MB/s is only a measure that's meaningful for sequential reads where the data can be prefetched. Most enterprise storage is based on applications that read randomly all over the disk (like databases and email servers). The benchmark measurement for this type of application is in the number of operations you can do per second. A single hard drive spindle can do between 80 and 150 IO/s, which would generate the number of IO/s times the size of the IO blocks per second.
So those databases store your entire archive of all posted stories and comments? I assumed you would need some sort of high performance shared storage...
That is the primary stated purpose for VMWare. Also, once you are in a VM environment, you can load balance these single ap, low utilization workloads according to their needs. Have a report server that only gets hit heavily once a quarter? Leave it on a slow core for most of the time, and send it to a beefy quad core at end of quarter without having to reboot the machine.
The other factor is the cost of staying current on hardware- if you have 300 single app servers running at 10% CPU utilization and you want to do a mass server upgrade to take advantage of lower power requirements for the newest Xeon processors, running VMWare ESX can allow you to bring the total number of physical servers down by a factor of 5 to 30 (depending on workload).
Everyone knows VMW is not well suited for performance hogging applications. Their whitepapers are fairly clear on this.
Alexa's usefulness is more statistical than exact. I don't use it to see specifically how much traffic a site gets, but to see how it changes over time. As long as their measurement standards don't deviate too much, then this can still be useful information.
Yeah... now that I read your post again, looks like I may have missed a little sarcasm... it's 3 AM and I tend to get a little preachy this time of night. Off to bed for me, before I say anything else I can't edit:)
"for buying an IBM ThinkPad, notorious for their unreliability. Perhaps he should have considered an Apple or Dell instead."
What are you smoking??? The Thinkpad is one of the most reliable laptops in the market, even since the brand got bought by Lenovo. His own fault, yes. For putting an unreliable battery in. Even a Panasonic Toughbook (arguably the most reliable laptop out there) would explode if the battery you attach to it explodes.
Dell just recalled a ton of their batteries for this very reason, and Apple laptops are generally not business machines. IBM (and now Lenovo) laptops are more expensive than Dells and HPs because of their reliability- your statement is completely without merit.
I bet these will have the same problem as CD-RWs
on
Bacterial DVD Holds 50TB
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Any time you use an organic compound for storage, you need to worry about the organic half life of the device. Writable optical media uses organic dye, and will only last several years in storage. I didn't see anything in the article that indicated this technology would be any better...
Just becuase the sales team and the marketing literature say it saves money doesn't mean it really does save money. You may sense a bit of distrust for salespeople but I have been in this business long enough to know that salespeople are only interested in selling their products/services regardless of the customers best needs.
It's not a fit for everyone, but there are enough fortune 500s buying blades to convince me that sometimes, they are cheaper. Your datacenter may not need them, but there are those that do.
True, but current blade servers are an unimpressive implementation of an excellent idea.
Only because of their initial expense. I do pre-sales technical support for IBM storage, so I asked my server counterpart, and the reason they're prices higher than rack or tower servers is that they cost less to cool. Over a year you get the difference in cost back in your AC bill.
"Narrow it down to one laptop type, or better yet, a particular model, and offer a standard configuration for it, and only offer "official" support for that."
I agree with this one. If you're going to support the hardware and software of many laptops running graphics programs, it will become a logictical nightmare unless you take 1 standard and ignore everything else.
Because of the apps you're running, you will probably want to standardize on a Mac platform, however if you go with a PC platform, don't choose your brand lightly. Lenovo's (formerly IBM's) T43 series is the most durable line out there and you can have Lenovo install two money savers on them: one of them is a BIOS level auto-backup program that will allow a support tech to walk a student through a roll-back even if the OS won't boot, and the other is a BIOS level "call home" feature that allows a stolen laptop to call home as soon as it's connected to a network when it knows it's stolen.
I haven't heard of anything like these for MAC laptops, however MAC laptops are better at running Photoshop and the like.
Also, for licensing, you should talk to your vendor about CLP pricing from Adobe- you'd have enough laptops to qualify for a very good discount. Also look into to upgrading current licensing. Even if you have an ancient license of Photoshop running on a pre-OS9 mac in a lab, you still get a fairly significant discount if you upgrade it to CS2.
The most important part of this is going to be your choice of manufacturer and vendor. I'm thinking with my sales brain here, but the reality is that if you have a good rep at CDW, PC Mall, or Insight, they can ease the roll-out process by letting you purchase the whole thing up front and rolling it out from their warehouse as you need them. This way you pay the same cost you would if you bought them all at once.
