Somewhere out there!

SanDisk Releases 32 GB Solid State 2.5-Inch Hard Drive

A couple of months ago SanDisk introduced a 1.8-inch flash based hard drive for notebook computers. It has now announced a more mainstream 2.5-inch 32 GB capacity Solid State Drive (SSD) that could be dropped into any UMPC or micro-notebook and work right out of the gate.The 2.5-inch SanDisk SSD is only going to be available directly to PC manufacturers initially, and it will be offered as a drop in replacement for replacing existing hard drives.

The cost to PC manufacturers will be about $350 per drive when purchased in bulk.

At $350 per 32Gb 2.5″ drive or $11/GB, Solid State is going to be hitting the mainstream very soon.

Technorati Tags: ssd, hardware

Maybe in 5 years they’ll be cheaper, but affording one of these guys in the short term is going to be hard:

Okay, you know me well enough not to leave you hanging like that: a single 128GB Zeus SDD will set you back $50,000. Seriously. No word yet on discounts for bulk buying!

From: How about a 128GB Solid State HDD? and SimpleTech’s super-thin 64 GB SSD for those tight places.

Technorati Tags: ssd, hardware

From jkOnTheRun: Polymer Vision to offer rollable eBook reader. One of these will certainly make it easily to give an ebook to my mother.

Technorati Tags: ebooks, hardware

AoE [1], [2] is a recent protocol developed by Coraid.

ATA over Ethernet is a network protocol registered with the IEEE as Ethernet protocol 0x88a2. AoE is low level, much simpler than TCP/IP or even IP. TCP/IP and IP are necessary for the reliable transmission of data over the Internet, but the computer has to work harder to handle the complexity they introduce.

Users of iSCSI have noticed this issue with TCP/IP. iSCSI is a way to send I/O over TCP/IP, so that inexpensive Ethernet equipment may be used instead of Fibre Channel equipment. Many iSCSI users have started buying TCP offload engines (TOE). These TOE cards are expensive, but they remove the burden of doing TCP/IP from the machines using iSCSI.

…

An alternative to iSCSI, the AoE specification is 8 pages compared with iSCSI’s 257 pages.

The storage hardware sold by Coraid is very cost effective. The basic 1U four SATA disk chasis SR420 is 2000USD, and with the addition of four 750b SATA disks (say about $450) provides 3Tb raw for under 4000 USD in a 1U with RAID 0,1,5,10 or JBOD. This can be combined with their NAS Gateway the CLN20, to provide a reasonable local network storage system.

With Hitachi’s forthcoming 1TB disk, you get 4TB raw. Crazy!

Of course SATA is not the best for database system but if you have a low access archive type system, or a video silo then this is going to work well.

Technorati Tags: aoe, storage, hardware

AnandTech: Server Guide part 2

Even the so called “Nearline” (Seagate) or “Raid Edition” (RE, Western Digital) SATA drives which are made to operate in enterprise storage racks, and which are more reliable than desktop disks, are not made for the mission critical, random transactional applications. Their MTBF (Mean Time Between Failure) is still at least 20% lower than typical enterprise disks, and they will show the similar failure rates when used with highly random server workloads as desktop drives.Also, the current SATA drives on average experience an Unrecoverable Error every 12.5 terabytes written or read (EUR of 1 in 1014 bits). Thanks to the sophisticated drive electronics, SAS/SCSI disks experience these kinds of errors 100 (!) times less. It would seem that EUR numbers are so small that they are completely negligible, but consider the situation where one of your hard drives fails in a RAID-5 or 6 configuration. Rebuilding a RAID-5 array with five 200 GB SATA drives results in reading 0.8 terabytes and writing 0.2 terabytes, in total 1 terabytes. So you have 1/12.5 or 8% chance of getting an EUR on this SATA array. If we look at a similar SCSI enterprise array, we would get a 0.08% chance on one unrecoverable error. It is clear an 8% chance of getting data loss is a pretty bad gamble for a mission critical application.

Another good point that Seagate made in the same study concerns vibration. When a lot of disk spindles and actuators are performing a lot of very random I/O operations in a big storage rack, quite a bit of rotational vibration is the result. In the best case the actuator will have to take a bit more time to get to the right sector (higher seek time) but in the worst case the read operation has to be retried. This can only be detected by the software driver, which means that the performance of the disk will be very low. Enterprise disks can take about 50% more vibration than SATA desktop drives before 50% higher seek times kill the random disk performance.

Technorati Tags: hardware, storage

AnandTech: Server Guide Part 1

There are two big problems with the “hardware choice does not matter much” kind of reasoning. The first is that the TCA is still a big part of the total TCO. For example this study[1] estimates that the price of buying the server is still about 40-50% of the TCO, while maintenance comprises a bit more than 10% and operation costs take about 40% of TCO pie. Thus we can’t help but be wary when a vendor claims that a high price is okay, because the maintenance on his product is so much lower than the competition.Secondly, certain hardware choices have an enormous impact on the rest of the TCO picture. One example is hot-spare and hot-swappable RAID arrays which on average significantly reduce the time that a server is unreachable. This will also become clearer as we dig deeper into the different hardware features of modern servers and the choices you will have to make.

RAS features

Studies done by IBM say that about 50% of the hardware failures are related to hard disk problems and 25% are due to a power supply failure. Fans with 8% are a distant third, so it is clear you need power supplies and hard disks of high reliability, the R of RAS.

