Posts by Trevor_Pott 6991 publicly visible posts • joined 31 May 2010
Also - and I double checked - there was a whole damned paragraph about "10GbE on the motherboard." In fact, it was followed by a discussion about the difference between LOM and switch PHY pricing and availability.
Dude, les Q?
From experience, you can *flatten* a Supermicro 24-port 10GbE switch, flooding each port with traffic and the damned thing doesn't blink. (Review on that, and a Dell 10GbE switch coming *very* soon.) I know I'll catch hell from a bunch of dark-age scratching-shit-on-walls-with-sticks types, but...
...fuck Cisco.
Maybe the make great core switches for people who need to move around terabits at internet cores. I wouldn't know; I don't play there. But damned if I can see a use for them in my datacenter. Give me Dell or Supermicro any day. That's before we even get into arguments about Cisco switches and their world-endingly shitty multicast performance!
Bring on openflow, ladies and gentlemen. It's time to relegate the proprietary switching solutions to the niche they belong to. Cisco may built "better" gear - for specific values of "better - but most people don't need "0 jitter, ultra-low latency, blah, blah, blah." And if they did, they'd buy Arista anyways. Most people just need cheap, bulk throughput.
For that, you need people selling solid non-blocking switches. Not Cisco's cruft. Let the upvotes fly, folks! You know you want to. Your CCNA training demands it!
That depends on a number of things. There is a war brewing between several vendors on 10GbE pricing. It could happen tomorrow. It likely won't happen until Haswell drops. Expect Haswell to ship with 10GbE on the desktop and 1Gbit LOMs on servers to become nonexsistant.
40GbE switching silicon is coming down to the point where you can make serious margin off of it, and QSFP cables are dropping to reasonable rates as well. Switching manufacturers are going to be forced to drop 10GbE prices around the Haswell timeframe – probably with no more than a 6 month lag – if they don't want shops to bulk ignore 10GbE and move directly to 40GbE.
That would be rather disastrous for switch manufacturers, and yields on 100GbE PHYs are still dismal; if everyone moves to 40GbE switch ports, then demand for 100GbE trunking interconnects will skyrocket. They won't be able to meet demand, and can only jack up the price so high before seeing massive pushback.
Until 28nm fab capacity becomes a lot more available – and that is at least 3 years out – then we can't crank out 100GbE switching at the rate we're doing 40GbE today. It just won't be economically feasible.
That means that we need to migrate people to 10GbE sever --> switch interconnects in a big way, leaving 40GbE for top of rack --> core and 100GbE for "folks with more money than sense."
Unfortunately, nobody wants to the first to take a bath on 10GbE margins. The prices are somewhat stable right now, and demand for 10GbE is growing at a fantastic rate. Eventually, someone will cave – my guess is Supermicro – and take the margin hit to drive to cost of 10GbE into the floor. Dell and other vendors won't have any choice but to follow. Intel will drop the silicon prices down to "pittance" levels and Dlink/Netgear/etc will block-shift to 10GbE overnight.
Everyone is leery of 10GbE prices crashing, but they are *far* more afraid of someone dropping 40GbE. The cost of 10GbE silicon is so low right now that they can afford a price war on 10GbE. A price war on 40GbE would cost the entire industry their margins for the next decade.
So…2014 is my guess. I expect that the price war will hit end of this year, beginning of next. By June 2014, we should be able to go out and buy $750 24-port 10Gbase-T Dlink switches. A year after that, we should be seeing 48-port 10Gbase-T switches drop below $1000.
@Simon Hobson as is well known, I disagree with the CLI uber alles crowd. I believe a GUI is agreat for administering. A CLI is great for automating. I administer a test lab, where I change things "to se what happens." I automate production, where it should do Only Pre-Tested Things.
@Rim_Block Interesting thoughts. I note you suggest Intel boards. I've had a miserable history with Intel boards; do you have any direst experience with those models? I suspect there are plenty of good boards that would make a reasonable underpinning for a testlab; gods know I can't have tried them all!
Re; iSCSI on Linux..."easy" is relative. I don't have a lot of trouble with it...but I work with Linux every day. That…and I wrote all the commands I needed down in a text file. :)
I could point you at several Windows sysadmins that do run in to trouble with it. *shrug* There is no good GUI; it holds a lot of folks back. Enough that I would worry about junior admins raised on nothing but Microsoft being able to reliably use the thing.
If, however, you know your Linux…go hard! The iSCSI targets for Linux are mature and stable. Maybe at some point I should do a "how to" for iSCSI on CentOS 6.2. Hmm...
10-20 webservers would run fine...even off my crappy old Synology. I could probably run 2 mayyyyyybe 4 VDI instances without users screaming too hard. But I can't imagine running a financials DB off of that, or doing windows updates on 10-20 servers simultainiously.
ReadyNASes - in my experience so far - don't provide more than 40-50MB/sec in RAID 5. I guess most of my "small business testlab" needs really do generally require a fully saturated gig-E connection's worth of storage.
That said, they are good NASes, and reasonably cheap. If you don't need 100MB/sec, they are grand. :)
@P.Lee I haven't run across an AMD chip that can "take" any modern Intel in the same price bracket since the Shanghai Opterons. (Note: I still have rather a lot of Shanghai Opterons!)
I would be happy to be wrong here - I was quite an AMD fan back in the day - but AMD seem to be underperforming, overpriced and with power/thermal requirements that are absolutely embarrassing. Not something I want in my lab; especially if I pay for 'leccy.
That said, I'll test anything that crosses my lab. I just haven't seen a good AMD widget cross it in a good long while. :(
As stated in the article, I prefer Supermicro motherboards, but have used ASUS extensively over the years. I can't stand Intel-branded motherboards, but have had few issues with Gigabyte.
I have seen no issues (so far) with these Asus boards...at least not at the levels of usage detailed in this article. I have not been able to push the things far enough to get a full 10Gbit symmetrical (using iSCSI) out of them, and am as yet unsure if this is a limitation of the hardware, or a weird limitation of VMWare's ESXi. (I can saturate 2 10Gbit links using SMB 3.0 just fine.)
I have a lot more research to do into that particular issue, but so far I am leaning towards "these motherboards can do anything it says on the tin with no issues whatsoever." I think we're actually so far along in the component design that you have to get up into extended ATX territory - and trying to max out 4+ PCI-E slots - before board manufacturer actually matters anymore.
TL;DR: these boards rock, and I haven't been able to break them, despite trying really, really hard.
I storage vMotioned 50 running VMs from one unit to the other while running in-OS backups on half of them and defrags on the other half, where all the storage was iSCSI.
