Posts by Drummer Boy 61 publicly visible posts • joined 1 Mar 2011
I have 2 portable players, one a recorder player, and a HiFi unit.
All used until recently. As someone else mentioned the ability to record in digital, at reasonable quality was great, and I used it until recently, when I bought a Zoom portable solid state recorded.
I still have all the mixes from my old digital 8 tracks band recordings from the lates 90s/early noughties on MD.
The lack of proper computer hook up stalled their use for me.
RIP
We did a new project for a customer and bought 2 dual quad core CPU boxes, plenty of RAM and disk, and VM Server, to run a multi web server site on (open source OS).
The next project we went back to separate metal, as it was a damn sight cheaper than buying the same processing power in a bigger model up chassis.
As for the power argument that was also a little moot, as we were comparing 2 bigger boxes with dual PSUs with 4 smaller boxes running single CPUs, so the draw was not much different, when actually measured going into the boxes. The web servers also took up the same amount of rack space, so no wins there either. Other than the ease of throwing up a new VM, there's nothing in it.
On top of that we have just discovered that one of our offices is running 'x' VMs with paid for OS's and have had to spend more than £20k on additional servers lics due to uncontrolled OS deployment. That's the bit of VM world that they forget to tell you about!!
I just wish I could stand in the middle of our data centre, with no aircon and it be silent and not cooking the chips as well!!!
They must remove all fans from their product placed Dell servers, and have water cooling thereby not needing aircon either, plus they must all be equipped with SSDs.
I wish I had their computing budget!!
Especially when the pouring is from the aircom overflow tray above the large IBM piece of tin that ran 15 warehouses (the real kind, not data ones!), spread across Europe.
It took 4 days to get the system back up, and then senior management suddenly saw the sense in spending several million on a separate site system.
They lost £5m per day.
Or the 'meat' error in the same company where the clerk pushed through a quarters VAT payments a day early and lost the company IRO £3m in VAT, on an entire warehouse of fags an booze.
That's why we, when knowing we have to deal with outsourced customer IT depts, put our prices up!
The amount of grief to implement all but the simplest IT projects via an outsourcing organisation is too painful to behold!
As the saying goes - 'Accountants, know the cost of everything and the value of nothing.'!
As a Head of Dept, with a multi disciplinary background, in a telecomms software shop, I see the result of this day in and day out. We are a small organisation, so I prize (and absolutely must have) people with multidisciplinary backgrounds.
There seems to be a huge gap in this area between small/medium companies and large organisations.
It's so bad that when we install into a customers site (tier one UK Telcos) that they have to have rooms of people (firewall team , network team, server team, virtualisation team, DB team and so on) to implement a straight forward 3 tier web app. I turn up on my own and can talk rings around the lot of them!!
In my experience outsourcing also increases this problem by an order of magnitude.
So all the power of the SAN, to do snap copies, multi path redundancy and so on is replicated in a NAS. I don't think so.
We moved from direct attached storage some time ago, and never looked back. We had nothing but issue with Direct Attached SCSI disk arrays and the like, but the SANs we have have been fault tolerant and far speedier.
Don't get me wrong NAS, Direct Attached storage and so on, have their places, but a SAN serves a specific purpose in an enterprise (even a small one like mine).
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