"Which reminds me; the problem about rebuild times growing will more or less go away as the industry (eventually) moves to SSDs; freed of the mechanical limitations of existing drives, SSDs will likely see increases in capacity keep up with increases in speed."
No, it was just increase the period of time before rebuild times become unacceptable. Growth of SSD capacity will far outpace the throughput increases going forward, so eventually, again, capacity will so far outpace performance that rebuild times will be unacceptable.
Why do people continue to think that SSDs should be several orders of magnitude faster in IOPS and several times faster in throughput but somehow cost the same price? I never understood that.
SSDs when you need speed, HDDs when you need capacity. No one "needs" a ferrari, a minivan probably makes more sense. But if you've got the money and like the performance, buy an SSD.
Kind of like 3PAR. Drives are split into 256MB "chunklets" and data is written across large pools of disks. They're actually #1 in the SPC-1 benchmarks right now. We recently deployed an F400 (active/active dual controllers, 4Gb, etc, the usual suspects) and have been very pleased so far. Works exceptionally well with VMWare clusters.
Unfortunately, as with most cloud services, healthcare, financial and legal have some serious regulatory roadblocks in the way. I know there isn't much data that I can backup from $work into $cloud without violating several laws.
As for security, just include truecrypt for win32 in the fat32 partition and truecrypt for linux on the ext3 partition. Then create a truecrypt volume on the ext3 partition.
Linux:
Step 1: Mount the disk
Step 2: Install truecrypt from disk (or repo)
Step 3: Mount truecrypt volume on ext3
Windows:
Step 1: Mount disk
Step 2: Install ext2 IFS and truecrypt from fat32 partition
Step 3: Mount ext3 partition
Step 4: Mount truecrypt volume on ext3
What about ext3 formatted with a small fat32 partition that contains Ext2 IFS for windows. Now it's portable, can be read in linux natively, and if you plug it into a windows machine, you just install the ext2 IFS and then mount your ext3 filesystem.
Why run three monitors with ultramon when you can run three independent PCs with three independent monitors using synergy? I've got the same (or more) screen real estate and 3x the horsepower.
"Meh, even the most expensive RAID cards loaded up with tons of RAM aren't as fast as a couple of Intel SSD's right now, so why bother with the expense?"
Today. We're talking about today, not in 5 years. The fact of the matter is _TODAY_ most consumers would be satisfied by SSD disk sizes several times over. Tomorrow we'll need more space and guess what - SSDs will be even larger than.
"No matter how many layers you add or remove, there will always be a chance of data losses when the OS crashes (Win, Mac, Linux, anything) because there is a finite time before changed data are permanently stored even on this new SSD menory."
Incorrect. All you need is a transactional filesystem, where they're written to a log first, then committed to disk. If it fails during the log write, it can be wiped and ignored. If it fails during the move from transaction log -> final location it can be tried again later.
My problem is people comparing this to solutions like Amazon's S3 or even EMC/NetApp/3PAR.
Amazon is a service. Multiple data centers, power, racks, cooling, sales, marketing, etc etc etc. It's like comparing a cash register to walmart. I also don't see that they offer service similar to S3 (eg a storage API). It's one very tiny component, you're not looking at the total cost of ownership. Compared to the major SAN vendors, the feature sets couldn't even begin to be comparable. Anyone who's purchased storage from major SAN vendors knows all the bells and whistles you get that you don't get from a box of disks.
For their needs, it's fantastic, brilliant and as a techie I absolutely love it. But the argument they're making is a red herring.
I couldn't agree more. If you post some expensive system everyone here will immediately tell you how they could build the same thing in their garage over the weekend for pennies. Post a cheap solution and they're so quick to point out that "great service and support" you wouldn't be getting with the commercial (and almost always proprietary) solution. What the hell is going on here?
Also my HP mini 2140 is tiny, light and has great battery life, I'm still getting 3 hours and the thing weighs under 3lbs, and is all aluminum. It's a great little device. I've also got Fedora 11 running on it as well. Both run fantastically well on the little thing. It also runs cool ("cool running" as you put it). I even threw an OCZ Vertex SSD in it for a couple days just for fun. The only problem is that it's only SATA1 so I only got about 150MB/s reads and 110MB/s writes (far slower than the SSD is capable of) but it sure was snappy.
We've also got about 30 HP Mini 1000s (1151NR to be exact) that we got from Verizon for $199 with contract (you can get the Ubuntu version from HP starting at $279). Exact same hardware, sold 4-5 hour battery life and the things barely weigh 2lbs and are less than an inch thick. They all run XP with Trend OfficeScan (which we use at $work) and they all run fantastically well. We started with a pilot program of 5 of them and now we can't roll them out fast enough.
Also with our HP discount I only paid $408 for my HP Mini 2140 with an extra gigabyte of ram (2GB total).
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"Which reminds me; the problem about rebuild times growing will more or less go away as the industry (eventually) moves to SSDs; freed of the mechanical limitations of existing drives, SSDs will likely see increases in capacity keep up with increases in speed."
No, it was just increase the period of time before rebuild times become unacceptable. Growth of SSD capacity will far outpace the throughput increases going forward, so eventually, again, capacity will so far outpace performance that rebuild times will be unacceptable.
Please define a "real RAID setup" and explain why software RAID isn't an option.
