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...
One topic I get a lot of questions about is creating an All-in-One ESXi 5.0 machine with ZFS storage based on Illumian, Nexenta, and Solaris 11 Express all alongside guest operating systems. For those not familiar with the concept, the idea is simple, utilize what is arguably the best open storage subsystem very similar to what Oracle and NetApp...
I had not thought about this in awhile, but Solid State Drives (SSDs) are now less expensive than their hard drive counterparts. Sure, someone probably just did a bit of research and saw a SanDisk Extreme 240GB is $180 ($0.75/GB) while a 3TB Western Digital Red edition drive is $180 ($0.06/GB) and declared me insane. I would instead argue...
The SanDisk Extreme 240GB utilizes a LSI SandForce SF-2281 controller alongside Toggle NAND to achieve some fairly impressive performance. Inside the SanDisk Extreme is NAND from the Toshiba and SanDisk joint venture which puts SanDisk at a bit of an advantage since they have a secured supply of NAND which all vendors do not enjoy. SanDisk also enjoys a...
The Western Digital WD Red is a hot topic in the NAS community at the moment as the small NAS market now has a drive specifically targeted at the market for the first time. Up until now Western Digital have separated their hard drive lines into three; Blue for consumer drives, Green for low-power drives and Black for performance....
One question asked frequently on this site is how can low-cost Infiniband host channel adapters (HCA) be used to achieve high data transfer speeds between workstations, servers and storage. Unlike standard 10/100/1000/10000 Ethernet connections, Infiniband setup is a bit more complicated and does not work out of the box. To the inexperienced user, setting up Infiniband can either seem daunting...
One very important aspect to the ESXi 5 All-in-One systems that have become very popular is getting the memory mix correct. Generally an OpenSolaris derived OS is used for storage as it provides both ZFS as well as native iSCSI to provide other virtual machines, and other network devices with fast, reliable and redundant storage. With that being said, OpenIndiana...
Today the ASRock Extreme11 appeared on the company's website. This is the same X79 Extreme11 that we previewed on this site months ago. This looks, on paper, to be the top LGA2011 workstation motherboard for Intel Xeon E5-1600 and Intel Xeon E5-2600 CPUs. The motherboard looks packed full with chips, sockets and heatsinks. So much so that I've not...
The Samsung 830 256GB SSD is a top pick in this SSD generation given Samsung's reputation for quality. One can find Samsung SSD offerings inside several OEMs such as Apple and HP so we know the level of testing the controllers and firmware are put through exceed that of small SSD companies. Recently SSD prices have come down a...
Gigabyte recently released new barebones systems for the new Intel Xeon E5-2400 and Intel Xeon E5-2600 series CPUs. Barebones systems are popular with resellers and end users because the chassis, motherboard, and power supplies are generally optimized for the package. Further, cabling generally comes pre-installed so usually taking a barebones system to a production ready system can be as...