A few months ago I wrote a grant to attain funds to purchase a mid-range Mac-Pro. The primary purpose of this machine was to provide a powerful development and testing platform for custom dashboard software, as well as a machine that could be dedicated to developing and renovating existing disaster recovery processes, including system backups.
I’ll go out on a limb here; this machine is overkill. The specs are:
- 3 Ghz 8-core processor (25MB of L3 cache)
- 32GB of 1866MHz DDR3 ECC RAM
- 512GB PCIe Storage
- Dual AMD FirePro D300 GPUs (2GB GDDR5 VRAM each)
I still use the original Mac Pro (2009) that I was using before the grant, albeit much less. I’ve been incredibly productive while using this machine. Most of the time I am running Mac OS X Yosemite, Windows 8.1 via Parallels, a dozen chrome tabs, ~15 SSH sessions, 2-5 Remote Desktop Sessions, and LDAP explorer, and #Slack. Not. One. Hiccup. I’ve rarely experienced any slowness, and have only restarted for updates.
It may seem like I am bragging about this snazzy piece of hardware; I’m not. I’m one of those special types of people that get super-excited about hardware and technology, and all I wish is to share that excitement. Over the last few months, in the midst of spearheading a huge Active Directory migration, I’ve managed to work on a few really cool projects that I will be blogging about soon. Before I post them, I thought it best to have some history, and some idea of what I’m working with (hardware-wise). More to come soon!