This year it seemed as if winter hit us like a train. Just 2 weeks ago it was 65 here in Washington DC. Three days later our high was in the thirties and we got about 3-5 inches of snow (If my timeline is wrong that’s too bad). Tonight, there’s a Wintry Mix and a Winter Weather Advisory. A Wintry Mix in my mind is either you are doomed with lots of ice or it’ll just be a standard boring rain. Ice of course is much worse than snow. So what’s this mean? NO! It doesn’t mean run to the store and buy up all the bread and water you can fit into your cart. It means it’s time for a little check list of things some people forget about when winter punches through their town. And yes, a lot of this can be ignored for those of you that are “cold” down south in the 60’s. And yes my friends in Dallas, water turns into ice at 32 degrees Fahrenheit.

1. Check your windshield wiper blades and fluid. This is great when trying to get the thin layer of ice off your windshield.
2. Check the tread on your tires because driving through snow without much tread can be quite a task.
3. Although the old trick of tossing your old batteries in the freezer to get more life out of them works, in this case it does not. During the summer the heat puts added stress on your battery and when winter rolls around your beat up battery has a harder time cranking through the oil that’s now thicker from the drop in temperature. So it’s a good idea to get your battery checked out.
4. Make sure to have an ice scraper in the car. Life sucks when you are waiting for your heater in your car to melt the ice off on the outside.

I wrote this checklist because I failed on 3 out of 5 of them during the storm that blasted everyone on the East coast. ‘WTFBS’ can be easily remembered for other reasons. Your Grandma may not like that, but you’ll be screaming it if you forget (Wipers, Tires, Fluid, Battery, Scraper).

Here’s a little excitement from the last storm. Sorry the picture is weak (taken via Blackberry).

There was still a good 5 hours of snow left. Luckily, there was a slight wind that was blowing a lot off the top of my car, although not so helpful on the driver’s side. The snow the next day was piled almost to the top of my window. I measured about 18” of snow total the next morning.

Remember back in the day when Beta and VHS tapes were “it” for movies until those crazy discs called DVD’s came out? Well some of you may not remember those days *rolls eyes*. Anyway, for me at least I couldn’t imagine there being anything better until LCD TV’s and Blu-rays became the norm. Now the question is what could possibly be better than Blu-ray? This next step could be movies written onto a chip something like a flash drive. After all we’ve seen flash drives go from 64MB to an astounding 64GB all packed into a small USB keychain in no time.

Your thinking, alright that’s great and all, but what is SSD? It stands for Solid State Drive and could just very well be the beginning of the end for Disk Drives.

Here at SoftLayer we offer the best SSD’s you can find on the market which are the Intel X25-E’s (The E stands for Extreme Edition). Unlike the X25-M’s which are multi-level cell (MLC) the Extreme Edition’s are single-level cell (SLC). Usually you think that multi would be better than single. For space yes, but performance wise, it adds about 100MB/sec to the write speed. They both however, have identical 250MB/sec sustained read speeds.

Okay, so how can SSD’s help your server?

Where SSD’s scream is their I/O performance. According to benchmarks done by Tom’s Hardware (TH) using IOMeter (Database Benchmarking), the X25-E’s are pushing over 5,000 I/O operations per second falling to ~3000 dependant on the queue depth. Comparing this to a 15.5K Seagate Cheetah is like comparing a Cassette Tape to a CD, as the Cheetah maxes out ~500 I/O operations per second. TH did several other benchmarks including File Server, Web Server, and Work Station benchmarks, yielding similar results giving the X25-E a lead of about 10 fold over the Cheetah. Access times are also no competition at 0.1ms vs. 5.7ms. The TH review is definitely worth the read if you are looking into such an upgrade and can be found at: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/intel-x25-e-ssd,2158.html

Going Green?

SSD consumes only a fraction of the power that a HDD uses. According to Intel the X25 uses only 0.06W at idle and peaks at 2.4W under load. Your typical Hard Disk Drive will use on average ~7.5W at idle and ~10W under load.

As well as using less power, since there are no moving parts that in turn means higher reliability as well as less noise generated. Less noise means us tech’s won’t have problems hearing you on the phone from the ringing in our ears from working in the datacenter *lol*.

Taking SSD to the extreme …

Samsung recently released a video where they strung together 24 Samsung 256GB MLC SSD’s resulting in 6TB of storage and 2GB/sec of throughput. For your viewing pleasure: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96dWOEa4Djs&fmt=22

Who knows what the future has in store for us, in ten years we may look at this video like we look at this one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZb0avfQme8

One thing is for certain, quieter, faster, more reliable, and more energy efficient datacenters.