* Posts by King1Con

36 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Jun 2010

Gartner mages throw deduping backup appliance bones, claim EMC's in lead

King1Con
FAIL

Re: Hater Bryant Where is Oracle/Sun/StorageTek? CommVault?

He said "no haters"...

You contributed nothing of value with your comment and personal assault.

Bill Gates' nuclear firm plans hot, salty push into power

King1Con
Angel

Re: @xperroni

Established energy companies invest in new technologies, if there is a return on the investment. Same thing with IT technologies. If there is a return, there is investment. If there is greater return on running older technologies, there is no investment.

Government regulation determines the speed to return on investment. Reduce the regulation, this decreases the speed to implementation, which decreases the cost, the solution shows a return on investment, the investment starts, jobs are created. Government is the problem, in the energy sector.

The smear tactics are used against "carbon" based energy, today. This is against everyone's interest. Carbon carries hydrogen atoms efficiently and breaking those bonds creates energy (as well as H2O and CO2 - both of which allow plants to make sugar & grow, so human food can have something to eat!) ;-)

As an example: we have natural gas buses and cars - well established technologies... yet politicians are killing coal plants to re-direct portable [clean natural gas] fuel to fixed power stations [located far from human populations.] This is dumb since dependence upon portable petrol could be reduced with clean natural gas [in heavily human populated areas] increasingly introduced for portable transportation.

I know how everyone loves electric & hybrid cars, but those are really dirty... the byproducts from batteries. I love batteries, don't get me wrong, but they are far more dangerous than byproducts from carbon based fuel.

Nuclear is a far better solution to Natural Gas for base-power. Coal based plants should remain on-line until they can be replaced with nuclear plants which can run on nuclear waste - which solves many more long term issues. (Keeps the rail line profitable, to subsidise mass transportation costs!)

(nuclear explosion icon, for effect)

Chinese government to spend $277 BEEELION on air-quality improvements

King1Con

Americans not spending $277 Billion is not a drop in the important bucket

With an annual U.S. borrow rate of about $813 Billion ($1,400 Billion borrowing started when Americans elected a new government of Democrats in their Presidency, House of Representatives, and Senate... a newly elected Congress decided to start re-collecting the proper amount of Social Security for the old people, helping to bring down their borrow rate) - there needs to be A LOT LESS SPENDING!

Americans not spending $277 Billion (that they do not have) is not even "a drop in the bucket" of balancing their Federal Budget! Americans, for the most part, feed large portions of the world, secure large portions of world trade, and design the hi-tech products used (or copied by others) around the world.

The Dumb better figure out QUICKLY that the world economy will collapse from Americans voting for politicians with crazy borrow & spend mentality - there will soon be a lot more to worry about than: how much [non-existent] money can be borrowed to spend on economically unsustainable plans to possibly slow down a possible catastrophic event that may possibly happen in the future.

We all need clean environmental policies, but new policies must be economically sustainable. A clean enviornment for a few years, which destroys the economy, and destroys a government, will result in a much worse environmental disaster when there is no more government with the power to regulate pollution.

The proverbial "cut off your nose to spite your face" scenario.

The Road to Greece... http://www.usdebtclock.org/

Sun sets on Oracle VDI products

King1Con

Re: Architecture

Some SunRay models run via PoE, just like ethernet video cameras, desktop VoIP Phone, desktop VoIP speakerphone, wireless access points, etc.

When an entire office infrastructure can have nearly their entire desktop, power, network, security, and voice infrastructure consolidated with central redundant power systems driven by switches with centrally & properly sized UPS's & generators at extremely low aggregate costs.

The SunRay is an amazing product which fits well into a completely architected office.

Review: Belkin Thunderbolt Express Dock

King1Con
Thumb Down

Re: *sigh*

eSATA is not always reliable. eSATA chipsets are occasionally not well debugged, because they are targeted at low-cost market.

