Thorleif Wiik » pixelpark

10 years at pixelpark

Thorleif Wiik — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 20:31:21 +0000

Unbelievable, 10 years are over !

Coming soon: Web 2.0 EXPO in Berlin

Thorleif Wiik — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 20:18:41 +0000

About one month left until Web2.0EXPO in Berlin. There’s also an “unconference” element with the Web2Open as a part of the Web 2.0 Expo. You can meet me at the Sun Microsystems stand, where I’ll present some Pixelpark 2.0 and Web Hosting solutions.

Sun Ecotour meets Pixelpark

Thorleif Wiik — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 21:13:34 +0000

Today, Sun’s Ecotour stops at our office in Berlin. Rolf Kersten and the Sun Ecorider brought us a lot of fun while having a short ride at Oberbaum City.

Ecorider inside:

Ecorider for everybody:

Ecorider and me:

www.pixelpark.com Relaunch

Thorleif Wiik — Wed, 27 Jun 2007 18:43:02 +0000

We launched a new web portal this week, our own one:

Here a screenshot of the old one:

Great work, thanks to the team!

Web 2.0 Hosting on Sun Blade 6000

Thorleif Wiik — Sun, 24 Jun 2007 17:06:32 +0000

I don’t pimp Pixelpark products much in this blog, but today I’ll do. Over the last years, we used to host Web portals in our datacenter for customer on a Solaris based serverfarm called gridpark. Since 2005 we run Solaris 10 with Solaris zones on Sun Sparc, Sun Coolthreads and AMD Opteron processors, dependent on the solution for the customer. Besides of the main gridpark platform, there are also customers on Linux, Windows 2003 and VMWARE on Dell and IBM Server Hardware. Most of these dedicated solutions are based on standard rackmount servers like Dell 2850, Sun X4100, X4200, X4600, T2000, V240 and so on. We looked at a couple of Blade platforms in the past, but almost all of them had a couple of disadvantages for us. But there’s a new Blade platform now, the Sun Blade 6000 familiy.

Besides the 10 slot chassis, there are are a couple of different server modules available for the Sun Blade 6000 modular system today:

T6300: 1 socket Sun UltraSparc T1, almost the same as the Sun T2000
X6220: 2 socket AMD Opteron 2000 Series, dual core, looks like the X4100 with more memory slots
X6250: 2 socket Intel Clovertown Series, dual and quad core

That means, we have the choice today to decide on which CPU platform to run web portals best. Looking at SPECweb2006 and SPECjAPPServer2004 results to compare this three CPU platforms, you will soon see the winner: The Intel Clovertown series seems to outperform the AMD Opteron 2000 Series and the Sun UltraSparc T1 CPU in these benchmarks. If you look at database performance (mysql and postgresql), tweakers.net published their experience comparing a Sun X4600 8 socket dual core Opteron Server with a Intel Cloverton X5355 2 socket quad core server.

The conclusion of tweakers.net is, that for typical web (2.0) workloads (SPECweb, SPECjbb, small databases) the Intel Clovertown CPUs has a very interesting price/performance ratio.

And what does this mean for project gridpark: It’s a big advantage for us, to have a the possibility to buy the Intel Clovertown based servers from Sun for the Sun Blade 6000 plattform and to have Sun Solaris 10 support as well as already optimized Sun Studio 12 compilers.

BCIX Traffic on Pixelpark Gigabit Port

Thorleif Wiik — Thu, 31 May 2007 20:25:25 +0000

Coming soon: Our first 10Gbit/s Port at BCIX .

xmas 2006 is coming

Thorleif Wiik — Fri, 08 Dec 2006 22:57:46 +0000

Nice to see my co-workers on pixelpark.tv My current favorite is on December, 2nd.

BCIX Traffic on Pixelpark AS33811 Gigabit Port

Thorleif Wiik — Sat, 25 Nov 2006 13:18:29 +0000

While BCIX is migrating all peering members on the new Foundry Networks BigIron Plattfom, traffic is growing on our Gigabit Ethernet Port. Peak Peering Traffic (no Upstream traffic included) is now about 400Mbit/s…

Barcamp Berlin

Thorleif Wiik — Sun, 01 Oct 2006 18:37:14 +0000

Und schon vorbei, das Barcamp Berlin bei Pixelpark. Es lief alles gut, leider waren etwas weniger da als angemeldet, es wäre also noch Platz gewesen. Das WLAN funktionierte bis auf einen kleinen Aussetzer am Samstag auch sehr gut. Schöne Bilder gibt es natürlich auf flickr. Morgen werde ich mit Sebastian mal diskutieren, wie wir die aufgezeichneten Videos am besten für alle verfügbar machen, ohne dabei auf youtube Minimalauflösung gehen zu müssen.

Barcamp Berlin gestartet

Thorleif Wiik — Sat, 30 Sep 2006 09:10:49 +0000

Glück haben wir mit dem Wetter, die Eröffnung des Barcamp Berlin findet gerade bei angenehmen Temperaturen im Hof von Pixelpark statt.