[Steve Modica]

A G5 won’t cut it for serving Nehalem and Westmere based systems. They have a very high bandwidth to and from memory and will basically swamp the G5. They’ll send more traffic than it can handle so the ports won’t keep up.

Steve Modica
CTO, Small Tree Communications

[Steve Modica]

You want to buy from a vendor that knows what they are doing.
At Small Tree, we spend a lot of time testing this stuff as well as supporting it. *most* of the calls are not problems with our hardware or configuration. It’s mostly other things. Apple bugs, setup problems, permissions problems, usage problems, FCP problems. We work through them all.
The main issue is that we aggregate the experience of all our customers into one place. So you either don’t hit those problems, or when you do, we know how to fix them fast so you’re back to getting your work done.
What makes us special is that our networking cards and drivers are used by anyone doing a Mac based NAS. So we get a good look at everything.

Steve Modica
CTO, Small Tree Communications

[Steve Modica]

That’s the dd command. It’s a unix command that’s available on Macs (you can run it from a terminal). Just run “man dd” in the terminal for the man page. It’s the jackknife of disk IO. It can’t do more elaborate things like asynch mode, but it’s very useful.

Steve Modica
CTO, Small Tree Communications

[Steve Modica]

I know the isilon guys and I like them a lot. It’s infiniband clustering and lots of cool load balancing. All good stuff.
That being said, you have 6 guys. You don’t need all of that. You also don’t need the amazing modularity they offer. So why spend that kind of money?
Small Tree can put something in with very low latency and it’s all stuff you can easily repurpose when you upgrade one day.
Steve

Steve Modica
CTO, Small Tree Communications

[Steve Modica]

Online Transaction Processing. Database stuff

Steve Modica
CTO, Small Tree Communications

[Steve Modica]

dd if=/Directory/sourcefile of=/NewDirectory/Destfile bs=4m

Not much will beat this. (unless one side or the other, or the network) can’t go very fast. Then you may want to compress or do other things)

Steve Modica
CTO, Small Tree Communications

[Steve Modica]

In the 8 and 12 bay systems, there are 3 memory controller channels. So having three slots populated is what you want. Not 4.

Steve Modica
CTO, Small Tree Communications

[Steve Modica]

I’d want the one that works and can maintain realtime streams of the codecs I want. Which one does that?

If they are striped (IE raid50 or 60) you aren’t going to have very good realtime performance.

Steve Modica
CTO, Small Tree Communications

[Steve Modica]

Isn’t that funny?

I would be harsher on the vendor, but apple does this to us. They release these systems with no pre-release program. So absolutely no one has seen the system prior to the day you can buy it. Then the vendors have to fight the herd to get one. If the vendor is a small company without a lot of cash, they may not have $5k laying around to buy the thing either.

So word of warning to all of you, when buying systems, remember that the vendors are buying their test systems at the same time.

Steve Modica
CTO, Small Tree Communications

[Steve Modica]

Here’s another way to look at this.
If your client drops some packets, its TCP stack will be very busy reordering and asking for the missing packets. That will slow down your client.

If your server is dropping packets, his TCP stack will be busy and it’s already very busy! So you’re going to impact everyone else.

Steve Modica
CTO, Small Tree Communications