technology, internet oddities & other random stuff
Archive for July, 2006
c|net cover AoE
Jul 31st
c|net have just revisited AoE. ATA over Ethernet is a new(ish) technology developed by a startup called Coraid targeting iSCSI at the lower end of the network connected storage market. Fibre attached storage used to be the only game in town. Each server has dedicated fibre cards to connect to your storage hardware, either directly or through (expensive!) fibre switches. At work we have a *lot* of this kit, and it didn’t come cheap!
iSCSI is significantly cheaper because, in theory, you can use the same LAN to connect to your storage as you connect to the outside world. Basically standard More >
Wordpress plugins
Jul 24th
I finally got the “addictions” plugin working (lists my favourite book, movie, music, game in the sidebar)… After all kinds of PHP hackery I just deleted it, downloaded the exact same version and copied it over, and it worked! AAAGGGGHH!
Still, The Bell X1 album is imense. Thank You For Smoking is the wittiest film I’ve seen all year, I’m finally churning through the Terry Pratchett books I never read when I was in college, and I’ve been a Civilization addict since the mid ’90s.
Sun Fire x4500
Jul 12th
The “Thumper” (their name, not mine!) is out. It’s a 4U dual Opteron server with space for 48 SATA disks. Fill it up with 500GB disks and you’ve got a brand name storage box for ???????2.50/GB. It runs Solaris 10 and they’re touting it as a perfect fit for their ZFS filesystem. ZFS is being pitched as the replacement to RAID, with replication and rollback built in. These don’t have a hardware RAID controller though. Sun claim that they can do it faster in software than any hardware controller and it makes sense. A couple of 2.6GHz general purpose processors should More >
New toy!!!
Jul 9th
I’ve just acquired a Viewsonic VX922 19″ LCD screen for my PC. I had a behemoth of a 21″ CRT, but it was just way to heavy to manhandle it back up two floors after the last time I sold it and bought it back (long story). It’s got switchable BNC & DVI inputs, so I’ve got a rock solid pin sharp image on my desktop PC via the digital DVI input, and the KVM is plugged into the BNC connector. I like the fact that it’s thickness is measured in inches rather than feet, so I actually have some elbow More >
