Some time ago I read about the BackBlaze box here on slashdot. Essentially it's a 4U server chassis design that holds 45 LFF SATA drives and a server motherboard, plus the requisite connector bits and power and so on. BackBlaze is a storage provider that offers some online storage service and they designed the chassis to do high-density storage and hired a company, Protocase, to build it. BackBlaze doesn't sell servers, or server designs. They designed it because they needed it and shared it in the hope others would give back design improvements.
BackBlaze open-sourced the design and authorized Protocase to sell it. I learned about this when I followed up on the story with Protocase because I'm in the server trade and the storage density was intriguing. We went back and forth but I never bought the thing.
Purely by coincidence I got an email from Protocase just today. They're selling the thing now as a fully built server with everything you need (motherboard, processor, PSU, expanders, drive controllers, etc) -- except drives now for $5395.00 (1-4 units) and $4995.00 (5-9 units). Their website won't sell it, you have to contact lpodgursky@protocase.com via email for how to buy this because they're not geeks like us - they bend sheet metal for a living. At the time of the slashdot story this would store 67TB, but nowadays it's twice that. 3TB drives now cost $120, which would be $10,800 roughly for 135TB raw or probably 110TB usable - which puts it at $100 per served terabyte. Some folks would consider that a bargain. You'll want the 10Gbps links as that much volume will be link constrained for volume migrations. For storage density that's 1.35PB (raw) per rack, which is about as good as it gets right now. Bring cash or AmEx because Protocase is a tiny company and can't offer terms for new customers.
Of course for stuff that's commercially valuable that much data would cost a lot to recreate. I would probably want two of these at least, and store multiple copies on each one. Advances in HDD density should take care of expansion needs and migration needs if your data is currently less than 50TB. For software look into OpenFiler, which is free to use and has commercial support available.
This is not an advertisement. I don't work for any of these people. I don't care if you buy this thing. But if it was my money and my data and it was worth $50K or more... I'd buy several of these and find some geographically diverse locations to put them and devise a strategy for replicating and migrating my data as the hardware grew stale.
So as long as I'm posting this... to totally sexy this up with automatically tiered storage for performance I'd add a couple Fusion-IO IODrive Octals per unit with Fusion-IO's directCache software to front this storage with 10TB of SSD cache per 135TB of slow SATA disk. That should get you up to over 1M 512B iops per node if you've stepped up to Infiniband QDR to handle the bandwidth. And I don't work with them either. This last bit will cost several times all of the rest of it. Probably layer lustre file system on top of that for large volume needs. If you need less volume, look into drobo.
I've already gone overlength for this post, so I may as well go completely nuts. So here's some of Lewis Carroll's "Alice in Wonderland":
* "Just the place for a Snark!" the Bellman cried,
As he landed his crew with care;
Supporting each man on the top of the tide
By a finger entwined in his hair.
o Fit the First : The Landing
* "Just the place for a Snark! I have said it twice:
That alone should encourage the crew.
Just the place for a Snark! I have said it thrice:
What I tell you three times is true."
"Three times" is a good rule for data. If you put data in three disparate places it's less likely to be lost. Alice in Wonderland is a great reference manual for just about everything. The Reverend Dodgson was a wise man.
I'm not in the nuclear fanboi camp at all - I think there are better, cheaper sources of electrical energy. I'm definitely not siding with whoever your argument is pointed at.
That said, it seems likely that electricity generation was a waste heat recovery operation at this plant. Its true purpose was probably to generate weapons-grade nuclear materials and to help learn about the effects of fission to transmute elements, not to generate power. This makes your comment off point. As abhorrent as the risks involved were, they got away with it and one might reason that not having the weapons-grade nuclear materials at that stage of history was a greater risk. But that risk is no longer a factor.
Now about that thorium... it's not necessary. The use of nuclear energy to create heat to flash a moderator and drive a turbine is pointless. It turns out if you dig a deep enough hole and pump water in, the Earth itself will heat the water - which when brought up another hole can be used to flash the moderator and drive a turbine. The Earth's crust itself contains abundant nuclear materials, the decay of which generates heat in-situ. The Earth's mantle also contains a vast reservoir of heat from the planet's formation that we could not tap probably ever. Pumping the water through gathers the heat through thermal conduction - no fuel, nuclear waste, containment or other such nonsense is required. You can even use greywater for the inputs. There is enough such heat generated in the crust under Great Britain (and territorial waters) to provide all their baseload needs and then some. And do it more cheaply than nuclear.
