I watched this video for the second time the day before Thanksgiving. I agree with it completely, not to make fun of where I work. I will admit in the past I have been juvenile and overly idealistic in my beliefs about the role of managers. We all want to do well I think, but still there’s more than a little truth to the criticism that people get more done outside regular office hours. I used to stay long after our office would close to get all the work done I had put off during the day simply because I didn’t want to lose my place or be interrupted. It really does call into question the logic of The Office, and what is being accomplished in an 8 hour interval each day. And it also calls into question what Work really is. I always just assumed the interruptions were the work, in spite of watching the video, I still feel that is true.
Month: November 2010
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Hitachi GST ends STEC’s monopoly • The Register
Hitachi GST flash drives are hitting the streets and, at last, ending STEC’s monopoly in the supply of Fibre Channel interface SSDs.
EMC startled the enterprise storage array world by embracing STEC SSDs (solid state drives) in its arrays last year as a way of dramatically lowering the latency for access to the most important data in the arrays. It has subsequently delivered FAST automated data movement across different tiers of storage in its arrays, ensuring that sysadms don’t have to involved in managing data movement at a tedious and time-consuming level.
In the computer world the data center is often the measure of all things in terms of speed and performance. Time was, the disk drive interface of choice was the SCSI drive and then it’s higher speed evolutions Fast/Wide UltraSCSI. But then a new interface hit that used fibre optic cables to move storage out of the computer box to a separate box that managed all the hard drives in one spot and this was called a Storage Array. The new connector/cable combo was named Fibre Channel and it was fast, fast, fast. It become the absolute brand name off all vendors trying to sell more and more hard drives into the data center. Newer evolved versions of Fibre Channel came to market, each one slightly faster than the rest. And eventually Fibre Channel was built right into the hard drives themselves, so that you could be assured the speed was native Fibre Channel 3Gigabytes per second from one end to the other. But Fibre Channel has always been prohibitively expensive though a lot of it has been sold over the years. Volume has not brought down the price of Fibre Channel one bit in the time that it’s been the most widely deployed disk drive interface. A few competitors have cropped up the old Parallel ATA and Serial ATA drives from the desktop market have attempted to compete. And a newer SCSI drive interface called Serial Attached SCSI is now seeing some wider acceptance. However the old guard who are mentally and emotionally attached to their favorite Fibre Channel drive interface are not about to give up even has spinning disk speeds have been trumped by the almighty Flash memory based solid state drive (SSD). And a company named STEC knew it could sell a lot of SSDs if only someone could put a Fibre Channel interface on the circuit board, allaying any fears of the Fibre Channel adherents that they needed to evolve and change.
Yes it’s true STEC was the only game in town for what I consider the Fibre Channel legacy interface in old-line Storage Array manufacturers. They have sold tons of their drives to third parties who package up their wares into turnkey ‘Enterprise’ solutions for drive arrays and cache controllers (all of which just speed up things). And being the first-est with the most-est is a good business strategy until the second source of your product comes online. So it’s always a race to sell as much as you can until the deadline hits and everyone rushes to the second source. Here now is Hitachi’s announcement they are now manufacturing an SSD with a Fibre Channel interface onboard for the Enterprise data center customers.
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LSI Launches $11,500 SSD, Crushes Other SSDs
Tuesday LSI Corp announced the WarpDrive SLP-300 PCIe-based acceleration card, offering 300 GB of SLC solid state storage and performance up to 240,000 sustained IOPS. It also delivers I/O performance equal to hundreds of mechanical hard drives while consuming less than 25W of power–all for a meaty $11,500 USD.
This is the cost of entry for anyone working on an Enterprise Level project. You cannot participate unless you can cross the threshold of a PCIe card costing $11,500 USD. This is the first time I have seen an actual price quote on one of these cards that swims in the Data center consulting and provisioning market. Fusion-io cannot be too far off of this price when it’s not sold as a full package as part of a larger project RFP. I am somewhat stunned at the price premium, but LSI is a top engineering firm and they definitely can design their own custom silicon to get the top speed out of just about any commercial off the shelf Flash memory chips. I am impressed they went with the PCI Express (8X) 8 lane interface. I’m guessing that’s a requirement for more server owners whereas 4X is for the desktop market. Still I don’t see any 16X interfaces as of yet (that’s the interface most desktops use for their graphics cards from AMD and nVidia). One more part that makes this a premium offering is the choice of Single Level Cell Flash memory chips for the ultimate in speed and reliability along with the Serial Attached Storage interface onboard the PCIe card itself. Desktop models opt for SATA to PCI-X to PCI-e bridge chips forcing you to translate and re-order your data multiple times. I have a feel SAS bridges to PCI-e at the full 8X interface speeds and that is the key to getting faster than 1,000 MB/sec. speeds for write and reads. This part is quoted as getting in the range of ~1,400 MB/sec. and other than some very expensive turnkey boxes from manufacturers like Violin, this is a great user installable part to get the benefit of a really fast SSD drive array on a PCIe card.