I think they're good.
@Chz My initial response may well have been on the hasty side. (To err is human. To err a lot is what happens when the coffee runs out.) I've reread it again, and I still see him as attempting to berate yours truly into submission. But if I am going to be a douche on the internets, I am going to be a verbose douche that explains himself so you can judge the totality of my douchiness with all the relevant context.
I am, however, sad that the conversation re: "is the expectation of professionalism on the internet a one-way street wherein those who write are expected to maintain a superhuman level of stoicism and those who comment are encouraged to be soulless self-respect stripping piranha-harpies" never got born. I think it has a real impact on what we – as readers of this fine ball of redtop satire – want this site to ultimately be.
Ah well, that's my problem though, eh? I actually worry about the underlying philosophical issues and long term results that are the inevitably born from the choices we make (good and bad) in our interactions with one another today. Ah well, off to write other things…
@keithpeter totally ad hoc. And we've had a few "disasters." (I.E. primary system caught fire, dead disks, power outage, fibre provider + backhoe, you name it.) In ten years, I've seen a bit of everything.
Fortunately, I am wildly paranoid. Wildly, world-endingly, crazy-like-a-fox paranoid. My file servers are specced and configured to run double duty (in an emergency) as virtual hosts. I have replicated and backed up traffic offsite here, there, everywhere. Certain endpoint systems are bought specifically to match the hardware of the servers in use so that A) the end user has a bitching system as they need for their job and B) in an emergency I can cannibalize it to get a more-critical system up and running.
When I build personal PCs - or PCs for friends/family/etc - they are build to similar specification as those systems built for my customers. That way as these people upgrade their systems - which occurs on a more rapid schedule, generally - I have a steady influx of gently-used parts that can be recertified and put on the shelf as spares for those brown-pants moments.
Every single thing I design or build is designed so that it can – in a pinch – serve any of a half dozen roles. Everything is tested to serve those roles before the first generation hits the ground and some of these systems will be torn out of use (for example as servers) and repurposed (for example as desktops.)
It isn't "proper." It isn't "best practices." But for many of these clients it is the difference between "being able to run a business and not being able to run a business." Doing things according to a whitepaper would bankrupt some of these organisations just to do the upfront costs, that's before we even get into the whole "refresh when the hardware warrantee runs out, or Microsoft releases Yet Another Version."
I sure catch a lot of crap from commenters for talking about such things. (It's blasphemy.) There are a lot of assumptions that because I am forced – yes, forced by necessity, something people can never seem to understand – to work with next to no budget for hardware or software that nothing is redundant or backed up. I think that these folks would be shocked to see exactly how far you can push modern equipment, and exactly how many layers of redundancy you can build into your network just by ensuring that your equipment can serve dual roles if absolutely need be.
I really like the ones who presume I must prefer things this way, or that I am somehow choosing this course. It is s simple matter of "presenting the arguments for more money" they claim; argue and you will get budget. It's not the case. I am generally privy to enough of the financials of these businesses that I know damned well how much money is coming in, where it is going and why.
My job is to make do with what's there until the money is available. It is to reassess the situation every so often and inform the business how close to the red line we are. What is the worst-case scenario? How do we recover from that? What are the risks of the various scenarios coming to pass? What downtime will occur whilst implementing backup plans?
The owners of the company then weigh the options and make the call about who gets how much money that year. So by necessity, everything for these types of folks is ad hoc. It isn't good for one's sanity, maybe…but you do learn rather a lot, very quickly.
And you learn very quickly to understand concepts like "return on investment," "total cost of ownership," "capital expenditure," "operational expenditure" and "operational paranoia" at a truly intuitive level. Every single choice and decision goes through cost, risk analysis, "how many layers of redundancies can we build for that" and many more filters.
It is ad hoc, but a carefully considered, meticulously constructed sort of ad hoc. Layers and layers of it, all interconnected and highly redundant. Fortunately, there looks to be only a couple more years of it until I am finally, mercifully free of the last of it. I can't wait.
"On an unrelated note, scary is seeing a refrigerator-sized core router (with about a mil or two worth of line cards installed in it) being held to the rack by four screws instead of the 8-10 that it preferred. :)"
I am still trying to get pas "a mil or two worth of line cards." Alas...
I don't have a "problem" with IOPS at all. I simply didn't feel it was as relevant in this particular context as it was in others. You'll note that IOPS figures were included and discussed in the Hyper-X review because I felt that in that context, they mattered.
I ran lots of bench marks because I was personally curious. I simply threw things at the unit, collected data and then sat down at the end of it and decided what would make a good article that would appeal to the majority of my intended audience.
That said, for future reference – and as an item I hope you take the time to reflect on – you will not get a writer to "include [x] in their articles" with borderline ad homenim posts. If you take the time to read my interactions with other readers, I think you'll find that I am open to providing information as I can, and even work to include the better suggestions into my articles. (Or write articles on requested topics.)
Most writers don't take well to attempts to berate them into subservience, no matter the technical ability of the individual typing the comments.
I don't disagree that with you at all that the things you talk about are important. You are elucidating critically vital information to convey to the readers, however I believe that the context is inappropriate. The topic at hand is completely inappropriate to include as part of the review of this device; it should be a feature unto itself. "Here be the basics of storage: learn it, motherfuckers" or some such.
I think it is an important topic, and despite the animosity of the presentation, I believe it is worth pitching the features editor for an article later in the year. I will add it to the list.
To be honest; it worries me...but less so than it probably should, were I a "proper" storage wonk. The truth is that I don't trust "dual controller" systems as the be-all and end-all of high availability either. Dual PSU, dual controller…but that still leaves a mobo, CPU, RAM and other widgets inside those boxes that are single points of failure.
The lack of real-time block-level replication is the thing that ultimately makes me twitchy.
Even if I were to go out and buy an expensive storage array from EMC, Netapp or otherwise, I wouldn't sleep at night unless everything was backed up. Ultimately, that means block-level replication between two storage devices bonded in a cluster using MPIO against at least two switches into two separate controllers on each relevant host.
And then I will still take backups with something like a Unitrends box. (HA is not backup!)
So what does the lack of a second controller in this circumstance really mean? If it fails you are down. That's a bummer. It is swappable; you can always keep a spare on hand. You could also keep a spare Drobo on hand, and just swap the disks, but that's getting into "byzantine" territory.
So my take on this is "do no use the Drobo for anything that requires HA storage." Also: "make sure you buy a second controller card and keep it on the shelf." For the majority of my workloads, I don't need HA storage. A half-hour's downtime – even at the height of the year – isn't the end of the world. I also keep backups of everything, so even if the whole thing were to vanish in a puff of smoke – a possibility for any storage array, no matter the vendor – I can recover.
