Warrington: Tuesday 26th February.
I am giving a performance and capacity planning session with some exclusive update material from intel. Some places still available...
Friday, 22 February 2008
Thursday, 7 February 2008
New whitepaper comparing drive technologies
A new link provides a handy reference to the speeds and transfer rates of SAS, SCSI, FC, ATA, and ATA drives. Compiled one because I was tired of running around looking for the right and accurate data of speeds and transfer sizes.
Watch out for my matching excel link comparing 100s of drives, old and new.
Watch out for my matching excel link comparing 100s of drives, old and new.
Wednesday, 6 February 2008
Beware the Sold State Disk: seek and ye shall find
Don't get suckered into solid state disks based on seek time alone. Examining all the solid state disks on the market, there is no doubt that for workstations and servers, SSD's offer a panacea - lower temperatures, less power consumption, fast access times.
BUT:
Be not fooled by cheaper SSD's offering lowly SATA (100Mb/sec) transfer rates. Despite the exellent seek time, the relatively poor transfer rate and SATA speeds will hamper IO.
Examples of nifty SCSI-based SSD's:
http://www.storageflex.com/s6.htm
Be not fooled also by FLASH-based SSD's. They are slower for writes that DRAM-based SSD's
Be careful in your selection: if an SSD seems really cheap, it is for a very good reason.
BUT:
Be not fooled by cheaper SSD's offering lowly SATA (100Mb/sec) transfer rates. Despite the exellent seek time, the relatively poor transfer rate and SATA speeds will hamper IO.
Examples of nifty SCSI-based SSD's:
http://www.storageflex.com/s6.htm
Be not fooled also by FLASH-based SSD's. They are slower for writes that DRAM-based SSD's
Be careful in your selection: if an SSD seems really cheap, it is for a very good reason.
Saturday, 2 February 2008
Cockcroft praises PerfCap PAWZ at USCMG
Adrian Cockcroft, sometime Sun Performance Guru, and author of one of the best performance books on Solaris (ISBN-10: 0131496425) praises PerfCap's PAWZ product at this year's USCMG. I remember emailing him about PAWZ 5 years ago.
Inland Revenue's website crashes...
...due to 'huge demand'. Hmm, well done to whichever outsourcing company looks after Capacity Planning for the Revenue Service. It is not as if they did not know that 31st January was a key date.
Questions to ask, expecting the answer 'No'.
- Were the servers hosting the web layer, application layer and database layers under capacity management?
- Was the infrastructure set up for Capacity Planning? Was a sizing study performed on the 'worst case scenario:namely a workload increase of 'x' on 31/01/08.
I know that this does not happen in the US: H & R Block, who host the on-line service for the IRS actually did capacity planning studies on all levels of their infrastructure to check that the servers could scale with usage.
Obviously not inthe UK. This will get worse next year, and proabably take 1 year to implement.
Well done to all concerned.
Questions to ask, expecting the answer 'No'.
- Were the servers hosting the web layer, application layer and database layers under capacity management?
- Was the infrastructure set up for Capacity Planning? Was a sizing study performed on the 'worst case scenario:namely a workload increase of 'x' on 31/01/08.
I know that this does not happen in the US: H & R Block, who host the on-line service for the IRS actually did capacity planning studies on all levels of their infrastructure to check that the servers could scale with usage.
Obviously not inthe UK. This will get worse next year, and proabably take 1 year to implement.
Well done to all concerned.
Friday, 1 February 2008
BNP interested in SocGen: no surprises there
Following my previous article wondering if a predator would go after a weakened Societe Generale, to the surprise of absolutely no-one we have the predictable situation of BNP Paribas lifting its corporate head over the parapet and expressed some interest in SocGen. Veterans of Banque Paribas will recall a bitter struggle in 2001 between SocGen and BNP for control.
From memory, the then-Paribas board were very much in favour of the offering from SocGen.
Alas, it was not to be: BNP simply showed the shareholders the money.
7 years and a bitter integration programme later (1 huge de-nationalised bureaucacy consuming a lean, mean and strongly-independent albeit smaller bureaucracy), it seems that BNPP may consume SocGen with the same appitite as Paribas. Would the French Government stop this on the grounds of competition? Well, they didn't prevent Credit Agricole and Credit Lyonnais sealing the knot. SocGen's retail business must be a tempting morsel for BNPP, with the investment banking arm possibly going to the BFI sector of BNPP. Remember, the French Government would prefer a SocGen staying in French hands at almost any cost to the French taxpayer.
Think about it...
From memory, the then-Paribas board were very much in favour of the offering from SocGen.
Alas, it was not to be: BNP simply showed the shareholders the money.
7 years and a bitter integration programme later (1 huge de-nationalised bureaucacy consuming a lean, mean and strongly-independent albeit smaller bureaucracy), it seems that BNPP may consume SocGen with the same appitite as Paribas. Would the French Government stop this on the grounds of competition? Well, they didn't prevent Credit Agricole and Credit Lyonnais sealing the knot. SocGen's retail business must be a tempting morsel for BNPP, with the investment banking arm possibly going to the BFI sector of BNPP. Remember, the French Government would prefer a SocGen staying in French hands at almost any cost to the French taxpayer.
Think about it...
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)