unixwiz

I went to a presentation today by a hardware vendor. Once again I am trying to understand why people think Blade server technology is such a great think to have. For example the vendor today had a blade system that was 10 RU high, and had slots for 10 blades. So basicly you have 10 1RU servers being mounted vertically in a 10 RU chassis. What does this actually buy you? Not to much of anything, you still have 10 independent servers to manage, you still had all the cables running to the chassis as you would if you had 10 1RU servers. The only thing you save is the number of power cords you need. I will say something about this vendor though, if I were to ever buy a Blade system, it would probably be theirs. So who was this vendor? Sun Microsystems. Some of the features that I think they have that other vendors don’t are the following:

• SPARC, AMD Opteron, and Intel Xeon processor-based server modules. The SPARC modules are based off of the Niagara chip set.
• 4 hot swappable hard drives per blade. This is a MAJOR issue with other vendors as they don’t provide hot-swappable hard drives, which means you have to take the blade out of service to replace the drives.
• Twice the memory support that most other vendors. (up to 64GB)
• Price - Just comparing list prices between the “top 3″ shows that Sun has more bang for the buck.

I am not an advocate on blades, I think they are just a way for vendors to play buzz word bingo with people who don’t know better.

One of the other cool things that was talked about is the Sun StorageTek 5800 aka Honeycomb. When they first started talking about it, it almost sounded like they were talking about WinFS that was supposed to be in Longhorn. But the more they talked about it, the more I saw that it was not WinFS, but a really cool and really fast data storage system. Wish I could win the lottery to buy one ..

Another server I would absolutly love to have at home is the Sun Fire X4500 aka Thumper, especially now that they are offering 1TB drives in it, which means it now holds 48TB of disk space. That is a lot of freaking space to have in a 5U format. If I only had the money, heck I would settle for the 24tb model. Add in Sun Virtual Desktop Infrastructure to the thumper and you have one hell of a house server. You could put Sun Rays hanging off of the thumper and each Sun Ray could have Solaris or Windows or Linux or what ever desktop you want. And because all the data is stored on the thumper in a ZFS file system it is automatically protected by raidz (assuming you set it up that way), and you could share all your file with the other people in your house.

And the last but not least coolest thing they talked about was the new Niagara 2 chips. Some notable features:

1. up to 64 simultaneous threads at a time - which means you basicly have an E10K/F12K/F15K in a single 2 RU box
2. One floating point unit per core. Whereas the Niagara 1 chips had one floating point for the CPU, the Niagara 2’s have 1 per core, which makes the chip even faster.
3. 10 GB Ethernet on the silicon - if gigabit ethernet was not fast enough for you, then you can have up to 2 10GB ethernet connections that are piped directly in to the CPU.

I can’t wait to get some of the new servers in with the Niagara 2 chips in them, they are going to spank the Niagara one machines.

After reading ThinGuy’s Blog: Are PC’s Killing Health Care? I can’t agree more… It got me to thinking when I was in the emergency room of a local hospital last summer. (Long story, but spent a while there) Anyways, while I was there (I have not been to the ER in ages and the last time I was everything was still done on paper), they popped down a little thing on the wall and he behind it was a “Windows Thin client”. The nurse did nothing but b@#*h about how slow it was. I watched and it looked to be running a Wyse Client and using Windows from some place that was not local. I got to thinking about how a Sun Ray environment would work in this hospital. Here are some ideas I thought of while laying in that short bed (I am over 6′5″) for 5 hours.

1. Instead of having the paper charts, when you arrive, your are “assigned” a smart card and all your information follows you on that card no matter where you go (AKA HCHD, Hospital Chart Hot Desking). For example I had to end up going to X-Ray, and the X-Ray tech did not have the complete orders and started taking Chest X-Ray’s instead of X-Ray’s of my knee. (Later found out that they wanted both, but the doctor forgot to put the knee one on the order sheet, if he had seen my chart he would have known that the original reason I was there was for knee problems).
2. The monitoring devices in the room (BP/Heart Rate/oxygen/etc) could be attached to the Sun Ray and therefore your info logged and displayed on the Sun Ray at a click of the button.
3. Each patient could be given their own card for surfing the web, etc.. (if they are ambulatory enough to do this)
4. By using the smart card to keep track of your stats, there is no paper to accidentally get “lost” or stolen (helps with HIPPA).
5. Be a lot faster than the current Wyse Terminals they were using as they would not have to wait for it to boot.
6. Security, there isn’t a day go by that I don’t read about some one losing some one else’s information. I.E. VA Hospital, (which uses some Sun Rays in areas around where I am), This would eliminate all of these loses, if everyone was forced to use it.
7. All Labs/X-Rays posted directly to the persons “card”

Granted some of the above would be a feat to pull off, but it can be done.

I think that using Sun Ray’s is the coolest thing, especially now that I have it set up for all the people in my group to pull their card out of their Office Sun Ray and plug it in to their Home Sun Ray and everything is still there. (If I can just get the performance problems worked out it would be really killer, but something about the combination of Solaris 10, Sun Ray 4 is causing me some slowness, and I am not sure where it is exactly. )

Now if more people realize the benefits of using Sun Ray’s over other “Chubby Clients” Sun Ray’s would take over the world.

