The Deep End | Paul Venezia | March 2007

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March 2007

March 30, 2007 | Comments: (0)

When it rains, it pours. I've been absolutely slammed with work lately, between the Asterisk piece that printed a few weeks ago, going in-depth with Sun's x4500 Thumper storage server and ZFS, a large-scale NAS filer test that is just about to get sewn up, and coding the ASAP tool (nee FindMe) that I'll profile in this space very soon. All that on top of building two brand-new datacenters in two states simultaneously. Suffice it to say, there's little time for anything else at the moment.

During all of this, I took receipt of a Sun Ultra 40 M2 workstation loaded with 16GB of RAM, an nVidia Quadro 5500 graphics adapter, and dual dual-core Opteron 2218s. At around the same time, IBM sent me a zPro workstation with two dual-core 3.0Ghz Xeon 5160 CPUs, 8GB of RAM, and an nVidia Quadro 3500. They're both extremely high-powered workstations, but in two different classes.

The Sun Ultra 40 M2 is the next generation of the original Ultra 40, which I took a look at last year. The M2 is the refresh, and offers eight 3.5" hot-swap SAS or SATA drive bays, the new Quadro 5500 graphics adapter, and a few other tweaks. If you've never seen a Quadro 5500, it's a monster -- it's two slot-widths wide and uses all of a PCI-Express x16 slot. Of course, the Ultra 40 is nVidia SLI-ready.

Essentially, the Ultra 40 M2 is the most powerful x86_64 workstation you can buy today. The graphics performance is phenomenal, with quick testing of GLXGears showing around 15k frames per second at 1280x1024. The built-in 7.1 sound as well as S/PDIF input and output is great for DAW applications, and with a current max of 32GB RAM and 6TB storage with 750GB SATA drives, it can scale far beyond most servers, never mind workstations. The built-in RAID is of the nVidia flavor, which is relatively poorly supported on anything but Windows, but I tossed in a 3ware 9650SE PCI-E SATA RAID6 controller, which married quite nicely to the multilane drive backplane, and voila, 110MB/s writes to a RAID5 array of six 250GB SATA drives. I'll be posting something specifically about the 9650SE soon, as well. What a wonderful time to be alive.

Vista is well supported on the Ultra 40 M2, and an install of Vista Ultimate easily cleared every performance hurdle during install. All the semi-neato eye candy in Vista is at your fingertips. Red Hat Workstation 4 runs just fine, as does Fedora Core 5,6, and the nascent 7. Windows XP x64 is also supported.

The pricing starts at around $11,000 for the configuration I have here, but if it's the fists of God you're looking for, you'd better be willing to pay a holy price.

The IBM zPro isn't at the same level as the Ultra 40 M2, but then, it's not in the same price class as the Ultra 40 M2. It doesn't have the same aesthetic appeal of the Ultra 40, and it really looks like a small AS/400, but in a way, that's not a bad thing. It certainly looks powerful. And in reality, it is. The two dual-core Xeons aren't Opteron 2218s, but they're no slouch, and the same goes for the Quadro 3500. Internal storage is provided by up to four SATA or SAS drives with an optional RAID controller. The audio is pedestrian but functional, and the overall package is nicely appointed for the price, around $8k in my tested configuration. Like the Ultra 40, Vista Ultimate has no problem on this system, nor does FC5, 6, 7, and RHWS 4. With twin 21" LCD panels fired up and an installation of FC7, it's ready for anything.

Unless you're trying to find the last digit of pi, either of these workstations will knock your socks off and leave you wondering how you ever used a computer before. As I gaze at my dual 1Ghz PIII workstation from several years ago (which was the bee's knees then), the march of technology snaps into clear focus. The PIII is a doorstop now, not even really fit for server duty. These two workstations, however, have a long way to go before being relegated to inevitable obsolescence.

As I continue to work with these systems, I'll continue to post tidbits about them. If you're wondering, the forcedeth issue I noted awhile ago was from an install on the Ultra 40. Such is life.

Posted by Paul Venezia on March 30, 2007 02:21 PM

March 21, 2007 | Comments: (0)

IT Watchdogs and the Dell mystery solved

In response to my recent APC NetBotz review, Robert Rosen hipped me to IT Watchdogs, a company that makes similar environmental sensors. They lack the heavy-duty server-side components, but offer a wide array of sensors for reasonable prices. Looks cool.

