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February 28, 2014

From WebOS to Android: 60 days in

Filed under: Random Thought — Tags: , , , — Nate @ 8:22 pm

About a month ago I wrote about my experience on the first 30 days of switching from a WebOS ecosystem to a Android Ecosystem. Specifically from the never-officially-released HP Pre3 to a Samsung Galaxy Note 3.

There were a few outstanding issues at the time, and I just wanted to write/rant a little bit about one of them.

Wireless Charging

Inductive charging technology has been with the WebOS platform since day one I believe(2009). I had become accustomed to using it, and any future phone really would need to have this for me to feel satisfied. Long ago it fell away from the “nice to have” categories to “cannot live without much pain”. Fortunately some other folks have picked up on wireless charging over recent years though sadly it’s still far from universal.

One of the reasons I liked the Note 3 was it was going to get(and did get) official wireless charging from Samsung. I suppose that is where my happiness came to an end.

I suppose it is semi obvious I wouldn’t be writing about it if my experience was flawless 🙂

Samsung charging accessories

What seems like a month ago now I went to my local Frys and picked up the one wireless charging back cover that I liked for the Note 3, along with a Samsung charging base station. I didn’t want to risk generating an unstable magnetic field in my bedroom and a rip in the space time continuum by buying a second or third rate wireless charger.

There are other back cover(s) available but the other one(s) I saw also included a wrap around front cover which I did not want. This cover looks identical to the stock cover(same color even, and seems like the same size as well though I could be wrong my perception is far from precise).

The Note 3 is a big phone, and it is fairly heavy too (slightly heavier than the HP Pre3) with a stock configuration. With the regular back cover it was fine, with the new back cover I can’t help but think of the word brick come to mind. I mean it is a stark difference – I would say at least 25% heavier than stock. There are no specs that I can find online or on the packaging that talk about the weight of the cover but it’s heavy.  I have gotten used to that heft over the weeks though. The HP Pre3 (and some of the WebOS phones before it I believe with specific exception at least to the original Pre which I owned as well) all came with charging covers built in, so I never had a comparison to make with/without them at the time.

Anyway so I’m past the heft of the new back cover (though compared to a co-workers HTC One with a fancier back cover his phone I think is heavier than mine even though it is smaller, he has a big cover on it though).

Charging experience

UPDATE 2014: after a month of frustration I finally figured out the solution to this problem. I had to remove the back cover, placing it face down on a table and compressing it before putting it back on the phone. The connection from the cover to the phone wasn’t good enough. Since I started doing this whenever I remove the back cover(rare) I haven’t had any issues with the phone not charging.

The next problem came with charging on the pad, it was spotty. There is a green light on the pad that is supposed to tell you when the pad is mated with the phone and is charging. Don’t believe it because it lies to me often. Most of the time it would charge fine, other times it would not. In my earlier days(before I learned that the green light lies to me) I tried just leaving it on the pad overnight with the green light on, woke up the next day with the battery at 10%.

The phone does indicate when it is charging wirelessly. Many times (including right now which prompted me to write this now) the phone just refuses to sit still and charge wirelessly. It will go in and out of charge mode every few seconds, then eventually it seems to give up and does not charge at all, unless of course I hook it to a USB cable. I don’t understand how it could give up like that it doesn’t make any sense to me unless there is a software component, but how could the software component refuse electricity ? I don’t know.

I have spent literally 10 minutes trying every possible position on the pad to have the phone not want to charge. Then other times it works 100% of the time for a day or so.

So I thought hey maybe it’s the crappy Samsung pad, I had read and heard some good things about the Tylt Vu, specifically they claim that they have a better charging area, meaning you can have the phone pretty much at any angle and it will charge. They have wide compatibility but did not specifically mention Note 3 at the time (I assume because the charging covers for Note 3 are still new).