I don't have a problem rolling this out to client sites to prove "scratch space" LUNs for creatives. I also have one going into service as the "volume shadow copy" LUN provider for a pair of physical servers on a client site. (That one has no SSDs; it's just a giant box of storage.)
Like any storage, it is a question of fitness for purpose. The lack of a second controller wouldn't bother me if Drobo were to add block-level replication; I'd rather have two completely separate units in lock-step than I would a single unit with various "redundant" bits.
The dual controller part would take Drobo doing some reengineering to solve. Block-level replication could be done with a software update. Until Drobo make that choice, I feel they are locking themselves out of a wider market that would otherwise give them serious consideration.
That particular screenie was - I think - pulled from a system doing a "bulk transfer" from a LUN on my Hyper-X array (which goes zoom!) to a LUN on the Drobo. If I read the notes correctly that I took down for that screenie, it was taken as part of a larger test in which - at the time - I was moving 25 VMs from one LUN to the other, and wanted to see how this would affect the stability of the file transfer.
Basically, it tanked the throughput - from 100MB/sec to 35MB/sec – and the throughput became "unstable," fluctuating between 30MB/sec and 50MB/sec. Windows file copy couldn't figure out what to do about judging transfer time on that and flopped around like a fish out of water.
Ultimately, however, it averaged 32Mb/sec over the course of the transfer – measurement taken with a stopwatch and some basic maths – despite the serious hammering the VM nodes were putting the unit through. (I think that 3 of the VMs in the transfer group were undergoing Windows Updates - .net and MSRT – while another one was performing an integrity check on a financials database. I turned Windows' caching off for the test.
@kiethpeter there are several customers using my corporate infrastructure, and yes…most of them are pro bono. I'm not a complete asshole; I try to provide charities, churches, friends, family and so forth with capacity (and even services) when and where I can. The tradeoff is that these services are provided on a "best effort" basis. I am continually attempting to acquire new hardware, software and expertise to ensure that "best effort" is better next week than it was the last.
My infrastructure is also (sometimes) shared by my largest customer; the customer in question reads does in fact read The Register. It isn't always black and white though; when I say they have zero money for IT spend and I mean it. Staffing is covered, but capital spend requires making some tough choices.
Do you refresh your servers/desktops/etc which seem to be doing the job and could be stretched out another two years or do you buy another $industry_specific_widget that could increase your production capacity 10% for the next 2 years, paying itself off and the new IT gear you need, if you can only baby the existing stuff along that little bit farther?
The customer in question chose the second route. I have reservations about it, but ultimately gave the thumbs up as "doable" largely because the IT equipment for my consulting company lives in their datacenter. If the brown stuff hits the rotating air circulation mechanism, then I can spot them spare capacity for long enough to see them though whatever issues arise.
(Does that make me a cloud provider? What kind of cloud? What if it's just "I have spare servers and light things up on hardware? Labels, categories and names, oh my!)
My relationship with the customer is solid; they aren't going to screw me and I am committed to making sure that they have what they need to get the job done. They provide me a rack's worth of space – and the fibre optic internet that goes with it – in their datacenter. In exchange, I make sure that if something goes wrong with their aging, finicky infrastructure it will get fixed, ASAP, even if that means putting my own equipment into play.
The datacenter is 20 ft from my office. Work is 15 minutes (8 at night) from my house. For now, it'll do.
I did a lot more than what ended up in the review. I had the thing for a month and ran a whole barrage of tests. Not all of them were properly recorded, screenshot, etc. (Though many more were than ended up in the article.) A lot of tests - at least initially - were to see where the bottlenecks were, what performance was like...basically to "get a feel for the unit."
The majority of my benchmarking work was done with iometer, sqlio, vdbench, crystal disk mark, passmark's performance test, hdtune pro and window's resource monitor. What came out of the benchmarks was that this device wasn't going to win any IOPS contests.
When writing the article I felt that taking up a page or so with a pile of statistics that can be boiled down to "the performance is okay for the disk loadout, but ultimately is rather middling, and heavily reliant on the tiering to make up the IOPS on the transactional side" was not really a great plan. It wouldn't let me address the other aspects of the unit or discuss the tiering in depth.
I decided that I would include the bits of performance info on the Drobo that I felt most admins likely to buy a Drobo would care about: throughput, not IOPS. My theory – and obviously I was quite wrong about this – was that if anyone was interested in more info, they'd ask. That's what normally happens; people ask questions about extended information in the comments and – assuming I have it – I provide it.
Well, apparently when I am wrong, I am spectacularly wrong.
So what results is ultimately a clash of perception. I perceived – and still do, frankly – Lusty's comments to border on ad homeniem, with a soupcon of "ultimately, you need to buy X product." I didn't – and, rereading his comments I still don't – get "wants to be helpful/educate" from his words. Then again, I am human, I can be – and at least once a day I am – wrong. If so, then Lusty, I apologise.
I don't mind being challenged. I do mind being attacked. There is a difference between a friendly challenge and an ad homenim; my interpretation places Lusty on the wrong side of that line.
My response – while somewhat irritable – was not meant to be "attacking" Lusty in any way. I certainly did – and do – want to explain why things get written as they do, what the choices made were and why they were made. I also wanted to find out what he wanted, what info I could provide him.
So no, I have no problems with someone who wants more information, or would prefer I included X information in an article. Criticism - and believe it or not, I do consider Lusty's comments valid criticism, not mere opinion – helps me determine what to put in future articles. Or, in this case, is putting more emphasis on my need to get a secondary site up where I can post "raw numbers" details for such reviews that I can then link to from a main article.
How one goes about expressing their desires for such information, however, will determine how your requests and thoughts are received by the individual you are addressing. Collectively, we internet denizens seem to have an arrogant opinion of ourselves and a sense of opinionated entitlement that is patently unreal. We demand the #deity-given right to attack writers on the internet personally and professionally yet we take notable umbrage when those same writers should dare to ask "so who exactly are you, and what do you want?"
The writer, we say, should serve as a psychic sink for our own narcissism and desire for personal recognition; they must accept beratement and chastisement from any and all quarters without questioning those who question them. They should accept us – anonymous blobs of text – as experts on all subject matters, especially when we disagree.
