I actually have a hard time understanding what you can do with all this hardware. The monitors; ok. Monitor real-estate is important since you don't have to use time and effort to shuffle all the windows you want to use. But what about the rest of the systems, two laptops and three servers?
I've read Stefan Didak's home office description as well, and he says that having a massive amount of storage and cycles can help you if you're doing complicated work. Does someone have an example of jobs that become easier with 4 terabytes of local storage and thirty CPU cores? It seems to me the overhead of administrating these kinds of system would dwarf any benefit.
Obviously I am wrong, but how? This stuff looks fun, and it definitely sounds fun to be more effective than your peers by making "unacceptable" choices regarding the tools you use.
Yeah I'm with you - I can see the need for two systems, one for real work and the other for all the other crap (email, music, etc) but not 6. I wonder if it's like getting tattoos - once you get more than one, it spirals until you're covered.
I just realized I actually do this right now - a mac mini for work and an ipod touch for music, email, etc. That's how I get away with using such a cheap system for design work - I offload everything except Fireworks on to the ipod, plus then I get a little bit of help with procrastination because the mini is for only real work during the weekdays.
Who needs it? My GF. She's an artist working with Photoshop. She works with 1G images. She has an 8G, quadcore, 1T system. Not to mention her HP z3200 printer. (Big mother.) She wants 2T raid storage for Christmas. I'm a developer, I get by with half that. :-)
Not sure how that answers why you need that many systems, sounds like she just needs one beefed up one and a lot of monitors - having extra boxes online to split up the work wouldn't help with Photoshop or her workflow, right?
Does someone have an example of jobs that become easier with 4 terabytes of local storage and thirty CPU cores? It seems to me the overhead of administrating these kinds of system would dwarf any benefit.
If you're doing any sort of graphics or video rendering, you eat up all the CPU, RAM and a lot of the disk that you can throw at it. Regular DV digital video takes up 12 GB per hour. Uncompressed 1080/24p HD video footage can take over 320 Gigs an hour. More here: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/howto/articles...
Video and graphics rendering are "embarrassingly parallel" problems, and will generally chew up any resources that you throw at them. Most semi-pro video editing/3d modeling programs have packages that let you throw up a render farm fairly quickly.
The guy claims to be running about 50 VMs. I can understand how they might pile up, too. Testing across multiple platforms and browsers is probably a lot easier with a massive farm of VMs. But you need a lot of CPU for that.
Two laptops isn't hard to explain: You have the ultralight laptop to carry to the coffee shop and the somewhat-heavier laptop to take with you when you need to get real work done on the road over several days.
He said that he writes distributed software for datacenters.
Presumably he runs all that hardware so he can have a lot of VMs running his distributed software at once. It's generally cheaper to buy a lot of commodity boxes than one super-beefy box, hence the large collection.
With that much memory, it is useful to have that many cores in order to index everything quickly. Finding local information fast can be a productivity boost.
He mentions that he uses a lot of virtual machines, something with which I can sympathise. Windows VMs tend to use quite a bit of CPU power (not to mention RAM) on the host, so if I could afford it, I'd probably push my VMs to a separate machine from my main workstation, and I rarely run more than 2.
I've read Stefan Didak's home office description as well, and he says that having a massive amount of storage and cycles can help you if you're doing complicated work. Does someone have an example of jobs that become easier with 4 terabytes of local storage and thirty CPU cores? It seems to me the overhead of administrating these kinds of system would dwarf any benefit.
Obviously I am wrong, but how? This stuff looks fun, and it definitely sounds fun to be more effective than your peers by making "unacceptable" choices regarding the tools you use.
[Edit: If you have the same questions, have a look at http://www.stefandidak.com/ramble/2007/04/03/home-office-usa.... It's really cool.]