Kevin's Coffee Break
Wednesday, October 31, 2012
Home Office
It has been a long journey but the home office is now complete. The follow picture looks at the back corner of the office through the construction
Saturday, September 22, 2012
Smart House
We have all heard about the smart house of the future. We will arrive home to a house that says "welcome home!" when we leave the house will remind us to take the garbage out and warn us that it might rain today. It will prepare our coffee, cook our dinner, and automatically notify a host of service professionals to perform maintenance and repairs.
I don't live in a smart house, but sometimes it feels like it. While most people are dropping their traditional land telephone lines and strictly using cell phones, we have taken a different approach. Each of us can be contacted directly via our cell phone number - a number provided only to close contacts. We have given our house a phone number too - the land line. That number is provided to everyone else. Most of those calls go directly to our answering machine.
The house's answer machine provides announcements loud enough to be heard throughout the house. "CVS Pharamacy is calling" followed by "This is CVS Pharmacy calling to tell you your prescription is ready for pick up." A few moments later the house announces "Doan Dodge is calling" followed by "This is Doan Dodge calling to remind you about your car appointment on Monday." Throughout the day the house tells us about doctor appointments, service status, reminders, and more.
I recently visited a Time Warner store and found a display for the Time Warner Security System. There is a door sensor that looks at the time of day to make different pre-recorded announcements. For example, when my son walks through the door after school the system could say "Welcome home Mark. Get started on your homework right away."
I don't live in the house of the future. But as I listen to my house throughout the day I believe the Smart House is within reach!
I don't live in a smart house, but sometimes it feels like it. While most people are dropping their traditional land telephone lines and strictly using cell phones, we have taken a different approach. Each of us can be contacted directly via our cell phone number - a number provided only to close contacts. We have given our house a phone number too - the land line. That number is provided to everyone else. Most of those calls go directly to our answering machine.
The house's answer machine provides announcements loud enough to be heard throughout the house. "CVS Pharamacy is calling" followed by "This is CVS Pharmacy calling to tell you your prescription is ready for pick up." A few moments later the house announces "Doan Dodge is calling" followed by "This is Doan Dodge calling to remind you about your car appointment on Monday." Throughout the day the house tells us about doctor appointments, service status, reminders, and more.
I recently visited a Time Warner store and found a display for the Time Warner Security System. There is a door sensor that looks at the time of day to make different pre-recorded announcements. For example, when my son walks through the door after school the system could say "Welcome home Mark. Get started on your homework right away."
I don't live in the house of the future. But as I listen to my house throughout the day I believe the Smart House is within reach!
Kitchen project day 2
The old floor section was cut out and the subfloor replaced. Next? The flooring will be patched.
Thursday, September 20, 2012
Our kitchen project
Why is our kitchen wrapped in plastic?
We don't have a storm door on our back door. As a result water has penetrated under the door and entered the house. Unknown to us, the water has gotten under the vinyl floor. Our house is only 9 years old and we estimate this water damage has been happening for most of those 9 years. It has caused not only the underlayment to rot but caused the 5/8" subfloor (guaranteed for 50 years) to rot too!
The home builder is coming to cut away a large portion of the kitchen floor. He will cut it all the way to the rafters below! Then he will surgically replace the subfloor and brace the subfloor from underneath.
Then a flooring company will come to replace underlayment and replace the vinyl flooring using a nearly invisible seam material.
That is why my kitchen is wrapped in plastic - to try to avoid getting all the saw dust on our food and dishes.
We don't have a storm door on our back door. As a result water has penetrated under the door and entered the house. Unknown to us, the water has gotten under the vinyl floor. Our house is only 9 years old and we estimate this water damage has been happening for most of those 9 years. It has caused not only the underlayment to rot but caused the 5/8" subfloor (guaranteed for 50 years) to rot too!
The home builder is coming to cut away a large portion of the kitchen floor. He will cut it all the way to the rafters below! Then he will surgically replace the subfloor and brace the subfloor from underneath.
Then a flooring company will come to replace underlayment and replace the vinyl flooring using a nearly invisible seam material.
That is why my kitchen is wrapped in plastic - to try to avoid getting all the saw dust on our food and dishes.
Friday, June 29, 2012
I am a Google Maps Star
https://maps.google.com/maps?q=508+Hamlin+Parma+Townline+Road,+Hilton,+NY&hl=en&ll=43.302311,-77.825869&spn=0.000004,0.001961&sll=43.323804,-77.822814&sspn=0.02329,0.031371&hnear=508+Clarkson+Parma+Town+Line+Rd,+Hilton,+New+York+14468&t=m&z=19&layer=c&cbll=43.3024,-77.825829&panoid=X_D0T7HQjGAjplxIhJuxrA&cbp=12,191.3,,0,0
Sunday, June 24, 2012
Abiquo
Abiquo: More than a cloud veneer
It appears Abiquo has all the pre-requsit features one would expect from a cloud veneer. It sits infront of a virtual environment and provides self-provisioning cloud features to customers. As you would expect from such a product, it supports many hypervisors: VMWARE, XEN, XenServer, KVM, Hyper-V, and Virtual Box. It has a service catalog with standard templates, shared/community templates, and customer owned templates. It has resource limits controlling how much any one customer is allowed to consume. It has LDAP integration for authentication. It includes the ability to create private networks and allows customer branding. It seems to have nailed the basics. But what makes Abiquo stand out?
The ease of implementation provides an interesting argument for Abiquo. During installation, Abiquo will scan an address range and look for hosts. It will add the hosts it finds to its console. It will then scan the hosts for virtual machines and allow the installer to easily add those virtual machines to the console too. This allows Abiquo to be installed quickly into an existing virtual environment.
