Posts by damnyankee

The D in Systemd is for Directories: Poettering says his creation will phone /home in future

And yet- NetworkManager is mandatory on EL8, and RedHat's blog covered how AWESOME IT IS FOR SERVERS.

Here's the thing: In spite of that blog entry, and all of RedHat's cheerleading, I can't conceive of a genuine use case where I want a server to have multiple possible configurations for a single network interface and to choose between them.

Systemd jacking around with fstab is well documented.

systemd also, and this is my favorite, consistently loses track of if services are running, leaving them in a state where they can neither be started nor stopped, because systemd failed at the one thing it should theoretically do.

"A Problem Lennart had once on his laptop" seems to be the entire use case for all of his projects, and RedHat seems hellbent on forcing those as dependencies everywhere and deploying them on something that is supposed to be "Enterprise Linux"

HPE downs Nimble-ful of HCI, lobs third hyperconverged system into its portfolio

What I REALLY don't understand is the Nimble chassis was literally designed to have plug in compute blades in a "hyperConverged" form factor. Why would they go this route and have it outside the chassis, leaving the giant piles of wasted space in the Nimble chassis, when it doesn't actually add anything over a Nimble + DL360 + competent engineer?

Microsoft doles out PowerShell 7 preview. It works. People like it. We can't find a reason to be sarcastic about it

Most Unix utilities won't work on Windows- win32 , .net, wpf, and every other interface windows exposes isn't a text file. Unix is all about parsing text files. Powershell is designed to hook into and expose messy API in a useful way

Deep sigh... Servers get teaser trailers now

Or an M series successor?

Methinks this is more likely to be a successor to M series as that chassis is getting long in the tooth and HPE is pushing Synergy "composable" as the c series replacement, aka the M series closest competitor

Lenovo intros monster disk box

Seagate by any other name

This is just a Seagate 2584- PDF Warning-https://www.seagate.com/files/www-content/product-content/xyratex-branded/storage-application-platforms/en-us/docs/modular-enclosures-sp2584-datasheet.pdf

Of supermarkets, Volkswagen and the future of Dell-EMC

I expect Dell to kill of the PowerVault iSCSI/FC line, while retaining the SAS powervault lineup. Between Unity, Dell SCv2000, and small PS arrays, OEMed NetApp E-series won't have a place whenever that reselling agreement is up for renewal.

Most of the EMC portfolio would be relatively easy to move to Dell tin. Isilon, Atmos, RecoverPoint and others all run on commodity x86 chassis as it is, and it's just a matter of swapping their current OEM (Lenovo? I recall something about a Lenovo deal, though some of it was still Dell), Isilon used to use Dell R710s, Recoverpoint was R620s, so I expect that to be a quick and painless change over at the next product refresh.

Bargaining powers with drive suppliers will also improve, as the combined Dell/EMC will almost certainly be the single biggest purchaser of disk capacity.

SC/Unity hardware unification may take a bit longer, though the SC4000 chassis might be a decent contender.

I just hope they start using Dell rails instead of the shite VNX ships with.

EMC now spruiking PCs and thin clients, not Compellent

Color me confused. Dell offers an all flash Compellent, they've brought compellent into new market niches, they've intro'd eql-compellent replication, it's now vsphere metro-cluster capable, and they have a scale out NAS from another acquisition that they've integrated. Of course post merger they'll kill EQL, it doesn't really have a place even in Dell's current portfolio now that controller hardware is improved and 10GbE is available.

Don't get me wrong, I like 3PAR, but I can play this game and hammer them over tech choices, and to one up, actually be factual!

3PAR has ridiculously tiny LUN limits! who has a 16TB cap in 2016?

3PAR has no way to cache writes beyond DRAM caching, failing against VNX FAST CACHE

3PAR has no way to target writes to higher tier disk, failing against Compellent's write to RAID 10 policy.

3PAR doesn't have intra-flash tiering!

3PAR sucks in a write heavy environment!

