Tech

Further to my earlier post on XenServer storage performance with regards to directly attaching storage from the host, I have been analysing the performance of various SSD storage options. I have attached a HP DS2220sb storage blade to an existing server blade and compared performance with 4 and 6 SSD RAID-10 to our existing iSCSI SANs. While the P420i RAID controller in the DS2220sb is clearly saturated and unable to provide throughput much over 1,100MB/s - the IOP/s available to PostgreSQL are still a very considerably performance improvement over our P4530 SAN - in fact, 6 SSD’s result in a 39.9x performance increase! ...

“Search - A Journey of Delivery on a Budget” Presented a Melbourne Search - July 2014 - “Search - A Journey of Delivery on a Budget” (Click for slides)

The way we work at Infoxchange has changed greatly. A retrospective journey into transforming Infoxchange’s technology and culture over the past 24 months - presented a Melbourne DevOps - December 2014

At the end of every year I note down a summary of the best applications, hardware & websites I’ve enjoyed & depended on throughout the year (and often for some time before). This post has long since been superseded. You can find the latest version of this post here. Software / General Use Fastmail - https://www.fastmail.com Evernote - https://evernote.com Reeder - http://reederapp.com Keynote - https://www.apple.com/au/mac/keynote Lastpass - https://lastpass.com Plex - https://plex.tv Calibre - http://calibre-ebook.com Software / Geek Use Sublime Text - http://www.sublimetext.com/3 Homebrew - http://brew.sh DropSync - http://mudflatsoftware.com Beets - http://beets.radbox.org Textual - http://www.codeux.com/textual XLD - http://tmkk.undo.jp/xld/index_e.html Code Academy - http://www.codecademy.com Exercism.io - http://exercism.io Sickbeard + Headphones + Couchpotato + Sabnzbd - http://www.totalhtpc.com/ultimate-usenet-guide.html Software / Mobile Tweetbot - http://tapbots.com/software/tweetbot Pushover - http://pushover.net Lastpass - https://lastpass.com Keynote - https://www.apple.com/au/ios/keynote Reeder - http://reederapp.com/ios Evernote- https://evernote.com Plex - https://plex.tv Backblaze - https://www.backblaze.com WTF Podcast - http://www.wtfpod.com/app MiniHack - https://itunes.apple.com/au/app/minihack-for-hacker-news/id631108846?mt=8 Uber - https://itunes.apple.com/au/app/uber/id368677368?mt=8 Goodreads - https://itunes.apple.com/au/app/goodreads-book-recommendations/id355833469?mt=8 Notify4M - https://itunes.apple.com/au/app/notify4m/id499161979?mt=8 Bandcamp - https://itunes.apple.com/au/app/bandcamp/id706408639?mt=8 Hype Machine - https://itunes.apple.com/au/app/hype-machine/id414315986?mt=8 Nuzzel (Only got onto this today) - https://itunes.apple.com/au/app/nuzzel-news-from-your-friends/id692285770?mt=8 Alien Blue - http://www.reddit.com/r/alienblue Software / SysAdmin or DevOps Specific Gitlab - http://gitlab.org Gitlab-CI - https://about.gitlab.com/gitlab-ci Dash - http://kapeli.com/dash PostgreSQL (Makes my list every year & just keeps getting better) - http://www.postgresql.org PGBadger - http://dalibo.github.io/pgbadger Docker - https://www.docker.com Consul - https://consul.io Puppet (I couldn’t do my job as well without it) - http://puppetlabs.com iTerm - http://iterm2.com Nginx - http://nginx.org Htop - http://hisham.hm/htop Bonnie++ - http://linux.die.net/man/8/bonnie++ Openfire - https://www.igniterealtime.org/projects/openfire Hiera-Eyaml - https://github.com/TomPoulton/hiera-eyaml Rubinius - http://rubini.us Puma - http://puma.io XenServer - http://xenserver.org ElasticSearch - www.elasticsearch.org Logstash - http://logstash.net FPM - https://github.com/jordansissel/fpm PFsense - https://www.pfsense.org Debian Jessie (Not quite released but the next great version of the best linux Distro IMO) - https://www.debian.org/releases/jessie Check_MK Multisite - https://mathias-kettner.de/checkmk_multisite.html PWSafe - https://itunes.apple.com/au/app/pwsafe-password-safe-compatible/id520993579?mt=12 Supervisord - http://supervisord.org Websites Last.fm - http://www.last.fm/user/sammcj2000 Feedly - https://feedly.com HackerNews - https://news.ycombinator.com/news Lucidchart - http://lucidchart.com/ MondoTunes (Might be a little biased here!) - http://mondotunes.org Hardware Das Ultimate 4- http://www.daskeyboard.com Logitech Performance MX - http://www.logitech.com/en-au/product/performance-mouse-mx 15’’ Macbook Pro Retina - http://www.apple.com/au/macbook-pro iPhone 6+ (because its bigger than bigger, or something) - https://www.apple.com/iphone-6 CuBox - http://www.solid-run.com/product/cubox-i4pro Parani SD1000 Bluetooth Serial Adapter - http://www.senaindustrial.com/products/industrial_bluetooth/sd1000.php SanDisk Extreme Pro 480GB SSD - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820171999 Other / Non-tech All Day Socks - http://alldaysocks.com Sennheiser Amperior On-Ear Headphones - http://www.head-fi.org/products/sennheiser-amperior-on-ear-headphones O2 + ODAC - http://www.jdslabs.com/products/48/o2-odac-combo Benchmark DAC1 HDR - http://benchmarkmedia.com/products/benchmark-dac1-hdr-digital-to-analog-converter Bellroy Wallets - http://bellroy.com Ink Shoes - http://www.inkshoes.it Kindle Paperwhite - http://www.amazon.com.au/gp/feature.html?docId=3077740006 Nerf Jolt - http://nerf.wikia.com/wiki/Jolt_EX-1 Books The Phoenix Project (Reread this year for the 3rd time) - http://itrevolution.com/books/phoenix-project-DevOps-book Surely You’re Joking Mr Feynman! - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5544.Surely_You_re_Joking_Mr_Feynman_ The Dark Tower Series - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/43615.The_Gunslinger Snow Crash - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/830.Snow_Crash

Intro At Infoxchange we use XenServer as our Virtualisation of choice. There are many reasons for this including: Open Source. Offers greater performance than VMware. Affordability (it’s free unless you purchase support). Proven backend Xen is very reliable. Reliable cross-host migrations of VMs. The XenCentre client, (although having to run in a Windows VM) is quick and simple to use. Upgrades and patches have proven to be more reliable than VMware. OpenStack while interesting, is not yet reliable or streamlined enough for our small team of 4 to implement and manage. XenServer Storage & Filesystems Unfortunately the downside to XenServer is that it’s underlying OS is quite old. The latest version (6.5) about to be released is still based on Centos 5 and still lacks any form of EXT4 and BTRFS support, direct disk access is not available… without some tweaking and has no real support for TRIM unless you have direct disk access and are happy with EXT3. ...