So I ordered two Vus, and tried my phone on the first one – did not charge. I tried again for 5 minutes or so every possible position and it would not charge. Took it to the Samsung pad and I believe it would not charge there either. Filed support ticket with Tylt to see if they had any ideas, meanwhile the Samsung pad started working again with the phone. It charged all night. I got up the next day, battery was full – I played some games for a few minutes battery drained to ~93% – took the phone to the Vu and it would not charge. Took the phone back to the Samsung charger and it would not charge.

Rinse and repeat several times…..eventually I got both the Vus to charge my phone, though it is still sporadic. Tylt was going to replace the Vu but I don’t think it’s the Vu’s fault. Samsung support wasn’t very helpful. I suppose it could be the back cover, but I mean how complex can that be? I’m suspecting more of a design flaw or perhaps a software problem preventing the charging from working. I don’t know. All three chargers have semi sporadic charging results, so I suppose I can rule the chargers out as a cause of the problem.

Next up..

Android day dream

One of the long time cool features of the WebOS devices is a feature called exhibition mode. Basically means when the phone is charging it can launch a screen saver of sorts on the screen, default is a clock but it can do photo slide show as well as some other apps. The HP Touchpad took this to the next level and used a form of NFC to uniquely identify charging stations so the device could launch a different mode depending on what station it is charging off of.

I use this a lot with my Touchpads still they make great digital picture frames, just sit them in the charger and the slide show fires right up. If I want to use it I just pick it up, no wires and off I go..

Android has something similar called day dream. However a flaw in either Android or in Samsung’s code prevents it from working correctly. When day dream is running, the configured application loads, which in my case is a slide show of sorts, and while the battery charges the slide show shows like it should.

The problem comes with the battery gets full – the OS kicks day dream off line and brings back the home screen and shows a notification the battery is full – disconnect the charger. The wireless charging unit stops charging for a minute or so – then the charging kicks in again, and day dream fires up again for about a minute perhaps then is booted off again and well rinse and repeat.

It gets worse though – if I want to use daydream I have to turn it on during the day and turn it off before I goto sleep. Because if daydream is in use at night, I hit the power button to turn off the screen before I go to sleep. Then guess what – when the battery is full the screen lights up and shows that same stupid battery is full message(and the screen does not turn off again). Without daydream the device turns the screen off automatically and stays off until I turn it on or remove it from the charging pad.

Stupid – I would of thought these would be basic things that would of been solved a while ago.

The only problem I really EVER had with wireless charging on WebOS was with the HP Pre3 and the original wireless pucks as they were called(base stations). The design of the Pre3 is slightly different so they don’t fit the older charging stations precisely, even with the built in magnet to help align the phone to the charger sometimes it gets out of alignment and goes into a charging/beeping loop until corrected. Understandable since they were not designed for each other. HP was going to release a newer, significantly more sophisticated charging station for the Pre3(which included wireless audio out too) but of course it never made it to market.

As far as I know, the WebOS phones did not ever “stop” charging when the battery was full, they just keep going. I realize this is not good for the battery but I’ll live with having to replace the battery every year or something if it means the above stuff worked right. In fact I never replaced a battery on a WebOS device in the roughly four years I used them.

Other thoughts

All in all I’m still pretty happy with the Note 3. I mean my phone usage has gone up significantly. I think I can compare it to moving from a feature phone to a smart phone originally. I really did not use the Pre3 very much anymore towards the end. The battery life is not to my expectations. Video playback battery life is excellent(I think CNET recently rated the Note 3 as something like 14 hours). But drive that CPU a bunch and it will chew through battery quick, I think I could fairly easily chew through 30% in an hour at high usage. I haven’t used any new apps since my last blog post, and in fact other than the two games I mentioned that I do play I haven’t touched any of the other games that I had installed either. I have loaded the thing up with pictures though easily 15,000. Also have all of my music on there, lots of video and still have about 25GB available (96GB total).

I also edited the Superbowl to a 19 minute video and have watched that tons of times on my phone(looks amazing). There is another video – an episode of NFL Films presents on the Superbowl I put that on my phone too – also looks incredible(and the episode itself is just awesome). I purchased a pair of Braven bluetooth speakers (originally bought one then got another) which can be paired to each other for stereo playback, they work quite well(and have NFC too).

