No, because the surface doesn't allow for multitasking. It doesn't allow you to install any real applications besides the Office app - Metro apps don't count, without something like RetroUI I can't break them out into multi-tasking capable items - oh, and the Surface RT doesn't give me 12 hours of usable anything.

Next.

What I want is a 13" Thinkpad with both nipple and an old-school trackpad (with real fucking buttons). Instead of running off of Intel's latest every-so-slightly-rebadged combustible lemons, they could power the whole damned thing off of something wiht as much oomph as my HTC Desire. Run Windows 7 on it, give it an mSATA SSD. Give it a decent screen res - 1440x900 minimum, gov! - and then pack every remaining millimetre with battery.

Actually, ideal ideal wouldn't have Windows 7, it would have Android, modified wiht the Wind River windowing system. It would be a hybrid (battery in both the keyboard section and the tablet section) and it would work as well with touch, mouse, keyboard or stylus. It would not treat ANY of these inputs as second class. It would support them all as separate events. It would support context menus as well as fondling, keyboard shortcuts as well as WACOM multi-pressure levels.

What it wouldn't do is lock me down, limit me or otherwise force me into bullshit compromises like "33/66" or "fondle, stab and poke". It would let me work how I want to work, but give me the option to work in newer workflows when and where appropriate.

It would be a Fujitsu P1510D, but made out of silicon that was nearly a decade newer. It would be larger, with more batter space. And it would be fucking excellent.

"Fucking excellent" in no way describes the Surface tablets, and for the love of merciful monkey gods, it in no way describes the horrid abomination that is Windows RT. It does, however, describe that venerable old Fujitsu P1510d; an idea before it's time...and simply lacking the battery life to have made it truly game changing.

Today, however, we could build it. We have the technology. We don't, however, have the will. A shame.

Re: Couldn't you just charge your phones overnight, too?

No. Internet access in San Francisco is essentially a fraud. Cellular coverage is made out of failure and the tears of little girls. Your cell phones have to expend 3x the power here as back home in Edmonton just to hit the tower, and you have to push a steady stream of virgins into the nearest lava flow in order to eek out a few measly megabytes of data from the telecommunications companies that extort "the most powerful nation on earth."

Even swapping SIMs from device to device, the power cost of keeping the cell tower reachable, of popping up a MiFi point so your netbook/tablet/whatever can be tethered and then using the GPS to navigate around the tentacle monster that is the bay area travel infrastructure you are going to flatten those batteries right quick.

Native San Franciscans might have adapted to the fact that this entire city wavers betwen "designed with malicious intent" and "designed by an autistic child with crayons," but visitors simply need to get from A to B while Getting Shit Done. That means relying on those smartphones in such a manner that - at best - you get 4-6 hours out of the little buggers, and that's having tried more models of the things than you can shake a stick at.

I fear charging my cell phones are an absolutely nessecary part not only of "getting shit done," but "finding my hotel afterwards" and even "not dying a horrible, gristly death by knowing somewhat in advance what the hell lane I am supposed to be in."

That, of course, is if and when the maps application is doing it's job and telling me to "turn right" directly off an onramp. But that's a rant for later…

Re: "What exactly is Puppet selling that VMWare wants"

Or you could just read the rather comprehensive review I wrote about System Center 2012. And I dispute your TCO claims in their entirety.

"What exactly is Puppet selling that VMWare wants"

Maybe I can help here, as I recall having conversations with both VMware and Puppet Labs about how both of them should get quite buddy buddy, so the chances are at least some of my arguments hold.

Puppet provides the ability to provision heterogenous environments. VMware is aware of a growing sense of paranoia amongst datacenter operators about getting locked into a single-vendor situation with regards to hypervisors + management tools, much as many fell victim to Microsoft. It is quite frankly something that VMware hears directly from partners and large customers, and is the number one reason for Hyper-V uptake in enterprise datacenters. Diversity equals bargaining power, and Puppet provides some of the best tools for ensuring that diversity.