Crashes are not uncommon with eSATA, if you are expecting your system to remain up for months. Some people have no problems, at all. It is about firmware - SATA and eSATA solutions often do not have the same rigor of firmware debugging that comes with SAS or other more expensive interfaces.

For example, firmware from SATA drives often do not guarantee that data has been written to storage when the firmware returns back that it has written to storage (marketing for speed purposes.) This means, someone may be using eSATA with off-the-shelf drives thinking they are getting secure RAID storage - and they are not... but they only realize it when there is a failure.

Of course, usb 3.0 or firewire cases with off-the-shelf SATA drives can offer the same issues. If you care about your data, you have to care about your firmware, or get a higher end solution (bundled firewire drive or bundled thunderbolt drive where you are paying the manufacturer to think about the firmware.)

Google shakes up US utility with green power tariff

King1Con
FAIL

"...increase in demand that drives down prices"?

Doesn't an "Increase in Supply" drive down prices?

This line of thinking is bankrupting us.

Just Sayin'

Ellison: Oracle will grow hardware biz soon

King1Con
Thumb Up

Re: Oracle, .... a busted flush with no future leading IP - nope, T5 and others

SPARC T4 is doing very well, as previously announced.

SPARC T5 coming with new IP such as compression, database acceleration, more cores, and faster clock speeds.

There are still a lot of unreleased technology (but tested in limited quantities), such as transactional memory (may show up in T5?)

There are still a lot of very interesting patented silicon technology, such as Proximity Computing.

Let the games continue!

FCC: Kids, here's 100MHz of radio spectrum - but you have to share

King1Con
Trollface

Central Authority vs Federated Authority...

"White Space devices are required to contact an online database to check out local conditions prior to transmitting, so they can safely make use of bands which are currently verboten nationally but only filled locally"

Imagine that - someone will be able to track every wireless device centrally, because those wireless devices have to "check in" and "check out" their usage. Wow, makes it easy, doesn't it?

Federated authority through distributed routing protocols of the current internet is very resilient... not sure how this will hold up under war or natural disaster.

When given the choice between central authority and federated authority - I choose federated every time... because if there is a local failure, one always has the opportunity to move to get a new signal... very good for wireless technology... interesting political implications.

IBM plunks Power7+ processors into Flex System servers

King1Con
Facepalm

How late was it?

I am surprised TPM did not comment on the timing of POWER 7+.

With POWER 7 coming to market on February 2010, an expected POWER 7+ debut on August 2011, does this make POWER 7+ about 15 months late?

http://netmgt.blogspot.com/2012/11/ibm-power-roadmap-power-7-better-late.html

TPM discussed the possible POWER 6+ failure, when the last POWER slip occurred.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/08/31/ibm_power_chip_roadmap_update/

Is POWER 8 going through the same turmoil, or is it coming in 3 months?

Oracle nudges Sparc T5s back out to 2013

King1Con
Happy

Re: Take no bets - nope, doubling down!

Anon --- I would be very surprised if future SPARC processors amount to anything more than a process shrink and very minor tweaks (i.e. more cache...

Process shrinks are not that easy. When you take the same paths, you can't necessarily get linear clock speed increases out of them since the distance of a path does not uniformly decrease in length (depending on the routing.) The amount of time it takes for systems to perform the routing of these massive chips it completely outrageous.

There appears to be an M4 & M5 both in test - possibly the end-2013 and end-2014 chips on the roadmap.

The latest Oracle road map has a T-series chip past the T5 in mid-to-late 2014.

Considering that POWER-mongers have been wrongly suggesting SPARC is not long for this world - it appears that SPARC and POWER are going to be the last chips standing, in the high-end arena.

It looks like you might be surprised!

Democratic congresswomen 'less feminine in appearance' than Republicans

King1Con

Re: imagine

Maggie was an amazing politician... take her over Janet or Hillary any day!

King1Con
Angel

Re: True

LOL!