My mobile data usage has been tiny though since the bulk of my time is either at home or the office where I use wifi. With the HP Pre3 for the most part I kept wifi off all the time because it would interfere with bluetooth. The phone claims from Jan 21 – Feb 21 I used only 136MB of mobile data (I have a 5GB plan – mainly for travel with the phone’s mifi hotspot mode).

Anyway that’s enough for now.

February 21, 2014

NetApp’s latest mid range SPC-1

Filed under: Storage — Tags: , , — Nate @ 4:14 pm

NetApp came out with their latest generation of storage systems recently and they were good citizens and promptly published SPC-1 results for them.

When is clustering, clustering?

NetApp is running the latest Ontap 8.2 in cluster mode I suppose, though there is only a single pair of nodes in the tested cluster. I’ve never really considered this a real cluster, it’s more of a workgroup of systems. Volumes live on a controller (pair) and can be moved around if needed, they probably have some fancy global management thing for the “cluster” but it’s just a collection of storage systems that are only loosely integrated with each other. I like to compare the NetApp style of clustering to a cluster of VMware hosts (where the VMs would be the storage volumes).

This strategy has it’s benefits as well, the main one being less likelihood that the entire cluster could be taken down by a failure(normally I’d consider this failure to be triggered by a software fault). This is the same reason why 3PAR has elected to-date to not go beyond 8-nodes in their cluster, the risk/return is not worth it in their mind. In their latest generation of high end boxes 3PAR decided to double up the ASICs to give them more performance/capacity rather than add more controllers, though technically there is nothing stopping them from extending the cluster further(to my knowledge).

The downside to workgroup style clustering is that optimal performance is significantly harder to obtain.

3PAR clustering is vastly more sophisticated and integrated by comparison. To steal a quote from their architecture document –

The HP 3PAR Architecture was designed to provide cost-effective, single-system scalability through a cache-coherent, multi-node, clustered implementation. This architecture begins with a multi-function node design and, like a modular array, requires just two initial Controller Nodes for redundancy. However, unlike traditional modular arrays, an optimized interconnect is provided between the Controller Nodes to facilitate Mesh-Active processing. With Mesh-Active controllers, volumes are not only active on all controllers, but they are autonomically provisioned and seamlessly load-balanced across all systems resources to deliver high and predictable levels of performance. The interconnect is optimized to deliver low latency, high-bandwidth communication and data movement between Controller Nodes through dedicated, point-to-point links and a low overhead protocol which features rapid inter-node messaging and acknowledgement.

Sounds pretty fancy right? It’s not something that is for high end only. They have extended the same architecture down as low as a $25,000 entry level price point on the 3PAR 7200 (that price may be out of date, it’s from an old slide).

I had the opportunity to ask what seemed to be a NetApp expert on some of the finer details of clustering in Ontap 8.1 (latest version is 8.2) a couple of years ago and he provided some very informative responses.

Anyway on to the results, after reading up on them it was hard for me not to compare them with the now five year old 3PAR F400 results.

Also I want to point out that the 3PAR F400 is End of Life, and is no longer available to purchase as new as of November 2013 (support on existing systems continues for another couple of years).

MetricNetApp
FAS8040
3PAR
F400
Date tested2/19/20144/27/2009
Controller
Count
24
(hey, it's an actual cluster)
SPC-1 IOPS86,07293,050
SPC-1 Usable
Capacity
32,219 GB
(RAID 6)
27,046 GB
(RAID 1)
Raw
Capacity
86,830 GB56,377 GB
SPC-1 Unused
Storage
Ratio
(may not exceed 45%)
41.79%0.03%
Tested storage
configuration
pricing
$495,652$548,432
SPC-1 Cost
per IOP
$5.76$5.89
Disk size and
number
192 x 450GB 10k RPM384 x 146GB 15k RPM
Data Cache64GB data cache
1,024GB Flash cache
24GB data cache

I find the comparison fascinating myself at least. It is certainly hard to compare the pricing, given the 3PAR results are five years old, the 3PAR mid range pricing model has changed significantly with the introduction of the 7000 series in late 2012.  I believe the pricing 3PAR provided SPC-1 was discounted(I can’t find indication either way, I just believe that based on my own 3PAR pricing I got back then) vs NetApp is list(says so in the document). But again, hard to compare pricing given the massive difference in elapsed time between tests.