**Disclaimer: I work as a buyer for PC Mall, but I'm trying to stay a generalist. Please do not take this as a plug for Mall.
Lenovo (formerly IBM) OEMs this into all it's thinkpads. Theirs is linked to that "blue one touch restore button". I am a bid specialist for PC Mall, and I can get you in touch with one of our reps if you want. For 300 licenses, you should be able to get a volume discount.
The name they're allowed to use is "think" as in Thinkpad. Not "IBM". You're not alone, btw. I am an IBM/Lenovo bid specialist for one of their business partners, and nobody gets it right here either;)
The majority of the Methlabs.org administration and development team have been forced out of their website following a series of threats and incidents. The member of the group that had been trusted to handle the finances and servers slowly managed to take over each individual part of the web site's assets, eventually claiming control over the entire group and locking out the majority of staff.
The organisation's founders, Tim Leonard and Ken McKelland, as well as the majority of the organisation's staff and developers (including the main developer of the PeerGuardian2 application, Cory Nelson and the staff members responsible for auditing the PeerGuardian Blocklists) have all been forcibly removed from the servers that were funded from donations given to the organisation by happy users, and from text advertising placed on the websites forum and project pages.
The money, which was to have been used to help fund the development and hosting costs of the group is now unavailable, stolen by the one who was trusted to keep it.
Development of PeerGuardian will resume, and the website will temporarily move to http://peerguardian.sourceforge.net/ until a new domain is registered and a new server found. The intention of the group is to register a non-profit organisation to handle the development of Methlabs applications and to promote open source projects that aid both security, privacy and peer-to-peer technologies, in order to prevent a repeat of this incident.
The team wish all their users the best through this difficult time, but promise that development will continue. Please visit http://peerguardian.sf.net/ for news as we make progress. All other sites, including http://methlabs.org/ and http://blocklist.org/ are under control of the rogue member and should not be trusted for safe updates to our applications or lists.
A new build of PeerGuardian will be released soon to reflect these changes. Until then we ask you to continue using Beta 6a but with caution as the update servers are no longer under our control.
All staff are available in irc.freenode.net, channel #methlabs if you wish to chat.
Thanks, The Methlabs Staff (looking for a new home) -----
Adam Hoier, Cory Nelson, Eric Mayuk, Fox Lowe, James Shanelec, Joseph Farthing, Ken McKelland, Steffen Tuzar, Tim Leonard
Call your rep wherever you buy your IT. I work at a DMR (direct to market reseller), and anybody who does my job really should know how to set you up with the right hardware and software to get the job done.
I would probably suggest either a VXA or AIT tape drive or library (depending on your dataset size) with either Dantz Retrospect for win-svr (assuming you use win-svr) or Veritas BackupExec as software. You may also want to set up some sort of NAS or scsi drive enclosure to provide for a disk cache. This means faster backups and restores throughout the day, and you still back this disk up to tape overnight / over the weekend.
This is called disk to disk to tape. Go ahead and read up on it. It's simple, and it works. It's also cheaper than any SAN or other fibre based data solution.
I sell servers to the SMB space and I have always mentioned Linux as an option, but I have less than 2% of my server sales being bundled with Linux. I always get the same answer: people in the SMB space think of Linux as more of a enterprise tool. It is complicated to learn, and windows comes in a nice shiny box that they've been buying for years. It's a hard paradigm to break as a vendor... especially when MS products generate so much revenue.
I got some training on this about a week before it was announced and they told us that it would have some "features" that would be the first step toward trusted computing. The salesguy said that it was for security, but the methodology he talked about seemed to indicate that it would be capable of taking control of certain parts of your machine away from you. I asked if he thought that the technology could be used to have your own computer enforce others' IP rights on you, and he skillfully avoided the question...
Hm, interesting idea, but what will you do when that game gets a city's worth of griefers? They'll just go around and crush any settlement thats just starting.
Well, that's war and "war ain't fair". Plus, if they band together as one big griefing settlement, they would quickly lose many trading partners and the resources they need to effectively wage war would be much harder for them to get.
Also, outside of griefing, how would this game deal with the fact that in every MMO so far, "teamwork" means throwing 20 people at a monster and hoping most of them live, or having a couple of people that do nothing but tank and hope they can heal fast enough? Is the game going to be balanced in such a way that a single person can't take on a given monster and live, while a group of people can take on that monster and everyone can live?
In ToA, teamwork means building a physical structure to shelter you from the elements, arranging for food (hunting at first, but gradually moving toward farming), and defending your liveliness. As for the monster dynamic, I believe most NPC monsters will be varying levels of pushovers. The real dangerous "monsters" will be the players who choose to play dragons and miraculously manage to survive long enough to be a real menace.
