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Solid State Drives for performance computing

February 16th, 2009 Roshin No comments
SUPER?TALENT FTM60GK25H Rev.2 SSD 60GBThe Hard Disk Drives (HDDs) have magnetic disks that spin at over 7000rpm while a read/write head hovers over them to do the job. Cons: moving parts, mechanical faults, lower speed, power consumption, heat and all that can bring the performance down and increase the carbon footprint ( these days anything can be measured by its impact on the environment ).
SSD - Internal LeopardEnter Solid State Drives (SDDs) which do not have any moving parts and thus ‘eliminate spin-up time, and greatly reduce seek time, latency, and other delays inherent in electromechanical disks.’ -wikipedia.
I am sure these are going to find its place in enterprise servers, data centers and storage solutions before they get to desktops. But this technology is HOT and will remain so for some time.
Categories: Hardware, IT Infrastructure, Technology Tags:

Cobalt Qube3

July 24th, 2007 Roshin No comments

I got new toy to play with – a Cobalt Qube3. If you are wondering what a Qube3 is, it’s a Network appliance that17.04.2009 was designed by Cobalt Networks in the late 90s. Later, Cobalt Networks was acquired by Sun Microsystems and they did some redesigning on this appliance.

The Qube3 that I got is an older generation Sun appliance running some sort of Sun-Cobalt Linux. The Qube has no ports for keyboard, mouse or monitor. It just has 2 Ethernet ports (one for clean and one for dirty, if you want to use it as a firewall), a connection for power, and a small LCD with a few buttons which allows you to carry out some simple administrative tasks, like resetting the web interface, configuring the network or gracefully shutting down the box.

Categories: Hardware, Linux Tags: , ,