Agree with me, we demand, not him or her or them! Be polite to me, writer man, even if I am utter trash to you. This, we call behaving like a professional; a one sided concept as soon as the internet is involved. To be professional on the internet, you see, is to treat even the vilest of anonymous commenters with respect, patience and – preferably – even some fawning adoration. It is – apparently – deeply unprofessional to respond to someone in kind; never challenge the assumptions, motives or tone of the anonymous block of text!
The worst part is…both sides of that particular argument are right. If you bend over backwards and mollycoddle every douchebag on the internets you're going to end up wasting a lot of time and quite possibly killing yourself in a drunken, depressed stupor. The internet is a cyclone of shrieking trolls; many of whom take great delight wasting your time and ruining your day.
By the same token, you do want to be polite, respectful and – dare I say it – professional to as many of these folks as you can. Many of them are decent, hardworking types who are looking to make a contribution to the world and hoping you'll help them do so.
Sorting the shrieking troll (who ultimately is going to be a net drain on your psyche and time) from the indelicate nerd (who ultimately would be a great guy to know personally) is hard. Hard enough that we all get it wrong from time to time.
Reading people, interacting professionally, negotiating, helping and basically doing that "transfer of information in a social context" thing is a hell of a lot easier in person (or even over the phone) than it is in text. You get queues there that you don't in text form. So how things are presented in text makes a huge difference.
Most writers – especially tech writers – refuse to interact with commenters. They won't read the comments to heir own articles and they certainly won't respond. General douchiness of commenters is the biggest cited reason, but "inability to tell if serious, trolling or just horribly socially inept" is the second most frequent one I've heard.
Thus far, I've chosen not to be one of those folks. I've had such positive feedback from many of my readers about the fact that I take the time to answer questions and interact that I have chosen to maintain the practice. It could be that I was wrong to make that choice; I will be giving it serious reconsideration.
I have always taken a "give as good as I get" approach to comments. I have felt that anything else would generally lead to insanity. Commenters are right to expect some respect – and maybe even the benefit of the doubt – from writers. There seems to be distinct disagreement here over whether or not a writer has the "right" to expect the same of their commenters or not.
Is professionalism a one-way street on the internet? If so, then the other tech writers are correct and I have been wrong all this time: I should never answer comments at all. Nobody can reasonably be expected to maintain absolute decorum while being the psychic whipping boy for 7 million readers who are not held – externally or by the community to which they belong – to any similar standard.
The whole topic is – obviously – something I've given a lot of thought to. Beyond the traditional commenttard "you've got problems" response - trotted out by the internet's most brilliant minds whenever something is discussed in depth - I am interested in the thoughts and feedback of all and sundry regarding the above.
Wish I could; sadly, it has to go back ASAP. I had heard (3rd and 4th hand, mind you) that the more recent Drobos - starting with the 8 disk units - stopped having those issues. I think it was a software tweak they made. In any case, I remember hearing exactly those same complaints about the old 4-disk models that were USB only type affairs. The same people now claim that this isn't the case with the 8-disk network attached varieties.
Entirely anecdotal, however, please take with truck full of NaCl.
If you really do work with storage on a professional basis then you know full well that iSCSI is more than "just a protocol." There are layers to how it is implemented and there is more to it than traditional "disk based tests." This is doubly true when you are dealing with a unit like the Drobo with is doing block-based tiering.
The unit as a whole item has to be considered. That means the disks, whatever controllers are driving them, whatever layers of cache exist, how the tiering/promotion works, how the iSCSI target software responds, how the network on the device is set up (remember, buffers can be very bad in layers!) and finally what targets and workloads you are layering on top of those disks.
There is more to that than IOPS. There are layers and layers of software, hardware and configuration here which may very well end up treating data accesses differently. In fact, given this is a tiering unit, we know for a fact that access patterns matter.
Indeed; one of the biggest takeaways from this was that using the Drobo's LUNs for traditional windows file transfer was a non-optimal scenario given the specific design considerations implemented in this unit. (An interesting result.) If I were simply using raw disk storage – no networking, iSCSI software, tiering, layers of caching, etc – I would have expected completely different performance characteristics than the unit evidenced.
The reason I didn't focus on disk tests is precisely because this isn't a million-pound array. Fully loaded, the thing is less than $15K. It isn't a unit designed for IOPS or targeted at those live and breathe IOPS. Thus things like "reliability, stability and fitness for common use cases" trump synthetic benchmarks.
Regarding "making articles poor" and my supposed "issues," I think you're rather out to lunch here. While I would love to include a billion data points in my articles – mostly to fend off bitchy internet piranhas – I don't remotely believe what ended up in the article is "poor." My editors don't make decisions about what words I use. They make decisions about how many words I get per article, and they choose which pictures go up.
I then make a choice: what to include in my articles, and I maintain that I chose the right things to include. So let me try to explain this clearly: I normally aim my articles at what I consider to be the widest bulk of readers our there: SMEs. Enterprises buying million-pound storage are a tiny chunk of the market. Even those enterprises aren't deploying their million-pound storage arrays to cover every use case.
The kinds of organisations that buy million pound storage arrays will get a demo unit shipped to them and test them in house. I seriously doubt most of them read reviews on The Register, Ars Technica or so forth. They don't get paid to read reviews, they get paid to do reviews.
Given the above, I don't see a problem, really, with the editor's decision to put up screenies with Windows file transfers. Nor to I get why you get your panties in a bunch that protocol-level testing is part of the suite of tests I consider normative for any storage I encounter. I do both.
You saw protocol-level screenshots and made the assumption that this was all I did. You didn't ask; you assumed. You then proceeded to comment such that – while you may have felt you were offering yourself as a helpful resource – certainly came across as rude bordering on ad homeniem.
You may not see it that way – in fact it seems fairly obvious you aren't able to see that about your own comments – but others have. (I was in fact alerted to your comments in both threads by e-mails from other readers.)
Comments on the intricacies of storage are welcome; education is good. It is when you tie them to assumptions about which tests have/have not been performed (rather than asking) and/or make assumptions based on – of all things – flavour images that the whole thing falls apart.
If you had for example said something to the effect of "hey Trevor, I am an enterprise storage guy; in my world we use these tests for these reasons. Did you run those? What did you get? If you didn't run them, why not? Could you? I am looking for this info."
Put like that, I'd have cheerfully dug up whichever statistics I had to hand, or even taken the time out on Wednesday to light the unit back up before I shipped it back and run some additional tests to provide you/other readers whatever additional info was desired.
"Did you know that" and "more info please" generally go down a lot better than "if you knew what you were doing you'd" or "No True Scotsman…"
Cheers.
The FUD you are spreading is related to making assumptions that what you see is all that is tested, or that your assumptions about a vendor/solution are truth.