This is to be the greatest library ever assembled. It is worthwhile in and of itself. A noble goal to prevent the permanent loss of so much art and knowledge - to avoid the Great Forgetting. It is the very preservation of world culture.
Let's round this out with a little bit of biography from his website.
Bruce Schneier is an internationally renowned security technologist and author. Described by The Economist as a "security guru," he is best known as a refreshingly candid and lucid security critic and commentator. When people want to know how security really works, they turn to Schneier.
You'll find more facts about him here. In addition to being an internationally recognized security expert and author he's the chief security officer for BT Group.
Considering what they do with the data to make the graphs fit, they may as well be making up the data too. They're all in a snit right now because the last fifteen years of data doesn't have any significant more warming in it, which is a strong divergence from the CO2 trend that has continued to go up. Let's hide the decline.
When people live there the habitat will have to spin to simulate gravity because in the long term humans don't do well in microgravity. The weak gravity and ample resources make both of these rocks nice spots for spaceports, especially if they have substantial water. Ceres may have an astounding amount of water - more than all the fresh water on Earth.
Enterprises don't use Ubuntu. RHEL (and thus CentOS) are still 'in favour'.
Redhat derived distros are nice for servers, like CentOS. Ubuntu derived distros are nice for clients. Use the tool for its purpose and you have a foundation to practice your art.
Mispurpose your tools and you're just another hack, though you may create something interesting that elevates you to Master Artist.
Put what you want on your website. Google will put what they want on theirs. If you don't want to see what they put, don't go there. This is a first amendment issue.
What if HP not only installed it everywhere, but made it open source so as to expand the audience for their app market? WebOS as a Windows app solves a lot of difficult problems for HP, the biggest of which is finding the knee of the adoption curve. It also solves many of the problems with Windows that we have been struggling against for many years. It wouldn't kill iOS or Android, but it might be a credible third choice if they are quite careful about terms.
You might want to check your meds and then re-read the article. The word "Novel" is here used to mean "new". It has no relation to the company "Novell", which went bankrupt a few years after partnering with Microsoft and sold themselves to a private company - Attachmate sans their patents that went to... an IP consortium Microsoft had a controlling interest in. NVM. Maybe it's me that needs to check my meds.
Dude, that's not where I was going. I was trying to be light, as evidence "on a clear disk you can seek forever".
You need not be offended that your needs don't fit the odd cases my customers need. I struggle each day to keep up so that I can serve them, and have whole books of notes on each. It takes something over half of each of my days to dig into the available tech to make sure I'm up to speed, and there's always something I missed. To need to work even 1GB in real time is a pretty big deal, let alone 500GB.
Some folk actually need to work terabytes of data in real time though. For example one of my customers that logs ten years of email for 10,000 users. If they can migrate that data to some more responsive media so as to more efficiently search and index the data they're more likely to be able to comply with a court subpoena before the deadline and not lose a court case by default that could cost MANY of millions of dollars. These subpoenas are rather common, and if they failed to deliver the content to the courts and defaulted once, they would become more common as carpetbaggers exploited this weakness. They're well motivated to keep up with the pace of tech.
Funny story: I was doing faster I/O on RAMDISK in 1985, though admittedly on lesser volumes. What we've done since now and then is make it cheaper and more common, more reliable and more capacious. Not faster. In a quarter century we should be able to do better.
Dude, I'm married. Im not going to find out if there's anything interesting on TV, well, EVER. An Android tablet with OTA DVR might help me find out what my kids are on about. Otherwise I'm totally disassociated.
Now that Microsoft's having their Partner Banquet with Microsoft you won't have to worry about it much longer. Pretty soon Zuckerberg's going to find Facebook isn't a guest at the banquet - it's the main dish. It is always this way. Over and over and over these stupid companies do this and it always ends the same way.
