Voice of the DBA

Tag: hardware

  • The 2019 Home Lab

    Many of us won’t grow and expand our career completely at our jobs. While some employers will provide training in the form of funds to buy books, take a class, or learn in some other way. I think most employers will understand that you are learning at work and need time to experiment and practice some skills. That isn’t necessarily going to be enough time for you to learn and practice everything at work. Many of us end up doing some normal work at home, and we’ll likely need to do some career growth at home as well.

    That means some sort of resources that are available to work with the data platform. These days I’d recommend a lab of some sort in Azure or AWS, but I know many of you are worried about costs and uncomfortable with building a lab on a service that might require a monthly charge. I think you can easily get away with a minimal or zero monthly charge, but I do understand your concerns.

    That means a home lab, and I wanted to ask this week what you have and need in your lab. I’ve asked in the past, but it’s 2019, so let’s revisit the question. I wrote about this at Quora, but what would you do today if you were starting? Or what is your current lab?

    For me, I have a desktop machine at home that really powers my lab. I run VMWare, but if I were more cost conscious, I’d just use Hyper-V or Virtual Box for full machine work. I think containers are the future and I’d suggest you start learning about them, but for now, have a virtualization method of setting up a machine and installing SQL Server. There are evaluation versions you can run for Windows, but certainly you can also just install SQL Server on your system. Developer edition is free, so no excuses here.

    While some might want complex setups for HA, DR, and other testing, for most of us, a developer edition, a little disk space, and some time will provide a lab where we can get things done. There are lots of Stairway series here at SQLServerCentral, tons of articles here and at Simple Talk that you can follow along with, and many questions in our forums that you might read the first post and try to answer on your own.

    If you have a lab, let us know how you set it up today. If you don’t, maybe this is a good weekend to start thinking about how to set one up.

    Steve Jones

    Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Stitcher or iTunes.

  • Changing Hardware

    I’ve been an Intel user for most of my life. While I have owned Mac machines, and I did once have an AMD desktop for the kids, I have pretty much stuck with Intel as my CPU of choice. Certainly I’ve had other processors in mobile devices, but for work, I have almost always purchased servers, desktops, or laptops with Intel CPUs.

    I remember the time in the 80s and 90s when there were lawsuits, advertisements, and innuendo put out by the companies, as well as fans of either side. I knew people that were sure Intel was the only way to go, fervently claiming that I’d have all sorts of issues trying to run my software on anything other than an Intel CPU. Just as insistent where others that assured me AMD worked fine and Intel was an overpriced waste of money.

    Over the years, I’ve seen Glenn Berry note that SQL Server runs better on Intel, because of the superior single-threaded performance on Intel machines. He’s changed his mind recently, and talks about why in a post this week. Glenn does advocate moving to new hardware, which often can give you better performance over older hardware at a lower consumption. If you are stuck on an older 2008/2012/2014 system, perhaps a hardware refresh is worth considering.

    Would any of you consider moving to AMD CPUs for your SQL Server instances? Is a hardware refresh something you might consider instead of upgrading software versions? If you got a 30-40% performance increase from a modern processor over a 2012/2013 era one, would that be worth the cost of changing hardware?

    We know that changing hardware isn’t as simple or easy as replacing one part with another. Likely you’d have a fair amount of labor to change out a bit of server hardware, even if you didn’t have to change any of your storage. With the growth and advantages of the cloud, is this something to even consider these days?

    I don’t know, though I tend to think that for most organizations, it’s not worth the time and hassle to update hardware without updating software. Perhaps you feel differently, and if so, tell us why.

    Some of you might be like me, not even really thinking about what hardware choices are out there. You let someone else worry about the physical machines and you just ask for a certain level of RAM, a number of cores, and a certain amount of storage performance. That’s how I’ve built SQL Servers in the past, which is really what I do now in the cloud.