1) Religious alignment system (think DandD style with gods/goddesses representing alignments). "Good" players received the protection of their appropriate gods, say protection from corpse looting. "Evil" players received other rewards and protections, but not protection from looting (thus their reign of terror ends when a dozen good characters stand up to them). Changing alignment leads to temporary penalties where nobody wants to protect you. Then, players who play "good" characters can go about their lives with the occasional evil character attack (the rewards for being evil should be good enough to justify it). Evil characters (the pkillers) can spend their time killing each other for the loot. By splitting hairs farther, perhaps Lawful Good characters (who had never attacked another player) would be completely immune to pkilling, which other good players would have to hold their own or hope that they were close enough to town for the town guards to come running.
Won't fly though, people would flip out at the suggestion of religion;) You could get around it if you're Star Wars, and implement a version following the Light/Dark side concept of Knights of the Old Republic.
2) If the world was heavily magical (ie, everyone was a magician and justified this), everyone could be issed a mostly harmless pet familiar. Who would then be capable of growing into a dragon and hosing down any unwanted invitations to a duel with fire. It could be made so that pk could still be possible, but would widen the xp gap needed for griefing considerably to take on a n00b and their dragon at the same time.
A) Preventing PvP entirely outside of arenas. Easy to implement when everyone is a good guy, but what do you do if you've got a situation where players play on opposing countries/sides/whatever and fighting is expected as part of the story? This path seems to be getting taken a lot by current games.
B) Doing nothing and letting it happen. This seems to be what the other games do. I wonder if I was the only one who was annoyed by the article's advice of "Ignore them and they will go away"? When I was in elementary school, I was bullied regularly for a year while I tried to "ignore it" until I finally snapped and bloodied the bully's nose. That led to a week of peace followed by the bully's friends holding me down while he taught me not to bother fighting back, followed by more of the usual. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
In the end, I think MMO companies will need to come up with creative, true-to-plot solutions to the problem, whether its as simple as a "murderer" flag, or tied to more complex socioeconomic penalties (say, shopkeepers charging you more and more the more bloodthirsty you become, until eventually the same players that you kill are making money off of you by reselling items to you at a hefty markup).
Many of these ideas simply limit people's ability to do what they want. IMHO, the only way to get a truly free PVP game where griefers cause no problems is to make the environment so challenging that players need to band together to survive. Perfect example (for a game in development): www.shadowpool.com . Shadowpool studios is creating a game with permanent death (think lives in Mario) where the only way players can keep themselves alive is to band together and create settlements. Settlements are going to be the cities and newby zones, but are formed and run like guilds on other games.
I kinda like the permadeath idea. You should check out a game in development now: http://www.shadowpool.com/. They expect players to play characters until they run out of life points and then restart. It works for me because I will get to experience more aspects of the game than I would playing just one character, and I won't miss out on the more advanced parts of the game that you can only get to by singlemindedly pursuing the goals of only one characters.
They also have some interesting ideas on PvP... I am not so sure about those though.
Don't know if anyone will need this, but I used to work at a company that has a service that makes it easier to find spare parts. You can access it by going to www.itpartshopper.com and type the part number into the search.
It's a strange problem, security. Educated users are key, but because Microsoft has the largest market share, they also get the largest number of uneducated users. What will happen if Linux eventually completely replaces MS products on the desktop? Will they have the same security problems?
Slashdot Mirror
MB/s is only a measure that's meaningful for sequential reads where the data can be prefetched. Most enterprise storage is based on applications that read randomly all over the disk (like databases and email servers). The benchmark measurement for this type of application is in the number of operations you can do per second. A single hard drive spindle can do between 80 and 150 IO/s, which would generate the number of IO/s times the size of the IO blocks per second.
They should run a distributed version of this test- have 1000 people per browser run it for a few weeks.
So those databases store your entire archive of all posted stories and comments? I assumed you would need some sort of high performance shared storage...
That is the primary stated purpose for VMWare. Also, once you are in a VM environment, you can load balance these single ap, low utilization workloads according to their needs. Have a report server that only gets hit heavily once a quarter? Leave it on a slow core for most of the time, and send it to a beefy quad core at end of quarter without having to reboot the machine.
The other factor is the cost of staying current on hardware- if you have 300 single app servers running at 10% CPU utilization and you want to do a mass server upgrade to take advantage of lower power requirements for the newest Xeon processors, running VMWare ESX can allow you to bring the total number of physical servers down by a factor of 5 to 30 (depending on workload).
