Tape is dead. Seriously. Backing up direct to tape requires long backup windows, good network performance, constant purchase of new tapes, and expensive Backup Exec licenses, and even if you can get the latter to work, restoring from tape at best takes an hour--if the tapes you need are on site. Making tape backup work requires staging to disk with snapshots--and once you make that investment, you might as well use it as your primary backup and take advantage of replication, cloning, and other features that the disk filer probably has. Tape is useful only for last-ditch offsite data storage or vaulting, and even then it's still a security risk.
1. Barracuda Networks spam/virus filter/firewall. http://www.barracudanetworks.com/ns/products/spam_ overview.php
2. StoreVault or NetApp filer for data backup. Put a FC or iSCSI HBA in the server, and you can also boot from a LUN on the filer that can be replicated and snapshotted too.
It's too bad the Symantec CEO didn't comment on what he plans to do with a suite of decade-old Veritas products that are harder to use, less capable, and more expensive than most hardware-based storage solutions available to the enterprise today.
Why must Slashdot link to Dvorak every time he write something provocative? He is the tech journalism equivalent of a man who shouts "Fire!" in a crowded theater.
From the demo unit we got from Clearwire, it was clear (ahem) that everything besides port 80 was severely throttled down. Web surfing? Fine. IMAP, SFTP, etc.? Too bad, can't.
'94-'00 Integras are incredibly easy to steal, which I learned the hard way, watching it drive away as I walked home. The insurance agent (who did not try to deny my claim) rattled off a half-dozen ways to get into the car that he knew of. I eventually got it back mostly intact, five weeks later, which I think pretty much used up all my luck for the century. The car now has a new alarm with open-circuit ignition kill, concealed fuel pump kill switch, and an autolock (club that goes under the clutch). Pain in the ass, but not as bad as having your car ripped off.
1000 A-bombs works out to 'merely' 10-100 megatons of yield. Hardly a planetbuster. No one in the vicinity would have survived, but many could have noticed the bright light on the horizon and gone to investigate.
Granted that replicating the data off the x4500 is a problem, but it's going to be a problem for any system with this much disk throughput. How are you going to match 2GB/sec with any SAN or external storage? You can't. That's the price you pay for such a fat pipe between the drives and the CPUs.
Fortunately, ZFS means you won't have to worry as much about data loss. Striping all data across 48 disks with 64-bit checksumming is already solid, and you can still implement raid-5 or -6 on top of that with whichever OS. (One of the white papers for the x4500 lists the MTBF as 23 years given spare drives... surely an exaggeration, but I'd settle for 1/5 of that.)
Thumper is indeed overpriced, list, but hardly anyone pays list. This is a problem Sun continues to fight--list pricing has little relation to what you pay for it on the street. There's no way it'll get down to $16k, but any competent Sun reseller should be able to get a fairly deep discount, especially three or four months from now when Sun's not trying to control demand.
Heat output from all those drives is a concern, but if you look at the photo on the ponytailed hippie's blog, you can see that the box has 20 fans in the front and probably more in the back. Makes you wonder what the thrust-to-weight ratio is.
This box is going to make a screaming database server. 2GB/sec throughput to the internal disk beats anything out there, -and- the customer doesn't need to invest in SAN hardware to do it.
The government forces employers to pay H-1B employees average to above-average wages for the position, so I don't think it's a matter of being unwilling to pay.
Actually I do hiring, and our lawyers have advised me that for anti-discrimination reasons, I can't ask potential employees whether they are U.S. citizens--only whether they can work legally in the U.S. I don't remember if that's federal or state law or if it's just to protect us against lawsuits, but the end result is about the same.
The only reason I would deliberately try to hire an H-1B worker is if that worker were some kind of superstar who would bring so much value that it would justify the legal costs and wrangling. Otherwise they're simply not worth the effort.
In my experience, H-1B workers aren't worth the effort. The government goes to great lengths to make sure your H-1B employee is paid commensurate with others in similar positions, and after the time and money wasted hiring lawyers and filing paperwork with the government, H-1B hiring is a fool's game. If I was legally permitted to ask whether a potential employee was on an H-1B I would never hire another such worker ever again. Why these companies are actively searching for visa workers is beyond my comprehension.
