We live in a world of cattle, not pets, and Kubernetes rules the roost. I’ve been meaning to spend some time getting up to speed on the latest but didn’t have enough hardware to make that happen until now. I recently bought a whole pile of surplus hardware so I will be able to experiment with orchestration and container platforms in the office.
Intel
My Core i7 Macintosh SE
I recently built the biggest, clunkiest iPad mini case ever, transforming my old Macintosh SE case into an iPad stand. But what to do with that empty case? Why, it’s the perfect size for a custom Mini-ITX PC! Introducing my liquid-cooled Core i7 monster Mac SE!
My FreeNAS Build: Supermicro X10SL7, Intel Haswell Xeon, ECC RAM
Today I’m going to dive into the hardware I selected for FreeNAS, starting with the motherboard, CPU, and memory. FreeNAS runs on any PC hardware, but building a reliable and scalable storage solution means picking higher-end components. I selected a Supermicro X10SL7 server-class motherboard with 14 (!) SAS/SATA ports paired with an Intel Xeon E3-1231v3 (Haswell) CPU and ECC memory from Crucial.
Plexistor Integrates NVDIMM for Every Application
I’m really excited about the prospects of memory-addressable flash. Moving flash closer to the CPU and addressing it as memory rather than block storage brings tremendous performance benefits, and is a once-in-a-generation radical change to system architecture. But questions remain as to how it can be integrated with today’s applications. Now Plexistor is here with a promising solution: Their “Software-Defined Memory” concept is a generic filesystem for storage, from NVDIMM to NVMe to SSD.
Impatiently Waiting For the Next MacBook Pro
I’ve been a MacBook Pro user since the last decade, switching for better hardware but staying for the better OS. I happily bought a 15-inch MacBook Pro with Retina Display the day they were announced, but I’ve been using that same machine since 2012. Now I’m impatiently waiting to upgrade, holding out for Intel’s new Skylake CPUs and the late-2015 or early-2016 MacBook Pro.