Unused storage ratio

What is this number and why is there such a big difference? Well this is a SPC-1 metric and they say in the case of NetApp:

Total Unused Capacity (36,288.553 GB) divided by Physical Storage Capacity (86.830.090 GB) and may not exceed 45%.

A unused storage ratio of 42% is fairly typical for NetApp results.

In the case of 3PAR, you have to go to the bigger full disclosure document(72 pages), as the executive summary has evolved more over time and that specific quote is not in the 3PAR side of things.

So for 3PAR F400 SPC says:

The Physical Storage Capacity consisted of 56,377.243 GB distributed over 384 disk drives each with a formatted capacity of 146.816 GB. There was 0.00 GB (0.00%) of Unused Storage within the Physical Storage Capacity. Global Storage Overhead consisted of 199.071 GB (0.35%) of Physical Storage Capacity. There was 61.203 GB (0.11%) of Unused Storage within the Configured Storage Capacity. The Total ASU Capacity utilized 99.97% of the Addressable Storage Capacity resulting in 6.43 GB (0.03%) of Unused Storage within the Addressable Storage Capacity.

3PAR F400 Storage Hierarchy Ratios

3PAR F400 Storage Hierarchy Ratios

The full disclosure document is not (yet) available for NetApp as of 2/21/2014. It most certainly will become available at some point.

The metrics above and beyond the headline numbers is one of the main reasons I like SPC-1.

With so much wasted space on the NetApp side it is confusing to me why they don’t just use RAID 1 (I think the answer is they don’t support it).

Benefits from cache

The NetApp system is able to leverage it’s terabyte of flash cache to accelerate what is otherwise a slower set of 10k RPM disks, which is nice for them.

They also certainly have much faster CPUs, and more than double the data cache (3PAR’s architecture isolates data cache from the operating system, so I am not sure how much memory on the NetApp side is actually used for data cache vs operating system/meta data etc). 3PAR by contrast has their proprietary ASIC which is responsible for most of the magic when it comes to data processing on their systems.

3PAR does not have any flash cache capabilities so they do require (in this comparison) double the spindle count to achieve the same performance results. Obviously in a newer system configuration 3PAR would likely configure a system with SSDs and sub LUN auto tiering to compensate for the lack of a flash based cache. This does not completely completely compensate however, and of course I have been hounding 3PAR and HP for at least four years now to develop some sort of cache technology that leverages flash. They announced SmartCache in December 2012 (host-based SSD caching for Gen8 servers) however 3PAR integration has yet to materialize.

However keep in mind the NetApp flash cache only accelerates reads. If you have a workload like mine which is 90%+ write the flash cache doesn’t help.

Conclusion

NetApp certainly makes good systems, they offer a lot of features, and have respectable performance. The systems are very very flexible and they have a very unified product line up (same software runs across the board).

For me personally after seeing results like this I feel continually reassured that the 3PAR architecture was the right choice for my systems vs  NetApp (or other 3 letter storage companies).  But not everyone’s priorities are the same. I give NetApp props for continuing to support SPC-1 and being public with their numbers. Maybe some day these flashy storage startups will submit SPC-1 results…….not holding my breath though.

February 2, 2014

Go Seahawks!

Filed under: Random Thought — Tags: , , , — Nate @ 8:47 pm

Go Seahawks!