A great example is the BYOTL feature where you started in on how I wasn't going to feed 10GbE off of the spinning disks discussed in the article, etc. The article didn't talk about feeding 10GbE. I discussed it in the comments section as it was going to related to a future article and you immediate set in with "the storage you discussed in the article won't do that." Of course it won't. The storage in that article was designed to meet the needs of that article.
I can't process the nightly input of the Square Kilometre Array with the MicroSD card in my cellphone either, but that doesn't make the shiny new Class 10 I tossed in there any less fit for purpose.
In the case of this Drobo you are prancing about discussing bottlenecks, access patterns and tests as though you know from firsthand lab experience that it will have issues in various places. If you have results that say so, put then here for all to see. I will test them before I put it back in the box and/or gladly point the Drobo guys at your results and see if they can verify. I promise you they are entirely interested in characterising their hardware for all use cases, knowing where it is inappropriate to use and sharing that information freely with customers. They are one of the few storage vendors I know who don't try to fleece you.
No storage solution is perfect for all use cases, and I never claimed the Drobo was, nor does Drobo make such claims.The performance and reliability characteristics are such that the unit itself strikes me as "entry enterprise class." It is beefier than all but the more niche SMB offerings, and really does compete against some of the lower-end Netapp stuff on offer.
I could see the Drobo being used at a branch office to back-end local systems there, or for video editing, etc. Anything where the loss of the information on the unit isn't critical because relevant backups exist elsewhere and a time delay of a few hours between the last backup and what was on the storage unit isn't the end of the world. That actually covers a lot of scenarios; even in modern enterprises. (Domain controllers are a good example of this. They typically exist in pairs, and Server 2012 actually can tell if it is a VM that has been rolled back or spawned from a template.)
Synchronous high availability isn't a requirement for absolutely everything; must as systems administrators want it to be. It is, however, increasingly considered a baseline requirement and the ability of one of these B1200i units to keep itself in block-by-block lock-step with another one will be "required functionality" 3 years from now. IF Drobo isn't working on it for inclusion in the next generation of these devices, then the B1200i will have been an expensive experiment for them.
Does the Drobo B1200i have the raw IOPS required to compete against a Tintri or Violin solution? No. Could it reasonably see use in the enterprise in place of lower-end enterprise Netapp, Dell or HP offerings? Yes.
Now, if you want to have a little semantic quibble about where you define the cutoff between SMB storage and Enterprise storage, that's fine. State your precise requirements to be considered Enterprise instead of SMB and I'll tell you if it meets those. Lots of people have different definitions of the spaces involved – though of course, everyone thinks their definition is correct, and some spend a great deal of time and effort trying to convince others of that – but the lines are still pretty damned arbitrary.
I have worked with SMBs for most of my life. The Drobo B1200i would be complete overkill for 75% of them. It would fit comfortably in most of the rest of them and I can envision several scenarios in which if could serve my enterprise clients quite ably.
To me, that makes it entry-level enterprise gear. I'd like to see certain functionality added – block level synchronous N-to-1 replication for one example – added before I would put it up as "critical systems" gear, but it provides enough oomph to run many workloads in a modern enterprise.
So yes, I do call FUD, sir. At first blush, I read your statements across multiple comment threads as indicative of someone who believes in IOPS Uber Alles and specifies nuclear aircraft carriers in order to go round the block and pick up groceries, rather than tailoring solutions.
Of course, for me to level that as an accusation – rather than say "this is what it seems like, please confirm/deny – would indicate that I took a small amount of information provided then added an assload of assumptions in order to create a perception that matched my prejudices and desired spin on the situation. Right now, I don't know quite enough about you, but you really do strike me as someone who falls broadly in to one of two categories.
The first: a fanboy with an axe to grind: enter the conversation with a particular set of solutions in mind that you feel are "better than all others" and will slowly poke context-inappropriate holes in competing (or even not really competing in the same area) products until their solution is revealed to be "the best." Bonus points if you manage to take one set of requirements then completely ignore them by imposing your own requirements in their place, setting straw men to demolish in proving that the discussed solutions are irrelevant because they don't meet your requirements, which have nothing at all to do with the original requirements under discussion.
The second: a vendor. I've seen a disturbing uptick of late in astroturfing, and it has made me paranoid about vendors who spend way too much time and effort tearing on the competition in tech sites.
Let me be clear; sharing information is good. I like the sharing of information. But it is stupid comments like "as it happens I do have a deep understanding of storage technology which is why I'm talking about latency and IO size rather than posting screenshots of file copy operations" that make me thing you are either full of shit, or a just a douchy dong. That statement of itself is laced with a whole fuckload of completely inaccurate assumptions which you basically take as gospel and run with. That's FUD.
In the context of this particular comment, it I didn't post any screenshots. Oh, I took some screenshots. I took several of various things and put them all into a Dropbox folder and shared it with my subeditor. He then chose which to add to the article. I haven't had access to the CMS to do things like "add my own screenshots" until well after this article was handed in.
Secondly, your derision indicates that you find testing things using Windows file copy as a tool to be inappropriate. While I agree that it would be were it the only tool employed, I call several layers of bullshit on any so-called "storage expert" who doesn't bust out real-world use cases like windows file copy as part of their larger testing suite.
Synthetics are good for some things, but real world testing is critical too. IT is all about workloads, and sweet holy fuck, some people use storage to do things like copy files. In fact, it is one of the most likely use cases this Drobo model will see.
Making such basic mistakes as assuming things like "all tests performed are discussed in the article" or even "all screenshots taken are posted" makes me feel that the rest of your arguments regarding the technical aspects of storage are questionable. "Writers are subject to the whims and mercies of the editors and their restrictions" is a pretty basic, fundamental bit of knowledge to have about tech magazines, newspapers or the conveyance of information in the writer form in general. You either lack that knowledge, or you choose to ignore it in order to impose your views and prejudices.
You continue forward as though omission of information - or chosing to include some things instead of others - is concrete evidence that no other tests or assesments were performed. "What you see if what you get" taken to an extreme, despite the information being presented in tone and in legnth as a summary. What's more, the snarky comebacks - though oh, so witty to you I am sure - border on (but don't quite spill over to) ad hom attacks which rather undermine the highly technical nature of your attempted information dissemination.
What does that say about your approach to storage testing? Or whether or not I should trust your assessment of the utility or positioning of a product you haven't handled?
FUD, sir. This is how I interpret your comments. If you intended them any other way, please, do enlighten me. I am not seeking to be hostile or mean with my words here – I'm trying new things in 2013 – but I do feel that your approach and your words are lacking in both context and candor.
