I will be participating in a panel discussion at the Cloud Computing Expo in New York on Wednesday (4/2). The topic is “How and Why is a Flexible IT Infrastructure the Key To the Future?” Please stop by and say hello if you are at the show.
In our industry, new CPU announcements are a dime a dozen. Most of them are simple speed bumps, or at the most an increase in the number of cores per socket.
The Nehalem announcement was different, in that Intel was solving the bus limits that have impacted overall system throughput. The announcement was exciting but being able to buy systems containing those CPUs took a long time to reach fruition. Pre-release performance tests of these new Xeon 5500 CPUs revealed that the announcement was more than marketing. They show that Nehalem provides breakthrough increases in many aspects of system throughput. In many areas, the 5500 is twice as fast as its predecessor 5400. Unfortunately the 5500 is not a drop-in replacement for other Xeon CPUs. It requires a new chip set and socket.
Last week I gave a presentation at the TechForum Roundtable in New York. Thank you to Priscilla Tate for running a great event.
Backup to disk is the number one application for deduplication today. My presentation covered the most common approaches vendors use to leverage deduplication in a backup environment. This includes client side, backup server based, inline processing, and post-processing.
Demystifying Deduplication (7.9 MiB)
This topic was originally developed as part of a CTI Strategy Services consulting engagement. The customer credited us with saving them 6 months of effort.
We’ve rescheduled the sixth NEOSUG meeting for March 11. Dave Miner will talk about the state of OpenSolaris and demo some new functionality, and I’ll talk about what’s new in the Solaris 10 update 6 (11/08) release. Hope to see you there. For full details and registration info have look at the NEOSUG discussion forum.