輪語春秋研究社

By admin, December 31, 2015 1:03 pm

其實幾年前在MC論壇就第一次見到了輪語春秋研究社的成立,之後它發展迅速並且擁有了一個自己的固定俱樂部(地點在廣州)。他們當中人才濟濟,各個骨幹成員都在其熟悉的範疇內獨當一面。無論是測評、分享或者是欣賞的文章,前期研究工作都很仔細認真,分析非常到點,所以每篇都值得大家觀看,共同學習。

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2016-03-20

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2016-03-29

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Beauty Comes in Every Form and Shape

By admin, December 29, 2015 11:56 am

For me..it’s the Exoto Ferrari 246 F1.

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NO STOCK of this Equallogic 600GB 15K SAS Disk!!!

By admin, December 28, 2015 7:07 pm

This is the 4th time Equallogic 15K SAS failed (previous failed record was on April 30, 2015), but this time comes with another surprise the local Dell logistic and inventory department called me saying they don’t have any stock currently!!! ARE YOU KIDDING ME? There are at least 50-60 Equallogic boxes running 600GB 15K SAS in Hong Kong and they don’t have the most failed parts in stock? and we paid for 4 hours Pro-Support replacement service…to be updated!

The RAID reconstruction took 3 hours and 40 mins to complete this time.

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Update: Jan-15, 2016

5th time Equallogic 15K SAS failed.

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Update: Jan-18, 2016

6th time Equallogic 15K SAS failed.

Whenever you see predicative failure kicks-in (ie, Copying to Spare), then you know it’s time to call Dell service, as all previous 3 predicative failures, none of it worked, the process always failed at half way.

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Update: Jan-30, 2016

7th time Equallogic 15K SAS failed

4 disks failed one after another in 30 days is a Wow!!!

It seems the 5 years + SAS disks do have a life span of around 5 years warranty time, that’s why you need to extend your warranty for another 2 years as Dell gives maximum 7 years warranty for their enterprise products.

Update: Jul-15, 2016

8th time Equallogic 15K SAS failed

Don’t think predicative failure will help, so called pro-support right away to replace the failed disk.

Update: Oct-1, 2018

9th time Equallogic 15K SAS failed

After more than 2 years, finally it comes another disk failure, but this time the copy to spare was successful!

—————————————–
Level Received Member Message
Info 10/01/2018 04:43:05 AM eql01 Completed copying-to-spare operation from drive 4 to drive 15.
—————————————–

One interesting fact I found out, when I re-insert the failed disk, EQL produced the following error that I’ve never seen before.

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History-of-Failures

ERROR event from storage array eql01
subsystem: SP
event: 14.4.18
time: Mon Oct 1 11:00:43 2018

0:Orphan disk drive: Disk drive LUN 4 (26bc078a0900-779214cc-8) no longer belongs to RAID LUN 0 (3be078a0900-b0e5c22b-92d39732). This disk has a history of failure and will not be used.

Update: Dec-2, 2018

10th time Equallogic 15K SAS failed, more than half of the disks are replaced, firmware EN03 from EN01.

Update: Dec-31, 2018

11th time Equallogic 15K SAS failed just before the end of 2018, this time is the first disk with firmware EN03.

Update: May-23, 2019

12th time Equallogic 15K SAS failed, firmware EN03 (TB EN03, Disk 0:0)

Update: Nov-15, 2020

13th time Equallogic 15K SAS failed, firmware EN03 (TB EN03, Disk 0:3)

Update: Jul-19, 2023

14th time Equallogic 15K SAS failed, firmware EN03 (TB EN01, Disk 0:5)

Update: Mar-1, 2024

15th time Equallogic 15K SAS failed, firmware EN00 (TB EE06, Disk 0:13)

=========================
Update: Jan-23, 2023

1st time Equallogic02 10K SAS failed (TB FE10, Disk 0:11)

Update: Feb-28, 2023

2nd time Equallogic02 10K SAS failed (TB FE10, Disk 0:12)

Update: Mar-13, 2023

3rd time Equallogic02 10K SAS failed (TB FE10, Disk 0:2)

