* Posts by PlinkerTind

61 publicly visible posts • joined 25 Aug 2015

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Nexenta, SanDisk hop into bed, one thing leads to another – now they've got a 512TB flash brat

PlinkerTind

HDD crisis was fake

I hope the HDD companies gets out competed by SSDs, because the three HDD vendors form an oligopoly now, forcing us to pay noose bleeding prices for a simple HDD.

http://news.softpedia.com/news/HDD-Crisis-Was-Fake-Seagate-and-Western-Digital-Post-Big-Profits-266676.shtml

Native hypervisor coming to OpenBSD

PlinkerTind

KVM?

OpenSolaris distro called SmartOS has ported KVM. So maybe OpenBSD also can port KVM?

Seagate births 8TB triplets and a 2TB mobile nipper

PlinkerTind

HDD crisis was fake

After the Thailand floodings, the three hard disk vendors have blamed shortage to keep the prices of HDD artificially high. But this oligypoly is just constructed. In fact, the year of the shorting the HDD vendors posted record profits and shipped more disks than ever. Still the HDD prices are very high. If SSDs win and HDD die, I would not shed a tear. Just google a bit for more information

http://news.softpedia.com/news/HDD-Crisis-Was-Fake-Seagate-and-Western-Digital-Post-Big-Profits-266676.shtml

Tegile's new faster fatter flash box flings self at big data analytics

PlinkerTind

Re: it's not about the hardware

If it is ZFS, then avoid dedupe. ZFS dedup is broken and should be avoided. OpenZFS reports problems with ZFS dedupe. But ZFS compression works great. I suggest you turn off dedupe and keep compression, and then you will probably see very good performance.

Boffins promise file system that will NEVER lose data

PlinkerTind

Re: BFS was pretty good in the 90's

BTRFS has no research confirming it does catch all types of silent data corruption. ZFS is confirmed in at least two separate research papers, that zfs do catch all types of silent data corruption. Read the Wikipedia for links to research groups examining zfs. Btw, phoronix last month lost an btrfs volume, and in the forum thread there are several similar stories. I wouldn't trust btrfs, but it's your data.

PlinkerTind

Re: Does it handle

With zfs snapshots you can always rollback in time if you find out you've accidentally deleted data months later.

PlinkerTind

Re: BFS was pretty good in the 90's

Silent corruption is quite a serious problem too (besides crashing disks or power outage). You remember the old VHS cassettes or old Amiga disks? Today you can not read any on them. Why? Bit rot. Data rots over time, cosmic radiation, etc. So you need checksums to detect flipped bits. Journaling wont catch silent corruption. Only ZFS does. Read the wikipedia article on ZFS to see some research on ZFS superior data corruption protection abilities (better than everything else).

Blueprints revealed: Oracle crams Sparc M7 and InfiniBand into cheaper 'Sonoma' chips

PlinkerTind

Re: x86 small workloads

".....Hmmm, ever heard of RAC?...."

Oracle RAC is mainly for uptime. Everything is mirrored on two identical servers. Sure, you can also distribute different database tables among the mirrored servers - which is what Oracle calls "partitioning" but you can not have a cluster of nodes handling the same database table rows. That would be very inefficient to sync data among nodes with roll back etc

PlinkerTind

Re: Phil 4 == last time I checked

Solaris vs Linux on same hardware, typically shows that Solaris has superior performance.

PlinkerTind

Re: x86 small workloads

"......All this is highly interesting analysis .... in a world where workloads cannot execute (optimally or at all) without a vertically scaled 32 socket system. One might find such a world, somewhere in the multiverse. Or said 32S system might be called the Glooper v2 and installed in the Royal Bank of Ankh-Morpork....."

Typically business entréprise workloads such as databases can only be run on a single fat scale-up server such as huge Unix boxes. It is extremely difficult to do heavy transaction processing on a cluster, syncing data integrity across all nodes, rollback, etc. No one has done it. That is the reason you must pay $$$$ for Oracle database on a huge Unix instead of byuing a cheap clustered database on x86 that can beat oracle. Clustered databases don't exist, too difficult to create.

Sure, there are Datawarehouses that are clustered but they are only used for reading data and analyzing so they don't have to save data and guarantee data across many nodes. They are not used to store and edit data. There are clustered databases such as SAP Hana but these are typically RAM databases only used for reading and analyzing, ie used as Datawarehouse. You don't store data in ram. SAP Hana also has a database for storing data, transactions, but guess what? It only runs on scale up 16 socket server called UV300H. No cluster. The SGI UV2000 cluster runs a database TimesTen at USPS, but it is only used for analyses, detect fraud. It has a real database for storing data too.

In short, there are no clustered databases used to store transactions. They are all used for reading and analyzing data. The only type of servers for databases storing transactions are scale up servers, ideally with 32-sockets or more.

PlinkerTind

x86 small workloads

"...If you were choosing a CPU platform, would you choose:

d) SPARC. It has ummmmmm

The years of x86 vs SPARC/Itanium/POWER are over..."

It is true that x86 works fine today. If you have smallish workloads. An Intel Xeon E7v3 can cope with some nice workloads. Small that is. If you need to tackle the largest workloads, there are no other choice than using Unix such as POWER or SPARC.

The largest x86 business server for Enterprise has until recently been 8-sockets. Just recently there was a 16-socket x86 server released. 16-socket x86 servers are immature and scale badly. And guess what? 64-socket SPARC server beats 8/16-socket x86 servers.

For instance, the best SAP score is 320.000 saps for x86 with the brand new Xeon E7v3. The top record? It's SPARC with 844.000 saps, it's SPARC all the way. There is no way an x86 can come much higher than 300.000 saps. SGI UV2000 with 10.000s of cores can not do it, as it is a cluster. And scale-out clusters can not run business software. You need a scale-up server with as many as 32-sockets or 64-sockets. Decades ago there was an 144-socket SPARC server.

So, yes, if you only have smallish workloads, x86 is fine and you dont need Unix. If you have extreme demands, only Unix will do. The biggest POWER8 server, the E880, has only 16-sockets and 16TB RAM, so maybe it will be considered midsize. The largest SPARC servers have 64-sockets and 32TB (and soon 64TB), and are from Fujitsu, the mighty M10-4S. So the only high end business servers with >32-sockets out there, are SPARC. POWER8 maxes out at 16-sockets. Intel Xeon maxes out at 16-sockets as well (but the new 16-socket x86 likely has awfully bad performance as neither Windows nor Linux has ever scaled this high earlier).

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