"How big is the burden in actual dollars?
Take 100 server racks full of rack-mount servers. Each rack that requires 12 to 13 kilowatts, uses1.3 megawatts of power for the servers. The power for cooling to remove the heat generated is almost equal to that dissipated by the IT hardware itself. So the air conditioning will need another 1.3 megawatts of power. With the cost of electricity today, 1.3 megawatts at 10 cents a kilowatthour for a 24/7 operation is approximately $1.2 million per year. This is quite significant. And the pressure to reduce it is becoming urgent."
OK, so it's marketing propaganda, but suggests that energy used by hardware in a datacentre ~= energy used to cool a datacentre. That sounds about right to me, but admit I haven't checked in detail. (Somewhere I have specs on power and cooling at our datacentre I could use for reference, but that'll take me a little longer to find, but as I say, it sounds 'about right').
So, if they completely eliminated the 'cooling power use' then yes, halving our electric bill would be very useful, as 'clean, UPS backed 3-phase' in datacentre quantities gets rather pricey.
More likely though, this is a bit of an exaggeration, and they'll halve the 'cooling' bill. Which would only be 25%. However if they can get their cost of hardware under that threshold price of 'electric bill per rack' then they'll get sales in proportion to how much, and how annoying it is to deal with.
It's probably not far off. Bear in mind that a lot of the 300W of your power supplies in each system is dissipated as heat. I've got a datacenter that's had water cooled racks installed (which as you might imagine, has horrific 'overheads' on installation, cableing and maintenance). At £5k/rack, + overheads, it was still a cheaper solution than standard 19" rack + aircon bill.
Do you filter on protocol or port? Protocol filtering is an additional challenge, which again requires specialist skills/equipment, where port blocking, whilst easy, is about as easy to circumvent too.
Actually I've found that IM can be an extremely valuable communications tool, when working in a mobile/distributed workplace. Email/telephone are good, but IM is a really excellent substitute for the 'hey $name, which server was it that went baffy last night?' that you'd ask across the office.
Anyone who says that communication isn't vitally important in teamwork is in all ways wrong, and IM is just as effective a tool as business commmunications as it is for personal commmunications. The only downside is 'personal use' but frankly that's _always_ going to happen. I reckon every employer should include a 'don't take the piss' clause in AUPs and that'd be fine:)
More truth in that than I care to thing about. You will be thought much more highly of for 'working hard' filling in a 5000 line spreadsheet, one line at a time, for 2 weeks, than you will for writing a shell script that does it in 10 minutes, do almost 2 weeks of work, and slack off a bit on the last day. When you point out that you accomplished the same amount as the guy at the next desk in the same period of time, then clearly you are being obstructive and critical of fellow employees.
I'm pretty sure it says that on the outside of the box. I've got one, and rather like it. 6 minutes is enough to sort out the bits I can't be bothered to fetch the 'real' vacuum cleaner for (another dyson)
Agreed. The real advantage of robot vacuum cleaners (or lawnmowers) would be to just 'let them run'. I don't care it it takes a few days to cover all my floor space, what I do care about is that I don't have to faff around with unloading, recharging, or otherwise 'playing' with my new robotic toy.
Get me a cleaning bot that runs for weeks without intervention, and covers the whole area over that sort of period, and I'll buy one. (So I might actually go look at the siemens one, it sounds like what I'm after)
Wierd. I have 2 of 'em at the moment. A little 'handheld' and a floor unit. They're still going strong, despite a good few years of use and abuse. (6 blokes, shared house, you get the idea;p). Having something that's robust, and can suck up small children really is a wonderful thing, and I wouldn't hesitate to recommend 'em to anyone.
Clearly this doesn't square with your experiences, but I still remain a fan.
Depends on your objective. If you want something that runs the fastest it possibly can, yes you're probably right. Don't use VMware. Regardless of whether it's web, database or... well whatever, VMWare is an overhead.
In a perfect world, as a sysadmin I create a nice stable system, and it works really well. Maybe I run lots of apache instances on a single machine, and they co-exist happily.
