Adventures of a Technical MasterMind

Could, cloud cloud, the cloud is HERE! I love articles like this http://alan.blog-city.com/has_amazon_ec2_become_over_subscribed.htm# Really interesting read, and makes a lot of sense. The problem is that you don't have visibility into what they are running and how well its running. Running my business on a completely unknown infrastructure would be a no no. I understand the internet is a big shared infrastructure, but wouldn't you rather know the specifics about the performance and capacity of your infrastructure. This is an interesting thing to think about before you move apps all over the cloud, and have to manage a mess. I do like some of the monitoring which is being done by products like Zenoss : http://mediasrc.zenoss.com/documents/Using+Zenoss+to+Manage+Cloud.pdf . I like Zenoss a lot, but haven't done a full deployment of it yet. I might have the opportunity to do that soon!

We're doing some storage upgrades, basically I need to build out a load testing environment, and since our application is pretty much database trapped I need to invest a bunch of cash in more big iron and more spindles. I need quad – 6 core db servers, which is what we have in production right now. I also want to get 24 spindles of disk, which is what we have in production as well for the database. The disks will mostly be used for the loadtesting environment, but they will also be used for some of the other projects. It's too bad our netapp FAS 3040s have all the slots full (10g, PAM, then the rest FC cards). I need to buy FC disks and DS14 shelves versus buying the newer SAS disks which I would rather have, pretty annoying. Anyways I am buying 28 disks, and its costing me around $54k for the disks. So if you add up the disks that's 8.4TB raw (but the spindle count is what really matters), which means I am at about $6.30/G of data, which is pretty poor. That doesn&