My post the other day on Dell basically selling the 6950 for the cost of the RAM and CPUs garnered some attention. It seems that Dell's pricing is accurate for the moment -- 30-40% off the normal pricing in an effort to bring more eyeballs to their new server lines. At $29k, it might be worth buying the server just for the RAM and procs. I'm interested to get a look at a Dell-built Opteron server just as I'd be interested in checking out a sports car built by International Harvester -- just for the sheer novelty.

Posted by Paul Venezia on March 21, 2007 09:19 AM

March 19, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Talk about a price difference

I've been perusing vendor websites comparing prices on their big iron Opteron boxes. I've found something that isn't quite right:

1) Sun x4600 M2, 64GB RAM, four Opteron 8218s, two SAS drives, RHEL3, rack kit: $47,999
2) HP DL585G2, 64GB RAM (extrapolated from their online pricing), four Opteron 8212s two SAS drives, RHEL3, rack kit: $70k or so
3) Dell PowerEdge 6950, 64GB RAM, four Opteron 8220SEs, two SAS drives, RHEL3, rack kit: $30k

Notice something odd? There isn't much in the way of detailed specs on Dell's site, but their pricing for 4GB DDR667 RAM is $20k for 64GB, or around $1.5k/DIMM. HP's pricing is $4k/DIMM. Sun is in the middle, and to be fair, the x4600 scales to twice the spec of either the Dell or HP system. Either Dell's throwing one heck of a loss-leader in a bizarre way, or someone messed up the site pricing.

Posted by Paul Venezia on March 19, 2007 11:41 AM

March 12, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Where's Waldo? Locating the OID you need.

A few days ago I decided to write a little Cisco-centric SNMP query/modify tool. I didn't need or want anything beyond simply finding the switch and switchport a MAC or IP address was plugged into, and to be able to set that port to another VLAN, and then enable/disable the port to force the system to renew it's DHCP lease. Most of the OIDs I needed were simple to find, others not so for some reason. Here's my short list:

Pull the MAC address table: .1.3.6.1.2.1.17.4.3.1.1
o- Used in conjuction with community@vlan syntax.

Pull the bridge port number table: .1.3.6.1.2.1.17.4.3.1.2

Find the ifIndex number: .1.3.6.1.2.1.17.1.4.1.2.<bridge port number>

Find the assigned VLAN: .1.3.6.1.4.1.9.9.68.1.2.2.1.2.<ifIndex>

Find the real port name: .1.3.6.1.2.1.31.1.1.1.1.<ifIndex>

Set a port to another VLAN: .1.3.6.1.4.1.9.9.68.1.2.2.1.2.<ifIndex> integer <VLAN ID>

Enable/disable a switchport: .1.3.6.1.2.1.2.2.1.7.379.<ifIndex> integer [ 1 = enabled | 2 = disabled ]

I'm still writing this tool, so there's sure to be more in the near future.

Posted by Paul Venezia on March 12, 2007 07:22 PM

March 02, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Dell's Little Black Box

Awhile back, Dell sent me an RD1000. It's an attractive little external removable drive, fed by USB2, with 40, 80 and 120GB cartridges. The cartridges are really just SATA hard drives, but they're cheap and easy to handle. I've put my RD1000 through an enormous number of read/write cycles without a hitch, and am currently running it on my FC6 workstation as a local backup drive. An rsync cronjob runs nightly to sync the most vital 110GB of my 180GB homedir to one of the 120GB cartridges. I've found that it's actually quite speedy relative to price, coming in at around 28MB/s writes, 38MB/s reads with an ext3 filesystem -- not too shabby. For remote site system backups in a small office, this thing is perfect. The cartridges are sturdy enough to be shipped repeatedly, easily handled by non-savvy folks, and cheap. I believe that the disks are just straight SATA drives, so in the event that the chassis has a problem, it may be possible to bring up a cartridge on a standard SATA controller -- I haven't tried this yet, though it's on The List.

I was actually thinking of the RD1000 following a phone call from Oliver Rist, who spent the first 5 minutes on the phone trying to unmount a failed IOMega external drive that had just gone south, taking 90GB of apparently important data with it. His preferred method for fixing the problem centered around rapid-fire expletives followed by hitting things with a shoe. Of course, this being Oliver, I can only imagine that at least 80GB of the departed data was home video of him practicing to be a cage fighter. The world mourns the loss.

Posted by Paul Venezia on March 2, 2007 05:53 PM

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