Update: Mar-26, 2023

4th time Equallogic02 10K SAS failed (TB FE10, Disk 0:3)

Update: Mar-27, 2023

5th time Equallogic02 10K SAS failed (TB FE10, Disk 0:2)

Update: Mar-28, 2023

6th time Equallogic02 10K SAS failed (TB FE10, Disk 0:4)

Update: Mar-30, 2023

7th time Equallogic02 10K SAS failed (TB FE10, Disk 0:6)

Update: Apr-08, 2023

8th time Equallogic02 10K SAS failed (TB FE10, Disk 0:11)

Update: Apr-16, 2023

9th time Equallogic02 10K SAS failed (TB FE10, Disk 0:3)
10th time Equallogic02 10K SAS failed (TB FE10, Disk 0:10)

Update: Apr-17, 2023

11th time Equallogic02 10K SAS failed (TB FE10, Disk 0:7)

Update: Apr-24, 2023

12th time Equallogic02 10K SAS failed (TB FE10, Disk 0:15)

Update: May-6, 2023

13th time Equallogic02 10K SAS failed (TB FE10, Disk 0:3)

Update: May-20, 2023

14th time Equallogic02 10K SAS failed (TB FE10, Disk 0:0)

Update: Jun-8, 2023

15th time Equallogic02 10K SAS failed (TB FE10, Disk 0:21)

Update: Jul-14, 2023

16th time Equallogic02 10K SAS failed (TB FE10, Disk 0:11)

歷代波子911

By admin, December 27, 2015 10:59 am

看來看去,自己還是最喜歡風冷的930/946和993車身設計!

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Equallogic vs Nimble and Tegile

By admin, December 23, 2015 10:45 pm

The following is very interesting as they are currently the new kids on the block in storage world!

Recently, I’ve talked to Nimble’s senior technical consultant during the VMWorld Expo in Hong Kong, and indeed they are very similar to Equallogic…ie, downside is Nimble too can’t stand any of the array failed in the same cluster (Lefthand can) and no build-in thin reclaim feature (3Par does) and Nimble is limited to 4 nodes in comparison to Equallogic’s 16 nodes.

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However Nimble is with SSD built into their array design and firmware from day one, so the performance is much better even with the same set of hardware. So if your site is mainly used for VDI, then Nimble should be on your next purchase consider list.

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“Dell has become a top-four player in disk arrays, as IBM and NetApp are left behind in Gartner’s 2015 Magic Quadrant for general purpose disk arrays…Nimble Storage enters the leaders’ quadrant for the first time” (Read More)

Also please refer to the latest Gartner Magic Quadrant for General-Purpose Disk Arrays (Published: October 2015)

Of course, there is one main thing I don’t really like…Nimble and Tegile have a rather simple admin GUI (here is Tegile), it’s not really graphical oriented as Equallogic’s group manager…for the record, GUI is also one of the most important things for me to decide on a SAN storage purchase. Not to mention Equallogic has a deep inspection tool..SQNHQ…which I couldn’t find the same level of deep analysis on both Nimble (InfoSight cloud based?) and Tegile GUI.

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Besides, Image is everything…the actual design of the array itself (box and tray) does not look good as Equallogic…thought I have to admit the face plates for both Nimble and Tegile look cool…but somehow it doesn’t match with the array design behind it, strange…probably the designers are different for face plate and array.

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Yes, Nimble’s snapshot compression and de-duplication are good, but there is always a trade off in performance as compression requires CPU time to process. Fyi, Equallogic firmware 8.0 has this similar  build-in snapshot compression already.  After all, it seems to me both Nimble and Tegile are putting space utilization as its 1st priority selling point than it’s SSD performance, so Equallogic has no choice but to catch up. Seemed Nimble and Tegile are really pushing Dell hard for this!!! Finally Equallogic has to change under pressure which is really good for its customer.

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The other thing is Nimble and Tegile is x86 based hardware (Ah…SuperMicro!!!) while Equallogic uses propitiatory RISC based CPU and Nimble’s firmware (ie, software) is based on open source Linux cluster file system (GFS? To be confirmed).