All-flash IBM V7000 smashes Oracle/Sun ZFS box

King1Con
WTF?

@J.T. --- shortstroked?

J.T. --- 4% of the capacity in a v7000 outperformed a frame they had to shortstroke the crap out of.

Huh? That is an ignorant statement, if I am reading it correctly.

The ZFS storage does not short-stroke for speed, it uses SSD caching on reads and writes for speed and RAM for additional speed.

The Oracle storage would perform consistently, as you increase usage on the frame, it would not degrade, as short-stroked solutions would.

J.T. --- If you honestly think another 96% of capacity is going to double the price of a storage frame these days then I have a large british landmark to sell you.

Someone who understood the two solutions side-by-side would be interested in the cost of the IBM solution with a similar quantity of SSD disk capacity.

A pure SSD solution should be slightly faster than the hybrid approach, but the hybrid approach (for the same quantity of storage) should be less expensive (and more reliable, since the read-write cycles on rotating rust should be greater than SSD today.)

Insider cuts into Apple, peels off Intel Mac OS X port secrets

King1Con
Flame

Overclocking???

'obliged to run antiquated chips at higher frequencies and higher temperatures – essentially overclocking the parts.'

Ummm... when going to the original cited artcle, also from El Reg

'Overclocking is when the user raises the clock frequency beyond the recommended frequency marked on the processor. Chips are capable of operating at several speeds, and are graded as they leave the fab: good batches are judged capable of running higher frequencies. Since the parts Apple is using in the latest Macs run at their marked frequency, Apple can't strictly be accused of "overclocking".'

nuff said...

Dell storage sales drooping while others thrust up

King1Con
Go

How about a graph?

"Dell storage sales drooping while others thrust up"

I would like to see a market share graph!

Space-cadet Schwartz blows chunks out of Oracle's Java suit

King1Con
Unhappy

@BristolBachelor Re: Re: I must be missing something

BB> Oracle didn't want the hardware business; they wanted to conrtol the companies "giving away" competing technologies to theirs, like Java & mysql

Oracle wanted the hardware business more than IBM & HP - Oracle makes a huge sum of money on SPARC and Solaris.

Oracle bought Sun's hardware business - as IBM has been selling off pieces of their hardware business, as HP almost pulled the plug on a huge portion of their hardware business, and as HP is having the plug pulled on Itanium.

HP buying SPARC, as it was originally offered to them, would have placed HP customers in a position of continuity by now, instead of in a place of decent with Itanium's road map coming to an end.

Solaris shops bunged cash to upgrade old duffers

King1Con
Go

Re: A large Investment bank I talked to

anon> Numbers I've seen suggest a T4-4 has more throughput than an M8000 in a much smaller footprint, lower power draw & much lower purchase cost.

The [2 socket/16 core] T4-4 in multithreaded mode, perform better than the [8 socket/16 core] V890's we have, in our real-world applications (with no tuning.) They are really amazing.

Can't wait to pop in T5 boards, if it are compatible with the various half-populated T4-4 chassis we have.

Oracle pops cork as cut-price ZFS array creams NetApp rival

King1Con
Thumb Up

SSD, RAM, Disk, Dedup

twit> SSD outperforms disk shocker....

SSD was only used as cache on ZFS. From the costs the competition had, DRAM was probably used as cache in the other systems. Definitely a shocker that the DRAM/Disk combination was so overcome by SSD/DRAM/Disk combination of ZFS.

Kebabbert> dedup on ZFS... you need lot of RAM, something like 1GB RAM for each TB disk

Don't forget your SSD cache. If there are dozens (or hundreds) of VM's running, there is huge savings in hard storage. Want disk efficiency, add a little ram - the world had 64 bit systems for over decade. Best practice is to separate the OS, App, and Data - dedup the OS and App across the VM's, certainly the "best bang for the buck."

King1Con

RE: great if all you run is Oracle

tgs> keep this in mind, none of the oracle ZFS systems support any of the VAAI primitives for VMWare or have any integration into...

