In this article on the venerable Next Platform site, Addison Snell makes a case against some of the presumed truths of cloud computing. One of the points he makes is specifically something we run into all the time with customers, and yet this particular untruth isn’t really being reported the way our customers look at it. Sure, you are paying for the unused capacity. This is how utility models work. Tenancy is the most important measure to the business providing the systems.

This is our conditioning pass to get the units to stable state for block allocations. We run a number of fill passes over the units. Each pass takes around 42 minutes for the denser units, 21 minutes for the less dense ones. After a few passes, we hit a nice equilibrium, and performance is more deterministic, and less likely to drop as block allocations gradually fill the unit. We run the conditioning over the complete device, one conditioning process per storage device, with multiple iterations of the passes.

In the last year, this has been what this blog has seen for visitors/viewers and page views. 188,654 (unique) visitors 2,572,665 page views I am … humbled …

Story is here, at the always excellent InsideHPC site. Scroll the linked page on Aquarius to see some of their tech and their partners … Congrats guys! Great job!

This is an update to Scalable Informatics “portable petabyte” offering. Basically, from 1 to 16PB of usable space, distributed and mirrored metadata, high performance (100Gb) network fabric, we’ve got a very dense, very fast system available now, at a very aggressive price point (starting configs around $0.20/GB). Batteries included … long on features, functionality, performance. Short on cost. We are leveraging the denser spinning rust drives (SRD), as well as a number of storage technologies that we’ve built or integrated into the systems.

This is something we’ve been working on for a while … a completely clean, as baseline a distro as possible, version of our SIOS RAMdisk image using CentOS (and by extension, Red Hat … just need to point to those repositories). And its available to pull down and use as you wish from our download site. Ok, so what does it do? Simple. It boots an entire OS, into RAM. No disks to manage and worry over.

For those whom don’t know, Julia is a very powerful new language, which aims to leverage a JIT compilation mechanism to generate very fast numerical/computational code in general from a well thought out language. I’ve argued for a while that it feels like a better Python than Python. Python, for those whom aren’t aware, is a scripting language which has risen in popularity over the recent years. It is generally fairly easy to work in, with a few caveats.

Ok. Here’s the problem. Small environment for customers, whom are not really sure what they want and need for authentication. Yes, they asked us to use local users for the machines. No, the number of users was not small. AD may or may not be in the picture. Ok, I am combining two sets of users with common problems here. In one case, they wanted manual installation of many users onto machines without permanent config files.

I do expect more consolidation in this space. There aren’t many players doing what SGI (and the day job) does. The story is here. The interesting thing about this is, that this is in the high performance data analytics appliance space. As they write: 12-16% CAGR for data analytics, which I think is low … . And the point they may about the data explosion is exactly what we talk about as well.

Color me impressed … Seagate and their 60TB 3.5inch SAS drive. Yes, the 60 bay Unison units can handle this. That would be 3.6PB per 4U unit. 10x 4U per 48U rack. 36PB raw per rack. 100PB in 3 racks, 30 racks for an exabyte (EB). The issue would be the storage bandwidth wall height. Doing the math, 60TB/(1GB/s) -> 6 x 104 seconds to empty/fill such a single unit. We can drive these about 50GB/s in a box, so a single box would be 3600TB/(50GB/s) or 7.