Today we are looking at how-to install OpenIndiana on ESXi 5.0 in order to make an All-in-One ZFS server. The basic premise of this method is that one can utilize a virtual machine, passing through SAS controllers with VT-d or IOMMU to create a ZFS-based storage subsystem. Once this is done, it is fairly easy to install operating systems...
The Antec ISK-110 VESA mount is a mini ITX case that comes with an internal, fan less 90w power supply. I recently was looking for a new HTPC case for the ASUS P8Z77-I Deluxe. My goal was to make a speedy current generation HTPC that could easily handle anything I threw at it. When I asked for recommendations, the...
If you've ever shopped for a stable, high-performance SAS or SATA host bus adapter (HBA) then you have no doubt heard of LSI and the venerable LSI SAS2008 SAS controller chip. Cards based on the SAS2008, like the LSI 9200-8i, the 9200-8e, and in fact all of the cards in Pieter's article have fantastic reputations for performance, reliability, and...
This week QNAP expanded their lineup to include the TS-x69 series of 1U and 2U rackmount NAS appliances with the four disk TS-469U and eight disk TS-869U respectively. QNAP is a company well known for building "low-end" NAS appliances from 2-8 disks and has really moved into the SMB market over the past few years. Traditional storage vendors such...
Lately I have done a few SSD benchmark sessions on some of today's popular SATA III solid state drives. One thing that I did not have is results of Anvil's Storage Utilities bechmarks for all of those reviews. I actually think Anvil's utilities represent one of the better, if not the most complete picture of solid state disk performane...
News recently is that Apple just announced a press event on 12 September 2012 which everyone thinks is going to be the big iPhone 5 launch among other products. I have to believe Apple just Osborned (past tense verb of Osborne for those wondering) their iPhone sales for the next month and a half (or longer.) For those wondering,...
Today we are looking at the Intel Xeon Processor E5-1650 which is perhaps the sweet spot for LGA 2011 Xeon processors. With 6 cores, 12 threads running at 3.2GHz base and 3.8GHz max 12MB of cache, the Intel Xeon Processor E5-1650 is a more than capable CPU for multi-threaded workloads. For those wondering, the LGA 2011 Xeon E5 series CPUs have...
Supermicro has just released a couple of Quad Xeon E5-4600 based motherboards. These boards are behemoth in size, much like quad AMD Opteron G34 motherboards, for obvious reasons. Packing Quad Intel Xeon E5-4600 CPU's, 32x DDR3 DIMM slots capable of up to 1TB ECC memory and a few expansion slots to boot makes these new Supermicro Quad Intel Xeon motherboards...
Western Digital released earnings that absolutely blew out analyst estimates this week. Analysts are expecting Seagate to follow suit next week. This makes a ton of sense. With the Western Digital - Hitachi GST merger and the Seagate Samsung merger, there are effectively three hard drive players with Toshiba being number three. The hard drive industry has essentially has...
Building upon last weeks piece regarding how to set up an Infiniband link using a Ubuntu 12.04 machine. That guide utilized two very low cost Mellanox MHEA28-XTC controllers which cost less than $50 each used. Today we are looking at the performance of the setup. One of the big drivers for using Infiniband is that it is a very...