Ok, I specifically said UPS power, as in it takes time to spinup the generators and switching from one source to the other does not always go perfectly in the real world. One factor is minimum cycle time on the compressors. The 3 minute time frame was from TFA which says that at a density of 5KVA per cabinet thermal shutdown can happen in 3 minutes due to thermal load.
Oh and as far as the one leg collapsing thing, yes we were VERY pissed at everyone involved in that little problem, it turns out it was a design flaw in the transfer switch. Because it happened during the day we ended up taking more of an outage for replacement of the switch then we did from the incident but it just proves that even a well designed system can have problems. That datacenter was small enough to only have single source power, my current datacenter has dual feed including dual generator and fully redundant cooling so a single transfer switch malfunction wouldn't take it down but you have to work within the parameters set by budget and need.
If your PSU's have a PF of.65 they absolutely SUCK. Our datacenter has a PF of.89 as measured by our UPS's. This is using IBM xseries and HP Prolients along with a smattering of other systems including a midsized PBX and a Xiotech SAN. My home PC has active PF correction and has a PF of.95. If you had an entire datacenter running at.65 you would be getting a HUGE bill from the power company because they have to use a dummy load at the generating facility to balance out that uneven load.
Your numbers are off by a factor of 10 because one ton = 12,000 BTU/hr! I guess you have WAY too much cooling capacity, which isn't good because you will be constantly cycling your cooling which is way less power efficient than running a properly sized unit more or less continuously.
The problem is humidity, a big part of what an AC system does is maintain humidity in an acceptable range. If you were going to try to do once through with outside air you'd spend MORE power during a significant percent of the year in most climates trying to either humidify or dehumidify the incoming air.
It sounds like they DID have backup power for the cooling but that they switch over to backup power caused some problems. This isn't really all that unusual because cooling is basically never on UPS power so the transition to backup power may not go completely smoothly unless everything is setup correctly, tested, and there are no or little unusual circumstances during the switchover. I've seen even well designed systems have problems in the real world. One time we lost one leg of a triphase power system so the automatic transfer switch failed to flip over and startup the generator. The UPS realized it wasn't getting good power so it flipped over to battery power. Luckily the UPS sent out its notification and we were able to manually switch over to generator and get the cooling online, but there is almost no chance of it working in we only had 3 minutes to get things corrected.
Firefox are the standardizers, the commoditizers forcing Internet Explorer to follow that lets google provide services without dealing with ActiveX, MSHTML and crippled old IE browsers.
Funny but this AJAX thing that powers many of Googles sites was originally powered by an ActiveX control.
The HD-XA2 is definitely superior with 1080P output including HDMI 1.3 deep color. Even the HD-A20 is better. And of course there's the HD-A30 and HD-A35 with 1080p24 support. I also like the looks of the HD-A3+ better but that's a personal preference not a technical spec =)
Sorry but you can already get a HD-DVD player for less than many upscaling DVD players. Walmart had one last Friday for $99, a price I expect to see many times between now and christmas. Sure it was the HDA2 which is far from the best player, but it doesn't matter since it is better than standard DVD and will sell a crapton of units at that price. Hell even most people that have an HD set don't have a set that will outperform the HDA2 so for most people the limitations are moot.
Making good sauce is like making good bbq, the process is low heat and lots of time.
Re:How is this different than a food chemist?
on
Chefs As Chemists
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· Score: 1
Remember, cooking is an art, baking is a science.
Which explains why almost every interview I have ever read with a top chef has had either dessert or baked goods as the least favorite thing to make! I guess it's a good thing we have pastry chef's or else there would probably be a distinct lack of carbs with a great meal =)
Yeah but this guy was boning someone other than his wife who directly reported to him AND was expensing his love nest. That's a lot of no-no's including the big one, misappropriation of company funds.
If those Dell servers rebooting are 2650's then just pull the DIMM's in the 3rd and 4th slot. We had a bunch of customers with those boxes and that was the only way to get the random crashes to stop. We had Dell replace entire boxes and still have the issue. One customer blamed our OS build, but once we pulled it down to 2 DIMM's the box stayed up for over a year vs the 12-72 hours it was staying up before.
