Avago continues its acquisition spree. Broadcom (network chipsets and NPUs, CPUs, etc.). This is looking like a more integrated semiconductor IP play here. They grabbed LSI, and shed the non-chippery bits. They grabbed PLX. And Emulex. As they say, curiouser and curiouser. This makes perfect sense to me, and given the other acquisition announced today, I am going to bet they will be talking (at least) to Xilinx. And then there’s Intel.

[update] TL;DR this appears to be rumor/speculation. One would think that such an acquisition would be prominent on Nutanix’s web site. Its April fools, in May. /sigh Huge in the hyperconverged space (which, not so curiously, is where the day job is), and its setting up the battle lines between the major software/hardware players. Cisco was already number 5 hardware vendor, and was bragging about “beating the white boxes”. The last may be more wishful thinking than reality.

Take the worlds fastest hyperconverged storage-compute server. Mix into this the worlds fastest networking. What do you get? (hint: something you can order today) ~# iperf -c 192.168.1.1 -l128k -w 512k -P10 -t 4 ------------------------------------------------------------ Client connecting to 192.168.1.1, TCP port 5001 TCP window size: 1.00 MByte (WARNING: requested 512 KByte) ------------------------------------------------------------ [ 11] local 192.168.1.2 port 50804 connected with 192.168.1.1 port 5001 [ 4] local 192.168.1.2 port 50796 connected with 192.

So the day job did a small capital raise. Not a huge amount, but helpful for some day to day stuff. We did this in part because a larger effort we were working on stalled for reasons I won’t go into here. Looking at where we are and where we need to be, I am amazed at the profound need for performance throughout the hyperconverged space, and blown away that we appear to be the only one focused upon it.

This is something of a hard post to write, for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that the topic comes as something of a surprise to me. I am just going to state it, and then discuss it. The vast majority of people (and companies) out there, whom think they know something of hardware/software/system level diagnostics and problem identification (from newbie to “veteran”) are either full of it, or really clueless.

More soon. We’ll post here, with some basic results. Insanely cool stuff.

Should be fun, we will have booth (#461) on the side near the thoroughfare for the talks. Our HPC on Wall Street booth looked like this: [ ](/images/HPConWS-booth-spring2015.jpg) The display on the monitor is from our FastPath Cadence machine, and is part of the performance dashboard, built upon InfluxDB, Grafana, sios-metrics, and influxdbcli. Here is a blown up view, note the vertical axes for BW (GB/s) and IOPs. [ ](/images/cadence-dash-spring2015.jpg)

… so we don’t get lost in the mobile-geddon changes.

Nebula, a cloud “appliance” (and company) has shut down. The software is open source, so their customers can pay others to provide support, or migrate to another stack. This isn’t a public cloud company, rather a private cloud company. There is little operational risk in moving from one openstack build to another. Feel free to reach out to me (landman @ scalability.org) privately if you need to speak to someone about this.

Rich at InsideHPC has the story. There is a good fit for Micron, as they are rapidly turning into one of the stronger players in the space. As I had noted, the storage OEMs are either buying into vertical integration or partnering to make it happen. Convey is actually a natural fit given other of Micron’s projects. The big question is, for the OEMs not going this route, or waiting to go this route, will that strategy work?