More to the point, Puppet is focused on Openstack/Cloudstack, with passable (but limited) Microsoft anything support. VMware is quite okay competing with these open source alternatives, as VMware – despite the gnashing of teeth every time I use the term – is quite perfectly aware that the hypervisor has become commoditised. VMware believes strongly that their value proposition is their management tools, and third party ecosystem/integration. They believe they can compete against "free" by creating something easier to use, more convenient and better at automation. I believe they are 10% correct in this assessment.

Puppet is exploding. Like Spiceworks, it has a rapidly expanding community and uptake doesn't look set to stop. If VMware can get Puppet to be a great tool for Openstack, Cloudstack and VMware, with Microsoft's support lagging behind, then individuals and organisations seeking heterogenous support through Puppet will be turning to the open source alternatives and not Microsoft. VMware can have a voice in the development of these opensource projects. Microsoft is a true threat, if it starts seeing real adoption.

Beyond this, lots of companies still run physical equipment. VMware is big on the idea of managing things as a "single pane of glass." Puppet already manages devices that VMware doesn't have the ability to manage. The two companies combined could give you control over your entire datacenter; storage, networking, virtualisation stack, operating systems, applications, hybrid-cloud migration, cloud services provisioning, inventory and asset tracking and more.

Combined, Puppet and VMware would be very – very – close to being able to take on Microsoft's entire System Center suite of products. In fact, I'd argue that they need a good discovery package, mobile device management suite, a backup suite and an anti-malware suite and they're done. They could pip Microsoft by adding a simulation tool.

Now, interestingly, I have been working with a group of companies over the past six months that may well be able to come together to provide this. Consider Spiceworks; they offer network discovery and (very soon) mobile device management. Unitrends is a contender for the top enterprise-class backup startup and CloudPhysics is a simulation company with strong VMware ties that I personally believe will completely change the way we collectively approach network design, provisioning and even root cause analysis of errors. Toss Zenoss in there for a great monitoring package, and I'd buy that stack over Microsoft any day.

I've been busting my ass for 6 months to get as many of these folks in the same room as possible. (In fact, I'm in San Francisco next week as part of said mission.) I can't tell you how happy I am that VMware and Puppet managed to get all cozy; deep VMware integration has been something I've wanted out of Puppet for ages.

I abhor Microsoft's byzantine – and frankly batshit insane – licensing. I'm also tired of Microsoft's "just wait until the next service pack" bullshit on getting fixes (or what I would consider mandatory features) integrated into their products…only to have that "service pack" become yet another product that I have to license one more time at the cost of $way_too_much.

If we can get a third-party alliance set up of third-party vendors, then we might finally, mercifully see a price and innovation war occur in the enterprise management space. Something that hasn’t' really happened yet. Symantec can see it coming. That's part of why they want to divest themselves of Altiris. They know damned well they can't go toe-to-toe with Microsoft, VMware and Dell in an all out fight for dominance.

As to why VMware is choosing Puppet over Chef, I can answer that for you too. Chef is a very "script-heavy" offering. It is really a developers tool for controlling equipment and environments. Puppet can use scripts…but that's not remotely its focus. Puppet is about creating known-good states, and then enforcing the state. You set up a "state" for an operating system or system, and puppet handles whatever needs to be handled to ensure that state is set, or it screams at you that it can't.

Chef relies on the script writer to know his stuff, do a lot of testing and then deploy live. It is very much an extension of the traditional, plodding, "fortress IT" style practice of systems administration that marked the Unix era.

The entire ethos of Puppet – define a state and enforce it – fits very neatly into VMware's vision of the software defined, dynamic datacenter. Puppet is about trusting the tool to abstract the details of administration away. VMware is about automating your datacenter such that a smaller number of sysadmins can accomplish more. Fast, dynamic, every changing.

Chef works well in a world where you only need to make changes to your software or deployed applications once or twice a year. Puppet – and VMware – envision a world where change is a part of daily life; as natural as breathing.

So what does Puppet offer VMware? Rather a lot I'd say.

Re: First-degree burns treatment

"switching to real hardware"...what?

You mean you still run stuff that isn't virtualised in production?