Actually the 320s goes to 14 drives if you replace the DVD drive with the 2xSATA expansion option =) We just got one in not too long ago and they are very nice. 9.75TB in 2U is just incredible if you don't need fast seek times =) We're using one for DR file storage and will be buying another for disk to disk to tape. Neither application is going to tax the system that much and my plan at DR if it's a long term situation is to buy faster storage, robocopying from the DL320s will be much faster than restore from tape =)
One of the best design/implementation guys I know is a high school dropout. He was too smart and too much of a wiseass in school so he had problems with the administration, in frustration he dropped out. Now he makes six figures and travels the country as a consultant. He's probably been in charge of the design and implementation of over a thousand systems. While I would want my DBA to be a college graduate due to the applicability of CS concepts there are many positions including network administrator that don't really have much applicable need for a degree. I would take a guy with a decade of solid experience over a recent CS grad every time.
Yep, my dad saved a guys life with his cellphone. He was hiking on a mountain in Mexico and came across a climber who had slid several kilometers down a glacier. He tried calling the lodge at the base of the mountain and when he was unable to reach them he called my mom back in Ohio who ended up writing the message out in spanish and faxing it to the lodge. A mountain rescue team was dispatched and the guy survived despite massive injuries, the doctors said there was no way he would have lived if the rescue had been delayed even an hour.
Eh? It's not so much the forests (the wood pulp for paper tends to come from quick growing farmed trees) but the streams and rivers that suffer from paper production, both from the paper production process and from the fertilizers used in the tree farms.
1) Newegg doesn't always have the best prices, though they are generally competitive and have good service.
2) Actually with the 7600 series you don't need to match much of anything, you will only see the performance of ~1.9x your slowest card, but they can be different manufacturers, ram, etc. Just be sure to use Nvidia Forceware drivers, not those tweaked by a manufacturer and you are good to go.
Hmm, I built a system last year with a 7600gs with passive cooling because I wanted a silent htpc that could play games, today I could add a second card for ~$50 and get some seriously better performance so that games that I used to play at 1280x1024 on my 17" monitor I can now play at 1920x1080 on my hdtv, doesn't seem insane or counterproductive to me =)
Really, because my wife and I make less than 2x the median income and we do a night out like that a couple times a year. Of course travel and food are our big passions so we drive old cars we pay cash for and live in a 1200 sq ft home. I guess it's all a matter of where your priorities lie.
Dude, the 7600GS was $100 last year! I know because I built a system with a fanless 7600GS last October and that's what I paid. Today's $100 card is the 8600GT which is about as fast as last years $200 card the 7800GT. It also uses less than half the power and supports DX10 (not that it's of much use right now since MS shot themselves in the foot by making it Vista only).
If it's gone generic I doubt it will be a problem with insurance companies as they would probably rather you use a proven cocktail not covered by patents than an expensive custom pill covered by patents.
the power of Unix shells, in my opinion, is the ability to pipe the output of one program into the input of another
Did you know that Powershell takes pipes one step further than Unix and actually passes the object you are working on between processes? A good example of where this is nicer than the Unix alternative is doing registry manipulation, I can search for a registry key by name then enumerate the values under it and modify values all without having to worry about data types (within reason). Another good example is grabbing a user from AD where I can grab them based on any query context then manipulate the attributes of the user just by doing result.Attribute=whatever, this is MUCH simpler than doing a similar process against an LDAP directory on any other system. At this point for me the biggest drawbacks by far is that not enough stuff is exposed as objects, though 2008 is supposed to be fixing much of that, and that remote object serialization is a COMPLETE joke and from reading the team blog that doesn't look it's going to be fixed in the next release of PowerShell either which really bugs me as it kind of limits its usefullness as a mass system admin tool.
Wow, great post. It's similar to what I said up higher in the article in a much more articulate manner. Theo and company spend so much time in their security box that they fail to realize the complexity of running real world systems. Just because there is a theoretical attack surface for virtualization doesn't mean that it makes real world systems less secure, in fact it is often quite the opposite. From a security standpoint the ideal solution is each module of an application running on a seperate box not connected to the network running a minimal permissions based OS. In the real world we're lucky when we can get everything into it's own OS container, which virtualization makes more cost effective and therefore likely to happen.
