Utility Computing dot China

Not sure when exactly this happened – I am guessing in the past 2 weeks as the Missus is declaring we need a new webcam at home so inter family video chats can resume. So all up it was about 1 year of being cut off from modern communications.

A mate from 1X.com on my insistence decided to do an un boxing of his M9 for me.  It is the least he could do since we acted as counsellors and advisors on purchase and then mental distractions during the agonising wait that ensued. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ZTxY2mojCs

I was talking with the other expat tech in the office today and thought to myself, “Who is the domain registrar for google?” Thinking to myself it is probably network solutions (the ONLY place BTW to register .cn domain names if you want even a modicum of control over them). Well I fired up a [...]

Ever wondered where all that disk space has gone? Why the 100GB drive is not 100GB? Well apart from some systems using GiB and others GB and then some manufacturers using base10 and not base3 and saying that 1GB is 1000MB and not 1024 – I have found another one. When making a file system [...]

In the middle of putting out a proposal for a very large client/tender at the moment. Well over a life time’s earnings in servers and an as yet un calculated retainer and service rate at this stage – electricity and bandwidth and human hours all cost money. I always try to get the best prices [...]

During a recent test run to see if a new PostgreSQL back end server would hasten things up in a main cluster – that has now become CPU bound and NOT IO…… the wizardry of that I will blog about later. In any case, the short of it is, that we were juggling PERC4 cards [...]

My hosting manager found out this cool info recently. DRAC cards are a pain when they do not work – which is not rare. They are very important and are only needed in rare circumstances. However if those circumstances arise – these cards MUST perform. I must say that the PE1800 and DRAC4 that we [...]

Well, I was thinking of this for a while. Then Google bought them and Google can do no wrong in my eyes, so I signed up. Some of you will have to adjust your readers. However I now support email subscription and a heap of other potentially cool things.

Good read on the numbers behind your storage risk planning. http://storageadvisors.adaptec.com/2007/07/10/effect-of-drive-count-on-raid-5/ Personally, when the data at stake is your clients and by inference your company’s reputation and business longevity, nothing short of a 1 in your RAID setup will do. So RAID1 or RAID10. Currently I split data for PostgreSQL on to RAID10 volumes for [...]

For those that care. IE: Hundreds of thousands of emails a day and you need to see what went wrong and where and for who and why? http://www.splunk.com/