Mac Users: Buy This Now
https://www.macheist.com/buy/invite/94211
The latest MacHeist bundle: $50 for 12 apps, the most notable being Pixelmator, CSSEdit and Snapz Pro X. I picked up the 3-pack bundle for $100 and a total of 36 license key. 4 days left. w00ties!
Tags: apple, command, mac, macheist, news, opinion
. 19 Jan 08 | Computer | Comments (0)
Small Office VoIP: Skype Pros/Cons
Before the 2007 tax year ended, OpenRain decided to finally solidify a telephony strategy for the next year or so. Key requirements were..
- Easy ad-hoc and scheduled conferences.
- Mobile flexibility and continuity across physical locations.
- Scalability for the next couple years.
- Voice mail
- Call forwarding.
- Little to no management overhead. (I don’t want to run a dedicated PBX.)
- Usable hardware.
- Practical prices for worldwide incoming/outgoing calls.
- Less than ~$2K initial investment.
It came down to one of two primary directions..
- Hosted VoIP (such as with Vonage or Qwest) with SIP phones such as from Cisco or Avaya.
- Skype with 3rd-party hardware and Mac soft-phone.
After some debate, we chose to use Skype exclusively for services, and have been fairly satisfied. I have a few beefs, but at less than $100 per year per person, I can’t complain too much.
Skype Pros:
- Instant gratification. Easy to set yourself up for calls to/from landlines.
- Good soft-client with videoconferencing support; Address Book.app integration is present in the latest Mac beta client.
- Inexpensive. Less than $100 per seat per year for SkypePro and SkypeIn (an incoming number).
- Awesome value when bundled with an IPEVO SOLO.
- Extremely simple web interface for distributing company credits.
- Concurrent logins from multiple locations. I leave my SOLO on 24/7 and use the soft-client on the road.
- Great quality on Skype-to-Skype calls. Good quality to landlines.
Skype Cons:
- My biggest gripe: In the U.S., outgoing calls do NOT show your SkypeIn number on the recipients phone.
- Vendor lock-in, since Skype uses a proprietary protocol. Since cost of entry for services is so low, however, it may not be a huge deal if your want to switch to a SIP-based provider.
- The WiFi-Phones all suck. The IPEVO SOLO is the only desktop model I like.
- Possible future screwage of SkypeIn numbers if they ever change.
- No 911, which is a general issue with VoIP services.
Tags: openrain, opinion, review, skype, voip
. 04 Jan 08 | Computer | Comments (0)
Xserve w/Leopard Server (Mac OS X 10.5), First Impressions
We just picked up a refurbished 2.66GHz quad-core Xeon from Apple, which we’ll be using for internal infrastructure. (We’re in the process of migrating from a mix of Solaris and Linux). After about 8 hours of learning the ins and outs of Leopard Server over the weekend, we had the box running Open Directory (Kerberos and OpenLDAP), DNS, AFP, SMB, FTP, domain account and machine management, mobile home directories, MySQL, Software Update, Xgrid controller, Wikis, Blogs, iCal and VPN services, all tightly integrated with single sign-on (via Kerberos) into a sexy 1U package.
- Xserve (refurbished discount, direct from Apple): ~$3K
- 3 x 750GB Disks (Newegg): ~$450
- 2 x Apple Drive Module (direct from Apple): ~$380
- 2 x 2GB FB-DIMM RAM (Crucial): ~$300
- Infrastructural sanity: priceless. (…or ~$4.5K after tax and random small stuff)
That’s some serious value considering how much of a PITA setting all this up can be in Linux (or whatever) without vendor support, and far cheaper than paying a Systems Administrator in the long run. The Server Admin and Workgroup Manager tools are pretty freakin’ usable, too, relative to the internal complexity of the system. I’m a happy camper for now… let’s see if it lasts.
Tags: apple, expensive, leopard, mac, openldap, openrain, opinion, review, server, solaris, xserve
. 10 Dec 07 | Computer | Comments (0)
6 Things I’m Thankful For
An awesome first business year for OpenRain. The constant stress of context switching between software projects has become more managable, making weekend relaxation slightly more frequent. Marc has been a geeky Asian version of Superman, and our part-time office manager Gracie has been a godsend. Business has been great, and 2008 should be an exciting growth period.
Bread bowls. Especially the kind filled with Cream of Broccoli soup.
Not being poor. It’s easy to forget all the small luxuries afforded by a modest middle-class suburban family. Indoor plumbing, internet access, telephones, health care, shelter, affordable schooling… these aren’t common in many parts of the world.
Loads of opportunities. One of the most motivating and simultaneously scary realities of running your own software company today is knowing you hold all the keys to your own future. There are so few barriers (especially economic) to today’s start-up that there is little excuse for not taking the risks and giving it your all. This year alone I’ve gotten to go to L.A., Washington D.C., England, San Francisco, Mendocino (California), Amsterdam, Austin, Baja and Portland off the top of my head. (Note to self: redeem those frequent flier miles!)
Cheese. I’m a huge sucker for bree and havarti.
The awesome people around me. Support structure is fundamental to success, and I’ve been fortunate enough to have a great one. Y’all know who you are!
It’s been a superb 2007. Cheers to an even better 2008!
