a newshort benchmark writeup for JackRabbit for On-Demand Media Service. Quite cool. Our results were amazing.

Took us long enough… Now you can buy your JackRabbit high performance storage systems online. Just click here … Not everything is on the store, but we are moving to get the items up quickly. Nothing quite like buying Gigabytes/s while wearing bunny slippers ...

… and we don’t treat them like such. This is the gist of a conversation we had over the weekend. A JackRabbit unit running Centos 5.2 going out to a customer in the financial services space, required firmware updates for some of its components. It would have been simply too easy for us to do what many of our competitors do, and ship them a firmware/driver update on a CD or USB stick, or point them to a login for downloading the bits.

OT to our usual fare. The day job has a few possible openings for high performance computing technical types. Positions would be in Michigan, and one would have some extended travel. Please contact me if you would like to talk.

Whenever a post somehow critical of zfs or Sun shows up on the blog or in an email to a list, within a few hours, someone starts email-bombing us. Hmmmm………. Correlations do not imply causality. But they are damn suspicious. Update: I should also note that someone took the time to even try to subscribe me to several mailing lists. Wow. The value of this is …. what?

many things going on … busiest JackRabbit month on record. We moved into a new facility, migrated servers, setup a new phone system, setup a new lab, started the online store (still not complete, but ready to take initial orders!), … yadda yadda yadda. I won’t say JackRabbits are flying off shelves … though I could say they are hopping off them (JackRabbits don’t have wings after all).

TerraScale were an innovative bunch that developed some interesting technologies around the xfs file system, and made it scale in a cluster. Some time ago, Rackable bought them. Now it appears that Rackable is pulling back from this market, and is putting TerraScale … er … RapidScale on the auction block. Ok, its not quite like this … they have engaged a financial advisor to “seek strategic alternatives” for the group.

JackRabbit-M run of bonnie++ 1.0.3 no patches, run in the usual way. bonnie++ -u root -d /big -f nets these measurements: bonnie++ -u root -d /big -f Using uid:0, gid:0. Writing intelligently...done Rewriting...done Reading intelligently...done start 'em...done...done...done... Create files in sequential order...done. Stat files in sequential order...done. Delete files in sequential order...done. Create files in random order...done. Stat files in random order...done. Delete files in random order...done. Version 1.03 ------Sequential Output------ --Sequential Input- --Random- -Per Chr- --Block-- -Rewrite- -Per Chr- --Block-- --Seeks-- Machine Size K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP /sec %CP jackrabbit 129104M 668525 43 166778 18 1071018 66 426.

JackRabbit-M [you will be able to order these online in short order from our store]. More tests, more burn in. I will describe this unit in a moment. We are taking this one out to the test track. Running a few time trials. Cracking the throttle. Wide open. [queue Don Felder’s “Heavy Metal": this unit masses north of 60 kg … ] raw write speed: [root@jackrabbit ~]# dd if=/dev/zero of=/big/big.file .

For those not familiar with this vernacular, a 2x4 (two by four) is a bit of wood, 2 inches by 4 inches in cross-section. It is sometimes brandished as a defensive or offensive weapon. You use a 2x4 to beat someone into submission … or, more correctly, a metaphorical 2x4 … lest you wind up on the wrong side of the law. This post is about the actualization of the metaphor.