Re: About the clicky admin articles

As soon as I get good 10Gbase-T hardware, I'll review it. I should point out that a review of the Supermicro and Dell switches is coming up here soon (i am just putting it in to the CMS now) and that the Dell switch in question does have a 10Gbase-T variant. (Albeit slightly more expensive.)

That said, if and when you have requests for things to review/do a how-to on etc...ask! I am (naturally) limited by what I can get my hands on...but I've been working hard to build a lab that will allow me the flexibility to do reviews on damned near anything. Maybe I can meet the request, maybe I can't...but I promise you, if readers ask for it, I'll do my level best to get hold of it and put it to the test.

You can also help by providing suggestions as to what tests you would like to see run. Contrary to popular opinion – especially those of the berate, denigrate and wail like spoilt chillum crowd – I do this "reviewing products" thing mostly to try to help. Not every article will be thought provoking or insightful to the totality of the readership, but I do hope that each one provides some benefit to at least some of them.

In the meantime, I'll poke some 10Gbase-T vendors and see if any are willing to have their switchen wrung.

Re: Interesting article

It's amazing how often commenters get bent out of shape by a title, instead of the comment. (Or by two paragraphs of an article, ignoring the entire rest of it.) *shrug*

That said...I now have sexy testbed. I have requests from folks to test openstack and cloudstack. I already have plans to test Hyper-V and VMware. I will add your recommendations of Proxmox and SmartOS to me list. What's the point of putting such a lab together if I can't test the things on it that matter to our readers?

The Fat Twin arrived. I was expecting it to come with a variety of configurations, apparently that didn't quite happen. Instead, I have 4 identical nodes: 2x Xeon E5 2680 /w 128GB RAM and 2x 480GB SSD. Should be good enough to give any of the virty stacks a run for thier money, no?

When the petty cash refills, I'll fill the other 4 nodes.

Re: how about simply buying a NAS?

Show me the QNAP box that can FEED that 10GbE interface. None of them seem to be able to provide 1280 megaBYTES per second of storage movement...

Re: SAN is dead

Gluster is on my list for later in the year. And RAID cards have some distinct advantages over software RAID. Specifically when you start pushing 1000 megaBYTES per second or higher through them. Software RAID is fine if you RAIN. It isn't so fine if you only have the equipment to build a single, reliable and eye-bleedingly fast storage node.

*shrug*

Re: OTT

It's a testbed that needs licensing the instant I have to maintain "test" (or as we often refer to them "sandbox") copies of running instances. For example, my largest client has 250 VMs in production, among them there are 23 different "classes" of VMs. Each of these classes needs to exist in my testlab environment so that I can do things like test patches, the latest version upgrades to software and more.

In fact, this testlab just received its last components in the mail last night and they have already been pressed into service. That said, I use a single datacenter license to achieve this, and the rest of my lab runs Linux, as this is now the bulk of what I have deployed, and thus the bulk of what I have to test.

As for running the rest on Azure: no. For one thing, the cost of storage is too much, and my test labs often require the ability to access a significant subset of the live data for testing. For another, the laws of my nation do not allow me to store personally identifiable information on countries without robust civil liberties and privacy protections. That means the US is out, and trans-Atlantic data flinging in order to store in the EU is expensive.

I'll build my own private "cloud" thanks, and run my testlab requirements – and those I need to test the builds my clients have – on it. It's far, far cheaper over the expected 6 year life of this equipment.

@DS1

Yes, it is a lot fantasy. It is a Bonkers test lab, after all. But the stuff I detailed in Part 1 is realistic and achievable. The Kingston Hyper-X array should also be realistically achievable for most, if the "high speed storage" part of the equation appeals to you.

The 10Gbit network with added WTF was built as much to see "can it be done" as anything. My hope is that having such a test lab lying around will allow me to do better reviews on more relevant equipment for The Register than I would otherwise be able to do.

Do we want to limit ourselves to reviews of the latest iPhone or consumer home NAS? Or do we want to occasionally tear apart some bit of midsize gear or even enterprise kit? If we do want to be able to throw that more powerful equipment on the bench and give it a run for its money, someone is going to have to build a bonkers test lab. So I did.