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A Conversation with Ed Catmull – ACM Queue
EC: Here are the things I would say in support of that. One of them, which I think is really important—and this is true especially of the elementary schools—is that training in drawing is teaching people to observe.
PH: Which is what you want in scientists, right?
EC: Thats right. Or doctors or lawyers. You want people who are observant. I think most people were not trained under artists, so they have an incorrect image of what an artist actually does. Theres a complete disconnect with what they do. But there are places where this understanding comes across, such as in that famous book by Betty Edwards [Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain].This interview is with a computer scientist named Ed Catmull. In the time Ed Catmull entered the field, we’ve gone from computers crunching numbers like a desktop calculator to computers doing full 3D animated films. Ed Catmull’s single most important goal was to created an animated film using a computer. He eventually accomplished that and more onced he helped form up Pixar. All of his research and academic work was focused on that one goal.
I’m always surprised to see what references or influences people quote in interviews. In fact, I am really encouraged. It was about 1988 or so when I took a copy of Betty Edward’s book my mom had and started reading it and doing some of the exercises in it. Stranger still I want back to college and majored in art (not drawing but Photography). So I think I understand exactly what Ed Catmull means when he talks about being observant. In every job I’ve had computer related or otherwise that ability to be observant just doesn’t exist in a large number of people. Eventually people begin to ask me how do know all this stuff, when did you learn it? Most times, the things they are most impressed by are things like noticing something and trying a different strategy in attempting to fix a problem. The proof is, I can do this with things I am unfamiliar with and usually make some headway towards fixing a thing. Whether that thing is mechanical, or computer related doesn’t matter. I make good guesses and it’s not because I’m an expert in anything, I merely notice things. That’s all it is.
So maybe everyone should read and go through Betty Edwards’s book Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. If nothing else it might make you feel a little dislocated and uncomfortable. It might shake you up, and make you question some pre-conceived notions about yourself like, the feeling you can’t draw or you are not good at art. I think with practice, anyone can draw and with practice anyone can become observant.
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TidBITS Opinion: A Eulogy for the Xserve: May It Rack in Peace
Image via CrunchBase Apple’s Xserve was born in the spring of 2002 and is scheduled to die in the winter of 2011, and I now step up before its mourners to speak the eulogy for Apple’s maligned and misunderstood server product.
via TidBITS Opinion: A Eulogy for the Xserve: May It Rack in Peace.
Chuck Goolsbee’s Eulogy is spot on, and every point is true according even to my limited experience. I’ve purchased 2 different Xserves since they were introduced. On is 2nd generation G4 model, the other is a 2006 Intel model (thankfully I skipped the G5 altogether). Other than a weird bug in the Intel based Xserve (weird blue video screen), there have been no bumps or quirks to report. I agree that form factor of the housing is way too long. Even in the rack I used (a discard SUN Microsystems unit), the thing was really inelegant. Speaking of the drive bays too is a sore point for me. I have wanted dearly to re-arrange reconfigure and upgrade the drive bays on both the old and newer Xserve but the expense of acquiring new units was prohibitive at best, and they went out of manufacture very quickly after being introduced. If you neglected to buy your Xserve fully configured with the maximum storage available when it shipped you were more or less left to fend for yourself. You could troll Ebay and Bulletin Boards to score a bona fide Apple Drivebay but the supply was so limited it drove up prices and became a black market. The XRaid didn’t help things either, as drivebays were not consistently swappable from the Xserve to the XRaid box. Given the limited time most sysadmins have with doing research on purchases like this to upgrade an existing machine, it was a total disaster, big fail and unsurprising.
I will continue to run my Xserve units until the drives or power supplies fail. It could happen any day, any time and hopefully I will have sufficient warning to get a new Mac mini server to replace it. Until then, I too, along with Chuck Goolsbee among the rest of the Xserve sysadmins will kind of wonder what could have been.
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A Quick Look at OCZ’s RevoDrive x2 – AnandTech
SATA hard drive Interface – Image via Wikipedia What OCZ (and other companies) ultimately need to do is introduce a SSD controller with a native PCI Express interface (or something else other than SATA). SandForce’s recent SF-2000 announcement showed us that SATA is an interface that simply can’t keep up with SSD controller evolution. At peak read/write speed of 500MB/s, even 6Gbps SATA is barely enough. It took us years to get to 6Gbps SATA, yet in about one year SandForce will have gone from maxing out 3Gbps SATA on sequential reads to nearing the limits of 6Gbps SATA.
It doesn’t appear the RevoDrive X2 is all that much better than four equivalent sized SSD drives in a four drive RAID Level 0 array. But hope springs eternal, and the author sums up where manufacturers should go with their future product announcements. I think everyone agrees SATA is the last thing we need to get full speed out of the Flash based SSDs, we need SandForce controllers with native PCIe interfaces and then maybe we will get our full money’s worth out of the SSDs we will buy in the near future. As an enterprise data center architect, I would seriously be following these product announcements and architecture requirements. Shrewdly choosing your data center storage architecture (what mix of spinning disks and SSD do you really need) will be a competitive advantage for data mining, Online Transaction Processing, and Cloud based software applications.
