Voice of the DBA

Tag: hardware

  • The Ultimate Desk?

    I was wondering what this was when I saw it at the Microsoft Technology Center in Philadelphia at SQL Saturday #200. I sat in it, and thought it was pretty cool.

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    Turns out it is an Emperor 1510. You can actually buy it, for between $5000 and $20000, depending on the options. I think this was the cheaper version, and it was pretty neat.

    It’s not perfect, but it is neat to sit down, have the monitors then lower to meet your preferred height. There’s a flip over desk piece that has space for a keyboard. I guess you’d need to mount a keyboard on it, but it’s a neat idea. With a cup holder, it’s pretty neat. It also reclines up and down, so you can work at your preferred angle.

    The downside might be that getting in and out is a little slow. The monitors take a little time to move up and down, and you might easily bang your head.

    Not sure I’ve love this, or if it would be good for you. I like my standing desk, and use it a lot. Even at a sitting desk, I like getting up regularly and moving, not sitting for long periods of time.

    However this is cool.

  • PC Sales Declining

    About 3 or 4 years ago I was talking with my wife and a colleague of hers that worked in the mobile industry. This person and my wife thought that the mobile industry would explode, and it’s impact and expansion would dwarf the PC revolution that had most of our companies buying new machines every two to three years.

    I think that is part of what is happening with this article on the hemorrhaging of the PC industry. I see quite a few people moving to the mobile space, and using smart phones, texting, and more to handle the needs of their lives. The growth of tablets as well is changing the world. I see more and more non-technical adults carrying tablets to do their work. Kendall’s volleyball coach, our Scoutmaster, and more are using tablets, and ( I am guessing here), sticking with an older computer at home when they need it.

    There’s also the factor that we can get so much done on any device that we don’t need that many. These days email, video, audio, browsing, and camera work can happen on almost any device.

    The use of older hardware is another issue. We don’t see the fantastic pace of growth in hardware occurring anymore. I know machines get more powerful, but it doesn’t seem to be happening as quick as in the past. Part of this may be psychological with the clock speed ratings not changing as quickly, but it’s also that the technology seems to be focusing on power improvements more than anywhere else. Even the core growth has tailed off. I just bought a laptop, 4 years after my previous Windows laptop. They both had quad core chips, and while the new one seems to be faster, it’s not substantially faster.

    Hardware not speeding up, tablets and phones, but there’s something else as well. Microsoft did a fantastic job with Windows 7. In many cases people are finding that the OS is faster and slimmer, without the bloat of previous versions. One can actually put Windows 7 on older hardware and it will run great. I know lots of people are still running Windows XP, which works fine, but even if they upgrade, they don’t need to move to new hardware o do so. I suspect that other OSes are in similar situations. The software is so good, there’s no reason to upgrade.

    All of this isn’t good or bad. It just means a changing industry, and PC makers should both learn to adapt to new form factors (tablets), but also expect that we will buy fewer devices in the future.

  • Provisioning

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    At a talk recently, the presenter talked about the time lag for an on-premises server to be installed and configured to be on the order of months. Not that many, but it could easily be six months.

    That seems crazy, but in many companies I’ve worked in, that wasn’t an unusual time frame. From the time someone decided that a purchase was allowed, it could be days for the accounting department to approve the funds. A day or two to place an order, assuming that IT had already provided the specifications. Vendors respond quickly, but it could still take a week or two, possibly even more, for a server to arrive at our company.

    One of the advantages of cloud computing services is that new virtual machines can be bought and enabled in minutes. That might be true, but I wanted to ask many of you if you know how longs it actually takes for you to begin working on a new SQL Server.

    How long does it take to provision a new server?

    Imagine that you were to ask for a database server today, and you management agreed to grant the approval, think about how long would it be before you could sign into a SQL Server. I’m sure some of you have virtual infrastructures available, and that should reduce the time it takes, but let us know if that’s your setup and how long it takes.

    The ultimate service would be a cloud like application inside your organization that allowed you to select a SQL Server template, and send you a server name and login with minutes after an automated build took place. I don’t know many companies that have that yet, but I think many of us would appreciate that capability. Especially if we could choose the hardware we required.

    Steve Jones

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  • The Memory Cube

    How would you like memory in your SQL Server that’s 15 times as fast as your current DDR3 DRAM? I know I would, and since memory is often one of the things that can dramatically speed up, or hinder, SQL Server performance, this article about new memory cubes is good news. Over 100 companies have signed on to the specifications for three dimensional DRAM, which stacks memory dies on top of each other.
    How much better is the performance? Try 160GBps for this cube against the 11GBps that we typically see from DDR3. Even DDR4 is only 18-20GBps of aggregate bandwidth. What’s more, this new technology should require less power. That’s a good sign as more and more data centers are finding that power and cooling are significant issues and can end up being a significant percentage of the total cost of operating computer systems.
    This technology isn’t quite ready for production, as the prototypes only hold 2GB and 4GB of memory right now. However I would expect that to grow quickly as memory companies look to get production cubes out in 2013. The deployment will likely start in network devices and other environments where extremely high speed memory is needed, but I could see that server computers, especially those slated to handle large numbers of virtual machines, will move to this technology once capacities get over 32GB. At that point, there could be lots of OLTP systems that would benefit from faster access to memory, especially those systems backing high volume, (relatively) low storage systems.
    The bottleneck for many systems will continue to be the disk drives, but if you can process more data in memory, at a much faster rate, I’m sure there are lots of DBAs that would love to use this technology to reduce the number of complaints from their clients.
    Steve Jones