Category Archives: Servers

SSD Tiering versus Caching: Part 2

A while back I wrote about some of the differences between caching and tiering when using solid state disk (SSD) drives in a PC or server. Having just returned from the 2011 Flash Memory Summit in Santa Clara, I feel … Continue reading

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Snapshot and Full Image Backup for Windows Home Server

One of the short comings of the original 32 bit Windows Home Server (WHS) for me was the lack of any built in tools to backup the primary WHS boot drive. While using a RAID 1 boot drive would protect … Continue reading

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Cloudy Server Growth

Infoworld recently posted an interesting article (The numbers don’t lie — cloud computing boosts server sales) about how server market revenues have increased by around 11 percent in the second quarter of 2010, with quarterly revenues coming in around $10.9 … Continue reading

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Windows Home Server to the Rescue

I have now been running WHS since Dec 2007 on a small self-built VIA based ITX system, chosen because it was small and ran on much lower power and generated less heat and noise than a conventional PC or low … Continue reading

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Intel Patsburg and Software RAID

I just got done reading the “Intel eats crow on software RAID” writeup from the The UK Register. On one side I’m really happy to see that server based software RAID (or Virtual RAID Adapters, VRAs, as we called them … Continue reading

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VMware ESXi at Home

What started out as a simple experiment to help me learn more about VMware ESX has now turned into a full blown experiment running my current Windows Home Server setup, along with two Linux servers used for an online FEAR Combat gaming … Continue reading

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PCIe Flash versus SATA or SAS Based SSD

The impressive results being presented by the new PCIe based server or workstation add-in card flash memory products hitting the market from the likes of FusionIO and others are certainly pushing up the performance envelope of many applications, especially in … Continue reading

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Hardware RAID Adapters Making A Comeback?

We are constantly reading about how the number of cores being offered by Intel and AMD will eventually make hardware acceleration devices in a server mostly obsolete. But hang on, I recall hearing something similar back in the 90s when … Continue reading

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