The CANDIS Blog

I read this entry over on David Wolf’s blog before my recent trip back down under about power usage and IT infrastructure.

Silicon Hutong

And the topic did strike a “Hey this is real man!!!” kind of chord with me. A cathartic resonance that shall never come from me with respect to the greater greenhouse effect crap while the infallible science is still not in. Nor came to me for any other “agenda” or “crusade of the world” that seemed to so very trouble all those students over in the Arts and Law faculties. That seemed to have so much time on their hands, relative to us poor saps in Engineering and Business school.

Politics aside, wastage for the sake of wastage though is not very good. And I have a rather poignant insider’s look at this issue that also manages (in my mind at least) to cross paths with this issue about China’s talent gap, or indeed this also about the talent gap.

What does resource wastage and power requirements have to do with a talent gap, or as they lament now in overly taxed and anti-entrepreneurial Australia – the “Brain Drain”?

Allow me to explain.

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During a recent test run to see if a new PostgreSQL back end server would hasten things up in a main cluster – that has now become CPU bound and NOT IO…… the wizardry of that I will blog about later.

In any case, the short of it is, that we were juggling PERC4 cards around servers (PCI-X here, PCIe there..) and also complete raid 1 and raid 10 arrays too. The cards are supposed to “detect” the correct array type from the drives if the firmware was missing. Anyway, through a comedy of errors, it worked exactly 1/3 times. The other times we had to remember the exact settings of our arrays (stripe, etc) and how it was structured. So we could clear PERC cards and then recreate the arrays – taking special care to not initalise the new arrays.

So in the end, you can move arrays and channels about. And with LVM, even designations like /sda /sdb reording is also not an issue. However you should rely on good old fashioned hand held way of doing things. Before you start write down all the salient details of your arrays first.