April 8th, 2011
Something caught my eye recently. FreeNAS. Everybody claims that OpenFiler is a much superior system in terms of performance… but the latest release of FreeNAS supports something called ZFS… and ZFS was something that I had really wanted to look at….
One advantage of ZFS is that well.. it is cheaper in the sense that we no longer need to invest in really expensive RAID cards. ZFS works best with JBODs. And somehow.. ZFS sounds fast…. the way they use memory to actively cache the read/writes with their adaptive replacement cache (ARC) sounds more intelligent than the default linux disk caches used by Openfiler… and hey performance ain’t that bad when it can:
FreeNAS does have a very nice graph that shows cpu utilization and network bandwidth. During a large file copy, it topped out at 800 mbits/sec with average of 400 mbit/sec so a 1 GB network card is required to fully utilize its performance.
Read more: http://blog.patyuen.com/lessons/technology/openfiler-vs-freenas-tips-for-building-your-own-nas/#ixzz1IwH7FYaA
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April 8th, 2011
One of the main attractions of using OpenFiler together with my Esxi is that it allows me to easily scale the deployment of Esxi. Suddenly, my servers become somewhat like akin to blade servers. Each ESXI box can comprise solely of CPU and RAM. No Storage!
That is just so cool. But of course, on top of being cool, such deployment offers great flexibility. It allows the easy movement of Virtual Machines from one Esxi Host to another. If one ESXI host is running low on resources, i.e. CPU or RAM, I can easily suspend the instance. Remove it from the Esxi host configuration. Add it into the destination Esxi host configuration. And resume operations.
Tada! The entire VM migrated across. (Personally tried it out last night.. and it really worked. Had to lah… too cool already.)
Hmmm… this sounds a bit like a poor man’s way of V-Motion?
Posted in Esxi, Open Filer | No Comments »
April 8th, 2011
While going through the Openfiler forums… it suddenly dawned on me that Openfiler had an Achilles heel. While traditional raid cards come with battery packs to ensure that data in the cache gets written directly to the disk, Openfiler had no such battery packs in place.
Openfiler probably use the traditional Linux disk cache in some kind of write operations… and thus should a power outage occur… armageddon.
My fears were re-affirmed when I came across the posting:
No Volumes Shown After Power Failure
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April 8th, 2011
Setup the OpenFiler and ran some benchmarks on it through an ISCSI channel. I kind of think something is really wrong… feels like the bottleneck is either
- OpenFiler is terribly inefficient or something
- there is a performance issue with my OpenFiler network card…
oh btw, I did use the MOBO network card… which should be quite crappy as the MOBO is like many many years old…..
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April 8th, 2011
I happen to chance upon something called Openfiler while trying to sort out the backup issues. I was intentionally trying to use the thecus N2200 device for my backups… but grew quickly frustrated by the AJAX web interface that came with it. Why did they bother to build a fanciful UI like that …. which took 10s in between clicks?
Truly frustrating… so that set me down a windy path of alternative backup solutions. I have long heard of FreeNas and Openfiler as open source products that allowed you to convert a Crappy Old PC into some kind of useful NAS, giving your old computer hardware a new lease of live… sounds good to me….
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April 7th, 2011
The last few weeks had been terribly interesting. I was busy ordering stuff from the US from both New Egg and Amazon. It all started when the Sim Lim uncle wanted to charge me like 5k SGD to build a server with 32GB Ram. I wanted 64GB and did not want to pay that kind of a price… and so… the adventure began…
Posted in Esxi, Open Filer | No Comments »
April 11th, 2010
I am currently sipping my macchiato latte at pacific coffee company at Vivo City. Yeah.. they have nice plush sofa there.. and I just kind of like lounging around there with my laptop….
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Posted in Ideas, entrepeneurship | No Comments »
April 6th, 2010
Hmm.. looks like everybody is jumping into digital marketing… Did a mindmap on a Business Times article I read today…
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March 28th, 2010
Just wanted to blog this down.. before I conveniently forget about it. Yes.. sometimes I get wierd ideas on how to make the world a better place.. 
Recently, due to my failing memories, I lost my phone. The result was that I got myself a new android and new iphone.
And I was thinking to myself… why do people need to hail a cab through the traditional phone line? Surely, it is much more convenient for someone to just whip out their i-phone/g-phone and click on the option to say that they would like to hail a cab and have their whereabouts information effortlessly integrated to the Taxi reservation system?
It is a win-win for both sides.
Consumers.. no longer need to specify their location (as the phone GPs can do the work for them). They save big on both time and mobile charges.
Taxi Companies … no longer need to spend money on telephone receptionist to handle the calls. The system can automate the entire cab hailing process.
Hey.. in the future, it might even give rise to paid hitch hikers. I remembered once when the government actually made it mandatory for all cars entering the CBD to have 4 passengers… there was actually a central pick-up point for people to gather.. so that cars with insufficient passengers can just load up these strangers….
Surely, a driver who is on the way to Clementi wouldn’t mind stopping by and picking up a passenger who is going there for a few extra bucks? Win for the driver (money), Win for the hitch-hiker (cheaper ride) and win for the environment (less CO2)! A triple win-win-win!
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March 21st, 2010
Hmmm… finally had some time to indulge in a really good book. Spent the weekend reading up on Super Freakonomics. Hmmm… reminds me of the good old Freakonomics. Nice.
And you know something really strange… the best part of the book is actually the Introduction…
Did a nice mindmap (using a software that costs me a hundred bucks!).. but could not resist the temptation….
Posted in Economics | No Comments »
