* Posts by rch

32 publicly visible posts • joined 5 Oct 2009

Oracle accused of breaking US competition law over Solaris support

rch

Re: IBM or Redhat funding Terix to attack Oracle?

"You still want to share threads ??"

Can unused threads from one container automatically be used by another container? If not containers are missing an important aspect of virtualization.

"Trust me if what you're saying was a real problem it would have been fixed a long time ago."

One example of a real problem that has not been fixed a long time ago: Doing something with a container without a reboot. That will be fixed when Solaris 11.2 is out later this year.

Is FCoE faster than Fibre Channel? Who knows? Just run your own tests

rch

"Why not end-to-end FCoE?"

When HDS presented its "Universal Storage" they did not mention FCoE with one word. No one in the audience asked about it either. That is the status of FCoE after 7 years of Cisco hype.

My experience is that Cisco UCS is bought for many other reasons than FCoE. One of them being that the network people, or more correctly Cisco people, has had a say in the server purchase.

HP fleshes out faster, flashier 3PAR storage gear

rch

Re: "FC SAN is the the largest and fastest growing mid-range protocol"

"..dedicated FC SAN and specialized skills..."

FC is extremely simple compared to almost any IP network. That is partly the reason why we never see any sort of downtime in our SAN. The story is not so bright when it comes to IP where the ever growing complexity leads to a lot of human errors. Also it seems that the FC manufacturers(except Cisco) are not so eager to release shiny new functionality with a lot of bugs.

HP 3PAR kit wins X-Factor for mid-range storage arrays

rch

I would consider HUS-VM as midrange+ also since it is a scaled down VSP.

Sepaton launches super-duper big data-slurping deduper

rch

Re: looking to get bought by HDS?

Would probably be hard to have 99.999 % uptime with HP EVA or what they call it these days.

You won't find this in your phone: A 4GHz 12-core Power8 for badass boxes

rch
FAIL

Re: Catching up on SPARC T5

"If you want to migrate a Solaris 10 server to a Solaris 11 server, you utilize containers "

What? Are you kidding? Making a flash archive out of your Solaris 8 server and run that in a branded container on Solaris 11 is nowhere near an OS upgrade. You still run Solaris 8 but now with some trickery I wouldn't touch with a 10 foot pole in a production environment.

Running Solaris 10 in a container on Solaris 11 is just some half assed attempt to escape the huge task of doing a real upgrade. A task which is comparable to migrate to another HW/OS-platform. Which many do by the way.

"You have some reading to do. Or, you have just not understood what Solaris Containers are good for."

Right.

rch
Facepalm

Re: Catching up on SPARC T5

The reason Oracle comes out fairly well on cost in the TPC-C is that they price their software support on Oracles largest systems at $2,300 a year. I could of course ask Oracle-employee Phil how many enterprise customers run this fantasy "support" model but I don't bother since both he, I and everyone else knows it is zero. The list price for Oracle database with a few options is close to $100,000 plus a hefty yearly percentage for support. And that is per *core*.

So any customer who knows how to operate a pocket calculator ie. not a typical Oracle customer, will find that IRL software totally dwarfs the cost for hardware by a factor of 15 to 20. So the logical conclusion is to aim for most bang for the buck on your DB licenses and that is:

Fast cores -> not sparc.

High utilization of cores - > absolutely not archaic Oracle Ldoms virt

And isn't it kind of embarrassing for Oracle that a 5 year old IBM server without the benefit of flash and SSD is on par in TPC-C with the newest and biggest Oracle server with twice the cores and 8 times the number of threads and 80 Tb of flash?. An Oracle system which is so new that it isn't even available for customers yet so no one else has the chance to do a compare.

"Why after all would IBM release Power systems that don't support AIX?"

Wow, after Oracle letting most of the Sun tech die a silent death it is good to hear that the FUD department is still expanding.

What is correct here is that for some of the Power models you have one Linux-only version which is cheaper(competes with x86) and one version which runs a choice of AIX/i /linux(competition fast fading away).

"Solaris is years ahead of AIX".

