They were using 15K RPM SAS drives. Your 7200 RPM drives aren't going to touch the speed of 15K RPM drives on a SAS backplane. Not by a long shot.

The sad thing is that patterns have become so many and so complicated that I can't tell if you're joking or not. Proactor pattern? Is that really a thing?

I hope he burns.

I think the punch line there was supposed to be vapor(ware).

+1.

When you saying "calling into non-Java code", you're talking about the JNI, right?

I'd be curious to see an apples to apples comparison between cache sizes of disks from the same manufacturer. The problem is that the controller might be much more optimized on one drive more so than another (IE, the cache won't make so much of a difference). For instance, I've heard WD drives are very much not optimized for utilize their cache effectively, although I can't find anything to actually back that up.

We use Linux on the backend, but thanks for the tip. I wasn't aware Windows Server had this.

I'd prefer to have the VOIP on it's own subnet, but getting a second switch on the backend was a no-go. I've got a patch panel, so I've got expandibality built in. When it comes time to deploy, I'll try to get the budget to drop one in the rack. But I can't rely on getting gear, so I assume I won't have it to be on the safe side.

Have you used FOG at all? I'm in the middle of a project where I have to setup a PXE boot server to install Windows to a bunch of boxes. The rub of it is that I've already got a DHCP server and I'm a bit weary of running the FOG installer that is going to reconfigure my production server (which already has a TFTP server installed). I'm also a bit worried that when we switch over to VOIP phones I'll need that TFTP server to serve configuration to the phones.

If you have any experience with these setups, I'd be eager to hear any advice you could share.