But this isn't an ideal world. What VMWare does, is fundamentally to workaround the fundamental bogosity of Windows. It lets you create an environment that's trivial to replicate, hardware abstracted, and doesn't trash the rest of the machine around it, when 'someone' inevitably screws up. Someone does something stupid with your single instance apache server, and it goes splat as they fill up/, or get a broken CGI on there, or something. Same things happen to a VM, but then it's dead easy to fix.
There's a reason that almost all the hardcore vendors are 'virtualising'. It's because despite the performance overhead, the bonus you gain on managability, scalability, reliablity far outweighs the cost of having to buy a few more boxes. When you're talking about large sums of money riding on 'outage' this is a no brainer.
I'd still run websites on vmware, because then I can give users the power to do what they like, without screwing up my overall service. That's a good trade in my book.
I've seen the same thing - just doesn't like context switches. Also IO intensive stuff, tends to start hurting too. But then it's not like I only have one tool in my toolkit:). ESX is a tool for a job, and IMO very good at it. It's not the magic bullet that lets you do anything though.
Actually, the company I worked for 6 months back, one of the projects I was involved in was 'VMWare'. Production stuff running on on the ESX servers (which became 'virtual infrastructure') in our datacentre, as a cost effective scalable environment. Yes, we weren't getting 'uber performance' but then again, we were running 150 or so VMs on an 6 server VMWare farm.
One of the other things we prototyped and deployed was 'site services packages' - get GSX (now VMWare Server), stick it on a pair of 2U servers, and attach a storage array to both of them. Then create your 'template' fileserver, DHCP server, print server, proxy, that kind of thing and deploy them to this package. It worked very well indeed - you get a whole new order of magnitude on stability (although to be fair that's in part because we through away the crappy workstations that were doing the 'low intensity' stuff) and was extremely managable, and trivially replacable in the event of a hardware failure.
Performance? No, VMWare isn't that great on performance - whilst it's not bad, in an ideal situation, fundamentally what you are doing is introducing an overhead on your system. And probably contention too. But it's really good at efficient resource utilisation, easy manageability and maintainability.
As an experienced sysadmin, my reaction is screw performance. Let's start with reliable and scalable, and then performance just naturally follows, as does a really high grade service.
Proactive laziness is a fundamental of systems admin. Your job, is essentially to put yourself out of a job - or more specificially, free up your time to play with toys. The best way to do this is build something stable, well documented and easily maintainable. Then your day consists of interesting stuff, punctuated by the odd RTFM when something doesn't work quite right.
OK. I have a degree, it's a BEng in Computer Systems Engineering.
The subjects they taught me in this degree, are not often directly relevant to my day job - I work as a Storage Analyst, which is basically 'support, design and stuff' of SANs, Backup Systems and Archiving. These aren't really subjects that were covered in my degree.
My previous employer, I was working alongside someone who'd come in through an apprentice ship at 16, and had 4 years on me, with the company.
Which sort of shows, I guess, that experience _is_ a substitute for a degree.
The important point though, is in doing a degree I learned a _lot_ of things, that I'm starting to realise are phenomenally valuable to me. I understand the underlying concepts of so many things, not because I was 'taught' them precisely, but because I was taught how to think.
Once you start to understand what a 'computer system' actually _means_ then you start having an awful lot more ability to think laterally about how things should be done.
I've seen many workmates get into the 'don't understand it, so will put up with it' mindset, that's so _very_ prevalent, and have been shocked when I've pointed out a trivial solution that's just not at the 'layer' they're thinking of.
So, speaking as someone who spent 3 years on a degree. Worked part time for my second/third year, and moved into employment immediately. Have changed jobs 3 times, each time into something that I consider 'proper IT', and have quite a few people I know who _didn't_ do a degree, I would make the assertion that it's DEFINITELY worth it.