With ZFS offering dedup, it seems CRAZY not run virtualization on top of ZFS!

This is especially the case since the dedup'ed blocks are in memory, disk, and read cache... the more your virtualize on top of ZFS, the higher the IOPS (over non-virtualized loads, since virtualized workloads will have fewer opportunities for ZFS dedup to be used.)

Redmond campaigns for gay marriage rights

King1Con
Meh

Hate Speech, Luniness, etc.

philbo - the death penalty for cursing your parents? Of course, that makes lots of sense...

In that region of the world, and others as well, that is the standard, even today. I would suggest you Google "honor killings", and those who are involved in that particular activity are not followers of the Hebrew Bible.

In the West, parents kill children out of inconvenience. It is called Abortion... those children didn't even get a chance to curse their parents. What is more "loony" - kill a child for disobedience or kill them out of inconvenience?

philbo - it's a treasure trove of looniness

That is a pretty hateful thing to say.

perlcat - this hatred of LGBT people makes no more sense than christian ritual circumcision

So far, the only people I have seen be hateful are those people who are advocating Redmond's position in these posts.

As far as ritual circumcision, there are those people who choose to follow Abraham's covenant (Jews, Christians, and Muslims often have chosen to for thousands of years) and principles of freedom would dictate that people should be allowed if the activity does not cause any harm, without government regulation. It is relatively harmless. It is not like they are throwing children from cliffs, killing them in their mother, or something.

It is baffling that people want more government regulating people when there is not a physical need central to the function of ongoing society to tax & spend with the enforcement the regulation, ultimately through the gun of a government.

Why would citizens want more laws to tax & pay for a government official to hold a gun to the head of another citizen (because their feelings chance), when the reason is not core to the ongoing existence of society? Now THAT is "looniness".

King1Con
Go

Marriage is Regulation, not Love

When did someone EVER come up with the idea that Marriage is about Love?

I would venture to say that most marriages around the world have nothing to do with Love, it is about families agreeing that their opposing gender children have a suitable partner who can promote the family and ultimately their tribe and species.

When did someone EVER come up with the idea that Religious Marriage is about Love?

I would venture to say that most religious marriages around the world have nothing to do with Love, it is about a religious community agreeing that their opposing gender people have a suitable partner who can PRO-CREATE a family and ultimately sustain their community and species. (Most of the populous religious dictate that that God Creates and people Pro-Create.)

When did someone EVER come up with the idea that Civil Marriage is about Love?

When two people spend time together (in the Biblical Way) - there is a natural biological result: people of varying qualities. Nations-States are made up of people. People are taxed, people defend the nation/state in war from being conquered/dissolved, and people vote in some nation/states. Everything else is optional, in a nation/state. This being said, the quality of the people are critical for the nation/state. This is why marriage is regulated: it is illegal for Parents to have sex with or marry their offspring, because defective children are likely to result. It is illegal for Brothers & Sisters to marry, because defective children are likely to result. It is illegal for close relatives to have marry, because defective children are likely to result. If children are not going to result from union, there is no compelling reason for Civil Marriage between people.

When did someone EVER come up with the idea that Love results in Civil Marriage?

Why should two elderly sisters (who share familial love) who live with each other to help each other our with bills and physical ailments be regulated under the law than two women who want to have sex with one another? Why should a group of brothers (who share familial love) share a house when they move into a new town/country be regulated under the law than a group of men who want to have sex with one another?

If two people want to have sex, there maybe compelling reason for a Nation/State to regulate the behavior (i.e. sexual contact could promote various disease.)

Clearly, the addition of private sexual contact should only be regulated through tax dollars when there is a quantitative detriment to society if it is not regulated, since sexual disease may result in sterilization of individuals, which if becomes widespread will cause a nation to decline due to population drop. Also, sexual disease places an undue burden on individuals, making them less productive, and thus reduces tax revenues (how many widgets can you make when constantly scratching your crotch?)

