OpenSolaris Dedupe for home use
Posted by Sam
I know that dedupe will save a ton of space at work. We have lots of Subversion repos checked out on servers and lots of similar files like swfaddress and jquery that are reused in a lot of our projects. But I've been curious how useful it would be with my personal files. Here's what I've found when I deduped files from my home directory.
- Photos: 5.5GB savings (34GB pre-dedupe/28.5 post-dedupe)
- Music: No savings
- Projects: 1GB savings (2.2GB pre-dedupe/1.22 post-dedupe)
As you can see there are some decent space savings to be had even for home/power users. The savings would be even greater if I had enabled compression as well but I was more curious about dedupe since compression is fairly common these days.
Tags: zfs opensolaris deduplication
New version of SAM Released
Posted by Sam
There's a new version of SAM (Snort Alert Monitor) up at SAM's project site. The new release adds Authentication, a country heat map and country coded IP addresses. Check it out at the project site and let me know what features you'd like to see in the SAM forums.
Tags: sam
Dedupe in the real world
Posted by Sam
For those that haven't heard dedupe has made it's way into OpenSolaris 128a. You can download it at Genunix. To test what kind of savings we might expect to see in the real world I fired a VirtualBox with OpenSolaris 128a and turned on dedupe and compression (gzip level 6). Then I rsync'd 10 gigs worth of files from our staging server. The results? Dedupe dropped that 10 gigs to 6 gigs and compression dropped another 2 gigs which left us at 4 gigs. So dedupe gave us a 40% reduction and compression gave us another 20%. Not too shabby, especially when it takes about 10 seconds to enable it. A little bird told me that they are expecting dedupe in the Sun 7xxx series of storage by the end of the year. The Sun boxes are already the winner for best value and with that they jump even further out front!
Tags: opensolaris solaris deduplication zfs
Five things I like about WebROaR
Posted by Sam
WebROaR was announced a couple of days ago but somehow I missed the announcement. The more I look it over the more I like it so I thought I'd put together a list of five things I really like about it.
- Deploying a new application or taking down an application doesn't require a server restart. This is important when you have many apps running because it takes a while to fire those applications up again.
- Integrated stats! This is similar to what you get with New Relic.
- Exception tracking built into the app server! No longer do you need to remember to use ExceptionNotifier or other such plugins.
- Minimum workers! No longer do you have to wait 15 seconds for your app to load because the app server unloaded your site due to inactivity. I hear this is coming Phusion 3 but this is important for sites that aren't terribly busy.
- The admin interface!
And now for three things I'd like them to add.
- Multiple users. It looks like you could manually add users to a file but it should be doable through the admin interface as well.
- Restful interface. Call me picky but I'd like to see a RESTful interface for sites, users, stats, etc...
- iPhone interface. I know we don't NEED an iPhone interface but it would be nice, especially for those of us still on the Edge network.
Overall I really like where they are going with it. If they continue down the road they are heading down I think they'll have one of the best app servers for any language. Peaking at their code though it looks like they've got a ways to go, but for an initial release I definitely like where their head's at.
Tags: rubyonrails webroar
Good riddance Expedient
Posted by Sam
When we purchased Ripple Effects we inherited the data center that they had been using. I don't want to mention them by name so let's just say it starts with a Ex and ends with an pedient or you can hit their site if you really care. They have the absolute worst customer service but it was mostly a non-issue until recently.
Most of the stuff that was hosted there was pretty quickly transferred to a local data center where the rest of our servers currently reside, but like always we had a couple of stragglers. The bad service started when we had a database backup request. It's a fully managed SQL Server and we didn't have access to make backups. After waiting for more than an hour I called and was told that the person handling this for us had just left for the day without handing it off to somebody else. So me, my fellow admin and the client are all waiting on a backup that was never going to come because somebody decided it wasn't important enough to take care of before leaving for the day. Keep in mind we sent the request at 4:00 their time so it wasn't like we requested it at quitting time. Thanks, because my time is clearly less valuable than yours!
The next example of their wonderful customer service comes when we shutdown a mail server that was no longer in use. Whoever setup their network seemed fond of handing critical tasks to others so Expedient was supposed to handle monitor critical services. Well about 2 HOURS after we shutdown the mail server we got a call from their NOC that the service was down. Awesome! Thanks for the responsiveness. If this was a critical service, which it was at some point, then two hours is unacceptable. I probably would have heard from a client that the server was down long before Expedient and their crew noticed it. Well done sirs, well done!
And finally comes the straw that broke the camel's back. If I wasn't already disappointed with them before this certainly would have pushed me over the edge. I contacted Expedient last week to let them know we'd be removing the equipment from the data center the following week. Our contract expires late January and I wanted to get out there and remove all the equipment so I didn't have to wait until the last minute. There are several other things that need to be done in Pittsburgh anyway so the trip and timing made sense. All the sites have been moved and the services have been turned off in preparation. I was told that I could not remove OUR equipment until the contract was paid in full. Huh!?! You're holding our equipment hostage because you're afraid we MIGHT not pay? We've barely been using your services for months and yet we are still paying your ridiculous bills every month. Not to mention we have this thing called a contract. Maybe you've heard of it?! It says we agree to pay you this amount until this point in time. It doesn't say anything about us paying that amount unless we move all of our stuff out. We are a multimillion dollar company and as far as I know we don't screw over the companies we do business with. According to John Rosenson this is their policy. Might I recommend you adopt a policy that doesn't treat your clients like criminals? I'd also like to see where in their contract it states that we can't remove equipment whenever we want, because I really doubt it's in there. Also, let me clue you in to something. The equipment that is in your rack is worth about 1/5th of the last couple of payments so when you are trying to get leverage on a client you might want to make sure it's worth it. Expedient's solution to all of this was to ask us to write a little note saying we promise to pay through our contract. Yeah, because that's way more enforceable than a CONTRACT! Clueless! If you do host your servers at a colo I highly recommend NOT hosting at Expedient unless you like to overpay and be under serviced.