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September 16, 2010

How High?

Filed under: Random Thought — Tags: , — Nate @ 6:35 pm

I got this little applet on my Ubuntu desktop that tracks a few stocks of companies I am interested in(I don’t invest in anything). And thought it was pretty crazy how close to the offer price the 3PAR stock price got today, I mean as high as 32.98, everyone of course knows the final price will be $33, to think folks are trading the stock with only $0.02 of margin to me is pretty insane.

Looks a fair sight better than the only public company I have ever worked for, surprised they are still around even!

I never bought any options, good thing I guess because from the day I was hired the stock never did anything but go down, I think my options were in the ~$4.50 range (this was 2000-2002)

Just dug this up, I remember being so proud my company is on TV! Not quite as weird as watching the freeinternet.com commercials back when I worked there. A company that spent $7 million a month on bandwidth it didn’t know it had and wasn’t utilizing. Of course by the time they found out it was too late.

My company at the top of the list! I miss Tom Costello, he was a good NASDAQ floor guy. Screen shot is from March 2002. Also crazy that the DOW is only 68 points higher today than it was eight years ago.

Fusion IO now with VMware support

Filed under: Storage,Virtualization — Tags: , , , , , — Nate @ 8:58 am

About damn time! I read earlier in the year on their forums that they were planning on ESX support for their next release of code, originally expected sometime in March/April or something. But that time came and went and saw no new updates.

I saw that Fusion IO put on a pretty impressive VDI demonstration at VMworld, so I figured they must have VMware support now, and of course they do.

I would be very interested to see how performance could be boosted and VM density incerased by leveraging local Fusion IO storage for swap in ESX.  I know of a few 3PAR customers that say they get double the VM density per host vs other storage because of the better I/O they get from 3PAR, though of course Fusion IO is quite a bit snappier.

With VMware’s ability to set swap file locations on a per-host basis, it’s pretty easy to configure, in order to take advantage of it though you’d have to disable memory ballooning in the guests I think in order to force the host to swap. I don’t think I would go so far as to try to put individual swap partitions on the local fusion IO for the guests to swap to directly, at least not when I’m using a shared storage system.

I just checked again, and as far as I can tell, still, from a blade perspective at least, still the only player offering Fusion IO modues for their blades is the HP c Class in the form of their IO Accelerator. With up to two expansion slots on the half width, and three on the full width blades, there’s plenty of room for the 80, 160 GB SLC models or the 320GB MLC model. And if you were really crazy I guess you could use the “standard” Fusion IO cards with the blades by using the PCI Express expansion module, though that seems more geared towards video cards as upcomming VDI technologies leverage hardware GPU acceleration.

HP’s Fusion IO-based I/O Accelerator

FusionIO claims to be able to write 5TB per day for 24 years, even if you cut that to 2TB per day for 5 years, it’s quite an amazing claim.

From what I have seen (can’t speak with personal experience just yet), the biggest advantage Fusion IO has over more traditional SSDs is write performance, of course to get optimal write performance on the system you do need to sacrifice space.

Unlike drive form factor devices, the ioDrive can be tuned to achieve a higher steady-state write performance than what it is shipped with from the factory.

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