Mark Russinovich just posted a tweeted with the Infographic for The State of Cloud Storage in 2013 which compares, Microsoft Windows Azure, Google, Amazon, Rackspace and HP.
The State of Cloud Storage in 2013
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Category Archives: HP
Building a new Hyper-V Private Cloud Lab
Two years ago I created my first real IT Lab with some HP ProLiant ML110 G5. I used this in the past years to test new products and projects. The Lab at this time was very limited, no storage, no cluster, not much RAM and weak CPU performance. Not much help if you work a lot with Hyper-V Clusters and System Center products.
I was looking around for some time now to find a cheap offer for new servers. In the last week I found a offer from Cisco with c200 M2 servers and I couldn’t resist to buy two of the for my Hyper-V Cluster nodes. The offer was a special deal which was even cheaper than building the servers by my own, at this point thanks to my former employer Atlantis Informatik AG.
Now what I will do is creating a new Hyper-V Cluster friendly environment with two Cisco C200 M2 Hyper-V nodes, one HP ML110 G5 as Storage Server and one of my old HP ML110 G5 servers as Hyper-V Server which all my Management servers and Active Directory will run on.
If you want to know more about Hardware you can use for a Hyper-V Lab I recommend the posts of Carsten Rachfahl on hyper-v-server.de (german).
Hardware Configuration
Hyper-V nodes:
2x Cisco C200 M2 - Intel Xeon 5620 2.4GHz Quad Core, 16GB RAM, Remote Management, IPMI, 6 Networkports
Storage Server:
1x HP ProLiant ML110 G5 – Intel Xeon E3110 3.0 GHz Dual Core, 8GB RAM, 4x 500GB Raid 10, 3 Networkports
Management Hyper-V node:
1x HP ProLiant ML110 G5 – Intel Xeon E3110 3.0 GHz Dual Core, 8GB RAM
HP Microserver N40L Raid Utility and Driver
Now after setting up my HP Microserver N40L as a Windows Homeserver I had to install the utilities to monitor the Raid and other Hardware. On the HP Support Site you can find a link to the AMD Download page where you can download the Chipset Driver which also includes the Raid Driver and the Raid utility.
Download the AMD Chipset Drivers for the HP Microserver N40L
WHS with HP ProLiant MicroServer N40L
Two days ago my HP ProLiant MicroServer N40L arrived. Since I need more disk space I was looking for a good NAS solution. My first experiences with some of the common NAS vendors were not that great, most of the time the NAS was very very slow. Now this may has changed in the past years but still I prefer a mini server with a Windows OS.
That is where the HP ProLiant MicroServer and Windows Home Server 2011 meet, so I gave it a try. And guess what, it’s a great solution and it does exactly what I need. It stores files with a good performance, it’s quiet, it does not need a lot of power, let me stream content to my Xbox and enables me remote access to my data.
HP ProLiant MicroServer N40L
- HP ProLiant MicroServer N40L
- AMD Turion II NEO N40L 1.5GHz, 15W
- 4GB ECC DDR3 SDRAM
- 2x 2TB WD Caviar Green WD20EARX 5400 rpm, 64 MB Cache, 8,9 ms, SATA3
- Windows Home Server 2011
Now at the moment I use these two WD 2TB Disks in a RAID 1, and the N40L still offers space for two other drives.
HP Elitebook 8460w boots with OCZ Vertex 2 SSD
HP Elitebook 8460w boots with OCZ Vertex 2 SSD. Needs something like 16 seconds for off to Loginscreen. This is not a clean Windows installation, so maybe with a clean Windows installation the 8460w cloud boot up even faster.
HP Elitebook 8460w vs 8560w
Some weeks ago my HP Elitebook 8460w arrived. Now I had the chance to see the 8460w next to a 8560w. First things I noticed:
- The screen of the 8560w is much better
- The 8560w is also much heavier
- and the 8460w battery life is much better
Gallery (bad quality)
OCZ Vertex 2 Bluescreen after resume from Hibernate / Standby
Some weeks ago my HP Elitebook 8460w arrived. The first thing I did was installing a new OCZ Vertex 2 SSD and Windows 7 with Servicepack 1, I installed all the drivers from the HP Support Website and everything worked fine.
Now last week I tried to update the firmware on my OCZ Vertex 2 drive. Now with an Intel Rapid Storage driver installed, the OCZ Toolbox could not find the SSD drive and I could not update the SSD firmware. So I uninstalled the Intel Rapid Storage driver and updated the SSD. After I did this every thing still worked fine. But some days later I got the first Bluescreen after I came out of Hibernate. After searching for a solution I could see I am not the only one with this problem.
Now after some research I think I have the solution. This could be the Microsoft MSAHCI driver in Service Pack 1. After I installed the latest Intel Rapid Storage driver everything worked again.