The Register Spoils the Tuesday Announcement: Sun Set to Super-Size
The Register has dumped what it can find about the Tuesday announcement: Sun to replace excuses with loads of Opteron gear. Here's the forecast: X4500: "Thumper", the one we've waited for. Take a X4200, super-size it to 4U and then add 48 SATA drives... mix in the super secret ingredient (Solaris 10 Update 2, namely ZFS) and presto chango! Estimates are that a system with 16GB of memory and 12TB of storage will run you about $33,000....
Ruby Continues To Take On JSP
Ruby is a wonderful little language. And little is the key word for me. As I've stated before, while Java is a robust language and an excellent one by its own merit, it is a big beast with a learning curve of doom which never seems to end. While you can appreciate Ruby on its own, I didn't really truly appreciate it untill I'd spent 2 weeks in Java-land, learning JSP, J2EE, and friends. After doing the Java thing for a while, Ruby is a ...
Pillar Data Posts SPEC Numbers
Pillar Data finally joins the industry in posting SPEC numbers for their Axiom product. You'll recall that the Axiom solution consists of a Pilot (management node), up to 4 Slammers (controllers), and up to 32 Bricks (disk shelves). The "2.0 Release" is said to incrase the number of bricks from 32 to 64 but has yet to appear. The SPEC configuration consists of 2 Slammers (Quad 2.4Ghz Xeon, 16GB of RAM), 32 Bricks (384 disks total, 12 ...
OpenSolaris: The Premier iSCSI Platform
Its happened... as seen in the Monday ON drop, the Solaris iSCSI Target has been integrated. Download the code here. I've been hacking around with the iSCSI Target as long as I've been able to get my grubby hands on it and find it really exciting. Solaris is now in the iSCSI drivers seat, with its own initiator and target implementation. I big round of applause goes to Mr. Richard McNeal, at Sun, or as he might be better called: ...
Splunk 2.0.10 Released
Splunk 2.0.10 is available for all platforms except Solaris/X86, which is still at 2.0.8 right now. View the release notes for the good news. If your considering a Time Management friendly infrastructure project, strongly consider implementing Splunk, first on a small trial basis and then possible fanning it out to a larger, more comprehensive distributed (Splunk-2-Splunk) solution. We'll talk more about distributed splunk soon.
Time Management for System Administrators
I have a lot of books. Tamarah and I have one whole room of our house dubbed "the library" complete with 6 overflowing book cases... and I've still got 4 stacks of books 2 feet high in the den. The reality is I never actually "read" them, so much as I, in an SA like fashion, skim them quickly for what I need, read those sections that apply to my needs at the time, and then shelf them for later consumption. I can't remember the last time I ...
Sun “Chief Open Source Officer” on “Open Source”
I hesitate to write on this subject, I know Simon personally and like him, he's a good guy. But we have some differing opinions on the topics of open source philosophy. Here are three write-ups reguarding his recent talk at the Open Source Business Confrence in London: Sun's open source chief predicts software 3.0 Sun: Open source is about self-interest Simon Phipps on "The Zen of Free" (OSBC London) First things first. If you ...
New Top 500 SuperComputer List Released
Everyone loves big computers... especially me. So go wrap yourself in the June 2006 Top 500 List. Interesting things are happening in the Top 10, here's the bullet points imho: IBM Has taken control of the top 3 slot on the list, with 2 BlueGene's and a pSeries eServer p5 system comprised of 12,208 processors. A Dell PowerEdge 1850, 3.6 GHz, Infiniband cluster utilizing 9,024 processors makes number 6 on the list. Cray's best ...
Those that don’t matter: A talk with the editor of Business 2.0
As posted earlier, I was extremely offended and dismayed by the recent 10 people who don't matter expose in Business 2.0. As it turns out, I wasn't the only one offended in this house... my wife, Tamarah, was infuriated by the list as well. So much so that she mailed the editor, Owen Thomas. A lengthy and spirited exchanged followed, which I won't post in entirety given that it was a private exchange, but I found the following ultimate ...
Ruby on Rails at Penny Arcade
Penny Arcade has been suffering some problems lately which has reveiled that the site is powered by Ruby on Rails. This was announced back in November, but apparently skipping straight to the comic causes you to miss out from time to time. Gabes comments about the transition were classic: "Along with the slick new visuals the guts of the site also got a huge upgrade. Penny Arcade right now represents one of the largest implementations of ...