OK, you are never out in the field so I will tell you how this works. If you are at Solaris 10 and want to go to Solaris 11 you cannnot upgrade. So one has to find or buy a new server, install your new OS and application there and then you have to replicate what is years of configuration from the old production server. In the end you migrate the data and do a switch. This takes weeks, is risky and has extreme cost. You can call Solaris "the most advanced operating system in the universe"(true, Sun has stated this!) all you want but it is still amateur night.

With AIX it is a 10 minute reboot on an upgraded rootvg and a few minutes of relinking Oracle and you have upgraded your major version of AIX. That is enterprise for you.

And before you start about ZFS begin by telling us why Oracle does not use that tech in any of the aforementioned benchmarks.

rch

Re: Catching up on SPARC T5

"And even software licensing is half the cost on SPARC vs Power"

Software is licensed per core and even the old Power7 has more than twice the performance per core of the new T5. So even if Oracle tries to level the field with a core factor(very similar to handicap in golf which gives the lesser players a chance to "win") IBM comes cheaper since software is by far the dominating cost of a system.

With faster cores being more useful for single threaded work(batch) and superior virtualization which utilizes the expensive software even more, IBM wins by a clear margin.

Power also runs AIX which is a real enterprise OS. You can't even upgrade a Solaris 10 system to Solaris 11. A complete reinstall is required. Welcome to the land of Windows.

Red Hat: We do clouds at one third the cost of VMware

rch

PowerVM

Power and PowerVM is a rock solid combination. Why on earth would anyone run KVM instead?

Oracle and Dell forge worldwide server alliance

rch

Re: Pay attention to SPARC folks..

##Nothing in RHEL5 / 6 and their OEL counterparts gives me any reason to think otherwise.

Well, Solaris and RHEL/OEL are strikingly similar in the sense that none of them supports upgrade of major versions. Solaris 10 to Solaris 11 requires reinstall so does RHEL5 to RHEL6. But i will give Solaris credit for the fact that a patch upgrade usually does not break things as is the case with RHEL.

A reinstall could take weeks considering all third party software, drivers and configuration. A real enterprise OS does upgrade of major version leaving all config and software working and takes 30 minutes One such example is AIX.

Big Blue takes the fight to Xeons with Power7+ entry, midrange servers

rch
Pint

Re: untitled comment

IBM uses the term Virtual Machines(VM) nowadays, like in PowerVM. They try to convince us lusers to follow that but we don't comply and still call them LPAR.

HP reels in late for LTO-6 party, yells: Tape is BA-ACK

rch

Re: 6.25TB compressed?

If all your data is incompressible the task of calculating library size should be an easy one. If you only have 10TB of data the smallest library available should suffice and even accommodate a significant growth.

I guess the manufacturers compression ratio is based on a typical mix of data. Something between zip-files on one side and empty Oracle tablespaces on the other. Ours is 1:1.6 over 800 filled tapes. 1:2 is probably a little optimistic but not far off the mark.

rch

Converged the HP way?

"HP has launched its LTO-6 tape products and rebranded all its tape hardware under the StoreEver name, saying the tape goodies are now an integrated part of its Converged Storage product set."

Does converged here mean that tape and other storage appear under the same name on a Powerpoint slide or is it any more to it?

Brocade drill-down: Replacement for Klayko in the wings

rch
Pint

Shouldn't we all run FCoE now?

In 2007 I was told that bulidng an FC SAN was madness and a dead end. Now in 2012 disk system vendors don't even bother to mention or include FCoE when they present their latest Unified storage system.

What has happened with FCoE? Still just Cisco banging on about it?

Tape lives: LTO-6 rolls out – with more than TWICE the capacity

rch
Thumb Up

Good for me

The best thing about the introduction of LTO6 is that LTO5 prices now seem to drop to a decent level. Not long ago a LTO5 cartridge was more than two and a half times more expensive than LTO4. And much the same with the drives.

Cisco: We are NOT lagging behind Brocade

rch

No Cisco 16 Gb FC?

So if I understand this correctly Cisco is not going to step up to 16 Gb FC but rather try to push us over on FCoE.

Brocade has 2-year Fibre Channel headstart on rival

rch

FcoE adpotion

According to IDC FCoE adoption will be about 1% in two years time.

Unless your goal is to be a Cisco only shop there are no reasons for switching to an expensive, complex and under performing technology. A lot of people who can operate a calculator knows that.

