How to Support Your IT Innovators: I just can’t help making connections between this Harvard Buinsess article and this piece from The Chief Happiness Officer: How NOT to lead geeks.
Notes from week 2 rss reads.
This week : Cloud, Security
The Complete National Geographic on 160-GB Hard Drive: $199.95, not shippable outside of the U.S. and Canada.
Explore 120 years of amazing discoveries, fascinating maps, and the world’s best photography with The Complete National Geographic. This definitive collection of every issue of National Geographic magazine, digitally reproduced in stunning high resolution, brings you the world and all that is in it. Use the advanced interface to explore a topic, search for photographs, browse the globe, or wander on your own expedition.
Following my installation tutorial, I have read more on it. I will summarize my findings there.
Pros and Cons
Windows Home Server has the following cons and pros to me:
Pros:
- PC backup (still has to be externalized afterwards, your WHS can’t be your single point of failure.
- Media Storage with expandable capacity
- Extensions & Add-ins
Cons:
- I am sure you can build your own configuration but the license remains OEM (99$). That’s the only one I could find on amazon. What about the support ? The installation was not straightforward on a VM.
- Open source solutions are available. They require more integration but are competitive.
Links
In order to give a try to Windows Home Server as a replacement or addition to my NAS, I installed Windows Home Server under VMware and as it was a bit difficult to get a correct and complete tutorial, I did one : Installing Windows Home Server under VMware Workstation.
I had to play with a test environment for Apache, PHP and PostgreSQL and took some notes about setting up it. They are available at Setting up a development environment for Apache, PHP and PostgreSQL. You can find more tutorials on the dedicated page.
Notes from week 51 rss reads.
This week : Cisco, EMC, GreenIT, Microsoft, Wordpress
Jolicloud is a linux based distribution targeted to netbooks. It does abstraction of technical details and provides added value thanks to a cloud : backup, social features, additional software, etc. Easy to install, I gave it a try on my virtual platform of choice and did a tutorial (Installing Jolicloud on VMware Workstation, really basic) as VMware Worsktation was not officialy supported. I highly recommend you to do the same, with Virtualbox if you don’t have VMware Workstation or with a the live test drive (with no installation required).
More on Jolicloud:
Rightsizing Servers to Achieve Cost and Power Savings in the Datacenter: This article introduces a whitepaper (pdf) published December 09:
In a nutshell, the paper describes how we perform detailed analysis of our internal workloads and then select balanced servers that are optimally sized for our production scenarios. It is my hope that IT teams in other companies can use the information in our paper to justify devoting resources to characterizing internal workloads, because that is the basis of an effective rightsizing strategy.
The whitepaper makes a parallel between the servers and the cars purchasing process is interesting as it enlarges the vision on the all criteria to look for, but it just dismisses that if you have an outsourced services or if you just lease your servers, then your needs are not the same and you tend to remove some criteria from your process.
The document goes through SPEC (Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation) and TPC (Transaction Processing Performance Council) benchmark with their respective applications and limitations.
After an overview of cpu, memory, disk and network performance evolution over the last years and the links between theses components, the power factor is introduces through the PUE perspective, highlighted by this figure (from source document):
Three-year total cost of ownership of a basic 1U server
The whitepaper continues by studying cases for typical servers roles: web server, file server.
What I find really surprising, is that it never deals with virtualization.
Update : One more very good article on this whitepaper from GreenM3 : ex-Intel engineers at Microsoft share processor secrets, optimize performance per watt
Notes from week 50 rss reads.
This week : Cloud (AWS), Data Center, Electronic, Misc.
Read the rest of this entry »
