Note: I do quite a bit of development in Perl, and have my own biases, so please do take this into consideration. It is one of many languages I use, but it is by and large, my current go-to language. I’ll discuss below. According to TIOBE (yeah, I know), Perl usage is on the rise. The linked article posits that this is for DevOps reasons. The author of the article works at a company that makes money from Perl and Python … they build (actually very good) tools.

So there you are, with many software RAIDs. You’ve been building and rebuilding them. And somewhere along the line, you lost track of which devices were which. So somehow you didn’t clean up the last build right, and you thought you had a hot spare … until you looked at /proc/mdstat … and said … Oh … So. I wanted to do the detailed accounting, in a simple way. I want the tool to tell me if I am missing a physical drive (e.

ClusterHQ is now dead. They were an early container play, building a number of tools around Docker/etc. for the space. Containers are a step between bare metal and VMs. FLocker (ClusterHQ’s product) is open source, and they were looking to monetize it in a different way (not on acquisition, but on support). In this space though, Kubernetes reigns supreme. So competing products/projects need to adapt or outcompete. And its very hard to outcompete something like k8s.

Use Fortran for your MVC web app. No, really … Here you are, coding your new density functional theory app, and you want to give it a nice shiny new web framework front end. Config files are so … 80s … Like in grad school, man … You want shiny new MVC action, with the goodness of fortran mixed in. Out comes Fortran.io.

Ok … so here you are doing a code build. Your environment is all set. You have ample space. Lots of CPU, lots of RAM. All packages are up to date. You start your make. You have another window open with dstat running, just to kinda, sorta watch the system, while you are doing other things. And while you are working, you realize dstat has stopped scrolling. Strange, why would that be.

This has been long in coming. I feel for the people involved. Violin makes proprietary flash modules and chassis, to provide an all flash “array”. The performance is somewhat “meh”, and the cost is high. Like most of the rest of the companies in this space, their latest model bits are quite a bit below Scalable’s 4 year old models, never mind the new stuff. Since the IPO, they’ve been on something of a monotonic down-direction in share price.

This article on The Register indicates that Oracle is now working actively to monetize java use. Given the spate of java hacks over the years, and the decidedly non-free nature of the language, I suspect we are going to see replacement development language use skyrocket, as people develop in anything-but-Java going forward. Think about the risks … you have a massive platform that people have been using with a fairly large number of compromises (client side certainly) … and now you need to start paying for the privilege of using the platform.

It looks like (if the rumor is true) that Solaris will be pushing up the daisies soon. Note: Solaris != SmartOS This has been a long time coming. Combine this with Fujitsu dumping SPARC for headline projects … yeah … its likely over. FWIW: I like SmartOS. The issue for it are drivers. We tried helping, and were able to get one group to update their driver set. But getting others to update (specifically Mellanox) will be even harder now (and it was impossible beforehand, for reasons that were not Mellanox’s fault).

I work with many people, have regular email and phone contact with them, as well as occasional face to face meetings. We talk ideas back and forth, develop plans. I work on designs, coordinating everything that goes into those designs (usually built upon our kit). I work hard on my proposals, thinking many things through, developing very detailed plans. I share these with the people … our customers. And then the pinging begins.

We’ve got 3x Unison (https://scalableinformatics.com/unison) and 1x cadence (https://scalableinformatics.com/cadence) system that we need to clear out. The Unison machines are 5-7GB/s each, and the Cadence is 10-20GB/s and 200-600k IOPs (depending upon storage configuration). More info by emailing me. Everything is on a first come, first served basis, feel free to reach out if you’d like to hear more. Specs: ucp-01: Unison1 12 core, 128GB ram 2x40GbE or 4x10GbE ports 60x 2TB drives 4x 800GB SSD ucp-04: Unison2 12 core, 128GB ram 2x40GbE or 4x10GbE ports 60x 2TB drives 4x 800GB SSD usn-03: Cadence1 12 core, 128GB ram 2x40GbE or 4x10GbE ports 48x 400GB SATA SSD One more unlisted Unison unit with the same specs as the others, though with 3TB drives.