Everyone knows VMW is not well suited for performance hogging applications. Their whitepapers are fairly clear on this.
>"As I understand, Xen is the operating system and hypervisor all rolled into one, whereas Vmware is an additional layer on top of the host os"
Not quite- VMWare ESX runs on bare metal as an OS.
Alexa's usefulness is more statistical than exact. I don't use it to see specifically how much traffic a site gets, but to see how it changes over time. As long as their measurement standards don't deviate too much, then this can still be useful information.
"What are you smoking???"
:)
Yeah... now that I read your post again, looks like I may have missed a little sarcasm... it's 3 AM and I tend to get a little preachy this time of night. Off to bed for me, before I say anything else I can't edit
"for buying an IBM ThinkPad, notorious for their unreliability. Perhaps he should have considered an Apple or Dell instead."
What are you smoking??? The Thinkpad is one of the most reliable laptops in the market, even since the brand got bought by Lenovo. His own fault, yes. For putting an unreliable battery in. Even a Panasonic Toughbook (arguably the most reliable laptop out there) would explode if the battery you attach to it explodes.
Dell just recalled a ton of their batteries for this very reason, and Apple laptops are generally not business machines. IBM (and now Lenovo) laptops are more expensive than Dells and HPs because of their reliability- your statement is completely without merit.
Any time you use an organic compound for storage, you need to worry about the organic half life of the device. Writable optical media uses organic dye, and will only last several years in storage. I didn't see anything in the article that indicated this technology would be any better...
Just becuase the sales team and the marketing literature say it saves money doesn't mean it really does save money. You may sense a bit of distrust for salespeople but I have been in this business long enough to know that salespeople are only interested in selling their products/services regardless of the customers best needs.
It's not a fit for everyone, but there are enough fortune 500s buying blades to convince me that sometimes, they are cheaper. Your datacenter may not need them, but there are those that do.
True, but current blade servers are an unimpressive implementation of an excellent idea.
Only because of their initial expense. I do pre-sales technical support for IBM storage, so I asked my server counterpart, and the reason they're prices higher than rack or tower servers is that they cost less to cool. Over a year you get the difference in cost back in your AC bill.
"Narrow it down to one laptop type, or better yet, a particular model, and offer a standard configuration for it, and only offer "official" support for that."
I agree with this one. If you're going to support the hardware and software of many laptops running graphics programs, it will become a logictical nightmare unless you take 1 standard and ignore everything else.
Because of the apps you're running, you will probably want to standardize on a Mac platform, however if you go with a PC platform, don't choose your brand lightly. Lenovo's (formerly IBM's) T43 series is the most durable line out there and you can have Lenovo install two money savers on them: one of them is a BIOS level auto-backup program that will allow a support tech to walk a student through a roll-back even if the OS won't boot, and the other is a BIOS level "call home" feature that allows a stolen laptop to call home as soon as it's connected to a network when it knows it's stolen.
I haven't heard of anything like these for MAC laptops, however MAC laptops are better at running Photoshop and the like.
Also, for licensing, you should talk to your vendor about CLP pricing from Adobe- you'd have enough laptops to qualify for a very good discount. Also look into to upgrading current licensing. Even if you have an ancient license of Photoshop running on a pre-OS9 mac in a lab, you still get a fairly significant discount if you upgrade it to CS2.
The most important part of this is going to be your choice of manufacturer and vendor. I'm thinking with my sales brain here, but the reality is that if you have a good rep at CDW, PC Mall, or Insight, they can ease the roll-out process by letting you purchase the whole thing up front and rolling it out from their warehouse as you need them. This way you pay the same cost you would if you bought them all at once.
**Disclaimer: I work as a buyer for PC Mall, but I'm trying to stay a generalist. Please do not take this as a plug for Mall.
Phoenix (the BIOS maker) has software that keeps the backups securely on the machines. Here's the link: http://www.phoenix.com/en/Products/Trusted+Applica tions/Phoenix+FirstWare/FirstWare+Recover+Pro/defa ult.htm
Lenovo (formerly IBM) OEMs this into all it's thinkpads. Theirs is linked to that "blue one touch restore button". I am a bid specialist for PC Mall, and I can get you in touch with one of our reps if you want. For 300 licenses, you should be able to get a volume discount.
The name they're allowed to use is "think" as in Thinkpad. Not "IBM". You're not alone, btw. I am an IBM/Lenovo bid specialist for one of their business partners, and nobody gets it right here either ;)
"Dear Member,
The majority of the Methlabs.org administration and development team have been forced out of their website following a series of threats and incidents. The member of the group that had been trusted to handle the finances and servers slowly managed to take over each individual part of the web site's assets, eventually claiming control over the entire group and locking out the majority of staff.