Why do people continue to think that SSDs should be several orders of magnitude faster in IOPS and several times faster in throughput but somehow cost the same price? I never understood that.
Speed, Capacity, Low Cost - you can have any two.
SSDs when you need speed, HDDs when you need capacity. No one "needs" a ferrari, a minivan probably makes more sense. But if you've got the money and like the performance, buy an SSD.
Kind of like 3PAR. Drives are split into 256MB "chunklets" and data is written across large pools of disks. They're actually #1 in the SPC-1 benchmarks right now. We recently deployed an F400 (active/active dual controllers, 4Gb, etc, the usual suspects) and have been very pleased so far. Works exceptionally well with VMWare clusters.
Unfortunately, as with most cloud services, healthcare, financial and legal have some serious regulatory roadblocks in the way. I know there isn't much data that I can backup from $work into $cloud without violating several laws.
Both of which are relative terms. To stick in my closet at my house, that's both fantastically reliable and exceptionally fast.
As for security, just include truecrypt for win32 in the fat32 partition and truecrypt for linux on the ext3 partition. Then create a truecrypt volume on the ext3 partition.
Linux:
Step 1: Mount the disk
Step 2: Install truecrypt from disk (or repo)
Step 3: Mount truecrypt volume on ext3
Windows:
Step 1: Mount disk
Step 2: Install ext2 IFS and truecrypt from fat32 partition
Step 3: Mount ext3 partition
Step 4: Mount truecrypt volume on ext3
What about ext3 formatted with a small fat32 partition that contains Ext2 IFS for windows. Now it's portable, can be read in linux natively, and if you plug it into a windows machine, you just install the ext2 IFS and then mount your ext3 filesystem.
Yeah I can definitely tell you don't have children. You'd just tell them no and they'd never touch them, perfect plan!
No, it's not 4:3. What model of monitor is it? I'm calling bullshit on this one, I've never heard of a monitor with a 6:5 aspect ratio.
nerd spotted
If I have good backups it doesn't really matter. Do you have children or pets?
Why run three monitors with ultramon when you can run three independent PCs with three independent monitors using synergy? I've got the same (or more) screen real estate and 3x the horsepower.
1920x1600 is neither 4:3 or 16:9 ... so what exactly is the aspect ratio there? It's something around 4:3.3
"Meh, even the most expensive RAID cards loaded up with tons of RAM aren't as fast as a couple of Intel SSD's right now, so why bother with the expense?"
Clearly you aren't familiar with ioDrive
Yeah what were we thinking you're obviously the average consumer.
Today. We're talking about today, not in 5 years. The fact of the matter is _TODAY_ most consumers would be satisfied by SSD disk sizes several times over. Tomorrow we'll need more space and guess what - SSDs will be even larger than.
"No matter how many layers you add or remove, there will always be a chance of data losses when the OS crashes (Win, Mac, Linux, anything) because there is a finite time before changed data are permanently stored even on this new SSD menory."
Incorrect. All you need is a transactional filesystem, where they're written to a log first, then committed to disk. If it fails during the log write, it can be wiped and ignored. If it fails during the move from transaction log -> final location it can be tried again later.
My problem is people comparing this to solutions like Amazon's S3 or even EMC/NetApp/3PAR.
Amazon is a service. Multiple data centers, power, racks, cooling, sales, marketing, etc etc etc. It's like comparing a cash register to walmart. I also don't see that they offer service similar to S3 (eg a storage API). It's one very tiny component, you're not looking at the total cost of ownership. Compared to the major SAN vendors, the feature sets couldn't even begin to be comparable. Anyone who's purchased storage from major SAN vendors knows all the bells and whistles you get that you don't get from a box of disks.
For their needs, it's fantastic, brilliant and as a techie I absolutely love it. But the argument they're making is a red herring.
I couldn't agree more. If you post some expensive system everyone here will immediately tell you how they could build the same thing in their garage over the weekend for pennies. Post a cheap solution and they're so quick to point out that "great service and support" you wouldn't be getting with the commercial (and almost always proprietary) solution. What the hell is going on here?
Also my HP mini 2140 is tiny, light and has great battery life, I'm still getting 3 hours and the thing weighs under 3lbs, and is all aluminum. It's a great little device. I've also got Fedora 11 running on it as well. Both run fantastically well on the little thing. It also runs cool ("cool running" as you put it). I even threw an OCZ Vertex SSD in it for a couple days just for fun. The only problem is that it's only SATA1 so I only got about 150MB/s reads and 110MB/s writes (far slower than the SSD is capable of) but it sure was snappy.
We've also got about 30 HP Mini 1000s (1151NR to be exact) that we got from Verizon for $199 with contract (you can get the Ubuntu version from HP starting at $279). Exact same hardware, sold 4-5 hour battery life and the things barely weigh 2lbs and are less than an inch thick. They all run XP with Trend OfficeScan (which we use at $work) and they all run fantastically well. We started with a pilot program of 5 of them and now we can't roll them out fast enough.
Also with our HP discount I only paid $408 for my HP Mini 2140 with an extra gigabyte of ram (2GB total).
I run Windows 7 (along with Fedora) on an HP Mini 2140 with AVG (free) anti-virus and it runs great, even better than XP I'd say.
I'll see your one local privilege escalation and raise you 6 remote code executions, two privilege elevations and a DoS (and thats just for August)
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/bulletin/ms09-aug.mspx