Technorati Tags: hardware, server

AnandTech: Quad Core Intel Xeon 53xx Clovertown

This means that we have to subtract about 13% of the performance figures if we want to keep the TDP the same, and in that case some of the “compelling gains” are no longer really tangible. So we can conclude that CRM, Financial analysis, ERP and Java applications are the best applications for our Clovertown Xeon. For rendering, transaction processing, and especially structural simulation (LS Dyna) and flow modeling (fluent) the picture is a lot less clear.

 …

To the financial analysts, CRM, ERP and Java server people, the new quad core Xeon E53xx is close to irresistible. You can get four cores for the price of two, or up to eight (!) cores in a relatively cheap dual socket server. We observed at least a 40% performance increase compared to probably the best dual core CPU of today: the Xeon 5160.

For the people looking for a 3D rendering workstation, your usage model will determine whether the Xeon 5160 or the Xeon E5345 is the best solution. You get better animation and 3D manipulation performance (mostly single threaded) and better rendering performance at resolutions lower than High Definition with the Xeon 5160. 3D render servers are better off with the Quad Xeon E53xx but only if they have to render at 720p or full HD (1080p) resolutions.

The past 6 months have been excellent for Intel: after regaining the performance crown in the dual socket server market, there is also now a very viable and lowly priced alternative for the more expensive quad Opteron based systems. However, it is not all bad news for AMD. The current quad core might be good for Intel’s yields, time to market, and production costs, but it does have a weakness. The quad core Xeon scaling is very mediocre, and this despite a high performance chipset. The current 5000p chipset has a large 16MB snoop filter, reads speculatively to decrease memory latency, and has a whole other bag of clever tricks to get more performance out of the platform. Despite all this and a 2x4MB L2 cache setup, the quad core Xeon scales worse than the relatively old quad Opteron platform.

Technorati Tags: hardware, intel, opteron, review

Here is a few useful comments by Nick Anderson on the xen-users mailing list.

It depends on your application. Dont forget to look at residual cost of owning a Xeon 5100. I believe that it requires fully buffered dimms each pulling 9 to 14 Watt compared to non-fully buffered dimms for the new Opterons that support DDR2 which I think draw 2-3 watts per dimm. Plus even though the Xeon requires less power for the chip itself they dont take into account the fact that the Opterons have an on die memory controller. The Xeons have a separate memory controller which I believe draws another
2 Watts.

Kind of went on a tangent there … but really it does depend on the type of applications you are running. I seem to remember the Xeons whop up on the Opterons in single threaded applications, however I think the reverse is true when you start using threaded applications.

Obviously the figures from the review I mentioned yesterday aren’t so clear cut. However, now Intel are producing solid tech, there is no longer the bad taste from their hiding behind a market position and market power. It will be interesting to see what the Anandtechs and other tech-head reviewers say when they get this equipment. Better choice can only be good.

Technorati Tags: hardware, opteron, xeon

I’m doing some research on the current state of play for virtualisation hardware, as I need to build a basic VT or Pacifica system. This system is so I can do some testing between Xen and VMWare for hosting Windows 2003 TS. The Xen wiki has a list of the HVM capable CPUs and since I’d prefer something basic, I’ve been looking mainly at the desktop Intel and AMD solutions. Which are the Intel Core Duo and Core Duo 2, and AMD AM2 socket CPUs.

Given that the Core Duo is no longer available as a retail CPU in NZ, the only VT based Core Duo systems are laptops or Apple Macs. Since I want a lab system this choice is not as effective, lacking the option for additional HDDs or NICs. For the Core Duo 2 option according the Intel motherboard list and this review, the only Intel chipset that supports VT is the Q965/963. I’m still trying to confirm this, but if so it complicates matters as there are no Q965 based motherboards available in NZ at the moment.

There maybe non-Intel chipsets for the Core Duo 2 which support VT, but this is something I need further information on.

Conversely with AMD it seems that all AM2 socket systems support AMD-V (Pacifica) and these systems are readily available in NZ. That said, I’m not sure how good the AMD Athlon 64 X2 CPU is at supporting HVM. There are no reviews or howtos on AM2 motherboards which discuss AMD-V on the net.

With the lack of basic options, I’ve also considered server grade CPUs. The new Woodcrest 5100 Xeon and a simple Intel Server SC5400 chassis is at least twice the price of any potential Core Duo 2 system.

AMD have also recently released their new series of Opterons, the Opteron 1000, 2000 and 8000 series. Based this info from AMD and wikipedia, these are the only Opteron’s with AMD-V. Sun have also released this month two new x86 servers based on these chips: the x2100 M2 and the x2200. Both are SATA based and a x2100 M2 with a 1210 is pretty close to the price of a desktop white box solution, but a noisy rack system on my desk
as a lab machine is not very appealing.

A first up review of the Opterons vs Xeon, shows that Xeon 5100 series has really jumped forward with at least a 15% advantage for the same clock speed over the Opterons. It would be interesting to see if this improvement held out against the Opteron’s better 64bit mode. However, obviously the Opterons have lost their clear advantage.

So it seems right at the moment I have two options, an expensive Xeon 5100 or an unknown AMD Athlon 64 X2 system at half the price.

Update: The Sun Ultra 20 M2 might be worth considering as well. Although it gets a mixed review.

Update 2: Only the older single core Orleans and newer dual-core Windsor AMD Athlon 64 X2 CPUs support AMD-V.  Windsor Athlons are the only AM2 socket Athlons at present, but it might be possible to confuse them with the older models if you are not careful.

Technorati Tags: vmware, xen, hardware, hvm, vt, pacifica, review

From Thinkgeek a Bio Computer-On-a-Stick. Linux on a 512MB usb flash disk with a builtin finger print scanner for biometrics.

Technorati Tags: usb, biometric, portable