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Moving inventory out to make room for new stuff
We have a bunch of units to move out. These are from a recent POC project, and we have a new architecture project that needs all that rack space and then some … the team are building Franken-boxen clients for this project, so we have enough requestors on the network. Parts start arriving next week for that, and we really need to clear this out soon. I hate seeing good gear sitting idle on a storage shelf when it could be helping solve hard problems.
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Cat peeking out of bag: Schedule of presentations and talks in our booth for SC15 is up
I mentioned previously that we have some new (shiny) things … and it looks like you’ll be able to hear about them at my talk. See the schedule for timing information. This said, please note that we have a terrific line up of people giving talks:
Fintan Quill from Kx on kdb+ … which is an awesome market leading Big Data Time Series analytics and database tool that runs absolutely balls-out insanely fast on our architecture Christian Mohrbacher from Thinkparq on BeeGFS … the primary parallel file system we are leveraging for Unison parallel file system appliances * Mark Nelson from Inktank/Red Hat on Ceph … the reliable block and object storage system that we’ve built into our Unison Object/Block Storage appliance * Doug Eadline from Basement Supercomputing on Hadoop, and likely showing a Limulus deskside Hadoop appliance * Phil Mucci from Minimal Metrics on optimization problems for systems and code.
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sios-metrics core rewritten
This was a long time coming. Something I needed to do, in order to build a far better code capable of using less network, less CPU power, and providing a better overall system. In short, I ripped out the graphite bits and wrote a native interface to InfluxDB. This interface will also be adapted to kdb+ (32 bit edition), and graphite as time allows. In the process, I cleaned up a tremendous amount of code.
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Just give me a huge fast storage system, and a mighty network to delivery it by
A system in the lab. Here is a snapshot from our management GUI.
[ ](/images/unison-poc-system.png)
A couple things to note:
In the lower right corner, you can see the size of the /mnt/unison file system. This is an all flash system. No, there is no compression, nor dedup going on here. We could, but most of the use cases we are dealing with these days … this would not be a win.
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Looking forward to showing off a new product at SC15
Think … pretty interesting performance … Think very … very dense … Think … there may be some benchies leaked here soon.
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M&A: Huge ... WD acquires SanDisk
This is huge. Now Seagate has a relationship with Micron, Toshiba has its own disks and shares a fab with SanDisk (though I think with this acquisition, that will rapidly change). Ok … so the HD vendors are busy snapping up the Flash makers. Is Micron next? Rumors of something have been swirling for a while. Note also, SanDisk has their InfiniFlash unit. WD simply did not have storage appliances. This gets them into that space, and directly competing with the likes of all the smaller startup all flash array (AFA) vendors.
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Finding needles in haystacks covered in a fallen down barn
Ok … this one was very annoying. Imagine you are trying to diagnose a system crash on a production unit. The crash is quite specific in the subsystems … being one where the interrupt handler catches an exception, and then you start piling up softirq contexts. Its on the network side of things. You discover that the switch and the NIC are, somehow, incredibly, not quite compatible with each other. I can’t assign blame for this as I don’t know who is at fault.
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Ten years ago this blog was born
This was my first post. On 12-October-2005. I’ve written about many things over the past decade. 2000 plus posts, 200 per year, averages about 4 every 7 days or so. I’ve slowed down a bit in recent months, as work has grown more intense, but there are many thoughts I want to get down. To a large extent, my journey through HPC has been an interesting one, and only slightly captured in these posts.
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M&A: EMC gobbled by Dell
Need to think how this will play out. The Register’s take is here. It seems that this will solve the “shareholder value” problem indicated by Elliot Management (e.g. they wanted more return on their investment). As part of the increasing the return and value return to shareholders, EMC had been in a cost cutting mode. Layoffs have been in process, and likely products trimmed or refocused. Once this goes through (assuming regulators won’t protest), Dell will have
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The end of java in the browser
Coming soon. Mozilla is turning off NPAPI support at the end of next year. Java and java applets rely upon NPAPI to work. Needless to say, Java support in the browser is going to end. While this is good news, they are still going to allow flash. Which is less good. What is interesting about this, is that this sunsets support for many of the remote console applications that depend upon Java (for the moment) to provide KVM like capabilities.