Abiquo has detailed resource limits that can implement controls down to the number of CPU’s, amount of memory, number of public IP Addresses, and more. In addition to providing storage from the virtual environment for cloud consumption, Abiquo can use Netapp API’s to provide Storage As A Service and tiered storage (with different pricing per tier). Abiquo uses rules and algorithms to determine virtual machine placement. And finally, Albiquo comes with built-in V2V so that virtual machines may be moved between competing hypervisors.
In the end, Abiquo is a step ahead of other products in its class (such as Cloudstack and Openstack), and can serve as a low cost replacement for vCloud Director.
Friday, June 1, 2012
Tintri VMStore Flash Based Storage Array
Flash storage, deployed in solid state drives (SSD) can be 400 times faster than disk. However, SSD is expensive. A cottage industry of companies like Tintri are trying different approaches to using SSD in new ways.
Traditional Storage Arrays implement SSD as read/write cache. Traditional Storage Arrays attempts to predict what will be needed based upon current activity and will move items onto SSD to improve performance. Tintri VMStore takes a different approach. They use SSD as primary storage for “hot” data, and then offloads “cold” data to sata. It determines what data is hot based upon performance information gathered at the VM’s disks. Tintri believes that gathering information at this level provides better efficiency than gathering the information at a LUN level because caching often guesses wrong leaving idle data sitting in the cache. Because Tintri looks at VM’s disks, it is easier to identify I/O bottleknecks.
Since Tintri is determining which data is on SSD versus SATA, they argue that administrators no longer need to be concerned about storage tiers. I argue that unless you have enough Tintri storage to meet your needs, you’ll still contend with storage tiers.
Since SSD is expensive it must be used as efficiently as possible. Tintri accomplishes this by first de-duping data, and then compressing it. Wouldn’t this take a performance hit? Remember, SSD can be 400 times faster when compared to traditional disk – the performance hit would be insignificant compared to the faster drive.
SSD use Multi-Level-Cells to hold data. These cells can be overwritten only 5000 to 10000 times before the wear out. If your cache wears out – who cares? Just replace it. But if your primary storage wears out? You have a big problem! Tintri combats this by trying to efficiently use SSD via dedup and compression; and to add error checking and RAID 6 for when the SSD wears out.
Since SSD can be 400 times faster than disk, you can do some creative inefficient things and still be faster. Such as de-dup, compression, and data integrity checking. With error checking and parity, the system will ‘heal itself’ from disk problems on the fly. It also uses a Non-Volatile NVRAM as a write buffer so that if the Tintri mid-stream, the last write can still be constructed: The hypervisor decides to write data; the data goes to the primary NVRAM; the data is copied to secondary NVRAM; then the hypervisor is told the data was written; Tintri confirms the NVRAM data is complete; finally the NVRAM is written to SDD. Again… you would think this might slow things down, but not when you are working 400 times faster than traditional disk.
Another nice item: Trintri does automatic disk alignment for virtual machines.
Much of the Trintri literature compares how much faster SSD is versus disk, how more efficient their vmware-aware performance monitoring is compared to caching, and how Trintri takes advantage of the faster SSD to add efficiency and redundancy for high availability.
Traditional Storage Arrays implement SSD as read/write cache. Traditional Storage Arrays attempts to predict what will be needed based upon current activity and will move items onto SSD to improve performance. Tintri VMStore takes a different approach. They use SSD as primary storage for “hot” data, and then offloads “cold” data to sata. It determines what data is hot based upon performance information gathered at the VM’s disks. Tintri believes that gathering information at this level provides better efficiency than gathering the information at a LUN level because caching often guesses wrong leaving idle data sitting in the cache. Because Tintri looks at VM’s disks, it is easier to identify I/O bottleknecks.
Since Tintri is determining which data is on SSD versus SATA, they argue that administrators no longer need to be concerned about storage tiers. I argue that unless you have enough Tintri storage to meet your needs, you’ll still contend with storage tiers.
Since SSD is expensive it must be used as efficiently as possible. Tintri accomplishes this by first de-duping data, and then compressing it. Wouldn’t this take a performance hit? Remember, SSD can be 400 times faster when compared to traditional disk – the performance hit would be insignificant compared to the faster drive.
SSD use Multi-Level-Cells to hold data. These cells can be overwritten only 5000 to 10000 times before the wear out. If your cache wears out – who cares? Just replace it. But if your primary storage wears out? You have a big problem! Tintri combats this by trying to efficiently use SSD via dedup and compression; and to add error checking and RAID 6 for when the SSD wears out.
Since SSD can be 400 times faster than disk, you can do some creative inefficient things and still be faster. Such as de-dup, compression, and data integrity checking. With error checking and parity, the system will ‘heal itself’ from disk problems on the fly. It also uses a Non-Volatile NVRAM as a write buffer so that if the Tintri mid-stream, the last write can still be constructed: The hypervisor decides to write data; the data goes to the primary NVRAM; the data is copied to secondary NVRAM; then the hypervisor is told the data was written; Tintri confirms the NVRAM data is complete; finally the NVRAM is written to SDD. Again… you would think this might slow things down, but not when you are working 400 times faster than traditional disk.
Another nice item: Trintri does automatic disk alignment for virtual machines.
Much of the Trintri literature compares how much faster SSD is versus disk, how more efficient their vmware-aware performance monitoring is compared to caching, and how Trintri takes advantage of the faster SSD to add efficiency and redundancy for high availability.
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