If people want to have private freedom in society, they can vote through the ballot box to have private freedom, without using the power of the public government's gun to enforce coercion to sustain a relationship based upon a "feeling", which will diminish over time. Freedom, which does not create, create defective, create diseased, or kill citizens does not requires personal responsibility, not regulation through the force of a government gun.

Power7 chips going for a song in Big Blue January sale

King1Con
Pint

Maybe there is is a POWER7+?

Could be that IBM are clearing out the inventory now. 6 Months Late is better than nothing.

Every SPARC T processor has been on-time, some projected to be early. I guess POWER advocates will say that a particular SPARC processor from a particular vendor was never released 6 or 12 years ago, but POWER7+ being late for 6 months today is a real thorn in POWER's side today - especially since IBM is the sole server chip provider and customers have no other options, unlike the security SPARC customers had with multiple vendors over the years.

A beer for the upcoming POWER7+! Cheers!

Oracle whips out Solaris 11 system lasher

King1Con
Pint

Free as Beer

Tom> ZFS v28 is free. Oracle haven't committed to showing any more code than that

ZFS is part of Solaris 11, which can be downloaded for free, for non-commercial usage.

ZFS is Free-as-Beer at a fraternity party... I never heard people complaining that they don't know the formulation for Bud when sucking it down at the frat house for free

Oracle gives Solaris 11 final spit and polish

King1Con
Facepalm

RE: Solaris on x86? yep...

tranz -I struggle to understand why Oracle would really want to push this on x86 if their preferred option is OVM

Because OVM is a virtualisation technology that supports operating systems like Solaris x86

tranz - worried about deploying Solaris on x86 as I see no commitment from Oracle on this combination

the sky might fall, too. better find an underground bunker.

Catholic Bishops: 'Would you mind not bringing guns to church?'

King1Con
Angel

What's a nun to do, when she can't even be safe going to church, never mind sitting in one?

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/oct/31/trial-begins-illegal-immigrant-who-killed-nun-fata/

So where is IBM's Power7+ CPU?

King1Con
Mushroom

Maybe there is no POWER7+

IBM=RIM?

Oracle's Sparc T4 prices mask improved value

King1Con

The big question...

Will T4 enable moving off of UltraSPARC IV+ platforms without upgrading to M series? Crunching the numbers, the answer appears to be: YES

@Steven - The value in the T processor is far beyond integer/floating-point performance.

When comparing performance with x86 platforms, the crypto units provide a significant throughput boost with real world applications. With the T5, the inclusion of compression/decompression will increase throughput boost with real world applications, again.

I guess the message is: if you are marketing, do x86. If you are business, do SPARC.

Deduplication: a power-hungry way to streamline storage

King1Con
Thumb Up

> OK, so what happens when... I want to move to another platform and bring my data with me , or I want to store windows data on EC2 and incorporate it into a linux-based web solution?

When you want to move to another platform, move to the cloud, move from the cloud, use a different OS - just do it... open source dedup is already running as base infrastructure in freely available OS's and in the cloud.

http://www.linux-kvm.org/wiki/images/7/71/2011-forum-porting-to-smartos.pdf

Free, Open Source, and DeDup go wonderfully together!

King1Con
Go

If you have a virtualized environment, with 5 or more instances of an OS on a single system - dedup makes a lot of sense.

Dedup built into the underlying OS (ZFS) providing the virtualization also means the expensive memory serving as the disk cache (ARC) is also deduped... not to mention any expensive blocks of storage sitting in flash memory (L2ARC) is also deduped.

To understand the benefits of dedup (reduction in cost of memory, flash, storage, I/O) for increased throughput, at the expense of a needing some more CPU cores - the tradeoff is a no-brainer, especially since ZFS is free and already bundled with multiple OS's.