@Simon Hobson

My testlab will ultimately run Windows, VMware, Openstack, Cloudstack, various flavours of Linux and several BSD disties that I am playing with. Don't worry though, I'm totally a paid shill for [corporation_you_hate] as well as a religious freetard while simultainiously lacking any understanding of anything because I don't do what [commenter_1] says AND what [commenters2-n] say, despite the fact that they all completely disagree.

I write things on the internet, getting on 3 years now. After a time, it's all déjà moo. The handles attached to the blocks of text may vary, but the level and stinkyness of the bullshit contained in that text does not.

That said, the chief grand poohbah around here gave me a gold commenttard badge, and that is a great thing. It comes with an ignore button. The SNR has increased dramatically since I started using it.

Re: 2.5" bays for 5.25" holes.

Seriously; we had the Icy Docks on order at the local computer retailer. They were all set to arrive...then didn't. Oh, but they'll arrive! They'll be here in time for your review! Nope. Really should have bought from an etailier instead of waiting for the local retailer to get kit in, but ya can't win 'em all...

Re: Bypassing the usual flamewars...

Are you asking about the UPS from the dark ages, or the terrible IBM rack? Or the built-like-a-tank-will-never-ever-ever-ever-ever-die orange chair of doom?

Don't question the chair. The chair is indestructible. (And it has an equipment seatbelt.)

For the record though, we spent all night racking stuff last night...

There has been a lot of questions about this. I have put it on my list, I promise you. :)

@Jeff11

I did; but I couldn't get anyone to send me Infiniband gear, nor are there local suppliers that offer it cheap. So if I did invest, it would a) be stupid expensive and b) I would be in deep ca-ca-poo-poo if anything whet splor and I needed a spare ASAP.

I call this my "test lab," but I should point out that my "live" corprate VMs occupy 1/5th of this particular setup at any given time. (Actually, they fit just fine in a single Eris 1 node, but that's a whole other story...)

I would love to test, review and otherwise learn about infiniband. With luck, some will show up on my doorstep one day.

@Loyal Commenter

Did...did you just hipster steampunk?

I need a lie down...

Re: Quick...

If Eadon and RICHTO post in the same thread, do they annihilate eachother?

Re: Weekend disinfecting Linux?

The Mac was infected via Java. *sigh*.

I have no idea what got the Ubuntu; it was rooted and compromised beyond my ability to repair, I ended up pulling the data and burnign the system. The Fedora was compromised becuase some twunt refused to update the system, and the dude walked in through an SSH bug. (Easy to guess user password +running SSH on default port makes me sad.)

Re: But...

If you're counting on surface tension to create a spheroid, you're talking abotu hollowing out Vesta or Orcus to start, methinks. Not Apophis.

Re: But...

@Neil Barnes

You missed the bit where you have to spin the asteroid on its axis really, really fast, so as to cause the expanding steam to push the asteroid out into a spherical shape.

Re: Eadon's Tough New Security Plan

@Eadon

Having spent the majority of my weekend disinfecting two Linux VMs - one Fedora Core 12, the other Ubuntu 8.4 - as well as a Mac (Leopard) ...

...fuck you, sir. Those platforms do indeed need anti-malware. More to the point, they need anti malware that doesn't suck. Windows needs it more urgently, but all platforms are suffering.

Oh, and I personally got hit by that Internet Explorer 0-day on Saturday too. I use IE once in 3 months...BAM! Sirefef. Well thanks, Microsoft. And a great pick "up yer jacksies" to whatever assclown wrote the damned viruses in the first place, too.

Re: Bah!

@Stevie I use Windows every day. I use Linux every day. I bash (and praise) both as I see fit. I qualify as loud.

Cookie?

@JDX Linux can go toe-to-toe on many things...but I honestly think MS pipped Linux on the storage front this go-round. And Hyper-V is more or less a match for anything Linux can offer...but with far superior management tools available from both Microsoft and third parties.