HP has some uniquely interesting stuff here. They are integrating WebOS with their Windows build, and putting it on every pc they ship. They ship a lot of pcs. That's a quick ramp to an intresing numberof app buyers.
They are late to the party. Maybe they bring something interesting. Maybe not. But although I agree with you and the parent and the fine summary, I think it's too early to count this one out just yet.
Yeah, in addition to building great stuff in-house, they also buy stuff. After seeing what they've done with a lot of the stuff on that list, I'm impressed. Can't wait to see what they do with SageTV - which they just picked up a couple weeks ago. Android tablet with OTA DVR? That would be interesting.
You're onto something here. Maybe it's time we got up close and personal with the individual folk behind these attacks on our rights. Task: Lookup domestic info and current locations of studio executives and politically evil "representatives", their spouses and offspring for tracking purposes. Look for avenues of humint and telint.
Slashdot's not the right place for this so let's continue this discussion elsewhere.
That's rather limiting. There are PCIe attached solutions that consistently read/write at more than 6GB/s rather than 6Gb/s - like for example the ioDrive Octal. It can have far more storage than your limit - ten times as much on one card. That thing has a serious 48Gbps serial read bandwidth, sustained, and you can configure many PCs with eight or sixteen of them. This is only one of many. There are actually some applications that strain against the limitation of this bandwidth.
The good rule for a thumb rule is that it should be general enough to scope its use. By bragging your rule on slashdot you've only defined the limits of your own vision and use. You're advertising that you're either "old school" or you're limited by some vendor's products, or late. Not a good place to be.
Here's a good rule of thumb: A storage drive can never be so fast, nor so capacious, nor responsive enough to serve every storage customer's need - but on a clear disk you can seek forever.
Because adding more regulations to what is already one of the most regulated industries in this country doesn't give them any additional control. They already have "authority" to take over in the case of nuclear accidents as well, so what really to they have to gain by making a big deal of this. No new plants are seriously being considered so traditional energy companies aren't concerned with trying to prevent competition.
Well maybe if you guys came up with a plan to dispose of the spent fuel from the reactors you wouldn't have this problem. One full reactor worth of spent fuel every 18 months is a serious accumulation over the span of the life of a nuclear plant - currently 60 years. That's 40 reactors worth of spent fuel per reactor, and even at half strength that's 20 reactors of spent fuel heat creation per reactor. Even selling the power generated by the spent fuel ponds is looking like an option now. At this point the spent fuel produces far more heat than the reactors do, or will soon. Eventually we reach the point where all of the energy produced by the reactor goes to cooling its spent fuel. Maybe level II plants can turn this cost into a profit center. The fuel is retired as "not commercially viable" long before it's done creating heat. There may be another option here.
Storing spent fuel under the Missouri river should not be considered, even in the event of a thousand year flood. There is just too much downside risk. That river irrigates - or is tributary to the Mississippi river that irrigates - half of America's crops. If containment fails the fuel is washed into the river to be distributed across America's Heartland. If both containment and cooling fails for too long the overpacked spent fuel melts down and emits vast quantities of raidoactive iodine and cesium, among other things, into the river that grows our food. The contamination of croplands and the crops grown there would persist for hundreds of years as the radioactivity diminished. Experience has shown that if we allow a bet like that, we lose every time.
If the downside risk is realized are we just going to accept the escalation of cancer rates and just pay for it out of Medicare, or we going to buy our crops abroad. Either is a disaster and the latter is likely not even possible as most of the world is currently not sufferring from an excess of food - which leads to a question. If they won't sell what we must have, do we take it by force? In the history of Man this question has only one answer: war.c
If I had my 'druthers, I'druther it didn't come to that. We can avoid that by thinking ahead and doing good husbandry with our energy resources so we don't come to those dire straits - and being ready for those less wise by investing in the common defence so the idea of taking what we have is less palatable than taking what you must have from somebody else.
Slashdot Mirror
It does look like one though, I admit.
Some time ago I read about the BackBlaze box here on slashdot. Essentially it's a 4U server chassis design that holds 45 LFF SATA drives and a server motherboard, plus the requisite connector bits and power and so on. BackBlaze is a storage provider that offers some online storage service and they designed the chassis to do high-density storage and hired a company, Protocase, to build it. BackBlaze doesn't sell servers, or server designs. They designed it because they needed it and shared it in the hope others would give back design improvements.