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One more thing I don’t like Nimble and Tegile is their disk reliability, 7,200RPM SATA, come on, it’s confirmed those SATA are really unreliable and risky, I wouldn’t trust putting our mission critical data on those disks for sure. Even for our Equallogic 15K SAS, the failure rate per array is almost 1/16 every year…read too many horrible stories about those SATA array (ie, PS4100 series), just plain scary!

Last but not least, probably the most important one…price!!! Nimble or Tegile isn’t cheap really…as a new comer, I think it at least should have an attractive selling price in order for others to switch from the big bothers.

Still…IMOO, somehow, I still wouldn’t classify both Nimble and Tegile as the next generation of SAN vendors and it’s interesting to see Nimble’s founder were actually from Netapp…this reminds me Fortinet’s founder was actually from Netscreen (btw, both founders are Chinese)

Finally, there is an interesting report on Hybrid-Storage-Array-Buyers-Guide by DCIG

Nimble and Tegile: The new Lefthand and EqualLogic by John Sloan

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Which hybrid storage solution should we go with, Nimble or Tegile? You can tell when a technology has crossed the Rubicon of acceptance when the question shifts from validating the technology to comparing the leading evangelists of the new approach.

In this case the new technology or approach is hybrid storage which includes solid state with traditional disk. A couple of years ago organizations wanted information on solid state storage and whether solid state would help mitigate IO bottlenecks. Were the IOPS worth the higher cost per gigabyte of solid state?

Today hybrids are hot and just about everybody has a scheme for adding solid state either as a cache layer or a solid state drive (SSD) tier. Nimble and Tegile stand out because they are built from the ground up to be optimized for a mix of solid state and spinning disk. They both argue that traditional storage is built for disk even if it has solid state added to the mix.

Seven or eight years ago the new storage technology was iSCSI. Fibre Channel was the dominant architecture for storage networks and arrays. But some feisty start-ups started championing this idea of wrapping SCSI storage blocks in internet protocol and pushing it across Ethernet networks.
Nimble Storage
Two of the bright stars in that iSCSI firmament were LeftHand Networks and EqualLogic. There were other players to be sure but these were the two I heard about most from storage buying prospects, especially in small to midsize organizations. Somewhere during 2007 the predominant question from these prospects went from “Should we consider iSCSI solutions?” to “Which iSCSI storage solution should we go with, Lefthand or EqualLogic?”.

Then, as now, it was server visualization that pushed the start-ups into the limelight. Once VMware supported iSCSI for shared storage, midsized organizations buying their first SAN array for server consolidation/virtualization got very interested in Lefthand and EqualLogic.

The trigger now is the need to maintain consistent IOPS for virtual deskop initiatives. Failure of traditional shared storage to scale to VDI boot storms derailed many an implementation. Nimble and Tegile want to be your core storage platform but VDI has been their foot in the door of the data center.

So which of the two should you go with? Nimble or Tegile? Well, of course, it depends. Of the contests I’ve seen over this past summer, among organizations that have shortlisted both vendors, I can say that the two have been competing neck and neck. Those that have made their decisions say it was an extremely close run thing. From what I’ve seen:

Nimble seems to win over Tegile on cost, both upfront acquisition costs and expected future expansion/scaling costs.

esx-tegile-banner

Where Tegile wins over Nimble is in technology. More than one potential customer has told me that they really like how Tegile works. Tegile also supports multiple connection protocols where Nimble is iSCSI-only (that will likely change before the end of 2015).

We ranked both Nimble and Tegile as innovators in our most recent Vendor Landscape: Small to Mid-Range Storage Arrays. Tegile got kudos and ranked higher for their technology.
But as noted it is a very close run thing. Where one leads over another it is by degrees, not a slam-dunk differentiation. There is also the usual caution over risk of going with the small (albeit rapidly growing) start-ups over established players.

Lefthand and EqualLogic were both eventually acquired by HP and Dell respectively. A similar pattern was repeated with two other upstart storage innovators 3par and Compellent.