Really, the question is: do you manage everything from the command line, read all reports encoded, as text or as HTML...or do you have your staff doing more than just one task? If your staff do more than just the one thing (virtualisation admin, storage admin, network admin, etc) then the reality of the world is that they won't have time to memorise all the commandline details that would be required to do their jobs efficiently using that interface.

Chances are then that a GUI for day-to-day monitoring, maintenance and minor changes are better suited for these individuals, with scripting automating the bulk of the regular work. (Scripting used solely for automation can be done with the textbook beside you, it doesn't require rote memorisation of all the commands.)

In the latter case, good management tools matter. It is here that Microsoft has consistently been ahead of Linux. Is the commandline – and specifically the Linux commandline – better than Microsoft's offerings? Hell fucking yes. If you live and breathe commandline for administration of your daily tasks, accept no substitutes!

But there are rather a lot of admins out there who don't be narrowly focused experts. For them, good management – and monitoring – tools matter. MS did a good job on that here. (RSAT, SCVMM, SCOM, etc.) Credit where it's due.

Re: @Trevor_Pott - Still not getting it

@Steve Todd; the same deals are very likely available to everyone. Assuming they sit down to the negotiating table. But all negotiations start at the same place. That's FRAND.

The standards bodies knew exactly what Moto charged for those patents when they chose them. Moto has been remarkably consistent about their patent licensing for ages. This isn't some new change on their part. It is Apple, Microsoft et all choosing to litigate as a means of attempting to restrict competition rather than bothering to negotiate, licence and compete on a level playing field.

Apple, Microsoft et al are basically trying to turn FRAND patents into something worthless. Nobody is going to bother to put forth a patent to a FRAND pool – or even participate in a standards process – if FRAND patents basically mean "nobody has to pay anything, because they can simply refuse to negotiate and then outspend you." Instead, companies that actually do the real innovation – making the products and technologies that should be in FRAND in the first place – will bide their time, not announce that thye have relevant patents to the standards process, then whack everyone after the patent is settled. (By not having taken part, they aren't subject to the "call for patents" and certainly can whack people who use similar-enough items to those which they hold patents on.)

I suspect that Microsoft and Apple are trying very hard to kill the standardisation process. It is part of a wider anticompetitive strategy no different than their wailing and gnashing of teeth about Google's supposed "abuse of search monopoly" which was rightly stepped on. (Or blowing up Google's dropping of the ball regarding Windows Phone and maps, which isn't – and wasn't – nearly the scandal Microsoft's PR folks tried to make it into.)

If you wanted to complain about someone committing to a patent pool at a given rate with a FRAND patent, then changing their mind…go right ahead. That isn't what Moto is doing. Moto is charging an outrageous sum for the FRAND patents they hold; but it is the same sum they ask of everyone, and they have been asking it for a good long while.

Apple and Microsoft are not even the first to get right uppity about it, though Apple's "we're not going to negotiate, we're just going to go straight to the judge and whine like a blinkered bitch" is a novel approach to the whole process.

So really, we can go round on this. You seem to be under the impression that Moto can't ask "a ludicrously large sack of money" up front. I am trying to tell you that is bullshit: they can. They simply have to ask for the same amount from all. They do not have to be cheap. They ideally should be, however nothing compells them to be. And that, as they say, is get of my goddamned lawn.

Wheeeeee...

Business!

Re: @Trevor_Pott - Still not getting it

@Steve Todd you are completely incorrect.

The whole point of FRAND is to level the playing field. As long as the same stating offer is made to all players, then the amount can be negotiated lower. They only have to prove they started negotiations at the same point. There is no requirement to prove that others were required to pay that starting request. (Which, IIRC, they actually have proven in court as part of Apple's discovery at least once.)

Again; you are basically saying that the value of cross licensing is zero. All that matters is the "sticker price." That is A) bullshit and B) not upheld by current law. Sorry.

Re: @Trevor_Pott

@Doogie1 if you approached FRAND with no biases and preconceptions you would realise that the licenceing concept as defined and as in use by most companies today is actually quite open ended and subject to a lot of interpretation. It isn't defined law but rather more of an industry-wide "gentleman's agreement" that pretty much everyone pisses on when they feel like it. From the licensors to the (especially in mobile) the licences.