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Ok, I specifically said UPS power, as in it takes time to spinup the generators and switching from one source to the other does not always go perfectly in the real world. One factor is minimum cycle time on the compressors. The 3 minute time frame was from TFA which says that at a density of 5KVA per cabinet thermal shutdown can happen in 3 minutes due to thermal load.
Oh and as far as the one leg collapsing thing, yes we were VERY pissed at everyone involved in that little problem, it turns out it was a design flaw in the transfer switch. Because it happened during the day we ended up taking more of an outage for replacement of the switch then we did from the incident but it just proves that even a well designed system can have problems. That datacenter was small enough to only have single source power, my current datacenter has dual feed including dual generator and fully redundant cooling so a single transfer switch malfunction wouldn't take it down but you have to work within the parameters set by budget and need.
If your PSU's have a PF of .65 they absolutely SUCK. Our datacenter has a PF of .89 as measured by our UPS's. This is using IBM xseries and HP Prolients along with a smattering of other systems including a midsized PBX and a Xiotech SAN. My home PC has active PF correction and has a PF of .95. If you had an entire datacenter running at .65 you would be getting a HUGE bill from the power company because they have to use a dummy load at the generating facility to balance out that uneven load.
Your numbers are off by a factor of 10 because one ton = 12,000 BTU/hr! I guess you have WAY too much cooling capacity, which isn't good because you will be constantly cycling your cooling which is way less power efficient than running a properly sized unit more or less continuously.
The problem is humidity, a big part of what an AC system does is maintain humidity in an acceptable range. If you were going to try to do once through with outside air you'd spend MORE power during a significant percent of the year in most climates trying to either humidify or dehumidify the incoming air.
It sounds like they DID have backup power for the cooling but that they switch over to backup power caused some problems. This isn't really all that unusual because cooling is basically never on UPS power so the transition to backup power may not go completely smoothly unless everything is setup correctly, tested, and there are no or little unusual circumstances during the switchover. I've seen even well designed systems have problems in the real world. One time we lost one leg of a triphase power system so the automatic transfer switch failed to flip over and startup the generator. The UPS realized it wasn't getting good power so it flipped over to battery power. Luckily the UPS sent out its notification and we were able to manually switch over to generator and get the cooling online, but there is almost no chance of it working in we only had 3 minutes to get things corrected.
Firefox are the standardizers, the commoditizers forcing Internet Explorer to follow that lets google provide services without dealing with ActiveX, MSHTML and crippled old IE browsers.
Funny but this AJAX thing that powers many of Googles sites was originally powered by an ActiveX control.
The HD-XA2 is definitely superior with 1080P output including HDMI 1.3 deep color. Even the HD-A20 is better. And of course there's the HD-A30 and HD-A35 with 1080p24 support. I also like the looks of the HD-A3+ better but that's a personal preference not a technical spec =)
From high priced product
Sorry but you can already get a HD-DVD player for less than many upscaling DVD players. Walmart had one last Friday for $99, a price I expect to see many times between now and christmas. Sure it was the HDA2 which is far from the best player, but it doesn't matter since it is better than standard DVD and will sell a crapton of units at that price. Hell even most people that have an HD set don't have a set that will outperform the HDA2 so for most people the limitations are moot.
Making good sauce is like making good bbq, the process is low heat and lots of time.
Remember, cooking is an art, baking is a science.
Which explains why almost every interview I have ever read with a top chef has had either dessert or baked goods as the least favorite thing to make! I guess it's a good thing we have pastry chef's or else there would probably be a distinct lack of carbs with a great meal =)
Yeah but this guy was boning someone other than his wife who directly reported to him AND was expensing his love nest. That's a lot of no-no's including the big one, misappropriation of company funds.
If those Dell servers rebooting are 2650's then just pull the DIMM's in the 3rd and 4th slot. We had a bunch of customers with those boxes and that was the only way to get the random crashes to stop. We had Dell replace entire boxes and still have the issue. One customer blamed our OS build, but once we pulled it down to 2 DIMM's the box stayed up for over a year vs the 12-72 hours it was staying up before.
