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New JackRabbit site is up
Finally, hunkered down, did a less is more approach. See http://jackrabbit.scalableinformatics.com. Or this link. Getting content up there in bits and pieces. Working on the most requested bits, the updated benchmark reports. Update: As I have discovered, some people are ideologically opposed to telling us who they are before they read the papers. Fair enough. Will give them incentives. Go to the links, pull them down, and if you like them and possibly buy them from Scalable (or our partners) we will provide a discount if your correct name/email/phone data is in the database.
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This is wrong, so very wrong
When you update your computer, get patches, you assume (and this may be the hard part) that the people putting out the patches respect your efforts to keep your system secure. Of course, some like checking every few weeks if your system is “genuine”. You know that they would never, ever waste your time and effort on pushing a marketing program as a patch. Never. Ever.
Because it would be wrong.
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Paid my Microsoft tax today ...
Yes, for a number of reasons, we needed to get another laptop (good reasons, we are growing, and our new person needs it).
Unfortunately, it is pretty close to impossible to find a laptop without Vista. I would prefer XP Pro out of all the Microsoft products. It does appear that HP will be offering laptops with SuSE on them, and hopefully Dell will be offering them with Ubuntu and others.
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The 3-day IOzone test ...
Ugh … I had thought that I would be able to use VC++ to build IOzone. Well, I haven’t been successful at this. IOzone, like many other OSS codes use autoconf. Which hasn’t been ported to enable people to use VC++.
So I used Cygwin to build bonnie++ and IOzone. IOzone has been running, oh, about 3 days now, on the windows 2003 server x64 unit. With a 32GB file size, performance pretty much falls off the radar.
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Someone needs to take charge at Novell
[shakes head in disbelief] Reported on /. and elsewhere. Way back when it was announced, Mr. Ballmer, head honcho of Microsoft demonstrated how much he p0wned Novell when he let loose with some beauties right after signing a deal with them.
Our comment at the time was
And today, we get a demonstration of how badly they were played, and continue to be played, and how clueless their marketing is. From /.
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RedHat EL 5 is out
Old news by now. Looks like, apart from xfs, they fixed lots of things they needed to fix. They made the advanced version look very nice. With this, setting up JackRabbit Pack storage clusters should be pretty easy. We will still have to support xfs externally to them, but at least now they have some things we can use within our RAIN JackRabbit Pack storage cluster. Time to make sure it works.
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JackRabbits looking through Windows ...
Summary: JackRabbit officially supports Windows 2003 Server x64. Scalable Informatics will support JackRabbits running windows. For those not in the know, JackRabbit is a very dense, power efficient, and high performance storage system. 36 TB (yes TeraByte) raw in 5 rack units (yes, this is not a typo). We regularly measure more than 1GB/s sustained to disks. It has network pipes to push out the data as well, starting with quad Gigabit ethernet, and moving up from there to Infiniband, 10GbE, and other technologies as they stabilize.
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Like deja vu all over again ...
When I installed the original Solaris 10 bits (the 6.06 bits) on a machine, I was amazed at how incredibly confused and useless the installer was. For a supposedly powerful OS to have so completely useless an installer didn’t amuse me, it frustrated me. Keep this in mind. I am installing, or put more accurately, attempting to install, Windows 2003 x64 server.
Boots from the DVD/CD on the USB2 port. So far so good.
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More fast rabbits ...
The rebuild finished. Rebooted, not sure why we were getting the oddities we did. On the test track. Open it up, just a little.
As I am sitting here, I am watching it spill 500-700 MB/s to disk in writes. Our test case is 2x larger than physical memory. Caching isn’t relevant for reading and writing here. Now it is switching into “Reading intelligently…”. To understand why this is so interesting, here is some dstat output again.
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JackRabbits are fast critters
We received our unit back from the testers. We were interested in seeing them run the unit hard and comparing it to others in similar configs. Sadly this is not what happened. Regardless, we decided to take the unit out, play with it, understand the performance little better, then take it out to the test track and crack the throttle wide open. Let it run flat out for a bit. See what it can do.