    Steve Jones

  • Hard Drive Reliability

    Do any of you still use hard drives? I’m sure some of you do, and I’m also sure plenty of you aren’t sure if you’re using HDDs or SSDs. For some of us, the hardware is just a set of resources with a certain quantity, capacity and performance. While we used to spec, purchase, and assemble database servers in the past, these days may of us just specify cores, RAM, and IOPs or some storage capacity, not worrying about how our resources are actually implemented. I know that I assume SQLServerCentral is using SSDs in our hosted systems, but I honestly don’t know, much less care about the type of drives in use.

    I saw Backblaze release their 2018 hard drive stats recently, looking at the reliability of their storage. Since BackBlaze is in the business of storing data, they need to ensure that they have quality storage. I’m a customer, and I appreciate that they’re not just buying and using devices, but also tracking how well the different brands and models work. Since they have over 100,000 drives, this means they can provide some interesting information on reliability.

    As our storage needs grow, many of us won’t use SSDs for all our data. Even all the data in our database servers might not be SSD as the cost is high. I’m sure HDDs are well suited for backups, and potentially even still useful in many servers for data storage when workloads might not be as high. Even at home, I like to use SSDs as much as possible, but for some types of storage, especially pictures, audio, and video, HDDs are much more cost effective with their higher density.

    The Backblaze stats are interesting in a few ways. Certainly it’s amazing to see how larger and smaller drives perform. It seems that most drives have a very low failure rate, though there is an order of magnitude difference between different models of similar sizes. It doesn’t seem that the 10-14TB drives are worse than the 4TB drives, which makes me think that vendors are doing a great job with quality control in manufacturing. I used to worry about larger sizes being released and having lower reliability, but this doesn’t seem to be the case.

    Some drives have very low failures, but these are averages, so I’m not sure they’re necessarily better, but worth keeping an eye on. I also think that since many of these drives fail at < 1% annualized rate, they’re good choices for your data center. Certainly the HGST ones seem to have very low failure rates. I know I may pick up a couple of these for more photo storage as I’m running out. It seems that I never have enough space for all the pictures I take.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 3.6MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and Libsyn.

  • Remember the Simple Things

    This is a hardware post, and not at all database related, but it reminds me of troubleshooting problems in my career, and of a lesson that I thought I’d learned well. Apparently that isn’t the case.

    Over the last year I’ve been using a tablet to record my daughter’s volleyball matches. We’ve saved off the video between matches, often uploading it or sending it to college coaches. After the season, the tablet wasn’t used much, mostly for some movies on trips, but often it sat idle. Not too long ago a software update appeared for the Android operating system and I applied it, promptly forgetting about this.

    I recorded a couple matches earlier this year, but was too busy to download the video. As I was getting ready for a match last week, I realized that I needed to copy some of the video off the device to free up space. I connected it with a USB cable to my PC and …

    Nothing.

    No device appeared, and I couldn’t access video. I played with the settings in Android, even tried some software from Samsung. Nothing worked. I had read that modern versions of Android included some protection from random USB connections, so I ended up prying open the rubber case, removing the small SD card, cursing a few times as I tried to find a micro adapter to read it, watching the clock the entire time. Rushing to copy video and get out the door in time to make the match is not the least stressful part of my life.

    The next day I ran more searches, trying to find a way to connect remotely to the tablet from a Windows device. I kept seeing references that enabling the device visibility should work and Windows should detect the file system. It didn’t work, and this was frustrating. I was ready to purchase some software to allow remote connections to the device.

    Finally, I saw a note that some cables don’t allow data transfer. Apparently a micro USB cable is not a micro USB cable. I decided to try another one I had laying around, but no change. I did notice the message that the device was charging slowly, so I wandered through my desk to find the original cable that came with the tablet. I connected it and

    Voila.

    I had a file system to which I could copy video. I felt both relieved and rather ashamed of myself. I can’t remember the number of printer problems I’ve solved in my career by changing cables. Or the number of times a motherboard wouldn’t boot, but changing a power cable fixed the issue.

    Consider the simple things first when troubleshooting. They won’t always solve your issue, but if they do, you’ll be glad you tried them first.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 4.8MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and Libsyn.