Feel free to check it out. Been wanting to get this done for a while, had the code mostly written. Some work we are doing prompted the completion. Now it is there… The nice aspect is that we can change the look and feel at any point. The code base is also quite simple. Even though it is Ajaxy for the the tab bar, it is also accessible (or should be) via the jQuery library degradation of functionality for non-javascript sites.

Working on finally updating the day job’s web site. Expect it to go live in a day or less (less less!!!) Fixing some coding bits. At the end of the day, we had to choose between complex site building bits that sorta kinda worked, and our bits around DragonFly, that really did work, but required some coding. I didn’t want to write a website. Honest. I want there to be something akin to Powerpoint for web sites.

As you might know, we have been trying out a 10 GbE iSCSI connection to our JackRabbit server. We will be writing up a white paper about this later on. The issue I keep running into was not having a real benchmark test. Most of the benchmark tests we have seen have been, well, completely artificial, in that end user work loads aren’t anything like that. We want to try to test end user work loads whenever possible.

I got the quads, and put the MB into the machine, replacing the old MB. 64 GB capable MB with quad core AMDs. Plug it in, turn it on and … whrrrr …. whrrr …. whrrrr … Nada… nothing. No boot. Post bios codes are FF. Of course FF is not in the manual listing all the post codes. Go figure. Fine. Pull the MB out, put the old one in, the one I just pulled out to put this one in.

This will be short, no long discussion of benchmarks. Basically we tried JackRabbit as a target for many block oriented protocols. With 10 GbE, and with IB. I though 10 GbE would be badly beaten by IB in performance (real world, no ram disks here). I think I was wrong. 10 GbE based iSCSI was quite simple to set up, pretty easy to tune, and actually nice to work with. Compare this to building SCST-SRPT or the right version of iSER or the correctly patched OFED for SCSI-TGT, or … I like IB.

A customer will be running RHEL/Centos 5.1 and wants to attach to a JackRabbit for high performance storage. Should be possible with iSCSI, though it looks like the single connection of the iSCSI initiator limits performance. At first I thought it was card related, though I now see multiple other cards that exhibit very similar performance issues. In fact our numbers are remarkably similar, though their performance was measured relative to ramdisk, and ours relative to JackRabbit disk.

Searching all over. AMD has allowed the channel to be depleted. We are hearing from multiple sources that it will not be in the channel for a while. This is frustrating. It is nuts. It will do absolutely nothing to help AMD’s bottom line, and, that is one thing AMD sorely needs right now. All of our usual suppliers are saying they don’t have any. Now I found one supplier with some, and we are having them overnighted.

I hadn’t mentioned it, perhaps I should have. We had been building/testing a unit, now sold and scheduled for shipping, which we wanted to see what it could do if we did some tuning. We tweaked, we measured, we tuned,Il poker online ? un gioco di carte. we listened. Did some trial runs. Then we cracked the throttle wide open and let ‘er rip. root@jr1:~# ./simple-write.bash start at Sun Jan 27 13:31:49 EST 2008 100+0 records in 100+0 records out 13421772800 bytes (13 GB) copied, 15.

We have been working on testing/benchmarking JackRabbit iSCSI over 10 GbE. Without spilling too many beans, let me describe how our benchmark tests differ from most every one elses, and then I will talk about the performance we get. Most benchmarks we have seen on iSCSI target the nullio device, or the ram disk. That is, they are benchmarks of the protocol, and have little if anything to do with what you will actually observe for performance.

Today I received yet-another-invitation-to-some-new-social-network -site-that-promises-to-be-different. I did what I do with all of these invitations these days. I ignored it. VC’s take note. There are too many of these sites. The field is crowded. The sites are not differentiated. Few to none of them will be the next google. Or Microsoft. Few to none of the will be bought by google or Microsoft. These sites are little more than glorified web pages with databases.