If you can’t beat them buy them. The established players are struggling right now to beat Nimble and Tegile. But the usual mainline storage suspects have pretty crowded portfolios right now.They may not have room for a Tegile or a Nimble.


Nimble vs EQuallogic by Austin Henderson

The debate between Equallogic and Nimble essentially came down to the fact that we really liked the offering and the people of Nimble but questioned their staying capacity in the market. We were fearful that we would either purchase the product and it would not perform as advertised or that we would purchase the product and in two years they would be gone as a company.

The Equallogic brand name is a solid name and has a lot of experience to stand strong upon, but our research kept turning up some questions about how they had elected to employ snapshots in their platform and we reasoned that our ability to store snaps of our data on that device would be reduced in comparison to the Nimble product. This fear combined with the lack of follow through and inadequate justification of questions by EQ references and sales engineers confirmed our suspicion of the product as inferior in a technical sense.

To address the Nimble performance numbers we discussed with existing customers how the array performed and convinced them to give us 60 day terms on the purchase order – thus if it didn’t perform we would box it up and send it back. After review with other customers and their engineers we were fairly confident this would not be the case and as such decided we could take that risk.

Our Nimble array arrived and was installed with the help of two Nimble resources in very short order. Testing began shortly after install and within approximately a month all production data was moved to the device. Our RPO stretches backwards in excess of several weeks in some cases and the innovative approach to how the product takes data snapshots combined with thin provisioning and inline compression.

Our performance numbers are better than we could have imagined thanks to the use of SSD drives and while not measured yet the energy requirements have dropped considerably given that we went from 60 – 15K spinning drives to 4 SSD drives and 12 spinning drives.  Currently we have seen very few spikes above 3K IOPS and the device can scale on random read/write layout to approximately 15K – thus we have headroom to spare.

In the end the lasting power of the company remains to be seen – and we have our doubts – but conversations with the CEO and other leaders in the company lead us to believe the intent of the company is to leave their mark on the storage industry, not to exit stage right. Given our experiences thus far I would say they are headed for such a legacy and we are proud of and stand by our selection.”

識路回家冇? (轉文)

By admin, December 23, 2015 4:44 pm

愛回家和幸福一樣,從來不是必然的。唔好玩啦。

不敢說大家不愛回家,但在「回家」之前之上,我們實在還更愛其他東西:愛玩、愛自由、愛拍拖、愛獨 立、愛忙碌、愛工作,愛旅遊……或許未必真的那麼愛工作,但愛事業,就算未必真的愛事業,都把工作和事業等等排在優先,總之放在回家看看父母之前,總之愛 自己的生活多一點。而這些「生活」裏面,沒有幾多空間可以騰出來安放「回家」,日程裏面安放不了父母。尤其如果「家」,地理上有點遠。不一定長途他方異 地,但有點不方便,就更不容易找時間回家,對嗎?

說穿了:時間和優先二事,決定了人生。

時間花在什麼事、什麼地方,花在誰身上,就完成了人生。

時間,也成就了記憶,記憶溫暖生命到最後,最後我希望能心細情細記憶細地,在披一身老歲月老風雨的時候,即使寒夜回家心中也有燈火。

「總是會留下一些什麼吧,留下什麼,我們就變成什麼樣的大人(老人)。」

在電影《藍色大門》結尾裏,張士豪對孟克柔這麼說。每天24小時,你用來取捨什麼?緩 急先後,就是一切。小時候,記得父母輩總愛說,不是紅白二事,不會那麼人齊。如今,到我輩長大在役役經營自己的人生事業愛情,東奔西跑南征北戰,要玩要食 要風流,喪做喪買喪追趕,終於明白好像真的要喜事喪事,才夠「吸引力」和權威性,叫大家放下手頭的工作和忙碌,和親友抽空相聚相見。在紅白二事之間,祇管 有理無情燃燒生命,無閒亦不會make time會面,無事極難相見。無事見面,不是優先,太多其他優先。

