Oracle just announced a new line of Nehalem based x86 servers and they are beasts:

The long and short of it for me seems to be that the machines are beasts but power hungry beasts. None of the lower power Nehalems really seem to be on the table. Until we see prices, it will be…

Last night I watched almost the entire 5 hour live webcast announcing Oracle’s strategies regarding the Sun Microsystems acquisition. As a near-evangelist for Sun and Solaris, I’m very happy with the deal finally going through and even happier that most of what Oracle said makes sense to me as a customer.

Obviously, it is easy…

While the data sheet claims support for Solaris, there are several caveats which I have run into.

1. There is no mention of ZFS support in the data sheet and apparently, there is no support in the software either. One would expect this to be a non-question since ZFS has been part…

You may say, “It only takes me 3 hours to do a full backup of everything”, but over time backup windows are notorious for becoming too small. Backups are split over multiple days, technologies upgraded, etc. When planning a backup strategy, my approach is to eliminate the backup window altogether- that is do whatever…

When discussing availability of a service, it is common to hear the term “Five Nines” referring to a service being available 99.999% of the time but “Five Nines” are relative.
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In reality, none of those calculations are relevant because no one cares if a service is unavailable for 10 hours, as long as they…