The cray-cyber.org Computer Museum

Occasionally I feel nostalgic and want to log into an old supercomputer. The guys at cray-cyber.org have a great collection of older machines that they keep powered up for the general public to explore. Not all machines are kept powered up 24/7 but its a rare chance to get access to some very uncommon machines.

Among their collection is a Cray Y-MP EL, a SGI Origin 2000 and a Sun Enterprise 10,000. They also have a number of other Control Data, NEC, Cray supercomputers and mainframes. In addition to their extensive collection of working older machines connected directly to the internet is a wealth of documentation and photographs of these historic machines.

These guys have saved a number of machines from the recyclers and go through a lot to get them moved and to restore them to operational condition when they arrive to the museum. In addition to moving them and restoring them to operational condition there is power and space requirements for such systems. The passion that they have for preserving these parts of history is amazing for our day and age. Tours and public access to these systems are free of charge and they do accept donations for power and operational costs.

IBM to buy Sun??????

Reading the news today I saw a rather interesting and shocking article regarding IBM wanting to buy Sun. You can read the article here.

I used to work for IBM and I am quite familiar with their corporate culture. There are pockets of innovation but its mostly a big stable corporation where procedure and chain of command is very important. Business groups are very seperate an competitive and rarely collaborate. Sucess is based off of metrics and numbers rather than innovation and solutions. This made IBM very efficient but also allowed customers to fall through the cracks being bounced between business groups. Sun is somewhat the opposite and is a very innovative company that produces hardware and software that is much more cutting edge. Sun's workforce is really mobile with Sunray thin clients and generous work from home arrangments. IBM's workforce is more rooted to drab office space and more rigid work from home arrangements.

When I worked for SGI I saw this exact screen play of culture shock come together when SGI bought Cray. Cray was very much like IBM. All Cray employee's had offices and things were more formal with scheduled meetings. SGI was very much like Sun a very "hip" and relaxed work force that was very innovative. SGI employees worked in purple cubes decorated in unique ways and meetings usually occoured in front of the many esspresso machines in the same 1600 Ampitheatre Parkway building that Google now occupies. Ultimately this combination failed because they tried to assimilate two very different ways of approaching the solution to the same problem. It cost SGI more than they could ever anticipate. SGI now is selling commodity based Linux systems a mere shell of their former glory.

If IBM can buy Sun and then "stay out of the kitchen" it could work. I just don't see IBM doing this once the metrics are set they will step in and try to make things more efficent and fail in an epic way. While IBM's way of doing business is far from wrong its just too different from Sun's for them to sucessfully combine things. It would be like the "Hi im a mac" guy and the "Hi im a PC" guy collaborating on the same project.

Veeam "Fast" SCP for ESXi

I got an e-mail from the marketing people at Veeam inviting me to try their new Fast SCP for ESXi application "before everyone else". Needless to say I was really excited about the prospect of having something that was faster than the method that I was currently using with the manual SCP on the hypervisors and to try out some new software before its general release.

I did my comparison test with an 8gb VM transferred between two Dell 2950's with gigabit nics both connected to a Foundry x448 gigabit switch. With regular machine to machine SCP I get about 10mb/sec out of my transfers which is not great but works. Now to see the Fast SCP software in action. I start my transfer and hmmm we are only getting 5mb/sec out of the transfers. That's about half the speed I see out of command line SCP and WinSCP. Not really impressive at all.

If you look at this page Veeam clearly claims to be 6 times faster than regular SCP. I e-mailed the company bringing this to their attention and got a canned response back and then no response from a second email. I have no idea why a company would ask a someone to try software and get a valid user story back and let their support department blow them off with a canned response. I really love Veeam Monitor for my ESXi management but honestly Fast SCP is no better than WinSCP for ESXi machines.

Fun With New Hardware

It's been a long time since I have bought any new hardware. This is mostly because I am having so much fun in the virtual hardware world. Occasionally a really good deal comes your way and you just have to give in.

I picked up a IBM RS/6000 7044-170 and got quite a good deal. Its an older RS/6000 machine but is still a 400mhz Power3 with 2gb ram. It's been while since I have worked with AIX so it should be a lot of fun to tinker with. Whats most impressive about this machine is for a workstation class machine it has a full Service Processor with remote access capabilities so it can phone home in the event of issues. Its extremely well made and weighs a ton.

At the moment I have it hanging off the back of my Ultra 60's serial port doing some initial configuration. This is a workstation and has DVI graphics but from what I have read run's a really high single resolution output. For my purposes serial and ssh is fine for now.

Blastwave Open Source Package Manager for Solaris

In every operating system there are things to be loved and hated. I have always loved the rock solid hardware and software platform that Sun has sold for years. One of the things I have not liked for quite some time is having to install software on Solaris. If your lucky enough to find an actual package then you have to deal with the sometimes nightmarish dependencies not included with the package. Once you get all those packages on the machine (usually without wget unless you installed it) you have to install the packages individually and hope things don't break in the process. Especially if you are dealing with non Sun open source packages that have been put together by someone not very familiar with Solaris.

Downloading this simple package from Blastwave.org may be the last time you have to type pkgadd -d on your Solaris host. Once the package is installed you have a powerful package management system that can download and install packages just like apt-get or yum on a Linux host. Instructions here describe the installation and getting things setup correctly which I would recommend taking your time to go through.

One of the things I really like about Linux machines is the ability to quickly download and evaluate software to determine their suitability for the task at hand. Now I can have my cake and eat it too on my favorite rock solid OS and hardware platform and an installer that does not eat up tons of my time.