...even if you don't want to spend for the HD, a TiVo Series 2.5 DT does dual tuning goodness at standard def and has been available for how many years?

Don't take this the wrong way, because I love RT, but it does have some serious performance problems in the large scale.

It's absolutely perfect for the volume that I'm currently administering (3K-4K tickets per year, roughly 15K correspondence, 70K transactions) and once you realize why certain things are laid out the way they are, the API is *very* easy to extend and customize.

The last RT shop that I worked in was a completely different story. We were doing 100K+ tickets per year easy (with that increasing at a rapid rate) and that was 6 years ago. When I left, about a year and a half ago, there were approx 700+ queues, many thousands upon thousands of users and millions of correspondence. There was quite a bit of performance tweaking we needed to do to the code and, of course, the DB just to make it useable. Simply iterating over the queue list using the API was taking upwards of 3 seconds. 3 seconds. Not to render the list in a browser. Not to access the names of each queue. Just to iterate through the list. That install is now plowing through tickets faster than even and is well past the 1M ticket mark, likely has in the tens of millions of correspondence and is performing adequately.

RT is a *great* tool, but you're not going to see performance at those numbers unless you have a firm grasp on DB tuning, perl, Mason and RT's architecture and get your hands very dirty - or you pay a hefty sum to Best Practical for support.

* VMware ESX - enterprise grade virtualisation server. Combined with vmware infrastructure, you run a bare minimum hypervisor (no overhead from a standard linux or windows OS host), store your virtual machines on a SAN or NFS, have a pool of physical servers and automatically load-balance your VMs between them or even bring them back up automatically if a physical server goes bang. Nearly completely abstract your servers from the hardware, run 20 servers per actual piece of tin. Very much not free.

Almost. What you're describing is full "VMware Infrastructure". ESX is the bare-metal hypervisor - and has actually been "replaced" with ESXi. This is a stripped down version that has a smaller install footprint and therefore a lower exposure to exploits. Most of the old ESX patches were for things like Samba and CUPS on the service console. ESXi now comes from vendors like Dell in an embedded form even: 32MB on an SD card, pre-installed, no hard drive required.

You can use local storage with ESX and ESXi; just format it with VMFS. When you're dealing with live-migration (vmotion), automated resource balancing (DRS) and bringing VMs back up after a bang (HA), that's all part of VMware Infrastructure and Virtual Center.

Very much not free - BUT the ESXi installable hypervisor? Free. Go download it now if you want it. Due to the stripped down nature, it supports a more limited set of hardware than VMware Server (which relies on a regular host OS to work out the hardware details), but it performs much better. Depending on the host hardware and VM workload, you can get a 20:1 VM:host ratio with your eyes closed.

Please, someone shoot this idea down - why not just do it with infrared lights on the sidelines or something similar? All you need is some focused, non-visible light broadcast at field level and you could paint that visible using a chroma-key-like system. Calculating the angles of this and the deflection of the field, etc, etc seems far more complicated than it has to be...

I took great joy in sending an "Teh intarnets is down!!" email a few months ago to our network guy. Exchange servers worked...dedicated line to the main office worked...outbound link from our office? Not so much. :-) He got the email, I still couldn't get to google.com.