The organisation's founders, Tim Leonard and Ken McKelland, as well as the majority of the organisation's staff and developers (including the main developer of the PeerGuardian2 application, Cory Nelson and the staff members responsible for auditing the PeerGuardian Blocklists) have all been forcibly removed from the servers that were funded from donations given to the organisation by happy users, and from text advertising placed on the websites forum and project pages.
The money, which was to have been used to help fund the development and hosting costs of the group is now unavailable, stolen by the one who was trusted to keep it.
Development of PeerGuardian will resume, and the website will temporarily move to http://peerguardian.sourceforge.net/ until a new domain is registered and a new server found. The intention of the group is to register a non-profit organisation to handle the development of Methlabs applications and to promote open source projects that aid both security, privacy and peer-to-peer technologies, in order to prevent a repeat of this incident.
The team wish all their users the best through this difficult time, but promise that development will continue. Please visit http://peerguardian.sf.net/ for news as we make progress. All other sites, including http://methlabs.org/ and http://blocklist.org/ are under control of the rogue member and should not be trusted for safe updates to our applications or lists.
A new build of PeerGuardian will be released soon to reflect these changes. Until then we ask you to continue using Beta 6a but with caution as the update servers are no longer under our control.
All staff are available in irc.freenode.net, channel #methlabs if you wish to chat.
Thanks, The Methlabs Staff (looking for a new home) -----
Adam Hoier, Cory Nelson, Eric Mayuk, Fox Lowe, James Shanelec, Joseph Farthing, Ken McKelland, Steffen Tuzar, Tim Leonard
aka
braindancer, D3F, fox, FuRiOuS1, JFM, KuKIE, method, phrosty, r00ted"
Call your rep wherever you buy your IT. I work at a DMR (direct to market reseller), and anybody who does my job really should know how to set you up with the right hardware and software to get the job done.
I would probably suggest either a VXA or AIT tape drive or library (depending on your dataset size) with either Dantz Retrospect for win-svr (assuming you use win-svr) or Veritas BackupExec as software. You may also want to set up some sort of NAS or scsi drive enclosure to provide for a disk cache. This means faster backups and restores throughout the day, and you still back this disk up to tape overnight / over the weekend.
This is called disk to disk to tape. Go ahead and read up on it. It's simple, and it works. It's also cheaper than any SAN or other fibre based data solution.
I sell servers to the SMB space and I have always mentioned Linux as an option, but I have less than 2% of my server sales being bundled with Linux. I always get the same answer: people in the SMB space think of Linux as more of a enterprise tool. It is complicated to learn, and windows comes in a nice shiny box that they've been buying for years. It's a hard paradigm to break as a vendor... especially when MS products generate so much revenue.
I got some training on this about a week before it was announced and they told us that it would have some "features" that would be the first step toward trusted computing. The salesguy said that it was for security, but the methodology he talked about seemed to indicate that it would be capable of taking control of certain parts of your machine away from you. I asked if he thought that the technology could be used to have your own computer enforce others' IP rights on you, and he skillfully avoided the question...
Many of these ideas simply limit people's ability to do what they want. IMHO, the only way to get a truly free PVP game where griefers cause no problems is to make the environment so challenging that players need to band together to survive. Perfect example (for a game in development): www.shadowpool.com . Shadowpool studios is creating a game with permanent death (think lives in Mario) where the only way players can keep themselves alive is to band together and create settlements. Settlements are going to be the cities and newby zones, but are formed and run like guilds on other games.
I kinda like the permadeath idea. You should check out a game in development now: http://www.shadowpool.com/. They expect players to play characters until they run out of life points and then restart. It works for me because I will get to experience more aspects of the game than I would playing just one character, and I won't miss out on the more advanced parts of the game that you can only get to by singlemindedly pursuing the goals of only one characters.
They also have some interesting ideas on PvP... I am not so sure about those though.
Don't know if anyone will need this, but I used to work at a company that has a service that makes it easier to find spare parts. You can access it by going to www.itpartshopper.com and type the part number into the search.
Oh, yeah. I can just see the original thinkers at Hollywood, Inc. making a movie about these.
Hey! We could call it "I Robot"! Man, I can hear Asimov rolling around in his coffin...
They didn't pay for it until someone noticed. Very underhanded.
It's a strange problem, security. Educated users are key, but because Microsoft has the largest market share, they also get the largest number of uneducated users. What will happen if Linux eventually completely replaces MS products on the desktop? Will they have the same security problems?