Techhawking

Bootcamp is nice, but Virtualization is better. This is what almost everyone in the mac user community have been waiting for.
Parallels is already selling a virtualization product for Intel based Macs for last few months and has an edge over VMware in the world. But VMware’s large user base from the windows and linux community, can disturb Parallels’ lead in this market segment almost overnight.
VMware had been the defacto standard in PC-virtualization for few years until Microsoft came along. Recently it came out with a free version of its product called VMware Player which could “play” virtual machines created by its non-free products. While its possible that VMware may not release VMware Player for free in the Mac world, it might price itself low enough to compete with Parallels.

VMware’s latest move kind of confirms what Parallels has been betting on for all this while, that the Mac running on Intel will lead to more Windows users to buy and experiment with Apple products. Infact Steve Jobs has a lot to gloat about during tomorrows Keynote address, since VMware’s this move wouldn’t have been possible without the switch from PowerPC to Intel.

Hybrid cars solved the problems associated with electric cars and fuel guzzling engines. By bringing both of the technologies together, Hybrid cars can function on gasoline and still save costs by switching to an electric engine when possible.

A similar problem in computing industry is forcing storage manufacturers to work on a new kind of hybrid storage device called a Hybrid Drive. This device is a result of combination of the technologies behind regular disk based drive and the faster USB drives on your keychains. This combination provides it with high speed data access and cheap-per-byte pricing in the same storage device.

This concept isn’t new, and if you have worked with storage devices you will remember that most high end RAID devices already have an internal cache which does something similar. Infact most Operating systems, including Windows, Linux has Solaris have builtin file cache too. But most of these devices don’t use non-volatile Solid state (flash) which forces the cache to be destroyed everytime the Operating system is restarted. Solid state cache within the Harddrives can not only survive reboots (if non-volatile memory is used), it can also reduce the dependency on third-party caching software and hardwares which can introduce its own set of problems.

One thing to note is that though overall i/o speed will improve, the Solid state storage within HDDs will probably never completely replace in-memory(RAM) cache.

Though the technology behind this has existed for a while with a few very expensive implementations, its not until now, due to dropping solid state prices, that we might have a real chance at seeing this in action inside our home computers.
References

• Wikipedia - Hybrid Drives
  
• zdnet
• Wikipedia - Solid State
  
• News.com
• Samsung

Sun Microsystems was one of the first big companies to come up with 64Bit AMD V20Z servers which quickly replaced our ancient Sparc servers. Compared to the old E220s and E420s, AMD servers were about 3 to 5 times faster depending on what we wanted it to do.

The first round of V20z’s we deployed saved us a lot of rack space, but the heating and power requirements were little higher than expected. Though the v20z’s did reduce the footprint on the racks, the heat generated forced us to leave room on the top of the servers where the ventilation holes were placed. For all practical reasons, we couldn’t use it as one U system.

We ordered a second round of V20Z’s a few months back and though we were prepared for the extra rack space, we stumbled upon a whole new problem this time. We noticed that some of these servers were randomly rebooting, especially at times of high activity. We were using a mirror image of the Suse distribution which we installed on the first set of servers which rules out any change in the software/os side. Whats funny is that some of these servers were so predictable faulty that a simple “tar -xvzf filename.tgz” would kill it. Putting the boot drive from the faulty server in a perfectly working server confirmed that it wasn’t the OS or Harddisk which was faulty, but the server hardware itself.

These problems have been going on for over atleast a couple of months and we have opened up a case with sun for few weeks now. Among the things we have done to fix this includes updating different firmwares in various V20z components, play around with the memory modules add more space for ventilation and we even checked the voltage regulator to see if its defective. These servers are brand new and of the 30 or so which we bought we can consistently reproduce this problem on 6 of them. Infact we had the sun engineer (2 of them) come on site and see it for themselves and yet its hard for them to agree that they need to replace the server.

So the question is, how long does it take for someone to admit a mistake and give us a replacement ? Does Sun realize that while they request us to upgrade firmwares on our servers and do other time delaying steps, 20% of these servers can’t be used at all ? Do they understand that if we just wanted to keep them unused, we would probably not have bought it in the first place ?

Our company has tried to escalate this problem with Sun so many times, and the guy on the other end just refuses to sign off on the replacements.

Which leads me to the next question, how many other servers are there which have this problem ? If you have this problem, could you please reply to this blog, or let me know by email ? If 20% of the servers sold to us were badly defective, there has to be others out there who are having the same problem.

We have spent between 300 to 600 man hours trying to debug this problem and setting up  workarounds instead of resolve this issue. Posting of this blog online is not just an act of desperation on my part, but is also a message for Sun Microsystems to let them know that they are not the only server vendor out there.