One selects technology for a 5 year time frame, the technology that will certainly exist in 5 years time is FC.

FCoE not so sure.

Oracle previews Solaris 11, due in November

rch
Stop

questions to the village idiot

To support more threads how come Solaris only needs a patch while AIX needs a rewrite? Care to elaborate?

AIX on Power scales to the largest Power server and always has. What is the problem? That it does not scale to a non existing machine?

If AIX scales to 1024 threads and Solaris to 512 threads how come AIX has a scaling problem and Solaris does not?

What percentage of your computer knowledge comes from actual experience?

Oracle Solaris 11 to abandon elderly servers

rch

@kebabbert

Kebabert wrote:

"Apparently you IBM supporters are very uncortomble reading this article where it says that AIX will soon be killed."

Soon? Who was a lying FUDer again?

Don't you stop and think when no one supports your outrageous lies and repeated ramblings?

When even the most die hard SUN fan and Oracle employee writes the following to you:

"BTW: Please stop talking about this "IBM stops AIX" thing"

That is diplomatic speak for "Please shut your insane mouth Kebabbert. You are an emabarrassment for all things SUN and Oracle".

http://www.c0t0d0s0.org/archives/7363-Result-of-the-How-long-do-you-wait-before-Solaris-11-gets-on-your-prod-systems.html#c224633

Tape sucks, sniffs EMC

rch

Really?

#However, rotating a tape through daily/weekyl backups will kill a tape in 10-30 jobs

I obviously have no knowledge of how you are handling your tapes but these numbers are nowhere near my or others experience nor the specifications for LTO. Frankly they seem absurd.

#$30 per tape vs $100-150 for the same capacity disk,

Since this is EMC related I challenge you to get a quote from EMC for mid-range disk(VNX) that is even in the same ballpark as this number. That is SATA in a chassis with the necessary software and support.

Your calculations also assume using a very small tape library(80 slots) where the drive/slot ratio is quite high. For large librarys slot cost is down to maybe one tenth compared to a small library and the number of tape drives needed per slot is many times lower. So your analysis does not hold for any medium to large business where tape really shines. However if you restrict your analysis to small time operations we are in agreement.

At last your tape-only scenario is nowhere near any real world setups. Most of our backup jobs touches disk even if 90% of the capacity is on tape. So those numbers of yours for concurrent backup jobs seems far fetched. I hear no one arguing that one should ONLY use tape.

Lastly I suspect that your design or your choice of backup software restricts you in using tape optimally.

Tales from the storage frontier: What's next for flash, disk and tape

rch

Tape upgrades

"Its easier to refresh disk based storage than tape. Its not just the tape drive you need to factor in the cost of tape but also the tape library and the effort in human intervention."

We have a tape library +10 years old that has gone through 4 generations of tape technology. It is simply a matter of replacing drives and tapes and let the backup software do the rest. Robotics and library slots works across generations.

Now try to do the same with your 10 year old disk system. Does your new 2 TB SAS drive fit right in there? No, it doesnt. Most of the time a mere generation change in disk systems means a forklift upgrade.

rch

Agree with James

A relevant example is comparing a large TS3500 holding an appropriate number of LTO4-drives with the same capacity of SATA from mid-range disk systems(HDS AMS or EMC VNX).

Based on quotes the cost/TB for tape is less than 20% of the cost of disk. That is excluding any compression, the space savings with tape and the huge savings in power/cooling.

Of course this calculation does not hold for small setups because the initial cost of tape is quite high. But as the environment grows I have seen customers stuck in a corner with their disk-only backup regretting that they did not plan for a tape solution from day one. And the way to plan for that is choosing the right type of backup software. The type which lets you in an optimal way exploit the strengths of both disk and tape.

HP to show off next gen EVA on the Vegas Strip

rch

eva

"2.5billion dollar acquisition to fill an arguably non-existent gap ?"

What? The gap between EVA and the OEMed HDS USP/VSP is huge. In fact I would guess most mid-range systems from other vendors would fit right in there. With room to spare.

EVA is an entry level system, with entry level reliability, entry level performance and entry level functionality. It is cheap and you get what you pay for.