The other day I showed Chris how to install a new Sun Ray server. (this one is a 10 processor domain on a E25K, running Solaris 10, ZFS and everything new). Well we switched it over to be the primary Sun Ray server last night and noticed some slowness. So we decided to install APOC Sun Desktop Manager on it to see if we could disable some stuff to make the JDS enviroment run a little faster. The install of the console and server seemed to go fine, but every time we tried to run the “svcadm enable apocd/udp” it would fail and go in to maintenance mode. It seems that when ever the install happened, the info for the apocd/udp was not populated in to the inetadm..
The first thing I did was look at the /var/adm/messages and saw this:

Interesting, we then spent a while trying to figure out what was supposed to be in there. Running “inetadm -l network/apocd/udp” produced this:

What I ended up doing was this:

So now apoc runs, but now only part of the config stuff that I set in the Desktop Manager actually works. For example, I got the splash screen not to show, but I can’t get the default terminal to be dtterm instead of gnome-terminal (dtterm uses about 7meg of ram, whereas gnome-terminal uses about 78 meg..Take that and add about 20 users with about 10 or 15 terminal windows open and you have 2gig of ram for dtterm vs 23.4 gig of ram) So now we are trying to figure out some other performance enhancements. Thinking about putting a less intensive graphical environment on it for the people to use.

Any one have some good tips for speeding up a 10 x 1.2GHz UltraIII box with 16gb of ram running Solaris 10?

Technorati Tags: Sun Ray, Solaris 10

I got called the other night by our operations group because the keyboard and mouse would not work on their 3 head group of Sun Ray 150’s. So I went in and killed their session and had them restart it, did not work. So I went looking in the log files and saw this:

Well that could not be good. So I ended up going in to the office. Tried unplugging the Sun Ray and plugging it back in. This is when I saw the 9 D error icon. Nice little icon with a picture of a USB connector and a yellow triangle. So I unplugged it and disconnected the keyboard and mouse and then plugged it back in. Still got the same error. The funny thing about the error is, it is listed as this in the docs:

This is an over current condition on the USB bus, i.e., the total number of devices draws too much current . Consider using a powered hub.

So now I ended up swaping it out with one that was in my office and rebuilding the multi-head group, and they were all set. The interesting thing about it is that the status LED stayed green, instead of turning amber. So the next morning I tried it on a different server (the original server it was attached to is running SRSS 2.0 still) that was running SRSS 3.1, this time nothing showed up in the log files, but the Sun Ray still showed the USB 9 icon and the keyboard and mouse did not work. So I ended up calling it in for replacement. It is nice that the Sun Ray’s have a long warrenty period. This one was bought 2 or 3 years ago.

In an unrelated note, I have to go in early to get a power backplane replaced in one of our V890’s because we have went through three power supplies in the PS0 slot in under a month. The bad part about this is the 890 has 11 zones on it and 1TB of disk, so we are going to have some services out while Sun replaces the backplane and power supply. Hopefully this will fix it though.

I received a “big” envelope in the mail the other day, it was from Axel. (No Justin, not Axel Rose but the company Axel www.axel.com). In it they were talking about their new Ultra-Think Client techonology which is now available. What is interesting is their little info sheet that accompanied it. What follows is a copy of what they had on the sheet:

ULTRA-THIN CLIENT TECHNOLOGY is now available!!!

AXEL Inc has developed a unique technical approach, geared toward providing the following benefits:

• Optimized Electronics
• No Opertaing System
• No Local Administration necessary
• Embedded native client for RDP and ICA
• Emulation for 5250, 3270, UNIX
• Multiple Independent Sessions
• 100% Virus immunity

…Regardless of the size of your organization, type of host, servers, or application if reliability, security and cost of ownership are your primary concerns, the ultra-thin client technology is the right answer.

Consider the following: (applicable to PC’s and OS-based thin clients)
Anti virus license - Cost per PC or PC based thin client - $30.00 / year -
Usual warranty coverage for PC’s - 3 years
Up to 70% of standard PC’s (and thin clients based on this architecture) resources are dedicated to the operating system
Extensive usage of network bandwidth capacity.
Up grade license required for various application sold - per PC or user.
Multiple support sources needed from various vendors depending on the nature of the problem

And then consider, with Axel’s Ultra Thin-Client Technology…

No need for Anti-Virus license
5 years warranty
Resources fully dedicated to applications
Low Bandwidth usage thanks to smart display management
Upgrades unnecessary
Support from one source

Now I have never used one of the Axel Terminal’s, but I have used nearly every type of Sun Ray from Sun Microsystems. What I find funny about this ad is that what they are talking about is nothing new. Sun has been doing it for years. What is intresting is that it says there is no operating system in the thin client. But if it supports all those emulations it must have some sort of OS in them wouldn’t it? I like how it says that it supports “Multiple Independent Sessions”, but from looking at the specs it doesn’t look like it supports the hot desking like the Sun Ray’s do. I really like Sun’s hot desking feature when I can go between my house, office and off-site data center and still have access to the same desktop in all three places. My sessions also stays where it was when the network goes out (like tonight for some reason we were having hit and miss getting to the sun ray server at the office, but our sessions were always in the state that they were when the network went out.

Doing a quick search on google it also looks like the price of these terminals may be more than Sun’s Sun Ray thin clients. Sorry Axel, nice flyer, but I will stick with Sun Ray’s.