An extra CPU core is cheap in comparison to memory, flash, and disk storage while no other special hardware controllers are needed (at least for ZFS.)

Oracle's Sparc T4 chip: Will you pay Larry's premium?

King1Con
FAIL

RE: Just another speed bump

--- Seriously, why would anyone trust Larry to pick their pockets with this thing?

Why would anyone trust an anonymous comment regarding whether a known person should be trusted?

--- Just another way for him to lock you in

Who can lock someone into what?

SPARC architecture which is not controlled by any one company, Larry's company is just one who participates.

Anyone can participate in the open-standards group, anyone can build products, anyone can purchase products!

FAIL!

Tilera throws gauntlet at Intel's feet

King1Con

Looks like the T Strategy

Looks like the strategy used to develop the SPARC T-line of processors... right down to the embedded 10 GigE

What's old is new again!

Unisys revs up big ClearPath mainframes

King1Con
Dead Vulture

Very nice to Unisis

Why didn't TPM rip them apart, the same way he rips apart Oracle, and formerly Sun?

Not even a sarcastic comment about a really slow speed bump...

Not that this is bad, it would be nice for TPM to show the same level off even-handedness with Oracle/Sun!

IBM: Our appliance servers smoke Ellison's 'phony baloney'

King1Con
FAIL

reliable? my power 7 crashes multiple times a day due to an unfixed bug

Yep - due to some software issue regarding the interconnect in a cluster. the hot fix did not solve it. waiting for the full patch roll to see if it is any better.

Because it is clustered, no one seems to care.

junk.

Nexenta: The fastest-growing storage start-up ever?

King1Con
Go

Using ZFS on my NAS now - adding more

Bought some equipment off of eBay, set up a NAS with ZFS, filled up mirrored 1.5TB, adding mirrored 2TB drives to the pool now... faster rebuilds, more reliable, and easier usage than natively connected USB drives on several other operating systems clients that I tried.

It was the last option tested (after all the other options either failed or was considered too unrelilable) - but it was the option that we kept because a crash of the client OS, power glitch, or kicking a cord, didn't cause a half day to rebuild the RAID.

Yanking out the power cord between a server and the UPS or yanking a drive during an heavy I/O operation only causes a few seconds to rebuild the ZFS RAID - someone would be crazy to use anything else in a non-datacenter environment.

Oracle sneaks out Solaris 10 refresh

King1Con
Go

Good News!

This release of Solaris 10 is really good news!

Possibly the last release of Solaris 10 before Solaris 11 - adding the p2v for Solaris 10 physical to virtual zone is a good thing, it should help businesses move to Solaris 11 more quickly since Solaris 11 has Solaris 10 Branded Zone support.

Palin puts paid to Boob-gate

King1Con
Flame

Only one thing is clear

When the media is too intellectually deficient to address the policies of a grass roots politician, there is a tendency to objectify and dehumanize. It is the same tactic taken by Hitler and his conies duing World War II.

Ms. Palin has certainly taken her share of vicious dehumanizing attacks, she is a magnet for hate: a family woman, a hard working individual, reasonable looks, experience in energy, experience as a businessperson, and even greater years of executive experience than the person who was elected as President by the opposing party! (Good looks, business sense, and experience are not attributes of The Left in American politics.)

If there is anyone that the White House at the colonies on the other side of the pond needed FOR MONTHS, it was for someone like Ms. Palin, whose family understands oil and energy, to be engaged at the highest levels. The inexperience and mistakes of their current executive might leave a black spot on the U.K. & Western Europe as the crude continues to leak unabated and hits the gulf stream.

(Flame for not burning the crude off immediately, as the original ignored disaster plan stipulated, and facilitating the crude to remain under water via dispersants - to be carried where the gulf currents will eventually take it. If there was a sand-berm icon, that would be a good pick too, since that was part of a disaster plan whose implementation experienced a month-long American Federal Government Executive Branch delay, but that will not really affect Europe.)