Hardware on The IT Hollow

Your Rubrik for the Cloud

Tue, 25 Apr 2017 13:05:09 +0000

Rubrik has announced their latest revision of their Cloud Data Management solution, version 3.2. The new release has some “Snazzy” new features according to one unnamed source from the Rubrik technical marketing team, but I’m focused mainly on one specific capability in this post.

I’ve written about Rubrik several times before and have written some of the vRealize Orchestrator workflows for automating deployments with the Rubrik appliance. The main reason I like the solution is how easy it is to manage and that everything is API first, which is a must for automation these days.

Understanding the SSD write performance cliff

Mon, 28 Oct 2013 13:00:59 +0000

Solid State drives are much faster than their spinning disk predecessors, but can also have performance degradation due to how they interact with Operating Systems.

Flash consists of blocks of data and those blocks are full of smaller items called pages. A typical SSD might have block sizes of 512KB and 4KB pages.

There are 3 statuses that a healthy page could be in on a flash disk.

Written to: Data from the OS has been written to the page.
Unwritten to: The page is free and available to be written to by the Operation System.
Invalid: The page has data in it, but is available to be overwritten by the Operating System.

Understanding RAM

Tue, 09 Jul 2013 14:01:30 +0000

I’ve never paid too much attention to the different types of RAM (Random Access Memory) during my tenure as a Systems Engineer but wonder how much time it would have saved me in troubleshooting. This post is not only an attempt to educate other technicians, but an opportunity to refine my own knowledge of the subject.

There are three main categories that I want to review. Ecc vs Non-ECC, Unbuffered vs Registered memory, and Memory Rank.

Samsung Series 9 Laptop Review

Mon, 13 May 2013 13:10:16 +0000

I’ve almost always preferred HP laptops for work purposes based on how stable they’ve been for me. But while shopping for my last laptop, I decided to try out the Samsung Series 9.

To be honest, the biggest reason I decided to look at this laptop was the sleek design. I knew that I would be traveling a lot with my new position and having a light weight laptop was certainly preferable. In addition an SSD drive made me feel better about jostling the laptop around without damaging it.

QLogic 10000 Series Adapters

Mon, 15 Apr 2013 13:11:27 +0000

QLogic has introduced a new product that combines their already reliable Fibre Channel host bus adapters with solid state storage in order to do caching. Think Fusion-IO cards with a Fibre Channel HBA as well. (Yes I know that’s an over simplification)

The new QLogic cards come in 2 flavors. A 200GB SSD option and a 400GB SSD option, both of which are 8Gb Fibre Channel. I’ve been told that 8Gb was used to get started with this concept because it was already proven and solid, where as the 16Gb Fibre is much newer. I’m sure these cards will be a hit and 16Gb Fibre cards are in the works with even larger capacities.

Baby Dragon Home Lab

Tue, 09 Apr 2013 15:00:41 +0000

My configuration is listed below if anyone is interested in the details.

Similar designs have been done before by both Chris Wahl @Chriswahl and prior to that by Phillip Jaenke @RootWyrm who called them " Baby Dragons". I used their base config and made a few tweaks of my own based on pricing, part availability etc.

Part List

ESXi Servers - Quantity 2

Case: Lian Li PC-V351B MicroATX
PSU: SeaSonic Platinum SS-400FL2 Fanless 400W
RAM: Kingston 16GB (4 X 8GB) 240-Pinn DDR3 Unbufferred ECC
Motherboard: Supermicro MBD-X9SCM-F-O
CPU: Intel Xeon E3-1230 V2 Ivy Bridge 3.3GHz
NICs: Intel EXPI9301CTBLK 1000Mbps PCI-Express, SuperMicro Dual Port Gigabit Card
Boot: Kingston DataTraveler 101 G2 8GB USB 2.0
Local SSD: 64 GB Intel SSD

Flex Server - Quantity 1 (Used for a Hyper-V server, VSA or 3rd ESXi Host)

Case: HP Gen8 Microserver
Storage: 4 480GB SSD’s from OCZ

Storage Array

Synology Array: 1- Synology DS1513+
Hard Drives: 5 1 TB Wester Digital Blue 7200 3.5 inch hard drives

Networking Equipment

Layer 3 Switch: Cisco WS03750G-24T Switch
Firewall: Cisco ASA
Wireless Router: Dlink Wireless N+ Router

ESXi Server Notes:

I’m not going to lie, when I saw these cases on Chris Wahl’s lab and had to have them. They look crazy sharp and I love the pull out Motherboard mounting option. There are other components in common but I have a feeling these were copied because of a similar taste for components and budget rather than lust! :)

New from HP: Project Moonshot

Mon, 08 Apr 2013 16:15:32 +0000

Today HP announced their new initiative called Project Moonshot.

This initiative takes converged infrastructure and puts it on steroids. Hewlett Packard identified that the amount of compute, power and cooling that is necessary to continue providing resources for Big Data, and mobile platforms is unsustainable at the current rate. It just isn’t feasible with the current technology to continue to throw the same servers into data centers without optimizing.

February 19th 2013 Announcements

Wed, 20 Feb 2013 02:00:36 +0000

There was some exciting news released today so I wanted to get it in a post in case you hadn’t heard about it yet.

The HP Global Partner Conference is going on in Vegas and they release some new gear to accentuate their converged infrastructure model.

A new BladeSystem Platinum was announced which will include the options for infiniband, 16Gb Fibre Channel, and 40Gb Ethernet! If you’d like more information about the new BladeSystem Platinum please check out HP’s video.

HP Storage Comparisons (Sept. 2012)

Mon, 10 Sep 2012 12:00:26 +0000

I have been recently thrown into the world of HP Storage, and have been trying to learn all of the storage techniques that are in the HP product line. I noticed that I couldn’t find anything that really did a compare and contrast of each of the products so I started to put one together. Anything I couldn’t understand, I asked a great guy named Calvin Zito (@hpstorageguy) to give me a hand with. He was more than gracious so follow him on Twitter.

HP Virtual Connect Networks

Tue, 14 Aug 2012 07:00:46 +0000

I gave an overview of how HP blades are mapped to Virtual Connect Interconnect Modules in my last post. /2012/08/09/hp-virtual-connect-basics This post focus more on understanding the networks created through HP Virtual Connect Manager.

In the last post I described out blade NICs map to the Interconnect Bays in the back of an HP C7000 Chassis using the downlinks. Now let’s talk about how those NICs can get added to a specific Network. HP calls these networks inside of a c7000 chassis “vNets”.

HP Virtual Connect Basics

Fri, 10 Aug 2012 01:00:15 +0000

HP Virtual Connect is a great way to handle network setup for an HP Blade Chassis. When I first started with Virtual Connect it was very confusing for me to understand where everything was, and how the blades connected to the interconnect bays. This really is fairly simple, but might be confusing to anyone that’s new to this technology. Hopefully this post will give newcomers the tools they need to get started.