強如Steve Jobs,自己說「生命中我最喜愛的東西不費分文,我們最寶貴的資源明顯地就是時間」,但最後他後悔沒有更多時間給家人。知道,和做到,兩件事,兩回事。

年 近聖誕,又是洋人的回家過節時,像我們的農曆新年大日子。有幾多子女因事忙,無閒回家叫老人家聖誕快樂?德國的超級市場大集團Edeka推出了2015聖 誕新廣告,片中一個孤單老爸,老妻不在了,仔大女大有兒有孫,但聖誕沒人回來過節暖家。大時大節,他吃着一個人的晚餐,每逢佳節倍荒涼。各有家庭事業有成 的子女,完美示範白居易的《燕詩》,道盡天下間的「舉翅不回顧」,不是不想回顧,是沒空。明年吧。

誰說一定有明年?這年聖誕,老爸的死訊靜靜傳 來,靜得彷彿不敢打擾他們的生活,叫那些太忙的子女都踉蹌了、傷痛了,不再了,可以做的是回家奔喪。除了歲月,生命也會忽爾晚,過了賞味期限。死訊終達成 了老爸想要的一家團聚,人齊了。詎料舉家奔來了卻沒有喪,驚喜倒有一個:老爸健在,自傳死訊是唯一令大家把相見共聚視為優先視為首要的方法。大家笑了,一 起過節,失而復得,提醒世人:Time to come home。
配樂的歌曲是Neele Ternes的《Dad》:“I never told you how How much you mean to me……If life is a song, somehow it’s sad, I don’t know the words without you……the truth is home means nothing without you”,點情點睛,深苦深愛。

回家不是必然的,是奢侈的、罕有的,為什麼要這樣?珍惜有限光年相聚時,不限父母,還有你重視 的其他長輩親朋、親密愛人,他們應該是優先,不是嗎?“No matter how busy you are, you must take time to make the other person feel important”。我對時間觀念很着緊,因為我知道沒有永遠,更加知道無常,於是努力讓身邊重視的人知道自己重要。

決定好自己的時間,更要決定好你的優先,不一定也不止是回家和父母,更別老讓他人去決定你的優先。別讓步於人在江湖,努力改變自己的小江湖,或者不惜離開大江湖。

美 國哲學家John Dewey說“Time and memory are true artists; they remould reality nearer to the heart’s desire”。我相信我選擇,珍惜一個人幾十年,好過幾年或幾十天。朋友、愛人、長輩、close and dear ones,這個聖誕,還有平常日子,好好優先擁抱和珍惜,在生活奔波中make time找平衡,因為後悔是我的敵人。

畢明

看來Scale Figure的尺寸做錯了!

By admin, December 23, 2015 10:26 am

朋友寄來的相片,相比之下發現很多之前Scale Figure的人偶高度其實都做錯了,大多數都是1比17的。跟今年的新產品Jackie Stewart和Nino Farina比較就明顯感到這個問題的存在了。不過話有說回來,如果只是拿單個SF人偶跟車模拍照應該是看不出來什麼問題的。

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另外發現不同時期生產的Scale Figure,質量明顯不同,早期的上色人偶明顯比較精緻。

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原來本地臥虎藏龍!

By admin, December 22, 2015 2:58 pm

剛找到一大堆歷屆香港模型大賽的展品,原來本地臥虎藏龍,模型製作高手更是如雲!

A special Xmas gift from a very special person

By admin, December 22, 2015 1:32 pm

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葉倩文: 情義中人

By admin, December 21, 2015 5:21 pm

最近看了幾篇關於電影《山河故人》的文章,裡面都不約而同地提起了葉倩文的「珍重」,看來中國大陸的賈樟柯導演選了這首90年代頭的香港代表作肯定有他的用意。

所以近來我也自然多了去懷舊一番葉倩文的經典。特別喜歡的有以下的三首,後來發現歌詞原來都是重情重義的那類,覺得跟Sally本人的性格挺匹配的。

珍重

秋去秋來

祝福

另外發現鬼妹仔葉倩文原來唱中國小調竟然也是如此拿手!

最後當然不能少這首80年代的經典Disco舞曲 Cha Cha Cha!!!

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