You will never have another opportunity to do it, between bills and pressures of work. It will be hard, but... in my opinion it's an extremely valuable learning and growing experience. Do a degree. Do a degree in a subject you enjoy. It will serve you in good stead for the rest of your life. The subject is actually less important than the skills you gain, but obviously something relevant is more useful.
Dune was superb.
Children/Messiah had their moments, and served as a reasonable story follow-through.
I deny any other Dune books. Lalalala, there was no God Emperor. I'm not listening.
The shadow cabinet is appointed by the opposition party. It's purpose is in theory, to act for developing policies for the party, to give them better election prospects. Of course, what tends to really happen is the shadow minister rips the piss out of the 'real' minister, because 'it'd be better if we did it'.
Actually, it's the shadow cabinet - the opposition party appoints 'fake ministers' to heckle and harangue the real ones, whilst developing their own party policies on the subject.
Actually, there's a cool feature in Linux that does actually improve your system performance. It's built into the newer kernels, and is known as 'exec' mode. It's an execution pipeline that more efficiently utilises your system resources. As a fringe benefit though, it also improves performance. It's not a huge impact, only about 10-15%, and is dependant on the application in question. To enable it, all you need to do is add 'exec true' to your/etc/profile.
Should also work on your user profile, but obviously won't then help for key system processes.
I'm pretty certain that there's really a very short list of people who've been found to have commited war crimes, that actually signed up to treaties that said they 'shouldn't do that'.
Which I suppose is the way it goes really. There's not really any 'international justice' just people you're more afraid of than others. If you're lucky, the guy with the most firepower and enthusiasm is also the one who's interested in 'high standards' in terms of war crimes and human rights.
Hmm, never really thought of it that way. Declaring (as a nation) that you've found someone under a different jurisdiction to be a war criminal, I suppose it _is_ a protest. One which they might acknowledge and do something about, but... well if the government does 'back' whoever's found as a criminal, then you fall back to the other options, of hoping they come to visit, and kidnap them, or letting rip with the war machine.
Well, as you rightly point out, it does depend a lot on your tastes.
However when specialising, the trick is not to become _too_ specialised. There are many skills that are transferrable, and others which are not. The non transferrable are probably directly relevant to what you're doing. The transferrable cover the 'other stuff' like writing reports, project management, process management, change control, that kind of thing.
In my opinion, you are best served to aim for something you like doing first, but keep an eye on the supporting skills whilst you do. Those are what keep you growing, learning and at the end of the day, able to move to another job, when you inevitably do in your career.
Actually, I'd recommend having a look at something like ITIL for the 'IT baseline'. It's not the only way to run an IT department, but I'm noticing more and more companies are 'going that route' - being able to understand how and why your department does things the way it does is, IMO, very valuable, and more importantly, an excellent plus point when going elsewhere for interviews.
So out of interest, who _would_ have jurisdiction over, to take a random example, alleged war crimes against the President of the United States?
The problem with things like 'war crimes' is that they tend to be international level problems. So you can almost always write off those attempting to prosecute as 'protest courts' and say they have a political bias. You may well be correct, but the question becomes whether they're more or less interested in 'justice' than the alternatives.
More indepth answer? If you assume a degree is synonymous with 'being qualified' you are incorrect. There are a large number of graduates who have yet to learn the 'tough lesson' that their degree doesn't actually carry much weight. So the Slashdot community is helpfully trying to get them focussed on the fact that a degree, or lack thereof, isn't a binary state factor. It's an enabler, and it's useful, but then... so is having spent 3 years 'in the industry' whilst everyone else was off getting their degree.
Slashdot Mirror
We've already got re-inforced flooring in our datacentres. Lead acid batteries are pretty heavy :)
It's probably not far off. Bear in mind that a lot of the 300W of your power supplies in each system is dissipated as heat. I've got a datacenter that's had water cooled racks installed (which as you might imagine, has horrific 'overheads' on installation, cableing and maintenance). At £5k/rack, + overheads, it was still a cheaper solution than standard 19" rack + aircon bill.
