It’s an exciting time at Anchor as another big move is in the works. We moved to the current premises at 230 Clarence about 3 years ago now. At the time we thought it was huge and had boundless plains to share, but strong business and steady recruitment has seen us grow to about fifty […]
We recently talked about booting Linux from Really Big hard drives using GPT and a special boot partition. We thought we’d step back a bit and talk about why this is necessary, and how EFI bootloading differs from the classic BIOS boot. The case for GPT As we mentioned previously, you need to use GPT […]
In recent times we’ve been dealing with systems with more and more diskspace. Our latest deployment has a full 30TB of usable capacity! However, this presents some interesting challenges when it comes to booting the operating system. Disks larger than 2TB necessitate the use of GPT partition tables, and booting from GPT disks involves jumping […]
Solid State Drives (SSDs) are not new in the server world, but they’re seen a somewhat limited takeup due to their high cost per gigabyte of storage. This has been changing as prices continue to drop, and we’re now at the point where SSDs represent a viable option for primary storage of high-value data that […]
All the servers Anchor buys are from Supermicro. Most people won’t have heard of them, but they’re a sizeable hardware vendor that also does some OEM gear. Supermicro certainly doesn’t carry the mindshare of other big brands like HP, Dell, et al., but we chose them because their stuff is reliable and affordable – we […]
It’s no secret that we’d rather be working on Linux than Windows here at Anchor. It is, by and large, much more annoying to actually get anything done, but it also just breaks in opaque and unexplained ways. O Windowes, let me count the ways in which you are broken! This is one such problem […]