My experience with the 1/06 Solaris 10 was, well, less than good. I came away with the impression of a system that is very hard to install, one might say extraordinarily hard to install, with few supported systems. Video didn’t work, networking required going to an unsupported freeware site, pulling down a binary driver, and doing something akin to insmod in linux. I was simply not impressed with the installation. It was horrible.

For reasons I don’t quite understand WP seems to have eaten Dan’s post.?? Here it is, re-replicated: Looks like we both have trouble being succinct! Thanks for the Linux lessons.?? I’ve worked in both Windows and UNIX environments professionally, but I’ve never done any real work with Linux.?? I appreciate learning more, and your information is helpful. There’s no doubt that you are 100% correct about one thing:?? the market will decide.

Well, I wanted to get back to our core for a bit. The Michigan Growth Capital Symposium has been done for a month. My great fear in presenting there was that I wouldn’t be speaking to money people, but would in fact be speaking to business consultants, advisors, CEO/CFO/etc for hire. Sadly, most of my audience appeared to be that. Some were PR folks, some were nice to speak with, some were, well … A few VCs and fewer money people.

Microsoft is pushing its resellers to enter this market. From here Uh huh. Remember those paper MCSEs? Clusters are far more complex to get right than a basic PC network. Diagnosing and solving performance problems on tightly coupled machines is non-trivial. This is going to be … interesting.

I have given the Microsoft entry into cluster computing a great deal of thought. I want to see if this is a force to be reckoned with, or something else. Will they matter in the long term? A tactic is something you execute to further a long term goal. You may change tactics to achieve your goals. You may alter your tactical foci to adjust to market conditions. Individual tactics are not the important element, how they advance you towards your goals are.

While thinking this through, there are a number of serious issues with WCC I can spot. I won’t go through them here, I want to mull over them for a while. MPI. Supporting a new interconnect is hard. You have to relink your application. This is true on all platforms. Some such as the Scali system attempt to make this easy by separating layers, and allowing you to compile your app and select the fabric at runtime.

Imagine you have a great idea. You think about it, design it, test it, try it. You approach customers with it and they are very interested. You do the market research, find that the market is growing like banshees, build a busines plan, do all the footwork. Then you go look for capital to make it happen. So here you are with your great idea, and you see lots of other people starting to have similar inklings.

I had a conversation recently with two nice people from Microsoft about their (now released) WCC product. One of the people, Patrick wrote a comment (for some reason wordpress is editing it, so go to this URL: http://scalability.org/?p=59#comment-40 ) here that is worth looking at. I have been skeptical of the WCC product in that I didn’t understand what Microsoft’s vision was for this (no guffaws here), and thought that I might be misinterpreting what I didn’t hear.

In this post, the author indicates that SGI committed suicide, or at least attempted it twice. Their rationale was that the NT porting bit was the first phase, and that the Itanium choice was the second. Further they posit that there is no value left in the company. I disagree with the first and third points. SGI acquired Cray during the time when we were busy taking away their business. This was IMO, one of the first fatal mistakes.

All of us are guilty at some point in time or the other, of embellishing some attribute about something we talk about. We like our choice to be the “winner”, whatever that means. This “crime” takes many forms. What we see quite often is omission, either purposeful or inadvertant which paints a different picture than “reality” would indicate. We also see specious comparisons, and poor analytics to back up the conclusions.