Do you filter on protocol or port? Protocol filtering is an additional challenge, which again requires specialist skills/equipment, where port blocking, whilst easy, is about as easy to circumvent too.
Anyone who says that communication isn't vitally important in teamwork is in all ways wrong, and IM is just as effective a tool as business commmunications as it is for personal commmunications. The only downside is 'personal use' but frankly that's _always_ going to happen. I reckon every employer should include a 'don't take the piss' clause in AUPs and that'd be fine :)
More truth in that than I care to thing about. You will be thought much more highly of for 'working hard' filling in a 5000 line spreadsheet, one line at a time, for 2 weeks, than you will for writing a shell script that does it in 10 minutes, do almost 2 weeks of work, and slack off a bit on the last day. When you point out that you accomplished the same amount as the guy at the next desk in the same period of time, then clearly you are being obstructive and critical of fellow employees.
Parent post didn't mention the US at any point. Or does the fact that it might be a european taxpayer make it all ok?
I'm pretty sure it says that on the outside of the box. I've got one, and rather like it. 6 minutes is enough to sort out the bits I can't be bothered to fetch the 'real' vacuum cleaner for (another dyson)
Get me a cleaning bot that runs for weeks without intervention, and covers the whole area over that sort of period, and I'll buy one. (So I might actually go look at the siemens one, it sounds like what I'm after)
There could be something to what you say... I however, couldn't possibly comment.
Clearly this doesn't square with your experiences, but I still remain a fan.
In a perfect world, as a sysadmin I create a nice stable system, and it works really well. Maybe I run lots of apache instances on a single machine, and they co-exist happily.
But this isn't an ideal world. What VMWare does, is fundamentally to workaround the fundamental bogosity of Windows. It lets you create an environment that's trivial to replicate, hardware abstracted, and doesn't trash the rest of the machine around it, when 'someone' inevitably screws up. Someone does something stupid with your single instance apache server, and it goes splat as they fill up /, or get a broken CGI on there, or something. Same things happen to a VM, but then it's dead easy to fix.
There's a reason that almost all the hardcore vendors are 'virtualising'. It's because despite the performance overhead, the bonus you gain on managability, scalability, reliablity far outweighs the cost of having to buy a few more boxes. When you're talking about large sums of money riding on 'outage' this is a no brainer.
I'd still run websites on vmware, because then I can give users the power to do what they like, without screwing up my overall service. That's a good trade in my book.
I've seen the same thing - just doesn't like context switches. Also IO intensive stuff, tends to start hurting too. But then it's not like I only have one tool in my toolkit :). ESX is a tool for a job, and IMO very good at it. It's not the magic bullet that lets you do anything though.
One of the other things we prototyped and deployed was 'site services packages' - get GSX (now VMWare Server), stick it on a pair of 2U servers, and attach a storage array to both of them. Then create your 'template' fileserver, DHCP server, print server, proxy, that kind of thing and deploy them to this package. It worked very well indeed - you get a whole new order of magnitude on stability (although to be fair that's in part because we through away the crappy workstations that were doing the 'low intensity' stuff) and was extremely managable, and trivially replacable in the event of a hardware failure.
Performance? No, VMWare isn't that great on performance - whilst it's not bad, in an ideal situation, fundamentally what you are doing is introducing an overhead on your system. And probably contention too. But it's really good at efficient resource utilisation, easy manageability and maintainability.
As an experienced sysadmin, my reaction is screw performance. Let's start with reliable and scalable, and then performance just naturally follows, as does a really high grade service.
Proactive laziness is a fundamental of systems admin. Your job, is essentially to put yourself out of a job - or more specificially, free up your time to play with toys. The best way to do this is build something stable, well documented and easily maintainable. Then your day consists of interesting stuff, punctuated by the odd RTFM when something doesn't work quite right.
The subjects they taught me in this degree, are not often directly relevant to my day job - I work as a Storage Analyst, which is basically 'support, design and stuff' of SANs, Backup Systems and Archiving. These aren't really subjects that were covered in my degree.