Plane or train? Tape or disk?

rch

Choose both

First I don't follow this disk is always faster thing. For large sequential files ie. your big database tape gives predictable and high performance for backup and most important, your restore. Disk with deduplication is massively over hyped. What happens with your restore performance when your large database is deduplicated into numerous little pieces scattered around a few spindles of slow running SATA?

For any large setup use both disk and tape. Tape for copies. Mix of tape and disk for your primary backup.

And most important: Choose backup software that is flexible and which can leverage the advantages of both disk and tape. Do not buy software that forces you into one storage technology. Do not listen to EMC and Symantec.

IBM gloats over HP, Oracle takeouts

rch

To the lunatic

Kebabbert

# for instance, you say "even though you need four POWER6 to match two Intel Nehalem, the

# POWER6 is fastest". This clearly a lie.

Strange. I have never seen Jesper make such a blanket statement. In fact when googling it I only find Kebabbert, like a lunatic stalker, calling Jesper a liar and a FUDer all over the internet.

Why don't you provide one of your many links and back that claim up?

Oracle adds Fibre Channel to 7000

rch
Jobs Halo

Awesome

And now with *drumroll* FC support.

(SUN fanboy audience in a hysteric state of euphoria.)

Steve Jobs, because...well you know

IBM debuts new Power7 iron this week

rch
FAIL

AIX6.1

# another IBM Power upgrade means another new version of the OS to actually get the benefits of the new CPU.#

Nope. The benchmarks are done on AIX6.1 so you get the benefits of the new Power7 CPU now.

It must really suck to be a HP fanboi like you.

Intel 'Tukwila' born after long and painful labor

rch
Go

Re: Uptime Institute - What irony

I found it.

http://www.upsite.com/TUIpages/tuihome.html

Where they say:

#The Site Uptime Network’s mission is to identify, quantify and improve infrastructure availability.#

And when trying to look at the White Papers I got the following.

#Can't open.../w3w19033/web/upsite/webroot/cgi-bin\admin\templates\template_wp.tpl No such file or directory at PARSE.pm line 15.

For help, please send mail to this site's webmaster, giving this error message and the time and date of the error.#

I didn't find the webmaster but I guess a mail to HP will suffice.

Oh wait, the only servers certified there are HP Integrity servers so I assume other types are complete crap.

Big yay to Uptime Institute!

Power7 power lunch and launch next Monday

rch
Thumb Up

Good call, Jesper!

"I predict that a four socket POWER7, the upgraded version of the POWER 550 will beat the T5440 with at least a factor of 3, on the SAP STD 2 Tier benchmark."

http://www.sap.com/solutions/benchmark/sd2tier.epx?num=100

Could a hard drive dedupe data?

rch
Thumb Down

Dedupe should be as global as possible

For dedupe to be efficient you need lots of data and a lot more than a single hard drive can offer of capacity. A file server with a mechanism that can dedupe across tens or hundreds of drives will obtain a lot more space savings than what a single drive can do.

Hardware compression on the other hand, would be quite beneficial for a single drive. Tape drives do this with success as the performance of the drive in fact increases with the compressibility of the data.

Ellison whips out his Sparc TPC-C test

rch

@Halko

Halko wrote:

"Iam honestly glad I don't have to deal with Volume Managers any longer. I really like ZFS and the benefits it continues brings"

Funny then that a volume manager and not ZFS is used in this tpcc benchmark. Sun is using the dreadful Solaris Volume Manager which even Sun employees admit is a POS.

IBM readies Exadata killer

rch

A waste of time

For six years there has been no entries to the cluster version of the TPC-C benchmark. And for a very good reason. There is no interest in these systems at all. Anyone can combine a large number of servers and produce any result they wish. But these systems have very marginal use cases and do not provide the flexibility customers are looking for.

Exadata machines are just of no practical value. Like a wedding ring they only symbolize the current crush Ellison has for a particular hardware vendor. Exadata v1 was supposed to be the killer offspring of the Oracle/HP partnership. That lasted a full year. Luckily only a handful of customers were left with the abortion called Exadata1. I guess the market will have that in mind when Oracle now announces their next creation of hurriedly scrapped together SUN parts.

And now IBM has entered this silly contest.