StoreServ's ASIC architect must have one heckuva crystal ball

Re: ASIC halves CPU alright

Of course. I was just pointing out that based on the numbers they provided, the ASIC comes out behind a high-core Xeon. Those numbers could be wrong, or need to be revised, or don't take into account the full picture, but their "ASIC=X MBps, Xeon=Y MBps" math means pretty much any Xeon would be superior to the ASIC, and if I were HPE, I wouldn't be citing those numbers as a positive because if you can multiply you go "wait a minute..."

ASIC halves CPU alright

I would hope the ASIC more than halves necessary CPU utilization, as they essentially take a 2 socket system, run 1 socket and 1 ASIC. This halves their PCIe lanes, and their CPU core counts.

If the ASIC does 800MBps, and a xeon core does 150MBps... you come out ahead with >6 core Xeon. Given there are 22/24 core Xeons now, this particular spec does not pan out in their favor and is not something I would advertise overly much

ASIC halves CPU alright

if 1 ASIC does 800MBps, and 1 Xeon core does 150MBps, then the ASIC does not come out ahead in that calculation. There are at least 22 core Xeon chips (maybe 24?). The break-even point is 5.3 cores.

I wouldn't advertise that particular metric if I were HPE. Not to say there aren't other advantages to the ASIC, but the cited numbers don't look good for them ot anyone with the ability to multiply.

Dell looking at higher debt mountain to buy EMC

Chart is incomplete at best

and disingenuous at worst. Dell DR series appliances will be culled eventually, but they'll roll the Ocarina Dedupe/compression patents into the Data Domain gear as much as possible. The entry level array leaves out the Dell Compellent v2000 series, and the VNXe, ignoring that PowerVault (a NetApp E-series product) was going to be culled anyway because it's an OEM deal and Dell really hates cutting NetApp checks for a shitty product.

Dell's filer products are better than the Celerra portions of VNX unified/VNX Gateway, and so if Dell are smart, they'll toss that portion of VNX for the Dell (I believe it was either RNA or spinnaker?) filer code.

EMC also have Avamar, and Dell have been looking to ditch AppAssure/Rapid Recovery as quickly as possible in the face of massive code problems they didn't see during the acquisition. It's just starting to improve as they switched its development to the old Quest team instead of the AppAssure team who just don't know how to build a data storage backend. Dell vRanger & NetVault are in a precarious position in the face of Networker & Avamar, though NetVault appears to have a decent core.

Dell-EMC Federation, stardate 11254.7: What about the storage?

Some of this is simple

Equallogic was already on its way out from Dell. They will likely also kill their PowerVault line of rebadged Netapp E-series (again, already in progress). That plan will progress as planned, potentially slightly accelerated. Dell Fluid FS seems to be in some ways superior to VNX Unified/Gateway, and so may shuffle in there, as it's already backend agnostic. Dell has nothing to compete with VMAX, Isilon, DSSD, or Xtremio, so no real changes there. EMC is used to and comfortable with some product overlap (EMC Networker vs Avamar, Isilon/VNX file, LARGE VNX and VMAXe, or going backwards, Clariion & Celerra iSCSI).

VPLEX will be the real hero here, frontending VNX, Compellent, & VMAX arrays and providing a huge boost in resiliency to the Dell arrays over Live Volume.

The Dell DR appliances will complement the Data Domain ones, and I expect they'll take some of the Ocarina patents and run with them, eventually merging the product lines. On the software side, the Dell backup products are probably not long for this world, due to poor customer feedback. I'd expect some of their features to be rolled into other products and then they'll be quietly killed, or they'll be sold off to help fund the acquisition, as has been rumored before.

KeysForge will give you printable key blueprints using a photo of a lock

Limited attack impact

This is really rather limited in scope, most keyways for key blanks are standard in the US, your options are pretty much schlage or kwikset. Those 2 keys will get you into 99% of locks. unless it's something more obscure like a medeco (which requires pin rotation and thus this attack is useless), or some other restricted key blank system, of which there are very few in use outside of high security government installations, a photo of the keyway would do you very little good.