Until this article came out yesterday I was unaware that OCZ had an SSD product with a SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) interface. That drive is called the IBIS and OCZ describes the connector as HSDL (High Speed Data Link-an OCZ created term). Benchmarks of that device have shown it to be faster than it’s RevoDrive counterpart which uses an old style native hard drive interface (SATA). Anandtech is lobbying to dump SATA altogether even now that the most recent SATA version supports higher throughput (so called SATA 6). The legacy support built into the SATA interface is absolutely unnecessary given the speed of today’s flash memory chips and the SSDs they are designed into. SandForce has further complicated the issue by showing that their drive controllers can vastly out pace even SATA 6 drive interfaces. So as I have concluded in previous blog entries PCIe is the next logical and highest speed option after you look at all the spinning hard drive interfaces currently on the market. The next thing that needs to be addressed is the cost of designing and building these PCIe based SSD drives in the coming year. $1200 seems to be the going price for anything in the 512GB range with roughly 700MB/second data throughput. Once the price goes below the $1,0000 mark, I think the number of buyers will go up (albeit still niche consumers like PC Gamers). In the end we can only benefit by manufacturers dumping SATA for the PCIe interface and the Anandtech quote at the top of the blog, really reinforces what I’ve been observing so far this year.
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Intel lets outside chip maker into its fabs • The Register
Intel and Achronix-2 Great tastes that taste great together According to Greg Martin, a spokesman for the FPGA maker, Achronix can compete with Xilinx and Altera because it has, at 1.5GHz in its current Speedster1 line, the fastest such chips on the market. And by moving to Intel’s 22nm technology, the company could have ramped up the clock speed to 3GHz.
via Intel lets outside chip maker into its fabs • The Register.
That kind of says it all in one sentence, or two sentences in this case. The fastest FPGA on the market is quite an accomplishment unto itself. Putting that FPGA on the world’s most advanced production line and silicon wafter technology is what Andy Grove would called the 10X Effect. FPGA’s are reconfigurable processors that can have their circuits re-routed and optimized for different tasks over and over again. This is real beneficial for very small batches of processors where you need a custom design. Some of the things they can speed up is doing math or looking up things in a very large search through a database. In the past I was always curious whether they could be used a general purpose computer which could switch gears and optimize itself for different tasks. I didn’t know whether or not it would work or be worthwhile but it really seemed like there was a vast untapped reservoir of power in the FPGA.
Some super computer manufacturers have started using FPGAs as special purpose co-processors and have found immense speed-ups as a result. Oil prospecting companies have also used them to speed up analysis of seismic data and place good bets on dropping a well bore in the right spot. But price has always been a big barrier to entry as quoted in this article. $1,000 per chip is the cost. Which limits the appeal to those buyers where price is no object but speed and time are more important. The two big competitors in the field off FPGA manufacturing are Altix and Xilinx both of which design the chips but have them manufactured in other countries. This has led to FPGAs being second class citizens used older generation chip technologies on old manufacturing lines. They always had to deal with what they could get. Performance in terms of clock speed was always less too.
It was not unusual to see during the Megahertz and Gigahertz wars chip speeds increasing every month. FPGAs sped up too, but not nearly as fast. I remember seeing 200Mhz/sec and 400Mhz/sec touted as Xilinx and Altix top of the line products. With Achrnix running at 1.5Ghz, things have changed quite a bit. That’s a general purposed CPU speed in a completely customizable FPGA. This means you get speed that makes the FPGA even more useful. However, instead of going faster this article points out people would rather buy the same speed but use less electricity and generate less heat. There’s no better way to do this than to shrink the size of the circuits on the FPGA and that is the core philosophy of Intel Inc. They have just teamed up to put the Achronix FPGA on the smallest feature size production line using the most optimized, cost conscious manufacturer of silicon chips bar none.
Another point being made in the article is the market for FPGAs at this level of performance also tends to be more defense contract oriented. As a result, to maintain the level of security necessary to sell chips to this industry, the chips need to be made in the good ol’ USA and Intel doesn’t outsource anything when it comes to it’s top of the line production facilities. Everything is in Oregon, Arizona or Washington State and is guaranteed not to have any secret backdoors built in to funnel data to foreign governments.
I would love to see some University research projects start looking at FPGAs again and see if as speeds go up, power goes down if there’s a happy medium or mix of general purpose CPUs and FPGAs that might help the average joe working on his desktop, laptop or iPad. All I know is Intel entering a market will make it more competitive and hopefully lower the barrier of entry to anyone who would really like to get their hands on a useful processor that they can customize to their needs.
Carpet Bomberz Inc. 