BackBlaze open-sourced the design and authorized Protocase to sell it. I learned about this when I followed up on the story with Protocase because I'm in the server trade and the storage density was intriguing. We went back and forth but I never bought the thing.
Purely by coincidence I got an email from Protocase just today. They're selling the thing now as a fully built server with everything you need (motherboard, processor, PSU, expanders, drive controllers, etc) -- except drives now for $5395.00 (1-4 units) and $4995.00 (5-9 units). Their website won't sell it, you have to contact lpodgursky@protocase.com via email for how to buy this because they're not geeks like us - they bend sheet metal for a living. At the time of the slashdot story this would store 67TB, but nowadays it's twice that. 3TB drives now cost $120, which would be $10,800 roughly for 135TB raw or probably 110TB usable - which puts it at $100 per served terabyte. Some folks would consider that a bargain. You'll want the 10Gbps links as that much volume will be link constrained for volume migrations. For storage density that's 1.35PB (raw) per rack, which is about as good as it gets right now. Bring cash or AmEx because Protocase is a tiny company and can't offer terms for new customers.
Of course for stuff that's commercially valuable that much data would cost a lot to recreate. I would probably want two of these at least, and store multiple copies on each one. Advances in HDD density should take care of expansion needs and migration needs if your data is currently less than 50TB. For software look into OpenFiler, which is free to use and has commercial support available.
This is not an advertisement. I don't work for any of these people. I don't care if you buy this thing. But if it was my money and my data and it was worth $50K or more... I'd buy several of these and find some geographically diverse locations to put them and devise a strategy for replicating and migrating my data as the hardware grew stale.
So as long as I'm posting this... to totally sexy this up with automatically tiered storage for performance I'd add a couple Fusion-IO IODrive Octals per unit with Fusion-IO's directCache software to front this storage with 10TB of SSD cache per 135TB of slow SATA disk. That should get you up to over 1M 512B iops per node if you've stepped up to Infiniband QDR to handle the bandwidth. And I don't work with them either. This last bit will cost several times all of the rest of it. Probably layer lustre file system on top of that for large volume needs. If you need less volume, look into drobo.
I've already gone overlength for this post, so I may as well go completely nuts. So here's some of Lewis Carroll's "Alice in Wonderland":
* "Just the place for a Snark!" the Bellman cried,
As he landed his crew with care;
Supporting each man on the top of the tide
By a finger entwined in his hair.
o Fit the First : The Landing
* "Just the place for a Snark! I have said it twice:
That alone should encourage the crew.
Just the place for a Snark! I have said it thrice:
What I tell you three times is true."
"Three times" is a good rule for data. If you put data in three disparate places it's less likely to be lost. Alice in Wonderland is a great reference manual for just about everything. The Reverend Dodgson was a wise man.
I'm not in the nuclear fanboi camp at all - I think there are better, cheaper sources of electrical energy. I'm definitely not siding with whoever your argument is pointed at.
That said, it seems likely that electricity generation was a waste heat recovery operation at this plant. Its true purpose was probably to generate weapons-grade nuclear materials and to help learn about the effects of fission to transmute elements, not to generate power. This makes your comment off point. As abhorrent as the risks involved were, they got away with it and one might reason that not having the weapons-grade nuclear materials at that stage of history was a greater risk. But that risk is no longer a factor.
Now about that thorium... it's not necessary. The use of nuclear energy to create heat to flash a moderator and drive a turbine is pointless. It turns out if you dig a deep enough hole and pump water in, the Earth itself will heat the water - which when brought up another hole can be used to flash the moderator and drive a turbine. The Earth's crust itself contains abundant nuclear materials, the decay of which generates heat in-situ. The Earth's mantle also contains a vast reservoir of heat from the planet's formation that we could not tap probably ever. Pumping the water through gathers the heat through thermal conduction - no fuel, nuclear waste, containment or other such nonsense is required. You can even use greywater for the inputs. There is enough such heat generated in the crust under Great Britain (and territorial waters) to provide all their baseload needs and then some. And do it more cheaply than nuclear.
