Google's container is real... thank you sun.

Posted by Ian Holsman Wed, 18 Oct 2006 04:32:00 GMT

Robert Cringley’s prediction of google creating a data centre in a shipping container has been fulfilled.

not by google, but by sun.

Project Blackbox was announced today.

I’m waiting for the day for a operations engineer to say ‘we need to swap out container 5 as it is malfunctioning’, in the same manner they talk about a malfunctioning computer.

I think sun is going in the right direction here, and addressing the real problem, data center operations directly instead of focusing on incremental improvements like it’s competitors are.

way to go Jonathan and team!

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Question for you data center design guru's

Posted by Ian Holsman Wed, 27 Sep 2006 04:21:00 GMT

in todays NYTimes google is calling for a more simple and efficient power supply to be used.

I was just wondering why you couldn’t design a PC which just takes DC and have the transformer in the rack?

a 1U box which takes 240V in and provides 8-12 DC cords @ 12V each. (and whatever other voltages a PC takes).

that way you wouldn’t need a power supply in the machine itself, it would just connect to the DC. This would remove some heat from the machines itself.

any experts out there reading to tell me why this is a stupid idea? laptops have been doing it for a while.

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Anybody flying to korea soon?

Posted by Ian Holsman Thu, 25 May 2006 20:32:05 GMT

if so.. want to pick me up one of these babies ?

no hard drive, or fan .. the only down side is the screen size is 12 1/2” but I’m sure the extra battery life makes up for it. .. you could probably have the thing last on a single battery for the flight between melbourne and seoul.

kidding aside, one less moving (and noisy) part is great.

source: Brad’s Journal

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sunfire gets a bit of a slap

Posted by Ian Holsman Fri, 31 Mar 2006 13:02:00 GMT

and doesn’t seem to take it too nicely :-(

I decided to install the mysql beta on my laptop (Mac Intel @2G ram and 2GHZdual core) and my sunfire (@8G ram and 16 1GHZ Ultrasparcs).

(I have it installed on a x86-64 box as well, but that machine is busy at the moment)..

so for a quick sanity check I ran mysqlslap to see how it performs.

I chose to simulate a 20 concurrent users

sunfire$ mysqlslap -psunfire -c 20 -i 20
Benchmark
        Average number of seconds to run all queries: 1.714 seconds
        Minimum number of seconds to run all queries: 0.941 seconds
        Maximum number of seconds to run all queries: 2.539 seconds
        Number of clients running queries: 20
        Average number of queries per client: 0

vs

laptop$ mysqlslap -i 20 -c 20
Benchmark
        Average number of seconds to run all queries: 1.201 seconds
        Minimum number of seconds to run all queries: 1.072 seconds
        Maximum number of seconds to run all queries: 1.569 seconds
        Number of clients running queries: 20
        Average number of queries per client: 0

now.. before you get all pissy at me, these installs are both from mysql.com, are BETA release using ‘default’ setups.. I know they need tuning.

so I decided to run the mysqlslap against blastwave’s mysql5 (5.0.19) which has a bit better default setup (IMHO)

sunfire $ mysqlslap -c 20 -i 20
Benchmark
        Average number of seconds to run all queries: 1.647 seconds
        Minimum number of seconds to run all queries: 0.882 seconds
        Maximum number of seconds to run all queries: 2.783 seconds
        Number of clients running queries: 20
        Average number of queries per client: 0

still the same kind of numbers. one thing I did find interesting was that I only saw one connection in the SHOW PROCESS LIST command.

any mysql guru’s want to tell me what I’m doing wrong on the test here?

update: this is what I get on a x86-64 machine.


$ bin/mysqlslap -c 20 -i 20 -a
Benchmark
        Average number of seconds to run all queries: 0.002 seconds
        Minimum number of seconds to run all queries: 0.002 seconds
        Maximum number of seconds to run all queries: 0.003 seconds
        Number of clients running queries: 20
        Average number of queries per client: 0
same deal.. no tweaking of configurations, just download the tarball from mysql.com and fire it up.

anyone have any ideas?

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