Unless of course, you are simply trolling. In which case, please do e-mail me. I have a few "how to troll people even more effectively" tips I love to share with greenhorns.
I wish I had an answer to this, honestly. I've wondered the same thing. I was initially quite worried about exactly this issue; triple mirroring on 3x SSDs doesn't make give me any warm fuzzies if those three SSDs are OCZ. IF any company's SSDs are going to drop 3x SSDs at the exact same time, my personal experience says "it will be OCZ." So I installed several layers of backups on all production VMs that ended up living on this array – I am Le Paranoid, but don't quite (yet) have the hardware to achieve it – and soldiered on.
I suspect that a lot of it has to do with their thought process on the tiering. They refer to it as "transactional tiering" or "the transactional layer." They want really heavily hit stuff to live there – heavy access database blocks, basically – and that would be as much for write speeds as read. That makes the "move rather than copy" element of their tiering (sort of?) make sense; writing in a read-promotion-only scenario would leave your writes bounded by the cache. (Anything after cache fill would but straight-to-spinning rust and thus dead slow.)
I am not sure I agree with the decision, but I am not sure I disagree either. IT is a technology. It works in this fashion. I would find it adequate – even quite good – for several types of workloads, but not for others.
As with anything really, you have too look at your workloads and see if they fit. It most certainly isn't a good fit for everything, but I can think of several places where it is just fine. Ultimately, I'd like the ability to toggle between the "promote-read-only" behaviour pattern and the current "promote-read-write".
Not really; the customer in question has zero money. They don't have highly available, totally redundant infrastructure. They live off of periodic backups, templates and things like DFSR and rsync.
If their primary goes down and they are too poor/cheap to have an HA config or a working cold spare, what's the alternative? Wait a week for the local ultra-low-cost vendor to get a replacement part? The Drobo at least had drives that wrren't 6 years old. Plus I was test-driving a Unitrends backup appliance at the same time; way - way outside my customer's price range - which between the two setups - and when combined with VMWare DRS - gave them a more reliable and protected IT infrastructure than they were able to manage off the archaic crap they are consistently unwilling to upgrade.
I will trust a completely unknown Drobo NAS with some known-good backup solutions running on my brand new Ivy Brdige compute node a hell of a lot more than I trust their ancient Santa Rosa compute nodes with RAID 1 WD Raptor 300s that constantly fail. (For that mattrr, the Santa Rosa systems are detriorating as well...)
So no. The customer doesn't mind. They might not have made it through the season otherwise, and are too cheap to buy new gear.
No. I wish. I purposefully keep around "dodgy" hardware to test those scenarios, myself. The Drobo did about as well as an LSI 1078-based card at handling them; properly detected them in most ciecumstances, went pear-shaped on a rebuild - dropping the bad disk - when it hit a non-recoverable read error, etc.
Yep. I don't trust black boxes at all. I don't understand BeyondRAID because I don't know the algorithms used to move blocks around. Makes me very nervous. So I did what you suggested: pulled drives iut during a rebuild. Pulled drivers out in the middle of high I/O, etc.
Long story short: it offers RAID-6 class protection. It survives a disk pull during peak I/O. It survives a disk pull during rebuild. It survives instantainious 2-disk failures. It DOES NOTA like 2 disk faillures during RAID dxpansion (after adding a new disk). RAID expansion being different from rebuild.
Which puts it in line with my LSI or Adaptec hardware RAID cards.
It's actually not as heavy as it would seem at first glance. I don't have the shipping weight on hand - that's at the office - but it is far lighter than a fully loaded Chenbro SR-107, that's for sure. Drobo have put rather a lot of effort into designing the thing; it would probably hold up. I just...couldn't make myself do it. IT was just heavy enough that one bit of metal fatigue in one ear...
...well, onto the bottom of the rack it went. If I remember - I'll try, honest! - then when I get to the office on Wed and we have to pack this thing up, I'll see if I can find the packing wieght for you.
Actually, I used over a dozen tools from iometer to yes, windows file copy. You can turn off the caching, but thanks for playing, chap.
Re: feeding it adequate amounts of data, I did. Some huge transfers, some small, some mixed, some random, some sequential. I ran 50 VMs off the thing then did OS image level backus on half while defragging the other half and storage vmotioning things around.
It may even shock you to know that I was more interested in real world performance than synthetics. Amazingly, that's the bit that matters to me. More critically, it is what matters to most readers, I would think. How does the widget perform for its intended purpose?
You have been quite interested in poking your nose in to storage comment threads, spreading FUD based on assumptions and claiming Deep Knowledge instead of asking questions.
Of course, it would be so much easier to put your mind at ease with a totally detailed breakdown of every test I've run and what configs they used, but the truth of the matter is that they don't give me that kind of space. (I already caught hell for the legnth of this review, and there is more to discuss than raw performance.) I honestly wish I had the chance to put more in. Especially with regards to performance with the different tools under various load conditions and testing various aspects of the storage system. Unfortunately, I don't get a choice except to present it essentially as a summary.
So in the future, ask questions. I'll answer. Or, more interestingly, answer the more interesting question: just what is it you are selling? You seem to have an angle, why not just put it on the table and we can all judge? Surely it's good, you seem knowledgable enough.
People skills are malleable thing. I can be a perfectly wonderful human being, if I've a reason to be so. I can be a horrible troll. When and if I am in a position where kid gloves and delicate diplomacy are called for, I can - and do - play the game.
The Register's comment threads are not such a place. Quite the opposite; show any sign of weakness and the vicious pack of internet piranha hereabouts will tear you to pieces. Never mistake the persona that an individual chooses to portray in one forum on the internet – in this case quite deliberately - for the native and "natural" approach that individual takes.
What should give you pause is that while I may play the part of the ornery internet troll here on The Register's forums, even that affected persona is far – far – more agreeable than the demonstrated personalities of many top CEOs.
If you knew me personally – if you've interviewed with me, spent time with me at a junket or lived and worked with me in my native frozen habitat – I think you'd find that I am somewhat unlike the persona I portray for the hoi polloi text blocks here in the forums. Oh, I retain the "brutal honesty" trait – that's endemic to my personality and thus something I have trouble weeding out of any "character" I build – and along with that my true nature reflects my online one in that I don't like to mince words.
In reality, however, I'm far more like to listen to opinions and complaints. If for no other reason than that when dealing with an individual who is aught but a random block of text you are able to read more about that individual than their words alone can provide. Body language and voice patterns provide clues by which to judge many things about an individual. You can far more rapidly assess whether that individual is likely to be competent, have opinions/complaints/concerns that are valid or whether they are simply "hysterical individuals."