My previous employer, I was working alongside someone who'd come in through an apprentice ship at 16, and had 4 years on me, with the company.
Which sort of shows, I guess, that experience _is_ a substitute for a degree.
The important point though, is in doing a degree I learned a _lot_ of things, that I'm starting to realise are phenomenally valuable to me. I understand the underlying concepts of so many things, not because I was 'taught' them precisely, but because I was taught how to think.
Once you start to understand what a 'computer system' actually _means_ then you start having an awful lot more ability to think laterally about how things should be done.
I've seen many workmates get into the 'don't understand it, so will put up with it' mindset, that's so _very_ prevalent, and have been shocked when I've pointed out a trivial solution that's just not at the 'layer' they're thinking of.
So, speaking as someone who spent 3 years on a degree. Worked part time for my second/third year, and moved into employment immediately. Have changed jobs 3 times, each time into something that I consider 'proper IT', and have quite a few people I know who _didn't_ do a degree, I would make the assertion that it's DEFINITELY worth it.
You will never have another opportunity to do it, between bills and pressures of work. It will be hard, but ... in my opinion it's an extremely valuable learning and growing experience. Do a degree. Do a degree in a subject you enjoy. It will serve you in good stead for the rest of your life. The subject is actually less important than the skills you gain, but obviously something relevant is more useful.
Dune was superb. Children/Messiah had their moments, and served as a reasonable story follow-through. I deny any other Dune books. Lalalala, there was no God Emperor. I'm not listening.
So in a sense, I suppose you're right.
Should also work on your user profile, but obviously won't then help for key system processes.
Which I suppose is the way it goes really. There's not really any 'international justice' just people you're more afraid of than others. If you're lucky, the guy with the most firepower and enthusiasm is also the one who's interested in 'high standards' in terms of war crimes and human rights.
Hmm, never really thought of it that way. Declaring (as a nation) that you've found someone under a different jurisdiction to be a war criminal, I suppose it _is_ a protest. One which they might acknowledge and do something about, but ... well if the government does 'back' whoever's found as a criminal, then you fall back to the other options, of hoping they come to visit, and kidnap them, or letting rip with the war machine.
Ain't RealPolitik fun?
And oh boy, did this get offtopic :)
Hello, welcome to Slashdot.
News for Nerds, and Stuff that matters.
And yes, there is a correllation between IT people and the Slashdot readership.
(Not least an appreciation of the humour implicit in naming your site after some of the punctuation you would see in a URL)
However when specialising, the trick is not to become _too_ specialised. There are many skills that are transferrable, and others which are not. The non transferrable are probably directly relevant to what you're doing. The transferrable cover the 'other stuff' like writing reports, project management, process management, change control, that kind of thing.
In my opinion, you are best served to aim for something you like doing first, but keep an eye on the supporting skills whilst you do. Those are what keep you growing, learning and at the end of the day, able to move to another job, when you inevitably do in your career.
Actually, I'd recommend having a look at something like ITIL for the 'IT baseline'. It's not the only way to run an IT department, but I'm noticing more and more companies are 'going that route' - being able to understand how and why your department does things the way it does is, IMO, very valuable, and more importantly, an excellent plus point when going elsewhere for interviews.
The problem with things like 'war crimes' is that they tend to be international level problems. So you can almost always write off those attempting to prosecute as 'protest courts' and say they have a political bias. You may well be correct, but the question becomes whether they're more or less interested in 'justice' than the alternatives.
More indepth answer? If you assume a degree is synonymous with 'being qualified' you are incorrect. There are a large number of graduates who have yet to learn the 'tough lesson' that their degree doesn't actually carry much weight. So the Slashdot community is helpfully trying to get them focussed on the fact that a degree, or lack thereof, isn't a binary state factor. It's an enabler, and it's useful, but then... so is having spent 3 years 'in the industry' whilst everyone else was off getting their degree.
Given we're on the tenth doctor, 4 series would be quite a churn :)