This is to be the greatest library ever assembled. It is worthwhile in and of itself. A noble goal to prevent the permanent loss of so much art and knowledge - to avoid the Great Forgetting. It is the very preservation of world culture.
Let's round this out with a little bit of biography from his website.
Bruce Schneier is an internationally renowned security technologist and author. Described by The Economist as a "security guru," he is best known as a refreshingly candid and lucid security critic and commentator. When people want to know how security really works, they turn to Schneier.
You'll find more facts about him here. In addition to being an internationally recognized security expert and author he's the chief security officer for BT Group.
Considering what they do with the data to make the graphs fit, they may as well be making up the data too. They're all in a snit right now because the last fifteen years of data doesn't have any significant more warming in it, which is a strong divergence from the CO2 trend that has continued to go up. Let's hide the decline.
Patience little monkey. There will be many glorious images soon.
When people live there the habitat will have to spin to simulate gravity because in the long term humans don't do well in microgravity. The weak gravity and ample resources make both of these rocks nice spots for spaceports, especially if they have substantial water. Ceres may have an astounding amount of water - more than all the fresh water on Earth.
A tool is what it is. It's a tool to to work some purpose. Turn it well with your art to a different purpose and you've gone from craftsman to Artist.
Turn it poorly and you're a hack. There's the risk - though there's good money to be had in being a hack.
Enterprises don't use Ubuntu. RHEL (and thus CentOS) are still 'in favour'.
Redhat derived distros are nice for servers, like CentOS. Ubuntu derived distros are nice for clients. Use the tool for its purpose and you have a foundation to practice your art.
Mispurpose your tools and you're just another hack, though you may create something interesting that elevates you to Master Artist.
Put what you want on your website. Google will put what they want on theirs. If you don't want to see what they put, don't go there. This is a first amendment issue.
Then it's not funny.
What if HP not only installed it everywhere, but made it open source so as to expand the audience for their app market? WebOS as a Windows app solves a lot of difficult problems for HP, the biggest of which is finding the knee of the adoption curve. It also solves many of the problems with Windows that we have been struggling against for many years. It wouldn't kill iOS or Android, but it might be a credible third choice if they are quite careful about terms.
You might want to check your meds and then re-read the article. The word "Novel" is here used to mean "new". It has no relation to the company "Novell", which went bankrupt a few years after partnering with Microsoft and sold themselves to a private company - Attachmate sans their patents that went to... an IP consortium Microsoft had a controlling interest in. NVM. Maybe it's me that needs to check my meds.
Dude, that's not where I was going. I was trying to be light, as evidence "on a clear disk you can seek forever".
You need not be offended that your needs don't fit the odd cases my customers need. I struggle each day to keep up so that I can serve them, and have whole books of notes on each. It takes something over half of each of my days to dig into the available tech to make sure I'm up to speed, and there's always something I missed. To need to work even 1GB in real time is a pretty big deal, let alone 500GB.
Some folk actually need to work terabytes of data in real time though. For example one of my customers that logs ten years of email for 10,000 users. If they can migrate that data to some more responsive media so as to more efficiently search and index the data they're more likely to be able to comply with a court subpoena before the deadline and not lose a court case by default that could cost MANY of millions of dollars. These subpoenas are rather common, and if they failed to deliver the content to the courts and defaulted once, they would become more common as carpetbaggers exploited this weakness. They're well motivated to keep up with the pace of tech.
Funny story: I was doing faster I/O on RAMDISK in 1985, though admittedly on lesser volumes. What we've done since now and then is make it cheaper and more common, more reliable and more capacious. Not faster. In a quarter century we should be able to do better.
Dude, I'm married. Im not going to find out if there's anything interesting on TV, well, EVER. An Android tablet with OTA DVR might help me find out what my kids are on about. Otherwise I'm totally disassociated.
Justin Bieber may as well be a citizen of Nauru. Who owns the rights?
So what you're saying is that the issue is differring views of how a reasonable person might interpret the contract.
Sounds like a civil matter.
/IANAFL
Now that Microsoft's having their Partner Banquet with Microsoft you won't have to worry about it much longer. Pretty soon Zuckerberg's going to find Facebook isn't a guest at the banquet - it's the main dish. It is always this way. Over and over and over these stupid companies do this and it always ends the same way.