What I find interesting about this entire thread is the certainty of some individuals that they can pin you down based on what you type in forums like these. We're readers of The Register for $deity's sake! We are supposed to be technologically adept internet sophisticates! We are supposed to understand the complexities not only of the machinery we tinker with but also of the online communities that we frequent!
How many articles have you read that discuss the science of alternate behaviour patterns in online fora? Or group dynamics as it applies to either online or offline scenarios? If you are older than 12 and on this site, you should have encountered dozens – maybe even hundreds – by now.
Forums on websites like The Register aren't carefully constructed, rigidly moderated bastions of academic thought, inclusive cooperation and mutual respect. Far from it! They are cesspools of the worst kinds of egotistical self promotion and partisan vitriol. Anonymity removes people's social inhibitions and you don't tend to get civil discourse.
Unlike some, I accept this as the natural order of things. I may not personally like it – and I have lengthy proposals for changes that could be made to eventually curb this – but I do play the game.
In this case, the game is being a mirror to The Register's community. The Register's commenters have become a community of "me, me, me;" inwardly focused on their own opinions and demanding that all and sundry believe exactly as they do. The past few years have seen this get worse, not better. Everyone enjoys tearing everyone else down whilst maintaining a pretence of individual unassailability, doubly so when individual opinion rather than rationally deconstructable criticism is the topic of discussion.
I find the entire exercise childish and demeaning, doubly so to the writers whom many of The Register's commenttard community seem to feel entitled to mock, berate and belittle.
So I gave up any attempts to be civil or lead by example; and yes I did have a period of trying that. I even had a nice period of simply "walking away" and washing my hands of the for a entirely. That lasted the better part of a year. Ultimately, I decided against both approaches deliberately and with very careful consideration.
If The Register's commenttards choose to act like vacuous children, then I will hold the mirror up to their faces. I will treat them with the same lack of respect they demonstrate for the writers and for their fellow commenttards. I will engage with them – at random, if I can – and argue them down to little trolled-out nubs. Since it is generally the same offenders over and over one of two things will happen, both of which are completely acceptable to me:
1) I will drive off the worst of the piranhas (unlikely).
2) I will vent my personal frustrations in a safe and largely consequence free environment whilst creating a "personality" that commenters on The Register can become polarised towards: love or hate, they can't stop reading, commenting and engaging with (seems to have worked.)
Yes, it's cynical. Yes, it is cold and calculated. What else would you expect? Every single thing I do is calculated and has a purpose. It always has.
If you want to get to know me, and not the character I choose to play you need to step away from The Register a little. A great start would be some of the Q&A interviews that folks have done with me. The first part of the Spiceworks Q&A is out. It should provide a much more realistic view of me, the individual.
The fact that you – or anyone – buys the persona portrayed in these forums as "me" without questioning the lunacy of that should tell you a lot. Of itself, it should start you thinking about human dynamics in online for a…and I use my real name here. Imagine how those dynamics change for those using pseudonyms!
The people that don't think about such things – that simply accept the world at face value – they are the ones that shouldn't be running companies. They are incapable of seeing the wheels within the wheels that are part and parcel of human interaction. Everything from fora persona to business interactions and reading your opponent across a negotiating table.
Cheers, mate.
Have a pint on me.
"you taken a poll as to how many people think you have a good attitude toward others' opinions?"
Several over the years. It is part of how the folks who run the place know they are on track with using snark as part of the schtick that defines the site.
"Or show a measured response to criticism?"
You aren't offering critisism. Only opinion. As to "measured response," you are talking about the website that posts "flame of the week" articles. I think you have mistaken The Register for some other website that tries really hard to make each and every reader feel like a love-wrapped unique snowflake. Maybe you missed all those years of the moderatrix or, well...everything about this site for the past decade or so.
"you are consistently rude and react badly to criticism"
Yes, I am consistently rude. And? Regarding criticism: nah, I handle that appropriately. I do not, however, give any fucks whatsoever about opinions beyond the obvious "this looks like an opening for a good troll" entry. Opinions are irrelevant to me as the individual that has them. If you want me to care about your opinion you must first convince me why I should care about you.
That's the thing about this here internet; it's the great leveller. Who are you? Why should I care? You could be a millionaire or a pauper. You could be a schizophrenic killer or even my wife, trolling me from a smurf account. You could be anyone or noone and that makes the value of the individual opinion impossible to gauge.
People who like to feel as though they somehow matter will argue that we should treat everyone's opinions as though they matter. Those people are consistently unable to explain exactly how one goes about doing so in the face of the reality in which every single topic on earth will produce individuals with divergent opinions.
Go with the majority, they will say; secure that their opinion must. be held by the majority. Individual ego means that the person holding the opinion believes that only those lacking any form of rational thought processes could disagree with them, so the majority must surely be on their side. Unless, of course, they know they hold a minority opinion. Then the argument is about tyranny of the majority and underrepresentation. "Balance" gets hauled out a lot, as does "bias."
Ultimately, what it boils down to is that the "opinion" of an anonymous block of text has no value. Certainly no more value than the opinion of a different, anonymous block of text. It is why I make a clear distinction between criticism and opinion. Criticism can be analysed on merit; the arguments and evidence weighed objectively.
Proponents of the value of opinion have yet to explain to me precisely how one bows to the personal opinion of anonymous blocks of text without alienating the other anonymous blocks of text that disagree. Until such a time as this is explained, I'll stick to careful consideration of criticism and due trolling of opinion.
" Zero fucks given. Moving on."
Well look at that! Several comments in, the lad gets it! This is exactly the appropriate response to encountering an opinion you don't like. Guess what, lads? I managed to achieve some amusement via trolling and taught some random text block on the internet a valuable life lesson about not investing one's sense of self worth in irrelevant blocks of text found on the internet.
Will wonders never cease.
No, I am working under the assumption that the fact that you have a need for self aggrandisement and some pitiful need to feel important doesn't make your personal opinion have more value than mine own. I too am a reader of The Register. I have a different view than you do. Some people agree with you, but the majority of the (growing) readership doesn't.
So to put this more bluntly: opinions are like assholes, everyone has one and they all stink. Your opinion is one amongst many; as valid – or invalid – as my own. To attempt to cater to the opinions of the few-but-noisy is – as previously stated – madness.
So yes, criticism can only be taken to be objective analysis backed by evidence here. Subjective anything is nothing more than personal opinion and completely irrelevant.
You aren't a special snowflake. Deal with it.