 

I’m not one for sports really, though I did get interested in NFL back when Seattle first went to the Superbowl in 2005/2006(despite my father being pretty hard core into 49ers and Broncos growing up I never had any interest in football). My interest waned over the years as their performance waned. Though this year was just incredible, I would never of imagined such a season or a Superbowl finish like that.  Living in the Bay Area now I don’t get to see many of their games unless they happen to be playing the Raiders or 49ers. I am surprised(perhaps I shouldn’t be) of how many folks in the Bay Area really hate the Seahawks. Myself I like many teams (mostly west coast teams, 49ers, Raiders, Chargers all inclusive — hell even the Broncos).

The previous two Seahawk games were waay too close for my own comfort I like to see a commanding 10 point lead in any game, I don’t like games won at the last second by a field goal or “one(or two) good play(s)”. I couldn’t of asked for anything more in this Superbowl, such a commanding destruction of the Broncos on both sides of the ball. To be totally honest I was prepared for the Seahawks to lose to the Broncos after the Broncos ripped the Patriots a new one two weeks ago (combined with the previous two Seahawks games being too close). Wow, I’m just totally blown away. I really don’t have words to describe how incredible of a victory that was.

Congrats, I wish I was in Seattle to be at COWGIRLS tonight I know it’s going to be a mad house…….!!!!!!!!!

Hell I’m tempted to drive back up there for Cowgirls next Friday+Saturday, will have to debate that with myself over the coming week.

One thing’s for sure I’m going to have to invest in more Seahawks stuff, I have just two t-shirts that I bought many years ago.

Side note: speaking of those fancy Superbowl ads, I’ve never much cared for any of them. In fact this is the first Superbowl that I can recall that I’ve watched live, I prefer to watch things on at least a two hour delay with Tivo to skip the ads(and halftime).

People don’t understand why I don’t like to watch it live(unless I’m at a bar – in this case I was at a friend of a friend’s house), as much as I can’t understand why they have to watch it live – the results of the game do not change if you don’t see it live. I suppose if your doing betting or something in real time you need to be up to date on the stats, I am not a betting person though (even if for no money  – just not my personality). The NFC championship I ended up sleeping through most of it while it aired – and watched it after it ended. Some folks claim they have to because of social media – for me it’s not hard to just turn off my phone and not use the computer until it’s over. I’m also not much involved in social media to begin with(I don’t see that changing anytime soon the more I see the more I’m turned off by it other than LinkedIn which I feel is good from a professional standpoint). [Update from 2/3/14: I just checked all of the sites that I visit regularly as well as all of the RSS feeds I have and there’s no mention of who won the Superbowl, and nothing in any of my online chats either(mostly work related), so further evidence that my life is fairly isolated from sports in general]

My favorite bar to watch games at in the Bay Area is Rookie’s Lodge down in San Jose (40 minute drive each way for me). My favorite bar ever to watch a game at is Tilted Kilt – specifically the Tilted Kilt in Temecula, CA. They must’ve had a half dozen 100″+ screens (only been to that particular location once a couple of years ago). Though I’m happy to go to any Tilted Kilt (unfortunately the closest one to the Bay Area is in Orange County – I go there whenever I visit my family down there). In Seattle my favorite bar for a game is Sport(there is an Internap data center in the same building which is how I first came across that place). Speakin’ of Tilted Kilt I visited a Twin Peaks when I was in Phoenix on my trip recently. Saw one of their places on Undercover boss at one point. It was nice, lots of TVs(at least a half dozen right in front of me at the bar), good service, though the food menu was lacking compared to Tilted Kilt – which had probably 4-5x more items to choose from.

I wasn’t about to go to a bar to watch this Superbowl(living in the Bay Area), too many folks with negative energy towards the Seahawks (the Seahawks/New Orleans game was bad enough I was at a local bar for that). The group I was with tonight was very calm though(don’t think there were any hard core fans, certainly no team jerseys or anything).  Myself I am an introvert so I don’t yell and scream and stuff when plays happen, I’m typically silent during a game. I clap softly sometimes. I feel the blood pressure rise inside when big plays happen but my nature is to suppress it from an external perspective (happens really no matter how may Jack+Cokes I have).

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