Thin provisioning needs communication to function, and zero page reclaim is only the array side of the story. WRITE_SAME helps reduce I/O load, but the server needs to use it. Wouldn’t it be nice if the operating system, file system, or volume manager would use these commands to help recover capacity?
Drobo, XP Users: Beware of 4K “Advanced Format” Drives!
December 23, 2009 By 4 Comments
Personal computer hard disk drive access methods have been repeatedly forced to adapt to ever-expanding capacity. But Western Digital is leading the change to larger 4 kilobyte hard disk blocks. Although this new “Advanced Format” includes mechanisms for backwards compatibility, buyers should be wary of these new drives for the time being.
Tuning Lighttpd For Linux
June 29, 2009 By 6 Comments
As I mentioned on Friday, I’ve recently built a multi-server web hosting environment around lighttpd, MySQL, and Ubuntu Linux. Ironically, my lighttpd web server slowed to a crawl that very evening! It turns out that I had not properly tuned lighttpd to function in a Linux environment. I was surprised to find that the Ubuntu [...]
Setting Up a Multi-Server Web Hosting Environment
June 26, 2009 By 7 Comments
The last few weeks have been tough on my web servers. The release of iPhone OS 3.0 tripled my site traffic overnight as folks investigate the new Exchange integration features, and traffic to IT commentary site, Gestalt IT, which I also host, has been growing rapidly. Plus, Google just refreshed PageRank again, sending even more [...]
I Can Finally Talk About Windows Storage Server 2008!
May 5, 2009 By 5 Comments
Iomega Grows Up and Moves Out of the House
April 16, 2009 By 12 Comments
Iomega has been a staple of the desktop computing environment for decades, but the company’s products have never been quite at home in even small corporate data centers. That changes today with the introduction of the iSCSI StorCenter Pro ix4-200r. As of now, EMC’s SOHO storage subsidiary is a serious challenger in the small business [...]
The Future of Home Storage
October 12, 2008 By 10 Comments
Consumers demand friendly, flexible solutions. They don’t want to fuss with their media, and they don’t want simple shared storage. They want integration with multiple devices and flexibility to access their content on any device.
Sun’s Excellent VirtualBox Goes 2.0
September 4, 2008 By Leave a Comment
Today, Sun released VirtualBox 2.0, a major revision to the (partially open source) desktop virtualization software. I have long used VirtualBox on my Windows machines as my virtualization product of choice due to its compactness, functionality, and low impact on the host system. Although I’m happy with VMware Fusion on the Mac, I intend to [...]
Living in a Copyrighted World
January 10, 2008 By 2 Comments
Techdirt’s I Learned It From Watching YOU, Big Content, pointed me to a Washington Post story, Hey, Isn’t That… about how the big old media companies have been repeatedly caught with their pants down, stealing content from us little guys. This got me thinking again about my own similar experiences. See, I’ve had my work [...]
Where is Linux in Storage?
July 20, 2007 By Leave a Comment
Marc Farley’s challenge of listing all the devices on our home networks got me thinking –I’ve got an awful lot of Linux devices, but all of them are infrastructure rather than interactive PCs. Of the 10 devices currently attached my home network, four are Linux based (two TiVos, a Linksys router, and Linksys NAS), three [...]
