Any NJ MO drivers out there??

[BigRedNJ]

I've seen a sunlit copper MO commuting on the GSP a few times now. North in the AM, South in the PM - same as me.
I live in somerset and commute to fairfield. Yes the drive sucks but the days I get to drive the MO (it's technically the wife's car) man that commute seems to just fly by...

So... where are you from and where do you typically drive to?

[EasternPA]

I'm never really on the Parkway, but I do drive from Trenton to Manhattan on Mondays and back on Thursdays. Turnpike all the way, 7A to 16E and back again. Sometimes I have to visit our data center in Leonia right near the GWB before coming home, and that's 18E (+5 miles) to 7A. Once I get to 7A, I'm about 20ish minutes from home. 195W to the baseball stadium in Trenton, then over the toll bridge into PA.

Are you interested in getting together for a Saturday meetup in Edison soon?

[msfiveiron]

Hey Steve! How are things going? I'd like to get together, but the social schedule is packed for the rest of the summer. BTW, I have no plans to come to NYC until after the RNC is over!

BigRed - New Providence checking in here. I'm starting to see more and more Muranos in the area. Just saw a Copper SE today, as a matter of fact. There's another Polished Pewter I've seen around town, but I'm not sure she's a resident. It's also a different trim than mine, as it has the haolgen headlights.

[BigRedNJ]

I'm actually right around the corner from edison. What timeframe were you thinking, and what do you usually do at these get togethers? (I think I asked you this in another thread)

[EasternPA]

Never had one before, so I really can't say. A friend of mine does this with his 1st generation RX-7 buddies and they go camping and stuff. I guess at ours, we can check out the various trim levels and some of each other's accessories and add-ons. I have the tv kit, Generator fabricated his own stuff and got the LCD headrests. I hope some other folks have the upgrade air intake kits or 20" tires. That, and cook up some hot dogs and hamburgers and hang out. And turn some heads as hopefully no one has seen that many Muranos together off of a Nissan sales lot!

p.s. I grew up in Scotch Plains/Fanwood, went to H.S. in North Brunswick and college at Rutgers New Brunswick, so I, too, know Central Jersey very well. Some back roads are getting a little rusty, but its in there somewhere!

[BigRedNJ]

Ah now you're talkin. Burgers, dogs, and checking out ppls Muranos sounds like a good deal to me. What do you suppose is the max turnout we could get? If I can make it, I'll bring some cold coronas in my "factory ice cooler with drain screws"

[BigRedNJ]

Speaking of get together ideas, do you know of any good off-road trails in NJ (or eastern pa for that matter). Nothing too extreme, but just something for the folks who'd like to spend some time with their MO off pavement? I think that would make for some good times.

[BigRedNJ]

Hey easternpa - what do you do for a living? I saw the datacenter reference and then the linux vanity plate... piqued my curiousity.

I'm an Oracle dba for a pharma CRM company. Before that I was with a small consulting firm who specialized in enterprise webapps. Mainly java servelets.

[EasternPA]

I'm an IT Architect for IBM On Demand. I am generally supposed to be able to architect end-to-end solutions for IT environments. My peers and I design multi-tier web infrastructures, global IT infrastructures, and so on and so forth.

We normally take assignments for a couple months or less, but I've been on an assignment for two and a half years designing and executing a server consolidation for the largest or 2nd largest insurance company in the world. 4,600 servers in 7 countries. After traveling to Europe to sell this to the various country-level executives, I became the lead architect on the US team, consolidating around 720 servers. We are doing a mix of consolidating multiple instances of the same application to one instance and consolidating various unrelated servers to hefty new boxes using VMWare ESX. You may notice msfiveiron and I are good friends in here. He was the lead architect and network architect for a while at the same job I'm still on.

Java servlets rock. We can run your workload on any hardware and any OS from Intel to midrange to RISC and mainframe. Farg Microsoft. Oh, and almost forgot

http://www-1.ibm.com/services/us/ind...t/its/a1000415

I learned SunOS before I learned Windows, and when I broke into the Intel world, a friend showed me Slackware back in Summer of '95. I did a wide variety of IT consulting all along the way preaching about Linux for years. Well, now the market allllllllllmost gets it. That friend went on to become the biggest Microsoft whore, and I a Linux and VMWare consultant. If anyone here reads Slashdot, my uid is around 50,000.

[BigRedNJ]

That sounds pretty cool. Consolidation seems pretty big these days. The company I'm at now is in deep with microsoft - 100% windows shop. We also partner with Unisys and are looking to deploy our software on their ES7000 platform - basically a SMP solution with similar architecture to some sun mainframes. Of course the first snafoo I ran into was windows ram allocation limits... We got a 32G box and I can only effectively use about 16G of it... Maybe going 64bit will solve all this.. not sure.

It is my burning hope and desire that I can get these guys to look into linux. One large customer runs production on unix (not sure which flavor) so hopefully I can use that as a good reason to have a unix test/dev environment.

[EasternPA]

I once had a large government customer who, when wanting an MS SQL database backend for their website (think 1,00,000 families of school age children), wouldn't even listen to a discussion about a federated database spread across multiple 8-way servers (the same infrastrucutre that ran microsoft.com at the time). They only wanted to hear about Windows Datacenter, and even then they deemed our 16-way/64GB solution insufficient (now 32-way/128GB). They felt, without any planning on their own (or understanding the implications -- cost, complexity, and the extremely limited list of certified software titles) they MUST run Datacenter on an ES7000, bar none. Can you say "Microsoft Kool-Aid"? They really had no idea what they were getting themselves into. At some point, you just have to walk away. Besides, that was just the database backend.. we still had the job to architect the other tiers of the web infrastructure!

[BigRedNJ]

what os are you running on the 32/128? is it 32bit? All on one box or multiple boxes connected via lan? how's it do with allocatiing all that ram?

I'm still not sold on the es7000/datacenter solution... way too many issues efficiently allocating ram above 16gb. They tout that it "supports 64GB of ram" or something like that. Yeah right, until you actually try to do it in real life.

Also, for that application, I'm guessing oracle would blow MSSQL out of the water.

[Sw1tched]

I'm up in Morris County, so if you see a debadged Copper MO with tints all around you've probably seen me. I take the parkway sometimes but I'm usually seen in Morris County and in Newark where I work

[BigRedNJ]

I'll bet the interior of your car looks pretty cool at night

[EasternPA]

Our solution lets you staple up to 4 8-way 32GB RAM boxes together over a high speed bus that lets you run one OS instance across all the CPUs and RAM. That's the heart of NUMA, the architecture we picked up when we bought Sequent. It runs Windows Datacenter. I have never seen it in action, nor the ES7000.

Finally, to get back on track here, I have that Garmin Streetpilot III ready to loan you. Get in touch with me to arrange a meetup.