The Register reports this morning, that Seagate has acquired DotHill. DotHill makes arrays and their kit is resold and rebadged by many. In general the array market (high end) is in a decline, and doesn’t show signs of turning around (ever). The low and mid market, including some of the cloud bits is growing. I am not sure about the OCP stuff, but the low end bits are where we are seeing 4, 8, and 12 drive arrays show up as completely commoditized gear.

Not really an HPC/Big Data play (yet). But they have filed. The traditional array market is in a decline, and depending upon how you view it, its either merely a steep decline, or an out-and-out death spiral. The tier1 vendors are defending a shrinking turf against aggressive smaller and more focused players. Moreover, flash is set to overtake disk in terms of lower cost to deploy in very short order. This plays well for folks like Pure and a few others, though the market they are playing in is in decline.

No, really mostly to clean up an accumulation of technical debt that was really bugging the heck out of me. I like Makefiles and I cannot lie. So I like encoding lots of things in them. But it wound up hardwiring a number of things that shouldn’t have been hardwired. And made the builds brittle. When you have 2 released/supported kernels, and a handful of experimental kernels, it gets hard making changes that will be properly reflected across the set.

Violin has had a rather tumultuous time in market. Post IPO, they’ve not had a great time selling. They have an interesting product, but with SanDisk coming out with their kit, and many others in the competitive flash array space, this can’t be a fun time for them. They don’t have a large installed base to protect, and their competitors are numerous and fairly well funded. Add to the mix that, as a post-IPO public company, they no longer have the luxury of not hitting targets … they will get slaughtered in the market.

We started the company on 1-August-2002. I remember arguing with a senior VP at SGI over his decision to abandon linux clusters in Feb 2001. That was the catalyst for me leaving SGI, but I was too chicken to start Scalable then. I thought I could do better than them. I went to another place for 15 months or so. Tried jumpstarting an HPC group there … hired lots of folks, pursued lots of business.

I just saw this about doing a divide and conquer approach to massive scale genomics calculation. While not specific to the code in question, it looked familiar. Yeah, I think I’ve seen something like this before … and wrote the code to do it. It was called SGI GenomeCluster. It was original and innovative at the time, hiding the massively parallel nature of the computation behind a comfortable interface that end users already knew.

Our toolchain that we use for providing up to date and bug-reduced versions of various tools for our appliances have a number of internal testing suites. These suites do a pretty good job of exercising code. When you build Perl, and the internal modules and tools, tests are done right then and there, as part of the module installation. Sadly not many languages do this yet, I think Julia, R, and a few others might.

This is one of Scalable Informatics FastPath Unison systems, well the bottom part. The top are clients we are using to test with. [ ](/images/flashy.jpg) Each of the servers at the bottom is a 4U with 54 physical 2.5 inch 6g/12g SAS or SATA SSDs. We have 5 of these units in the picture. And a number of SSDs on the way to fill them up. Think 0.2PB usable of flash.

Even less fun when the boxes are half a world away. Yeah, this was my weekend and a large chunk of today. This will segue into another post on design and (unintended) changes in design, and end user expectations at some point. Its hard to maintain a concept of an SLO if some of the underlying technology you are relying upon to deliver these objectives (like, I dunno, a wire?), suddenly disappears on you.

Article is here, take it as a rumor until we hear from them. My comments: First, M&A; is hard. You need a good fit product wise (little overlap and great complementary functions/capabilities), and a culture/people fit matter. Second, sales teams need to be on-board selling complete solutions involving the acquired tech. Sometimes this doesn’t happen, for any number of reasons, some fixable, some not. Third, Cisco is out of the storage game if this is true.