They are all pretty much shit in the mobile game. Apple, Moto, Microsoft and more. Not a bloody one of them has the moral high ground here. That said, nobody has been able to present any evidence that Moto breached the letter of the "agreement" that is FRAND. They offered Apple the same deal they offer everyone. The fact that Apple - and some commenters - don't like that deal isn't relevant at all. It is the point from which negotiations are supposed to start. The same point everyone starts from.

Even the $30,000 car manufacturer. (And yes, people have entered negotiations with car manufacturers from a "% of the MSRP of the shipping unit" standpoint.)

That is what FRAND is. Not "cheap" but rather "level playing field."

Re: @Steve Todd

"Non Discriminatory"

I don't think that means what you think it means. Certainly in the context of FRAND. FRAND is nothing to do with not discriminating based on device. It has everything to do with not discriminating based on company. FRAND is about offering potential licensees equal access to the patents; everyone playing by the same rules.

Nowhere does it state that it must be a flat rate per device. In fact there are many FRAND devices that discriminate quite directly per device; X amount per DVD player, Y amount per desktop, Z amount per mobile and so forth. The critical bit is that if 5 mobile companies all come to you and say "I want to use your patents in my device" you tell them "it will cost you X per device," and X will be the same. There is nothing in FRAND rules about a % versus a fixed amount. Both have been used by various companies at various times.

Even if you want to go about it from a moral perspective, you can easily argue the "fairness" and "non-discriminatory" nature of a % versus a fixed amount. It all depends on which biases and preconceptions you approach the argument with. In the case of FRAND, the only real issue is "the same standards are applied to all licences."

FRAND != cheap. FRAND = "level playing field."

@Steve Todd

Why should Motorola divulge the rates that other companies have negotiated, especially when those rates likely include cross-licensing agreements which will affect the price. All Motorola has to do is demonstrate that its beginning negotiations positions has always been 2.5% to all players, a position which - from there - it generally negotiates.

2.5% of the value of the device is the value Motorola intends to see for it's patents. That does not have to be in raw cash. It is often largely compensated for by cross-licenceing, with a little bit of cash on the side. That is fair, reasonable and non discriminatory. Note that FRAND does not mean cheap. It means "everyone who wants access to these patents must be able to licence them" and "everyone who wants access to them has to play by roughly the same rules."

Moto offered Apple a licence, under the same terms it has offered every other company who wanted access to those patents. Rather than negotiate from this starting position, Apple said "up yours" and ran to court, the ITC, and every other body it could.

"Mommy said no, so I am going to ask Daddy."

Spoilt child, sirrah. Naught but a spoilt child.

Re: Same same

Prove that Moto is trying to discriminate. Seems to me they offer everyone the same terms. Where is your evidence?

@Mark C Casey

Absolute Rubbish. The single greatest episode of Star Trek ever is "The Void," Voyager 7x15. It defines the "why" behind the Federation, and explains the underlying ethics that came to mean so much to trekkies everywhere.

In The Pale Moonlight is a great example of cynicism and "the need of the many." The Void reminds us that some principles are worth sacrificing everything for. It is for this reason that I prefer Star Trek to Babylon 5 and other such "dark" shows. Even DS9 – dark and gritty by Trek standards – maintained the core values and ethics of the Federation. Call me a dreamer if you must, but I believe in those ideals. "The Void" is, to me, an illustration of why.

Lies.

Badda Bing, Badda Bang. Accept no substitutes.

Inter Arma Enim Silent Leges has to be number 2.

Re: Deep Space Nine may not go down in the history books as the greatest of the TV Treks

Damned right. Fantastic regular guests. Martok, Weyoun/Brunt, Garak, Damar...

I miss that tough little ship, her floating hubcap garage and the madmen that crewed her.

Re: Trevor, you need to move in to a first world country away from Canada...

Also - and I double checked - there was a whole damned paragraph about "10GbE on the motherboard." In fact, it was followed by a discussion about the difference between LOM and switch PHY pricing and availability.

Dude, les Q?

