. Plus hardware raid supplies something that no software raid implementation can, battery backed write cache. I agree that hardware raid coprocessors need to get significantly better to keep up with the demands that SSD's will put on them, but that is quite separate from eliminating hardware raid altogether, for $500 the should be able to put out a board with a few hundred megs of memory, a fast processor, and a battery.
The Blackberry allows real passwords not 4 digit pins and it has policies to wipe the device after so many bad password attempts. Since the data is all in the corporate email system and can easily be re-uploaded to a new device there's no downside to this, this is very different from the consumer oriented iphone.
CH-53E super stallion is 16 tons external payload. The Russian Mi-26 is rated at 22 tons external payload and there are commercial operators so it's possible to lift those kinds of loads.
That thing has horrible ROI, it produces ~2,000kWhrs per year or about $200 worth of electricity but costs $9k minimum which makes the IRR for 25 years -4.1% and the NPV incredibly low. Now that of course is assuming no increase in energy costs relative to inflation which is very pessimistic, but it goes to show why small scale wind production hasn't taken off.
Reasonable people already live in a ~300sqft/person home. Unlike so many of my colleagues and friends I am not in debt up to my eyeballs (only debt is my mortgage which is a tradition 30 year fixed) and I own a 3 bedroom 1200sq ft house for myself, my wife, and our two sons. The only downside to my home is it is rather energy inefficient per sq ft because it was built in 1961, they don't build reasonable sized homes today and I didn't want a 4k+ sq/ft home.
From what I've seen the vast majority of patents held by large companies are used for one of two things, either as a defensive shield against patent claims from another large or medium sized company (MAD) or as a bargaining chip in cross licensing deals (AMD and Intel).
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500k barrels per day OPEC imports, $120B per year in conservative costs for the Iraq war and foreign aid to Iraq comes to ~$21/gallon.
The other downside to large scale photo-electrics are the vast quantity of toxins used in their production and the rare elements used in their production. Neither or those are going away anytime soon.
So you are proposing burning oil until we have little left and then burning oil sands and oil shale? Wow, that's incredibly short sighted. We need sustainable alternatives and the sooner the better. Continuing to rely on stored solar energy is a bad long term strategy even if there are zero environmental problems from doing so (highly unlikely).
We're not going to run out of saltwater any century soon, and most strains of algae grow just fine in saltwater.
They don't have to pick winners, just raise the floor price of dino-gas and let everyone else compete. That is what they should have done instead of the stupidity that was the farm belt subsidy disguised as energy alternative that we got. It would have encouraged alternative energy sources at a lower cost to the taxpayers and without encouraging an 'alternative' that consumed oil at near 1:1 levels.
Uh, fuel is transferable and the US accounts for what 40% of world consumption, so as long as we do not have a price floor alternatives have to compete with artificially cheap dino-gas (add the cost of 2 gulf wars and our support for Israel to the last two decades consumption and you get a much higher price per gallon, not to mention the environmental externalities that aren't priced into the pump price.)
The problem is that if you allow the price of energy to fluctuate below the cost of production of alternatives the alternatives will never take off because your ROI potentially goes negative. Since we know that oil will run out in the future it makes more sense to start allowing alternatives to flourish now while we have known reserves then to wait until the natural price floor encourages them (ie it might be too late with a horrible economic collapse and resulting war if we wait too long). Not to mention the likely environmental effects of continuing to burn fossil fuels until they are near exhausted.
Btw I said nothing of pouring tax dollars down a social rat-hole, I actually advocated increased taxes in one area with an offsetting credit in another which is tax neutral to some level of consumption and tax positive above that level (ie discouraging the unwanted behavior while not disproportionately affecting the economically disadvantaged.)
The solution to that is simple, you put in an algicide that your GE strain is engineered to resist. This of course requires fairly heavy quantities of algicide and monitoring to make sure that you haven't crossed that trait into natural species (monitor and destroy any reactors containing cross species).
It's per core/CPU in the machine unless you have hard zoning ala vmware or Solaris hard zones. If you application can possibly use more resources you have to license at the highwater mark for resources consumed (eg Solaris soft zones are supposed to be tracked with an audit trail and paid at the most resources consumed). Before we found out that our DR licensing is gratis because we don't do live failover and test DR less than 6 times a year we had four dual core processors in the box but were using boot.ini parameters to only use 4 cores with the understanding that we would change it if the production box became unavailable.
5kWhr/m^2 is average for the globe. Flagstaff Arizona is closer to 6, Archorage is closer to 2.5, for a fairly complete list for the US see this page.
We simply need to tax fuel enough to establish a price floor that will encourage alternative investments. The Europeans are already there so now the US just needs to start increasing the tax rate at say 25c per gallon per quarter and we will be there in a few years. You'd need to increase the standard deduction to balance out the regressive nature of such a use based tax but it would encourage alternative fuel generation AND curb demand at the same time, a win-win situation.