Actually the 320s goes to 14 drives if you replace the DVD drive with the 2xSATA expansion option =) We just got one in not too long ago and they are very nice. 9.75TB in 2U is just incredible if you don't need fast seek times =) We're using one for DR file storage and will be buying another for disk to disk to tape. Neither application is going to tax the system that much and my plan at DR if it's a long term situation is to buy faster storage, robocopying from the DL320s will be much faster than restore from tape =)
One of the best design/implementation guys I know is a high school dropout. He was too smart and too much of a wiseass in school so he had problems with the administration, in frustration he dropped out. Now he makes six figures and travels the country as a consultant. He's probably been in charge of the design and implementation of over a thousand systems. While I would want my DBA to be a college graduate due to the applicability of CS concepts there are many positions including network administrator that don't really have much applicable need for a degree. I would take a guy with a decade of solid experience over a recent CS grad every time.
Yep, my dad saved a guys life with his cellphone. He was hiking on a mountain in Mexico and came across a climber who had slid several kilometers down a glacier. He tried calling the lodge at the base of the mountain and when he was unable to reach them he called my mom back in Ohio who ended up writing the message out in spanish and faxing it to the lodge. A mountain rescue team was dispatched and the guy survived despite massive injuries, the doctors said there was no way he would have lived if the rescue had been delayed even an hour.
It's also used for the treatment of pain associated with rheumatoid arthritis.
Eh? It's not so much the forests (the wood pulp for paper tends to come from quick growing farmed trees) but the streams and rivers that suffer from paper production, both from the paper production process and from the fertilizers used in the tree farms.
1) Newegg doesn't always have the best prices, though they are generally competitive and have good service.
2) Actually with the 7600 series you don't need to match much of anything, you will only see the performance of ~1.9x your slowest card, but they can be different manufacturers, ram, etc. Just be sure to use Nvidia Forceware drivers, not those tweaked by a manufacturer and you are good to go.
Hmm, I built a system last year with a 7600gs with passive cooling because I wanted a silent htpc that could play games, today I could add a second card for ~$50 and get some seriously better performance so that games that I used to play at 1280x1024 on my 17" monitor I can now play at 1920x1080 on my hdtv, doesn't seem insane or counterproductive to me =)
Really, because my wife and I make less than 2x the median income and we do a night out like that a couple times a year. Of course travel and food are our big passions so we drive old cars we pay cash for and live in a 1200 sq ft home. I guess it's all a matter of where your priorities lie.
They are entertainers, that has been an important part of society since the gladiators of ancient Rome, if not before.
Dude, the 7600GS was $100 last year! I know because I built a system with a fanless 7600GS last October and that's what I paid. Today's $100 card is the 8600GT which is about as fast as last years $200 card the 7800GT. It also uses less than half the power and supports DX10 (not that it's of much use right now since MS shot themselves in the foot by making it Vista only).
If it's gone generic I doubt it will be a problem with insurance companies as they would probably rather you use a proven cocktail not covered by patents than an expensive custom pill covered by patents.
the power of Unix shells, in my opinion, is the ability to pipe the output of one program into the input of another
Did you know that Powershell takes pipes one step further than Unix and actually passes the object you are working on between processes? A good example of where this is nicer than the Unix alternative is doing registry manipulation, I can search for a registry key by name then enumerate the values under it and modify values all without having to worry about data types (within reason). Another good example is grabbing a user from AD where I can grab them based on any query context then manipulate the attributes of the user just by doing result.Attribute=whatever, this is MUCH simpler than doing a similar process against an LDAP directory on any other system. At this point for me the biggest drawbacks by far is that not enough stuff is exposed as objects, though 2008 is supposed to be fixing much of that, and that remote object serialization is a COMPLETE joke and from reading the team blog that doesn't look it's going to be fixed in the next release of PowerShell either which really bugs me as it kind of limits its usefullness as a mass system admin tool.
Wow, great post. It's similar to what I said up higher in the article in a much more articulate manner. Theo and company spend so much time in their security box that they fail to realize the complexity of running real world systems. Just because there is a theoretical attack surface for virtualization doesn't mean that it makes real world systems less secure, in fact it is often quite the opposite. From a security standpoint the ideal solution is each module of an application running on a seperate box not connected to the network running a minimal permissions based OS. In the real world we're lucky when we can get everything into it's own OS container, which virtualization makes more cost effective and therefore likely to happen.