Go Big or Go Home Desk Setup for the Inferno

[Day Trader]

The computers do not feed the monitors directly but instead they route their outputs to a video wall controller that handles all the screens I have here.

The one I have will support up to 128 screens and treats the entire screen setup as a single desktop.

Also it supports 128 virtual desktops so I can switch desktop views with either hot keys or a menu.

So say I have one desktop setup with all the stuff I run for Day Trading and another setup for all the end of day accounting and spreadsheet software.

[Pigskin75]

So, you give hot stock tips?

[Programjunkie]

All I can say is: Wow.

[-Doug-]

being an I.T. guy, I like what's done, until it poops out on you, then it's a nightmare. I work I.T. in a hospital, and the "vault" is somewhat similar, give or take a farm or two.

Even my home system is interesting. Three 24 inch LCD monitors, massively overclocked quad core (AMD, of course) 16 gigs of DDR3, dual video cards piggy-backed in CrossfireX, and enough hard drive space to choke a horse. This system was designed primarily for gaming, but have expanded into video editing, music production, and just now starting to dabble a little bit into web design and flash. I needed a system that would handle it all, but couldn't find a "name brand" manufacturer that had a pre-built system with the specs I wanted. So, off I went, scouring the vast world of the internet, looking for the best bang for my buck. I've built this entire system, including the water cooling, monitors, speakers, high definiton webcam.. everything, for just over $2,500. Everything, meaning desk and chair included.

Day Trader, I give you tons of credit for using an operating system that less than 10% of the population has ever heard of, let alone use. Solaris, if used by someone knowledgeable, is amazing. Basically anything Linux is fantastic, mainly because you can form it to suit your needs. With Windows, every operating system is cookie cutter identical. With the Linux kernel, no two are alike. My old dual-core Athlon II is running a flavor of Mandriva 2007 that I have twisted and formed the way I like it, and the current uptime is around 137 days without a reboot. Try that with Windows.

But back to topic.... Love the bank of SSD's.. that baby's gotta fly. you mentioned RAID.. do you have it striped or mirrored with parity? truth be known, you probably have some striped for speed, and some mirrored for redundancy. My home desktop is set up with four 128GB SSD for my OS's, in a 0/1 configuration. a mirrored set of two striped. As for my data drives, I have a beautiful little guy sitting on the floor called a Drobo Box, which currently houses four 2TB drives, and space for four more, when time and money allows. If one drive fails, all the data is dumped to the other drives, so nothing is lost. completely hot-swappable.

[Day Trader]

Each of the blades runs Solaris as the host system with various others run in Solaris Containers. The on board SSDs are mirrored with inverted nand drive setup that is easy to configure as you define your drive pools.

I really can't fault the ZFS that Solaris runs with all its self checking and other qualities. The SSDs in the two brain machines use ZFS snapshots that are stored on the storage pool of the data farm to give a low overhead recoverable status.

Heck I am probably an old geek who never loved the microsloth products. In fact out in my workshop I have a computer running right now that has four quad core processors in the beast and the OS it is running is OS/2 Warp 4.

Yep it was designed to handle 16 cores and booted clean off the install.

Also you can really really tweak Apple fanboys when you ask them how do you like running Berkley Unix or some variant.