Re: Cisco has competition

From experience, you can *flatten* a Supermicro 24-port 10GbE switch, flooding each port with traffic and the damned thing doesn't blink. (Review on that, and a Dell 10GbE switch coming *very* soon.) I know I'll catch hell from a bunch of dark-age scratching-shit-on-walls-with-sticks types, but...

...fuck Cisco.

Maybe the make great core switches for people who need to move around terabits at internet cores. I wouldn't know; I don't play there. But damned if I can see a use for them in my datacenter. Give me Dell or Supermicro any day. That's before we even get into arguments about Cisco switches and their world-endingly shitty multicast performance!

Bring on openflow, ladies and gentlemen. It's time to relegate the proprietary switching solutions to the niche they belong to. Cisco may built "better" gear - for specific values of "better - but most people don't need "0 jitter, ultra-low latency, blah, blah, blah." And if they did, they'd buy Arista anyways. Most people just need cheap, bulk throughput.

For that, you need people selling solid non-blocking switches. Not Cisco's cruft. Let the upvotes fly, folks! You know you want to. Your CCNA training demands it!

That depends on a number of things. There is a war brewing between several vendors on 10GbE pricing. It could happen tomorrow. It likely won't happen until Haswell drops. Expect Haswell to ship with 10GbE on the desktop and 1Gbit LOMs on servers to become nonexsistant.

40GbE switching silicon is coming down to the point where you can make serious margin off of it, and QSFP cables are dropping to reasonable rates as well. Switching manufacturers are going to be forced to drop 10GbE prices around the Haswell timeframe – probably with no more than a 6 month lag – if they don't want shops to bulk ignore 10GbE and move directly to 40GbE.

That would be rather disastrous for switch manufacturers, and yields on 100GbE PHYs are still dismal; if everyone moves to 40GbE switch ports, then demand for 100GbE trunking interconnects will skyrocket. They won't be able to meet demand, and can only jack up the price so high before seeing massive pushback.

Until 28nm fab capacity becomes a lot more available – and that is at least 3 years out – then we can't crank out 100GbE switching at the rate we're doing 40GbE today. It just won't be economically feasible.

That means that we need to migrate people to 10GbE sever --> switch interconnects in a big way, leaving 40GbE for top of rack --> core and 100GbE for "folks with more money than sense."

Unfortunately, nobody wants to the first to take a bath on 10GbE margins. The prices are somewhat stable right now, and demand for 10GbE is growing at a fantastic rate. Eventually, someone will cave – my guess is Supermicro – and take the margin hit to drive to cost of 10GbE into the floor. Dell and other vendors won't have any choice but to follow. Intel will drop the silicon prices down to "pittance" levels and Dlink/Netgear/etc will block-shift to 10GbE overnight.

Everyone is leery of 10GbE prices crashing, but they are *far* more afraid of someone dropping 40GbE. The cost of 10GbE silicon is so low right now that they can afford a price war on 10GbE. A price war on 40GbE would cost the entire industry their margins for the next decade.

So…2014 is my guess. I expect that the price war will hit end of this year, beginning of next. By June 2014, we should be able to go out and buy $750 24-port 10Gbase-T Dlink switches. A year after that, we should be seeing 48-port 10Gbase-T switches drop below $1000.

Re: Trevor, you need to move in to a first world country away from Canada...

I'll stay where the cost of equipment is high in order to have real health care and an unemployment rate that doesn't need 15 layers of bureaucracy to massage it into looking 1/20th the size it really is.

Cheers.

Re: iSCSI not so hard on Linux.

@Simon Hobson as is well known, I disagree with the CLI uber alles crowd. I believe a GUI is agreat for administering. A CLI is great for automating. I administer a test lab, where I change things "to se what happens." I automate production, where it should do Only Pre-Tested Things.

Re: Do your customers mind?....

Slowly coming to an end...I got a whole 9 hours last night!

It was magical.

Re: @lusty

@Chz My initial response may well have been on the hasty side. (To err is human. To err a lot is what happens when the coffee runs out.) I've reread it again, and I still see him as attempting to berate yours truly into submission. But if I am going to be a douche on the internets, I am going to be a verbose douche that explains himself so you can judge the totality of my douchiness with all the relevant context.

