Posts made by Aconboy

@ntoxicator - On Friday the President signed into law a bill that allows small businesses to deduct up to $500,000 of computer/software solution purchases on their 2015 tax returns for purchases made before the end of the year. Previously they would have only been able to deduct a total of $25,000 of these types of purchases in 2015 and would have had to spread the rest of the deduction over the useful life of each asset. This law now allows them to enjoy the entire tax benefit right away!

Said another way, if a tax-paying SMB customer purchases a Scale solution before 12/31, they will be able to deduct the entire expense from their 2015 income. This means they will realize significant cash savings for 2015 by buying now. A $50,000 purchase now only really costs $32,500 because of the cash saved on taxes.

Example
Scale purchase: $50,000
Estimated tax rate: 35%
Tax savings: $17,500
Net 2015 cash impact: $32,500

And there it is... Awesomeness embedded in pixels. love it

in answer to the original question, most DVR's have a hardware decoder built in and use proprietary codecs specifically to prevent the simple copy out of the files (usually a linux box on the back end ) and actually being able to play them back

@ntoxicator I will have Kevin Holmes and Ross Wimer reach out to you

@ntoxicator I can directly import .qcow2 images. Where are you located in the country and I will have a guy ping you directly

@ntoxicator yup. Straight list on a 2000 series 3 node cluster (before discounting) is ~35k, and a 1000 series is ~25k.... not hard to get there at all.

@ntoxicator - for that kind of money, I could put in a cluster at the primary site, and cluster at a DR site, and have real time replication with failover and failback (and likely still have beer money left over).

@ntoxicator on the HGST 1.8 drives - major firmware issues with those. The right IO patterns with them make them drop off of the bus with no warning.

@coliver Vendors also sell quite a few features that just aren't there in roll-your-own based approaches - site to site replication, zero footprint snapshots, etc.

@ntoxicator if you can, great, if not, that is fine, I do them pretty much every week

@ntoxicator I can go over what we do with you - no strings attached. I have a web demo that I do weekly on thursdays at 1:30 central time. http://bit.ly/HC3LiveDemo if you want to come. As far as KVM goes, being that it is a pair of kernel modules, it allows us to do tons of stuff that we otherwise couldn't

@ntoxicator agreed on supermicro - good gear, but the company is built to work with vendors, not so much end users. On the Scale side, we don't use Xen - too much overhead on the l3->l1 calls. We use KVM at the base, then made it cluster aware

@ntoxicator pricing seems to be relatively ok with 3250M5's, my concern is they seem a bit dated on specs vs others. The BIOS on them is a bit of a huge PITA in my opinion. Are you still thinking of rolling your own or is a prebuilt solution still on the radar for you?

@ntoxicator said:

So if anyone can explain to me

To do away with centralized storage such as what we have now and I've been moving to. I suppose this is what I've grown use to.

In order to have localized storage at the node/hypervisor level. one or many of the hypervisors would be storing all the data and sharing out the NFS? Then its replicated between? probably with DRBD Storage.

however, would would this be done with Citrix Xen Server for instance?

there are a couple of methods used there in the hyperconverged space. Two different schools of thought emerged on how best to simplify the architecture while maintaining the benefits of virtualization.

1. Simply virtualize the SAN and it's controllers - also known as pulling the SAN into the servers. The VSA or Virtual San Appliance approach was developed to move the SAN up into the host servers through the use of a virtual machine. This did in fact simplify things like implementation and management by eliminating the separate SAN. However, it didn't do much to simplify the data path or regain efficiency. The VSA consumed significant host resources (CPU and RAM), still used storage protocols, and complicated the path to disk by turning the IO path from application->RAM->Disk into application->RAM->hypervisor->RAM->SAN controller VM->RAM->hypervisor->RAM->write-cache SSD->Disk.

2. Eliminate the dedicated servers, storage protocol overhead, resources consumed and associated gear by moving the hypervisor directly into the OS of the storage platform as a set of kernel modules, thereby simplifying the architecture dramatically while regaining the efficiency originally promised by Virtualization.

@ntoxicator - yup, we do that too - 10gig out of band from the LAN path for storage stack handling and cluster self-awareness.

@ntoxicator said:

@Aconboy said:

HC3

How long has HC3 scale been avail? Today is my first time hearding and being introduced with the option

We began it in 2008, and first customer ship was in late 2011. we have north of 5000 units in the field across 1800 or so customer sites.Take a look at www.scalecomputing.com

@coliver said:

@scottalanmiller said:

@coliver said:

@ntoxicator said:

In my opinion. There would be more overhead

ISCSI LUN attached to Xen Hypervisor > VM > attached as local disk. Unless pass-through?

Slightly more overhead... probably an immeasurable amount. At the same time you are going against best practices and defeating many of the advantages of virtualization in one fell swoop by not attaching the storage to your hypervisor and presenting a virtual disk to the VM.

As I was writing out the downsides, I'm not actually sure that it is more overhead. Because the iSCSI has to be processed in software by the VM rather than in hardware by the host there is more network overhead in doing it to the guest.

Right, I agree with this I assumed that it would be slightly more processing overhead for the hypervisor but since it would be doing it anyway it wouldn't be anything additional.

Guys, this is largely the reason we architected HC3 the way we did - give you the flexibility and HA of SAN/NAS without the complexity or overhead of VSA's and storage protocols. This is also why we built it specifically for the SMB and Mid-Market - at a price that makes sense specifically for our target market (not trying to sound too "salesy" but this is exacly why we built the platform).

@ntoxicator said:

NOTE:

Just spoke with folks at Oracle sales, had a conference call to discuss X5-2 servers and specs. Awaiting pricing.

Also noticed ALOT of IBM server X on ebay.. newer ones at that. Not a good sign. Also relates back to how IBM didnt trust their own servers.

I am not super surprised, as I was looking at specs on the 3250M5 yesterday and was floored by how outdated they are compared to Dell, HP, SM, etc

@ntoxicator - As a non-sales guy from Scale (office of the CTO), I would be happy to set up a webex and go over what we do with HC3 and see if it a fit for you or not. We can dive to whatever level of technical depth you would like to go to.