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Tape is dead. Seriously. Backing up direct to tape requires long backup windows, good network performance, constant purchase of new tapes, and expensive Backup Exec licenses, and even if you can get the latter to work, restoring from tape at best takes an hour--if the tapes you need are on site. Making tape backup work requires staging to disk with snapshots--and once you make that investment, you might as well use it as your primary backup and take advantage of replication, cloning, and other features that the disk filer probably has. Tape is useful only for last-ditch offsite data storage or vaulting, and even then it's still a security risk.
Speaking of which, I hear Symantec just bought Altiris.
1. Barracuda Networks spam/virus filter/firewall. http://www.barracudanetworks.com/ns/products/spam_ overview.php
2. StoreVault or NetApp filer for data backup. Put a FC or iSCSI HBA in the server, and you can also boot from a LUN on the filer that can be replicated and snapshotted too.
It's too bad the Symantec CEO didn't comment on what he plans to do with a suite of decade-old Veritas products that are harder to use, less capable, and more expensive than most hardware-based storage solutions available to the enterprise today.
Why must Slashdot link to Dvorak every time he write something provocative? He is the tech journalism equivalent of a man who shouts "Fire!" in a crowded theater.
I always wanted to switch, but coding requires so much punctuation that DVORAK doesn't help. Plus it doesn't work with vi.
From the demo unit we got from Clearwire, it was clear (ahem) that everything besides port 80 was severely throttled down. Web surfing? Fine. IMAP, SFTP, etc.? Too bad, can't.
I'd like to see voting machines outright replaced by slot machines. Insert quarter, pull lever,
*kachunk* REPUBLICAN
*kachunk* REPUBLICAN
*kachunk* GREEN
Damn! Insert quarter...
'94-'00 Integras are incredibly easy to steal, which I learned the hard way, watching it drive away as I walked home. The insurance agent (who did not try to deny my claim) rattled off a half-dozen ways to get into the car that he knew of. I eventually got it back mostly intact, five weeks later, which I think pretty much used up all my luck for the century. The car now has a new alarm with open-circuit ignition kill, concealed fuel pump kill switch, and an autolock (club that goes under the clutch). Pain in the ass, but not as bad as having your car ripped off.
1000 A-bombs works out to 'merely' 10-100 megatons of yield. Hardly a planetbuster. No one in the vicinity would have survived, but many could have noticed the bright light on the horizon and gone to investigate.
Granted that replicating the data off the x4500 is a problem, but it's going to be a problem for any system with this much disk throughput. How are you going to match 2GB/sec with any SAN or external storage? You can't. That's the price you pay for such a fat pipe between the drives and the CPUs.
Fortunately, ZFS means you won't have to worry as much about data loss. Striping all data across 48 disks with 64-bit checksumming is already solid, and you can still implement raid-5 or -6 on top of that with whichever OS. (One of the white papers for the x4500 lists the MTBF as 23 years given spare drives... surely an exaggeration, but I'd settle for 1/5 of that.)
Thumper is indeed overpriced, list, but hardly anyone pays list. This is a problem Sun continues to fight--list pricing has little relation to what you pay for it on the street. There's no way it'll get down to $16k, but any competent Sun reseller should be able to get a fairly deep discount, especially three or four months from now when Sun's not trying to control demand.
Heat output from all those drives is a concern, but if you look at the photo on the ponytailed hippie's blog, you can see that the box has 20 fans in the front and probably more in the back. Makes you wonder what the thrust-to-weight ratio is. This box is going to make a screaming database server. 2GB/sec throughput to the internal disk beats anything out there, -and- the customer doesn't need to invest in SAN hardware to do it.
Maybe-- just maybe-- if I got one of these devices, I could understand my wife.
The government forces employers to pay H-1B employees average to above-average wages for the position, so I don't think it's a matter of being unwilling to pay.
Actually I do hiring, and our lawyers have advised me that for anti-discrimination reasons, I can't ask potential employees whether they are U.S. citizens--only whether they can work legally in the U.S. I don't remember if that's federal or state law or if it's just to protect us against lawsuits, but the end result is about the same. The only reason I would deliberately try to hire an H-1B worker is if that worker were some kind of superstar who would bring so much value that it would justify the legal costs and wrangling. Otherwise they're simply not worth the effort.
In my experience, H-1B workers aren't worth the effort. The government goes to great lengths to make sure your H-1B employee is paid commensurate with others in similar positions, and after the time and money wasted hiring lawyers and filing paperwork with the government, H-1B hiring is a fool's game. If I was legally permitted to ask whether a potential employee was on an H-1B I would never hire another such worker ever again. Why these companies are actively searching for visa workers is beyond my comprehension.