Voice of the DBA

Tag: hardware

  • CPU Upgrades

    I expected this to be an article from Glenn Berry. He often tries to convince me to upgrade. I think so he can justify buying his own new hardware.

    In this case, however, this is a note from Tom’s Hardware that it’s a great time to upgrade your CPU. The article is a few weeks old, referencing Cyber Monday deals, and it notes that CPU sales are at a 30-year low. This means there’s a lot of supply and retailers are trying to clear out stock.

    I don’t know how many of you find your CPU slow, or if you have access to change the CPU (often you can’t in a laptop). If you have a desktop, then you might not have a motherboard that supports the latest CPUs. Glenn would say upgrade your motherboard, but as I’ve seen in the past, this sometimes means memory upgrades as well.

    Many of us work with server machines, but we aren’t responsible for the hardware. We often can’t even request different hardware. Glenn has written about which CPUs work for SQL Server, though not for a few years. Maybe this piece will get him to update that article.

    SQL Server 2022 is the latest version, and the price as increased. The performance per core is more important than ever, so choosing the best CPU could have a big impact on the ROI of your database server. Even if you use the cloud, often there are choices in hardware, and expressing your reasoning for one over the other to the groups responsible for infrastructure can help ensure your organization gets the most performance for their billing.

    And if you’re the person specifying hardware, you definitely ought to understand the differences between the CPU choices and make the best choice for your budget.

    Steve Jones

    Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Stitcher, Spotify, or iTunes.

  • Are You Still Using Portable Drives?

    It’s the holiday season and that means lots of promotions for various items to give as gifts. Black Friday took place recently and I had no shortage of advertisements that I saw for all sorts of things. From computers to televisions to headphones to any sort of tech gadget you can think of. Plenty of other types of gifts as well.

    One item that kept cropping up for me was SSD drives. I saw an article in Tom’s Hardware about prices crashing to all time lows. That dovetailed with my part of the Data Community Summit keynote where I remembered Jim Gray saying 1TB would soon be US$10,000 in 1999 at the first PASS conference. I looked back at a few orders I’d made and saw I paid $150 for 512GB in 2017 and $125 for 1TB in 2020. Now I could get quality portable, SATA, or even NVMe drives for under $100/1TB. Incredible.

    I thought about this recently as I packed for a trip. I used to carry 2 1TB drives in my bag, along with a couple of thumb drives. At a recent event, I realized I only had 1 thumb drive in my bag, which I hadn’t used for years. Packing for the next trip, I realized that my portable drives had been pulled out sometime during the pandemic and never returned. Despite almost 10 work trips in 2021 and almost 20 in 2022, I haven’t needed a plug in a drive.

    In fact, I’m not sure the last time I used a drive with a wire. I’m used to getting everything through a network, even if it’s not a fast one. I wonder how many of you just live only on networks and never worry about using physical storage to transfer data. It seems that the idea of not really needing to use some physical medium to transfer information is becoming the norm rather than the exception.

    I know there are still uses for physical drives. The Azure Data Box and AWS Snowball are used when large transfers will overwhelm a network. There are likely still some people who flip tape drives or mount and dismount disks as more storage is needed, but that seems to be a specialist role rather than something that many of us worry about. Especially with the cloud, it’s more likely that many of us may never need to touch physical storage again in our lives.

    I don’t know if this is a good thing for the world, but I do think it is convenient. Knowing there is almost always a network around, and that we can make transfers between devices with wi-fi or Bluetooth without needing a physical cable is somewhat amazing. It’s a far cry from using multiple floppy disks or CDs to move data around. In fact, I had to search around for an optical drive as I realized I still have backups of pictures on DVD and none of the last few machines I’ve owned have a DVD drive.

    The changing nature of storage still amazes me, someone that first dealt with tape storage as the medium for saving work. The world has come a long way, and I’m looking forward to what comes next.

    Steve Jones

    Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Stitcher, Spotify, or iTunes.

  • The Home Setup

    For many years, a home setup has been something us geeky people built to experiment, have fun, maybe play games, maybe for some career learning away from work. I’ve written about various workstations, as has Glenn Berry.

    Then the pandemic hit and many of us were sent home to work. I’ve seen people working on dining tables, coffee tables in living rooms, and even on a spare dresser in a bedroom. I see big and small offices, many of which were thrown together to just get by in the spring of 2020.

    It’s a few years later, and while I wrote about the ultimate home office in July 2020, I know that there are plenty of you still at home, at least part-time. While some companies want to get people back into the office, I don’t know how many people end up working full time in an office with the need for some setup at home.

    I saw recently that Andy Yun was building a home lab for himself and his wife, Deborah Melkin (send congrats to the newlyweds! Hopefully, Andy and Deborah have nice working spaces at home, and they don’t interfere with each other. My wife and shared an office for a few years, and we both had to learn to grab a laptop and leave if the other was on a call first.

    This week I wonder how you’ve changed your setup at home? Have you set up a dedicated space for work, a desk, a new chair, better lighting or larger monitors? What tips do you have for making a home office a real office?

    Let us know what has worked, and maybe what hasn’t. Or better yet, what do you wish you had known in the spring of 2020 when you first moved into your home instead of the office?

    Steve Jones

  • Swimming Servers

    Microsoft put a data center on the bottom of the ocean, and it appeared to be a successful experiment, but now they’ve brought the water to the servers. Rather than sink a data center, which means cumbersome maintenance if there are issues, Microsoft is just sinking server boards.

    Their latest experiment takes liquid cooling in a new direction. In a vat of fluid, they have dozens of servers submerged. The liquid has a low boiling point and turns into a gas when contacting a CPU. The gas circulates like a miniature water cycle, condensing back into liquid when hitting a cool lid.

    I’ve always assumed all liquid would be bad on an electrical server board, but I guess this isn’t the case. I’ve heard of liquid cooling for home PCs, and my son actually added a system to his game machine, but I’ve always been nervous about doing so. I think my limited, and often error prone, experience with home plumbing repairs has be scared.

    I’ve rarely enjoyed being in a data center, especially the more modern designs that have a hot aisle and a cool aisle. Moving from one to the other is quite an experience, and one that I can’t think it good for your health over time. The older “cool” rooms I’ve been in weren’t much better, where I wore a winter coat all day when outside temperatures were 90F/30C and higher.

    I don’t know that this will impact me, or if I’ll ever actually see another server machine in my career, but I do know we continue to demand more computing capacity and capability. Perhaps at some point a data center for Azure or AWS will look more a like a warehouse for freezers and anything else. At least the people servicing the systems will likely have a better work environment when the entire space doesn’t need to be cooled down.

    Steve Jones