Did I say "any criticism is irrelevant?" No, I said "you can't please everyone, so don't even try." If you try to please everyone you will go mad. There is no one tone, no one attitude no one anything that will please everyone. Make a concession over here to this one very loud – but ultimately very small – group of people and you end up irritating this other group over there.
Believe it or not, people come to The Register for the snark. They come to it for the trolly headlines, the satire and the pisstaking. It's The Register's schtick. There are other websites out there that try for a very neutral, never inflammatory, try oh-so-desperately to make everyone happy tone. There are pro-Apple, and pro-Microsoft; pro-Google and even pro-Oracle blogs. There are sites that treat science reporting properly and those that don't. There are sites that publish opinion columns and those that refuse to.
In short; there is no shortage of diversity in the tech reporting world. This means that the people who read The Register do so because they want to read The Register. We aren't talking about an organisation abusing a monopoly on information distribution to push an agenda here. We are talking about people demanding that MSNBC tech the controversy because they like the tone and word choice Fox News uses to discuss climate change better instead of just changing the fucking channel.
Do I think The Register is perfect? No. I think that the science reporting in particular has some truly appalling representation here and I make a deliberate choice to read Ars Technica to cover those topics instead. By the same token, I read The Register for tech news instead of Ars because I like the snark and the pisstaking that El Reg throws on things.
I prefer the cynical, jaded and even trolly take that the writers and subs alike at El Reg have. I don't like the careful avoidance of controversy that permeates Ars Technica's technical writing, nor the vacuous ass-kissing that magically appears right before a major product launch.
More to the point, if and when I feel that I have an opinion to express regarding the quality, style or tone of the content on The Register I take the time to write a reasonably polite explanation of my views, provide examples and rationale. I send it in and hope that the brass take it into consideration. Most of the time, my comments are ignored – after all, my beliefs regarding things like science reporting obviously aren't doing The Register much harm – and so I do what I always have done: break up where I source my information.
The opinions of readers matter…but the opinions of readers only really matter in aggregate. You aren't important. Get over it. Shockingly, neither am I, nor is any one individual or group of readers. Fucking astonishing, eh?
Criticism – objective analysis of something with evidence to back it up – is always good.
Complaining – subjective whinging about how the information is presented in a manner that offends the sensibilities of a small group of individuals – is worthless.
"You don't share my personal biases" is all we ever hear from commenters. Linux fanboys decry what they see as pro-Microsoft/pro-opensource bias. Microsoft lovers decry what they see as a pro-opensource bias. Apple fanboys decry everything and everyone as against them.
Denliaists whine and complain whenever an article with actual science content emerges, and I complain whenever I see an article written by some twungle ending above the brainstem that either links to wattsup.com or uses 1998 as the start of a graph in a desperate attempt to cherry pick data.
Oh well.
I have written articles tearing Windows 8 a new one and gotten comments/emails from people angry about my pro-Microsoft bias. Figure that one out. I wrote an article about Apple in the Enterprise and had to put up with page after page of e-mails complaining that I was anti-Apple because I didn't praise Apple's native management tools as the be-all and end-all of the universe. So fuck those people with a lacquered bus. It's not like I threw a lab up and spent four months testing that shit or anything. Twunts.
So…your personal feelings? Your sad little prejudices and preconceptions? Zero fucks given. If someone has a valid criticism - that is a factual error or something that they can objectively prove with evidence - I think you'll find people more than willing to listen. (Well, in most cases.)
If, however, all you have is a bunch of bitching about style and tone and how other people who think more or less "just like you" prefer some other website's style/tone…I think you'll get a middle finger and some rolled eyes.
If you want your opinion heard, present it in a manner that will make a writer or editor give some fucks. Otherwise you aren't signal, you're noise.
Happy New Year,
--Some asshole writer on the interbutts.
1) You don't need to be a millionaire for your own island. Money determines size and location, but I know several folks with middle class incomes here in Canada who own entire islands. Some of them on nice, freshwater lakes.
2) Buy an Aircraft Carrier? They are smelly. And old. They are miserable to maintain and hard to get into port. Why not buy a decommissioned cruise liner instead? For that matter, why do you need such a large boat? Large boats are harder to defend, and you are anywhere in international waters and have that kind of wonga you are a target. Give me something small and bristling with defences – like a small destroyer – or better yet convert a sub.
3) Solve the national debt of a third world country gives you god status for about 3 seconds. Then they get right back into debt again. Unless you can solve the underlying issues that caused the debt in the first place – I.E. massive economic manipulation by first world nations, lack of natural resources, constant internecine struggles – you are doing nothing except ensuring that some first-world banker somewhere gets a much higher-than-average quarterly bonus.
4) No need to be rich for that; just takes some planning. If you're even in Edmonton, drinks are on me!
"When people hold sites like kotaku in higher regard then you're doing something wrong."
Disagree entirely. If 500 people hold kotaku in higher regard, but 7 million hold The Register in higher regard, then those 500 people aren't relevant. The issue isn't that people are pissy and want things their way, but which people, how many, how relevant are those people and - most critically - how relevant are those people to advertisers.
You can't please everyone all the time. So carve out a niche and try to make a profit from those you can please. You're doing it right if you can make money in your niche and show growth.
Well guess what...
Actually, I trained at The Register school of irreverent humour. Having been - like STB - a reader since 2000. Satire is something else altogether. 7+ million readers and for every single article some number of them are disgruntled?
Colour me shocked.
But it was 6.6M last year, so I'll keep hanging out under my bridge and demanding a tithe for my personal satisfaction of those who pass.
Weeping, wot?
3 things to mind: ensure personal financial security and retirement. That takes maybe $1M...tops.
You could leverage the money as an investment which could produce more money. At those amounts, that's easy.
You could give it all away.
I could only really see myself engaging in the first option followed by the last. I don't want mansions or yachts. I don't aant limos or planes. I want only to have enough money that I have the financial security and time to write my sci-fi triolgy before I die. I don't need the kind of money Tim Cook makes to do that, though I admit, I'd love to do his job for a decade or so. Not for the money...for the challenge.
:) Cheers!
Excellent article, and insightful commentary. Things for us all to chew on, I think. Most importantly the ending comment about specialisation. I have to agree; no one person can know everything about our industry. It isn't possible, there is simply too much to know. If you have enough staff to make "teams," then keep them specialised as individuals! Invest in their knowledge and training; make them experts in their area.
Assuming, of course, you can lick the "team" problem in the first place. As noted, it is more important than ever before that these specialists be able to work together. With software-defined networking leading a new wave of software-defined everything, I suspect that the requirement for cross-disciplinary mind-melds is only going to increase.
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