The CANDIS Blog » Enterprise Hardware

Korea and Hong Kong Cluster Deployments

richard — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 08:10:23 +0000

CANDIS staff have just returned from building out some redundant clusters in Korea and Hong Kong for a foreign Banking client. The whole process took 4 days, for 2 locations, 2 cities and 4 clusters. CANDIS is glad that we were able to help our clients manage the deployment with native language support and avoiding expensive travel for EU/US based engineers. All up it was 70 servers deployed with full remote management and power and network port control.

Korea LG Data Comm




	
	
		
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Hong Kong Equinix




	
	
		
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CANDIS got a mention in a Drupal.org write up for our work with TheBeijinger.com

richard — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 05:09:52 +0000

While no way near as cool or professional as my stint in CNN a couple of years back. It is still cool though;

http://drupal.org/node/357715

Busy Bee, China Storage Fabric, Thin Clients, iSCSI SAN’s and more

richard — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 17:34:04 +0000

Been a bit busy of late. Many new clients and some large contracts (our largest to date). Our utility infrastructure has grown a lot too. Some of the projects and services that we are working on now and hope to launch very soon are:

- Grid Computing

- China wide redundant “Storage Fabric”

- China Optimised International and Local Routing

- Geographic IP and IDC Failover

- More thin client goodness

BTW – never use Windows Server 2008. It sucks. It has “VISTA” written all over it….literally in all the help files and what not. It is a true dog of an OS…but the Terminal Services support is WAAAAAY better. Not that W2K3 was bad – this is just even more fluid – especially under virtualisation.

Will update soon.

Quick Storage Tip

richard — Tue, 27 May 2008 14:40:05 +0000

Ever wondered where all that disk space has gone? Why the 100GB drive is not 100GB?

Well apart from some systems using GiB and others GB and then some manufacturers using base10 and not base3 and saying that 1GB is 1000MB and not 1024 – I have found another one.

When making a file system that is not your root file system (/) or var (/var) or root (/root), etc – say a second drive or partition used for something else, try to format with the “-m 0″ command so that 5% is not reserved for the root user.

On a 1024GB array – say 1TB – that is a whopping ~52GB!!

Also if you will have many files in said system, also throw in the “-O dir_index” flag too, to enable hash tree’s for directory look ups – =big= speed increase.

Nickel and Dimming Vendor Olympics?

richard — Thu, 15 May 2008 02:51:26 +0000

In the middle of putting out a proposal for a very large client/tender at the moment. Well over a life time’s earnings in servers and an as yet un calculated retainer and service rate at this stage – electricity and bandwidth and human hours all cost money.

I always try to get the best prices within the scope of common sense for clients. Mainly because as a integrated stack vendor, the pricing on one component can blow out the total price of the whole stack. And hardware is the first place to start (given an understanding of the management systems and risk credentials of the project at hand already).

One thorn in my side is mandated “Installation and Configuration” charges. Which are basically extortion attempts.

On the one hand no tech from SUN or IBM from their mainframe/mini computer division is going to know or be able to setup all variables in our system as we need – and as we will do over a long period of time – IE: the process of “Configuration” is Iterative and not finite to one small window of time. :-\

And going back to that whole vertical stack business. Why should a client pay a hardware vendor for support and then pay the integrator for support? These built in service charges make it harder for us to win business and sell anything as we have to protect ourselves as we will be doing the support – and that usually means that the client pays twice!

As much as these hardware firms like to chase the integrators and system builders as a great “Channel” to their products buyers in the market place. Mandatory setup and Configuration fees (Yes they apparently are mutually exclusive in charging if not in the vernacular of the Queen’s English!) are a great way of say “Up Yours” to said channel partners/integrators.

It is not yet clear who will get the Gold Medal – but the race is very competitive!

:-\