EVA does much the same thing as XIV for rebuilds while allowing you to use 15k spindles.
So we need something that can keep up with an ICH-10R but can do RAID5/10 and has BBWC. For $500-1500 someone should be able to do that no problem, it just hasn't been a priority before because you couldn't get enough IOPS out of attached devices for the controller to be the limiting factor (16x15k SFF's still can't do as many 4k random IOPS as a single x-25e). Btw I've found the same thing but using the ICH8R, it can smoke any of the RAID controllers I have available for pure IOPS when coupled with the x-25e.
Your Oracle guys will have more meaningful statistics like average and worst case service latency, to a DBA they don't care if they can only get 20% saturation on the link because the storage can't handle the random IOPS. I don't have much of a problem because average service time is right at average spindle speed and worst case when we aren't experiencing a fail-over event is ~2x average service time. We have also benchmarked the array and shown that it will do ~10x more 4k random IOPS then we see the DB push on an average day. After we did all that benchmarking and statistics gathering the DBA's went back and worked with the 3rd party application guys to do some serious tuning on the SQL they were generating resulting in some reports going from 5 minutes to under 15 seconds to run.
Nope, my prices are not mixed up, we are buying an EVA with a significant number of shelves and are hence getting a decent discount, that brings the price per 450GB drive down to ~$1k. When you are buying something in that price range paying anything near list is just not doing your homework. We had competitive bids from all of the big boys except EMC (don't like to micromanage storage and their 5 year costs are so obscene as to be non-starters) and we let all the vendors know it was a competitive bid. HP came out with the right mix of features/price/performance and support.
I have a quote that we're about to execute that includes a bunch of 450GB 15k FC drives for ~$1,000 which is within spitting distance of $2/GB. Yes, on a $/IOP basis SLC does in fact beat FC drives even today, but the percentage of my storage that needs IOPS over everything is very low so I have built a balanced array which gives me the best combination of features/price/storage/IOPS. Other people will have other requirements, and there are some that needs IOPS no matter the cost, but I think those are still a small enough minority that they are not what will be driving the industry at large. For me the frontend cache is generally enough to keep my database servers happy with their log volumes writing at sub ms times, we just pin our most frequently used tables in memory which negates any need for super fast read cache =)
Put a Netapp filer in front of something like this, of course the filer would definitely be the limiting factor for IOPS in such a configuration as even the biggest ones aren't rated for near a million IOPS.
Consumer drives can peak at those kind of rates but they would fall over in a month or six if they were asked to sustain writes at anywhere near those rates. The only inexpensive SSD I would (and have) trusted my data to is the Intel x-25e and it comes in at $15/GB which doesn't compare very favorably for most loads with the still expensive $2/GB for FC HDD's. Things may change in a few generations when SLC rates come down to the $3/GB range, but high end HDD's will probably be at 25c per GB by then.
You miss the real world cost of using software raid, licensing. Most applications that justify $500 RAID controllers are licensed on a per cpu or per core model which means using the cpu to accelerate I/O is really freaking expensive. Oracle enterprise lists for $60k/2 cores on linux and windows which means if you max out a core doing I/O you have spent $30k to do I/O, you better be getting some phenomenal rates for that kind of money. Plus hardware raid supplies something that no software raid implementation can, battery backed write cache. I agree that hardware raid coprocessors need to get significantly better to keep up with the demands that SSD's will put on them, but that is quite separate from eliminating hardware raid altogether, for $500 the should be able to put out a board with a few hundred megs of memory, a fast processor, and a battery.
The Blackberry allows real passwords not 4 digit pins and it has policies to wipe the device after so many bad password attempts. Since the data is all in the corporate email system and can easily be re-uploaded to a new device there's no downside to this, this is very different from the consumer oriented iphone.
CH-53E super stallion is 16 tons external payload. The Russian Mi-26 is rated at 22 tons external payload and there are commercial operators so it's possible to lift those kinds of loads.
That thing has horrible ROI, it produces ~2,000kWhrs per year or about $200 worth of electricity but costs $9k minimum which makes the IRR for 25 years -4.1% and the NPV incredibly low. Now that of course is assuming no increase in energy costs relative to inflation which is very pessimistic, but it goes to show why small scale wind production hasn't taken off.
Reasonable people already live in a ~300sqft/person home. Unlike so many of my colleagues and friends I am not in debt up to my eyeballs (only debt is my mortgage which is a tradition 30 year fixed) and I own a 3 bedroom 1200sq ft house for myself, my wife, and our two sons. The only downside to my home is it is rather energy inefficient per sq ft because it was built in 1961, they don't build reasonable sized homes today and I didn't want a 4k+ sq/ft home.
From what I've seen the vast majority of patents held by large companies are used for one of two things, either as a defensive shield against patent claims from another large or medium sized company (MAD) or as a bargaining chip in cross licensing deals (AMD and Intel).
There are hydraulic ABS systems so the 12v isn't even needed.