HP has some uniquely interesting stuff here. They are integrating WebOS with their Windows build, and putting it on every pc they ship. They ship a lot of pcs. That's a quick ramp to an intresing numberof app buyers.
They are late to the party. Maybe they bring something interesting. Maybe not. But although I agree with you and the parent and the fine summary, I think it's too early to count this one out just yet.
Yeah, in addition to building great stuff in-house, they also buy stuff. After seeing what they've done with a lot of the stuff on that list, I'm impressed. Can't wait to see what they do with SageTV - which they just picked up a couple weeks ago. Android tablet with OTA DVR? That would be interesting.
You're onto something here. Maybe it's time we got up close and personal with the individual folk behind these attacks on our rights. Task: Lookup domestic info and current locations of studio executives and politically evil "representatives", their spouses and offspring for tracking purposes. Look for avenues of humint and telint.
Slashdot's not the right place for this so let's continue this discussion elsewhere.
I don't disagree with you in any way. And I don't see how your post disgrees with its parent. The whole thing is sick.
That's rather limiting. There are PCIe attached solutions that consistently read/write at more than 6GB/s rather than 6Gb/s - like for example the ioDrive Octal. It can have far more storage than your limit - ten times as much on one card. That thing has a serious 48Gbps serial read bandwidth, sustained, and you can configure many PCs with eight or sixteen of them. This is only one of many. There are actually some applications that strain against the limitation of this bandwidth.
The good rule for a thumb rule is that it should be general enough to scope its use. By bragging your rule on slashdot you've only defined the limits of your own vision and use. You're advertising that you're either "old school" or you're limited by some vendor's products, or late. Not a good place to be.
Here's a good rule of thumb: A storage drive can never be so fast, nor so capacious, nor responsive enough to serve every storage customer's need - but on a clear disk you can seek forever.
Do you see what I did there?
Because adding more regulations to what is already one of the most regulated industries in this country doesn't give them any additional control. They already have "authority" to take over in the case of nuclear accidents as well, so what really to they have to gain by making a big deal of this. No new plants are seriously being considered so traditional energy companies aren't concerned with trying to prevent competition.
Well maybe if you guys came up with a plan to dispose of the spent fuel from the reactors you wouldn't have this problem. One full reactor worth of spent fuel every 18 months is a serious accumulation over the span of the life of a nuclear plant - currently 60 years. That's 40 reactors worth of spent fuel per reactor, and even at half strength that's 20 reactors of spent fuel heat creation per reactor. Even selling the power generated by the spent fuel ponds is looking like an option now. At this point the spent fuel produces far more heat than the reactors do, or will soon. Eventually we reach the point where all of the energy produced by the reactor goes to cooling its spent fuel. Maybe level II plants can turn this cost into a profit center. The fuel is retired as "not commercially viable" long before it's done creating heat. There may be another option here.
Storing spent fuel under the Missouri river should not be considered, even in the event of a thousand year flood. There is just too much downside risk. That river irrigates - or is tributary to the Mississippi river that irrigates - half of America's crops. If containment fails the fuel is washed into the river to be distributed across America's Heartland. If both containment and cooling fails for too long the overpacked spent fuel melts down and emits vast quantities of raidoactive iodine and cesium, among other things, into the river that grows our food. The contamination of croplands and the crops grown there would persist for hundreds of years as the radioactivity diminished. Experience has shown that if we allow a bet like that, we lose every time.
If the downside risk is realized are we just going to accept the escalation of cancer rates and just pay for it out of Medicare, or we going to buy our crops abroad. Either is a disaster and the latter is likely not even possible as most of the world is currently not sufferring from an excess of food - which leads to a question. If they won't sell what we must have, do we take it by force? In the history of Man this question has only one answer: war.c
If I had my 'druthers, I'druther it didn't come to that. We can avoid that by thinking ahead and doing good husbandry with our energy resources so we don't come to those dire straits - and being ready for those less wise by investing in the common defence so the idea of taking what we have is less palatable than taking what you must have from somebody else.
Do you hear the black helicopters outside? No, of course you don't. They're stealth helicopters. They're coming for YOU!