Tags: opinion, reflection
. 01 Dec 07 | Personal | Comments (0)
OpenSolaris ZFS vs. Linux ext3 RAID5
Preston Says: I asked Dan McClary for a big favor recently: use his general UNIX knowledge and graduate-level statistics voodoo to produce a report highlighting performance characteristic differencess between OpenSolaris ZFS and Linux RAID5 on a common, COTS hardware platform. The following analysis is his work, reformatted to fit your screen. You may download the PDF, HTML, graphs and original TeX source here.
A Brief Comparison of I/O Performance for RAIDZ1 and RAID-5 Filesystems
Dan McClary
June 28, 2007
Introduction
The following is a description of results obtained benchmarking I/O performance for two OS/filesystem combinations running identical hardware. The hardware used in the tests is as follows:
- Motherboard: Asus M2NPV-VM.
- CPU: AMD Athlon 64 X2 4800+ Dual Core Processor. 2.5GHz, 2?512KB, 1GHz Bus
- Memory: 4 x 1GB via OCZ OCZ2G8002GK DDR2-800 PC2-6400
- Drives: 4 x 500GB Western Digital Caviar SE 16 WD5000AAKS 7200RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s
The Linux/RAID-5 combination uses a stock Ubuntu Server Edition installation, running kernel 2.6.19-generic, with RAID-5 configured via mdadm and formatted ext3. The Solaris/RAID-Z1 configuration is a stock installation of Solaris Developer Express Edition with zpool managing the zfs-formatted RAID-Z1 drives. Block size for all relevant tests is 4096 bytes.
Basic I/O testing is conducted using bonnie++ (version 1.03a), tiobench (version 0.3.3-5), and a series of BASH-scripted operations. Tests focus on I/O throughput and CPU usage for operations either much larger than available memory, and very large numbers of operations on small files. All figures, unless otherwise noted, chart mean performance with 2% deviation for large-file operations and 5% for small-file operations. These bounds well-exceed the 95% confidence interval, implying a range of high significance.
Large-File Operations
In dealing sequential reads and writes, particularly of large files, the Solaris/RAID-Z1 configuration displays much higher throughput than the Ubuntu/RAID-5 combination. Latency and CPU usage, however, appear to be higher than in the Ubuntu configuration. The reasons for these disparities are not determinable from the tests concluded, though one might venture that the management algorithm used by ZFS and each systems caching policies may play a part.
Figures 1, 2, and 3 summarize large-file writing performance in the bonnie++ suite. In large writes, Solaris-ZFS displays marginally higher throughput and occasionally lower CPU usage. However, the disparities are not great enough to make a strict recommendation based solely on large-file writing performance.
Figures 4 and 5 illustrate throughput and CPU usage while reading large files in the bonnie++ suite. Generally, results are consistent between platforms, with the Ubuntu configuration showing a slight edge when reading 15,680MB files (though with an associated drop in CPU efficiency).
tiobench results for random reads and writes given in Tables 3 and 4 show the Ubuntu/RAID-5 configuration displaying both higher throughput and greater CPU efficiency. However, these results seem somewhat questionable given the results in section §3.
Small-File Operations
In examining the performance of both configurations on small files, both in the bonnie++ suite and from shell-executed commands, the most obvious statement that can be made is that the Solaris configuration displays greater CPU usage. This, though, may not be indicative of poor performance. Instead, it may be the result of an aggressive caching or other kernel-level policies. A more detailed study would be required to determine both the causes and effects of this result. In each test, 102,400 files of either 8 or 4KB were created.
Figures 6(a)-6(c) and 7(a)-7(c) illustrate bonnie++ performance for both configurations. In contrast to the tiobench results, the Solaris configuration generally displays slightly higher throughput (on the order of 1-2MB/s) than its counterpart. However, as previously noted, CPU usage is much higher.
Finally, Tables 5-6 lists measured times as given by the standard Unix command time when measuring command execution. In these results, there are some surprises. The Ubuntu configuration performs somewhat faster when executing a large write (using the command dd). However, the Solaris configuration is much faster when dealing with 100,000 sequential 8KB files. For reference, all file creation is done via dd, copying by cp and deletion by rm.
Conclusions
Few overarching conclusions can be drawn from the limited results of this study. Certainly, there are situations in which the Solaris/RAID-Z1 configuration appears to outperform the Ubuntu/RAID-5 configuration. Many questions remain regarding the large discrepancy in CPU usage for small-file operations. Likewise, the Ubuntu/RAID-5 configuration appears to perform slightly better in certain situations, though not overwhelmingly so. At best, under these default configurations, one can say that overall the Solaris configuration performs no worse, and indicates that it might perform better under live operating conditions. The latter, though, is largely speculation.
Indeed, from the analyst’s point of view, both configurations show reasonable performance. The desire to deploy either configuration in an enterprise setting suggests that significant-factor studies and robust parameter designs be conducted on, if not both candidates, whichever is most likely to be deployed. These studies would provide insight into why the discrepancies in current study exist, and more importantly, achieve optimized performance in the presences of significant uncontrollable factors (e.g. variable request-load).
Preston Says: Thanks for the outstanding work, Dan!
Tags: comparison, linux, opinion, raid, review, solaris, zfs
. 17 Jul 07 | Computer | Comments (5)