Dell Launches EqualLogic PS6000XVS, PS6010XVS, PowerVault MD3200, MD3200i Storage Arrays

Dell EqualLogic PS6010XVSDell has announced new Dell EqualLogic and Dell PowerVault storage platforms.

Dell’s offerings now include the EqualLogic PS6000XVSand PS6010XVS and the PowerVault MD3200 andMD3200i storage arrays.

Here’s an excerpt from the press release:

“- New Dell EqualLogic PS6000XVS and PS6010XVS storage arrays combine the advantages of SAS and SSD drives in a single enclosure to improve density and performance. An extension of Dell’s expertise in automated load-balancing and data movement technologies, customers leveraging the EqualLogic 5.0 firmware can now benefit from automated data tiering within the new arrays.

– New advancements in the Dell EqualLogic software architecture dramatically improves the performance and scalability of EqualLogic storage arrays – all at no additional cost to new or existing EqualLogic customers. With the introduction of EqualLogic 5.0 firmware, VMware infrastructures can dramatically reduce SAN network traffic for the copy process by over 95% and CPU utilization for the copy process by over 75% VMware vStorage initiative.

– New Dell PowerVault MD3200 and PowerVault MD3200i storage arrays are ideal for small-to-medium sized businesses looking for an affordable, high performance virtualization platform. The MD3200 series of storage arrays provides up to two times the performance, host support and capacity scalability over the previous generation of products.”

The Dell EqualLogic PS6000XVS and EqualLogic PS6010XVS will be available in early August, while the Dell PowerVault MD3200 and PowerVault MD3200i will be available this week.

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World of Warcraft – Blizzard Reveals All

Being a World of Warcrafter, this makes a good read.

Blizzard reveals full scale of World of Warcraft operation

Blizzard has revealed the full scale of its World of Warcraft operation, from the number of computer systems it uses (20,000) to the amount of people it takes to create the game’s numerous classes, items and levels (37 – who have created some 70,000 spells and 40,000 NPCs since the game’s launch five years ago).


Blizzard reveals full scale of World of Warcraft operation // News

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SSD Performance in Windows 7

I came across this website after getting my hands on a OCZ – SSD 2,5” Hard Drive – 128 MB Cache – Summit 60GB.

I can say I’m very impressed with its performance so please read the quote below and follow link for the results.

Well I finally got my hands on an X25-M SSD drive from Intel (Thanks Alistair!) and have put it through its paces on my home built PC. The main thing to say here is that you don’t need the latest SSD to get an improvement when using Windows 7 as the operating system is an improvement in itself in terms of performance tweaks and such like.

Whenever I write a new review based on an operating system, I always like to see how the disk performance is; one of the main problems in Windows Vista was that the operating system was nearly always thrashing away at the system hard drive. There were a number of reasons for this such as indexing, caching etc but when you first boot up, it could be some time before you could actually get into folders, files or generally do anything you wanted.

Loads of users inundated Microsoft forums and newsgroups with complaints about slow disk performance, so much so that Microsoft eventually (nearly a year later) released an update to their disk caching algorithms within Windows Vista Service Pack 1. This was quite a major improvement over the original which improved both performance and the general feel of using the operating system. Again the problem was that it wasn’t enough for most users and a lot of people avoided bothering to upgrade to Windows Vista for this reason, it was viewed as a slower operating system than Windows XP – something it shouldn’t have been.

Now with Windows 7, no matter what type of hard drive you use, you will notice that there is an improvement right away with disk performance, for normal hard drive users things are not at lightening speed, but the hard drive does settle down much faster than it did in Windows Vista, it also spends less time rattling away when you first boot up.

SSD Performance in Windows 7 – Does it Really Make a Difference?

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How to securely erase the hard disk in Linux

How to securely erase the hard disk before selling ones computer

There are times when the news sites are abuzz with sensational news items. I am speaking of those news items which tempts one to pitch in and have his/her say come what may. And the news of someone who bought a laptop on ebay only to find it defective and how he took revenge on the seller by posting all the personal data on the hard disk on a website is by now a legend.

Now it is hard to decide who is in the right here – the person who published the private data on the website (for all you know, the laptop in question could have been damaged in transit) or the seller who is now the talk of the town, whose life is being dissected. There is no way to know. But that is besides the point. The truth is that it is scary to realize that it is next to impossible to delete all the data that one stores on ones storage media without completely destroying it. Because, with the right tools anybody can retrieve even deleted data.

So what can be done to alleviate the situation ? If you are using GNU/Linux or any other UNIX, then you have a tool called shred which can be used to wipe all the data from the hard disk. Here is how it works. Suppose I want to erase all the data on my hard disk, then I boot using a LiveCD like Knoppix and open a shell and type the following command:

# shred -vfz -n 100 /dev/hda

Here /dev/hda is my whole hard disk. And I am asking shred to make (-n) 100 passes by overwriting the entire hard disk with (-z) zeros. And shred program (-f) forces the write by changing the permissions wherever necessary.

Another GPLed tool (though not specifically related to Linux) which is quite popular is Darik’s Boot and Nuke (DBAN) which also does a swell job of wiping ones hard disk.

It is claimed that experts in the field of retrieving data can still get some data from a hard disk that has been wiped in the above manner. But atleast lesser mortals who buy second hand laptops and computers will find it beyond their means to lay their hands on the data.

All about Linux: How to securely erase the hard disk before selling ones computer

Tech Blog by Ezra Hill