Training the Next Generation of IT Engineers
Image Courtesy Rackable Systems Website
Third in my series of overviews on containerized datacenters is Rackable Systems ‘Ice Cube’. Rackable Systems boasts the highest processor, storage and rack unit densities of all three systems I’ve reviewed. HP is going to kick themselves, but I found out about these guys by watching the background of the HP promotional video of their POD containerized datacenter solution.
Here are the basics of Rackable Systems’ solution: The Ice Cube
HP has been promoting their containerized datacenter solution as a ‘cloud computing’ solution, implying that this is a datacenter virtualization product as well, even though it is primarily infrastructure and the computers, disks and tape storage devices are all extra. I put together the basic statistics on the HP POD for you.
The HP’s Solution: The Performance Optimized Datacenter (POD)
Image Courtesy Sun Microsystems
Containerized datacenters. Take a standard shipping container, outfit it as a datacenter and sell it to the customer as a turn-key, instant-on solution to the problem of providing physical space, power and cooling for equipment. Microsoft proposed this and demonstrated it at a trade show in 2007. HP and Sun have also built commercial products for sale.
I spent this afternoon looking at Sun’s Project Blackbox which Sun is heavily marketing using the Internet Archive for one of their customer testimonials.
Here’s Sun’s solution: Project Blackbox
My Linksys Wireless Router (model WCG200) supports 802.11a, 802.11b and 802.11g. I’ve never had problems with it. I currently use it exclusively for wireless access around the house with a WPC54G Linksys wireless adapter plugged into the PCMCIA slot on my laptop. I’ve tried a Belkin wireless access point and it just didn’t work–with anything. I’ve tried a Netgear wireless router (WGR614) which is faster in terms of total throughput, but the Linksys router is by far the easiest to configure and manage.