I am, however, sad that the conversation re: "is the expectation of professionalism on the internet a one-way street wherein those who write are expected to maintain a superhuman level of stoicism and those who comment are encouraged to be soulless self-respect stripping piranha-harpies" never got born. I think it has a real impact on what we – as readers of this fine ball of redtop satire – want this site to ultimately be.

Ah well, that's my problem though, eh? I actually worry about the underlying philosophical issues and long term results that are the inevitably born from the choices we make (good and bad) in our interactions with one another today. Ah well, off to write other things…

Re: Do your customers mind?....

@keithpeter totally ad hoc. And we've had a few "disasters." (I.E. primary system caught fire, dead disks, power outage, fibre provider + backhoe, you name it.) In ten years, I've seen a bit of everything.

Fortunately, I am wildly paranoid. Wildly, world-endingly, crazy-like-a-fox paranoid. My file servers are specced and configured to run double duty (in an emergency) as virtual hosts. I have replicated and backed up traffic offsite here, there, everywhere. Certain endpoint systems are bought specifically to match the hardware of the servers in use so that A) the end user has a bitching system as they need for their job and B) in an emergency I can cannibalize it to get a more-critical system up and running.

When I build personal PCs - or PCs for friends/family/etc - they are build to similar specification as those systems built for my customers. That way as these people upgrade their systems - which occurs on a more rapid schedule, generally - I have a steady influx of gently-used parts that can be recertified and put on the shelf as spares for those brown-pants moments.

Every single thing I design or build is designed so that it can – in a pinch – serve any of a half dozen roles. Everything is tested to serve those roles before the first generation hits the ground and some of these systems will be torn out of use (for example as servers) and repurposed (for example as desktops.)

It isn't "proper." It isn't "best practices." But for many of these clients it is the difference between "being able to run a business and not being able to run a business." Doing things according to a whitepaper would bankrupt some of these organisations just to do the upfront costs, that's before we even get into the whole "refresh when the hardware warrantee runs out, or Microsoft releases Yet Another Version."

I sure catch a lot of crap from commenters for talking about such things. (It's blasphemy.) There are a lot of assumptions that because I am forced – yes, forced by necessity, something people can never seem to understand – to work with next to no budget for hardware or software that nothing is redundant or backed up. I think that these folks would be shocked to see exactly how far you can push modern equipment, and exactly how many layers of redundancy you can build into your network just by ensuring that your equipment can serve dual roles if absolutely need be.

I really like the ones who presume I must prefer things this way, or that I am somehow choosing this course. It is s simple matter of "presenting the arguments for more money" they claim; argue and you will get budget. It's not the case. I am generally privy to enough of the financials of these businesses that I know damned well how much money is coming in, where it is going and why.

My job is to make do with what's there until the money is available. It is to reassess the situation every so often and inform the business how close to the red line we are. What is the worst-case scenario? How do we recover from that? What are the risks of the various scenarios coming to pass? What downtime will occur whilst implementing backup plans?

The owners of the company then weigh the options and make the call about who gets how much money that year. So by necessity, everything for these types of folks is ad hoc. It isn't good for one's sanity, maybe…but you do learn rather a lot, very quickly.

And you learn very quickly to understand concepts like "return on investment," "total cost of ownership," "capital expenditure," "operational expenditure" and "operational paranoia" at a truly intuitive level. Every single choice and decision goes through cost, risk analysis, "how many layers of redundancies can we build for that" and many more filters.

It is ad hoc, but a carefully considered, meticulously constructed sort of ad hoc. Layers and layers of it, all interconnected and highly redundant. Fortunately, there looks to be only a couple more years of it until I am finally, mercifully free of the last of it. I can't wait.

Re: I've seen...

"On an unrelated note, scary is seeing a refrigerator-sized core router (with about a mil or two worth of line cards installed in it) being held to the rack by four screws instead of the 8-10 that it preferred. :)"

I am still trying to get pas "a mil or two worth of line cards." Alas...