IT Thrill Seeking

Disclaimer: The ensuing hilarity is not condoned or suggested, merely posted for your reading pleasure.

All IT "professionals" aren't Mt.Dew drinking, dark office sitting, no showering, no documenting geeks. Some of us are inherent thrill seekers or closet adrenaline junkies. We've been presented with challenges or say, opportunities to for thrill fulfillment in the IT industry. A few examples. I am notorious for moving servers within racks "hot". I've honed my skills over time. Its not the smartest thing but sometimes the only option. Just make sure you have all your bases covered. Dual homed NICs, dual power supplies with a good, long extension cord, a place to set the running server and steady hands.



BTW, this was an ESX server housing roughly 15ish VMs, withOUT vmotion.
Got any good IT thrill seeking stories of your own? Do share please!

The Sun debacle

I've had this issue stewing for some time now and am just now posting it. I'll start by saying, I like Sun. As a whole, I think Solaris is a GREAT OS when coupled with Sparc processors. Great things happen when you can develop an OS around your own hardware, IE Sun and Apple to name a few.
A b!tch to setup and equally as painful to troubleshoot, however once you get a system dialed, you're golden. For a long time or until hardware fails or someone mucks it up. I also REALLY like ZFS. If I could butter my bread with it, wear it under my pants, or or kiss it good night, I would. ZFS is a GREAT piece of software, no one knows about.

Now, here is my issue. A few years ago, I set up 2 T2000s to run as Oracle DB servers. These servers front ended a Sun branded Stor-Edge 6130. I chose to go with ZFS rather than Veritas or UFS. ZFS had only been out for about a year but I felt the benefits where worth it and it wasn't exactly bleeding edge. So, for this setup, 3 of the 4 varibles are Sun owned. I turned off caching within the kernel for ZFS and let the RAID handle due to known issues. I followed every best practice article I could find to make this setup solid. And it was as it lasted almost 2 years and 2 san switch failures(without issue).

Fast forward to January. We run avg to small sized Oracle DB as far as enterprise DBs go. Its about 100 Gb. Not crazy right? So, our DBA adds a small 5gb DB onto the server and BOOM GOES DYNAMITE! We get tons of cpu bottlenecking and throttling. Long story short, Oracle doesn't see an issue with the setup. Sun doesn't see any issue with the setup, yet acknowledge this could be a ZFS kernel issue. Bugs happen and I'm OK with that.

The real problem occurs with Sun's response to our issue. I basically plead with them to attempt to reproduce our errors. I question what is different about our setup than anyone else in the world. Surely we can't be the only one's running an Oracle 10g DB on ZFS over Solaris10u4. Little old me? I'm the only one with the gumption, guile stupidity or whatever to run an Oracle DBA on ZFS? C'mon. Is Sun hurting that bad? Maybe I'm the only customer left. Sun tech guy says there is not patch and it won't even be addressed in Solaris 11. WTF?!?! So they know of it, but I must be the only one with an issue. Sun tech guys, "we'll right you a patch but you need to sign something stating you'll actually deploy it. And test it out. On production machines. HA! Good one Sun tech guy. After literally days of arguing and pleading to get them to do something I get a recomendation from him to to UFS and enabling directIO. Woohoo, beaten by your own OS. Way to stay with it. Prior to this incident I have had nothing but great experiences with Sun support. This took the cake. We are so soured that RAC on RedHat the next implementation.

Condemnation for ZFS? No way. I still love. I think this is an isolated incident and I won't be deploying it the same fashion. I'll be hard pressed to be allowed to purchase any more Sparc systems though. I'll have to settle for x86. Could be worse I guess. Could dealing with HPUX.

Mo 'Green' tidbits

If you know you will idle in your care longer than 8 seconds, shut it off. That is the sweet spot for fuel waste. Concerned about prematurely killing your start by shutting off you car all the time?
When was the last time your replaced a start in a modern(post carburetor) car?

Another Google WOW - Servers

One of Google's inspirational achievements:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-10209580-92.html

There are so many cool things happening in this article.

Save with CFLs. Yes and no.

One thing no one ever mentions about saving money with CFLs is that you should only use them as replacements when the existing bulb burns out. If you don't, you're essentially wasting your initial investmeny in the bulb and filling landfills with working bulbs. It may seem insignificant but it all adds up.

Riding out those bulbs until they burn may save you enough for a Grain Belt Premium. And that is one Premo you didn't have before

Gotta Have IT

It has occurred to me that there are 3 vital game changers out there.
Data deduplication
Virtualization
Wan optimization

All encompass maximizing efficiency.
Data dedupe gives you back 30 to 40 percent of your storage by finding
indentical blocks of data and placing pointers to it rather than writing
full copies of data. So,with file level dedupe, you have 1 copy of
a word document with 5 pointers referncing it rather than 6 full
copies.With block level dedupe, you save 1 version of the text
"thank you"; from every file with additional pointers, rather
than 8 billion strings of that text. It ain't cheap but pays for
itself.

Virtualization.The newest in sliced bread. Remember
mainframes? The more things change, the more they stay the
same Jam a bunch of separate, functional apps in one place
gaining resource, hardware, and operational efficiencies. With an
avg server running at 5% efficiency, this is very wasteful of the
aforementioned resources. The savings can be astronomical
depending on environment.

Wan optimization. This merges many technology concepts to provide
reduced latency and response times across slow links through caching,
compression and other secret sauce. Response times are akin to being on
a LAN.

Coolness comes at cost though. However, long run, all will save
you $.

Reduce, reduce, recycle.

....and above ALL, help someone.
I recently coordinated a donation of some of my company's outdated
PCs(pentium 3s) with a great nonprofit organization, pcsforpeople. They take
in used pentium 3s or higher fix them up, if needed, and distribute them to
underpriveledged families that can use them.

<preach>
Think about this. Something we take for granted(computers, the
internet, and email), some folks have yet to even experience. Hopefully,
families can take advantage of the vast information that can
become available to them. Can you imagine a day without email or
surfing? I can't. Its become a necessity for most and a privelege for some.
</preach>

You can help. I found the organization on a suggestion from a
coworker. I was looking for someone that could use these computers
rather than sending them off to be trashed. That is all it takes! More than
likely there is someone in your area doing the same very thing as
pcsforpeople. Find them.

Those in the southern Minnesota area, contact Andy Elofson at =
andy.elofson@co.blue-earth.mn.us or pcsforpeople.com