Outside the Asylum

Category: hardware

  • Fishworks finally released

    Sun’s super-secret-squirrel storage appliance project has been under wraps for years now. We’re talking Apple style secrecy.

    About a week ago they finally launched product.  Another cool bit of news is that there is a vmware ‘simulator’ version available for download. cool.

    The “fishworks” project was rumoured to be Sun’s NetApp killer NAS appliance, based on ZFS and solaris with a nice GUI.  This turned out to be bang on.  The GUI must have been what took the most time and effort, it looks slick.  NetApp have done bugger all with their GUI. I find it very clunky.

    add Fibre Channel support, de-duplication and if the performance is good Sun might just have a winner.

    UPDATE:  I’ve just seen Sun’s stock price chart and profit/loss info over the last few years. It’s in freefall. Lets hope this new stuff isnt too little too late.

    UPDATE2: it was. Oracle bought Sun

  • New sandbox PC

    I bought a new PC recently to run virtual machines on.  Virtualisation is all the rage, so I’ve decided to play around with Xen and VMware.  It also gives me an easy way to play with numerous OSes without having to frig around with hardware. As GNS3 is to Cisco routers, this box will be to OS’s.

    I’ve got ESXi on it at the moment with a ReadyNAS NFS fileshare set up as a datastore in addition to the internal disk.

    Thanks to nice corporate discounts, i was able to get this spec for a good price;

    HP Compaq dc5800 SFF

    • Intel Core 2 Quad Q9300 processor
    • 8GB RAM
    • 160GB SATA-2 10K rpm HDD
    • Intel PRO dual port gig-eth network card

    PS: Rational Survivability is a good blog for people interested in Virtualisation and Security

    UPDATE: Something to be aware of. Many corporate desktops have the Virtualisation enhancements in the CPU (Intel: VT-x) turned off by default for security reasons.  On this PC i had to upgrade the BIOS and drill down through the security menu to find the option to turn it on.  There was no doco on it that I could find and HP’s support people had no clue.

  • Camera upgrade

    I bought a Canon EOS 10D way back in 2003 and have loved having it. I saw the 20D and 30D come out and they really tempted me. When the 40D came out and I read the specs, I could resist no longer. Upgrade time!

    The first thing you notice is how much bigger the LCD preview screen on the back is. Huuuuge!

    40D back10D back

    I’m still getting familiar with the 40D. I only got it yesterday.

    Reviews of the 10D and the 40D

  • my ideal home workstation

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    I’ve been pondering what I’d set up at home if I was going to go all out but keep the cost within realistic limits.

    • Mac Pro dual quad core Xeon, lots of RAM
    • Highpoint RocketRAID 2322 PCI-Express x4 SATA II RAID Controller w/ RAID 5 and External Infiniband Support or maybe a pair of them.
    • Enhance E8-ML Multi-Lane 8-bay SATA Enclosure (with Two Mini-SAS to Infiniband 4-Channel MultiLane Cables)
    • Eight 750GB SATA-II HDDs or whatever’s biggest.

    UPDATE (11-04-2021): it’s now ~15years later. I’ve just upgraded the home lab to 10GE and arrays of 12 and 14TB disks. NVMe SSDs are up at 2 and 4TB in size, with speeds and latencies that weren’t even dreamed of not long ago. Latest lab server is an AMD 8core/16thread cpu.

  • Sun Multithreaded 10 GbE Networking Card

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    Sweet!

    Maximum Ethernet transfer rate
    • 10 Gb/sec for each single port
    • 16 Gb/sec total for both ports
    Host Interface x8 lane PCI-Express 1.1
    Network Interface Two instantiations of XAUI, IEEE 802.ae, 2002 compliant
    Optics 10GBase-SR, 10GBase-LR
    IEEE 802.3ae 2002 compliant