Fun with Fibre

One of my long term projects is to get my A3500FC array functional. Its quite ancient as its a first gen type of device that is merely a front end to some High Voltage Differential arrays but I have a soft spot for obsolete once tip top of the line cutting edge hardware. My unit has 5 D1000 High Voltage Differential arrays connected to the back of the A3500FC. The A3500FC has dual SCSI controllers each with their own really heavy cache battery. There are two Fibre Channel connections on the front of the A3500FC controller (why they did not put them on the back with the rest of the connections is beyond me). Each one of the Fibre connections is a blazing 1GB FCAL. But back in the day it was fast and its more than adequate for a "home SAN".

Sun officially dropped support for the A3500FC and seemed to go out of their way to EOL it by not supporting it with Solaris 10. Here is a photo of me downgrading one of my Netra's to Solaris 9 so that I can run raid manager and support the array. I have read about people being able to run A3500FC's off of Solaris 10 by doing a few changes to the OS but it seems like too much trouble with the potential for unexpected results.

TIP OF THE DAY: Never name your terminal server blinkey. Its bad luck! I named my Ultra 5 that I use as a terminal server blinkey and it has power problems (loose IEC plug) and is now having issues with its serial ports so I am stuck in my basement with a terminal arghhhh!

One of the big challenges for running a piece of hardware like this in a house is power. Just the array itself wants 12 110v IEC plugs. Thats not including power for the 6 systems that I have installed in the rack as well or the dual fibre hubs (yes hubs its FCAL). The rack itself is wired for three phase power with a really cool power switching module that supplies power to each one of the arrays. Since I have no real needs for redundancy or major capacity I plan on only running a couple of the D1000's and at that not in redundant power mode. This will probably be ok but as I buy more hardware I will probably have to look into having a more dedicated power source for the basement. So far I have yet to pop a breaker or even get close for that matter. :)

Snow Day. Well Sorta :)

Atlanta got a light dusting of snow today. Not really much of a snow storm but the airport canceled a lot of flights. The roads stayed clear and it was a great day to get lots of errands done. Went to get some groceries and of course the bread and milk were all gone. What exactly does one do with bread and milk when they are snowed in with less than an inch of snow? Went out and had a wonderful late night dinner at Landmark Diner where it was quiet and devoid of people.

2008 The Future is now

Its very difficult to keep a positive view of the direction of the technology market for many people. There are simply a lot of negative things happening in the market. This has never really changed over time. Take for example the factory workers in the industrial revolution afraid that they were going to be replaced by machines. There of course needed to be someone to operate the machines and deal with the increased efficiency of the machines. Factory jobs actually grew as the demands for the products increased.

The same is happening in a way in the technology market. While there are a lot of negative things going on in the market which I won't touch on since the internet is flooded with them there are a lot of good things going on. Social networking technology is being adopted by people who have never owned a computer before and spaces like Myspace, Youtube and Google are reasons for people to own computers and get on the internet. With blogs and video sites like Youtube the internet is also becoming a source of news without the predictable spin that many news outlets have. Devices like the iphone are giving regular people the ability to do more in the palm of their hand than many science fiction shows allowed. Did the Star Trek Communicator have Google maps? Consumer demand for the internet and new technology is growing like wildfire!

All of these technologies require people on the back end to keep them going. While many of the classical computer jobs of the past have been reduced in the quest to reduce operating costs so many more are popping up to replace them as technologies grow.

The news seems to be full of gloom and doom about how the economy is going to go into a recession but I am not sure I am really afraid yet. During the .com blowout that many of us all still have horrible memories about what happened to the big banks that are having problems now? Not a lot as they just adapted to the market. The technology market is filled with a lot of smart people who have the rug pulled out from them before. I think we learned from our past mistakes and as an industry will continue growing.