This article notes that Violin has divested itself of its PCIe flash card. This card was, to a degree, a shot across the Fusion IO/Virident/Micron bows. I don’t think it ever was a significant threat to them though. Terms of the sale indicate about $23M cash and assumptions of $0.5M liabilities, as well as hiring the team. What is interesting is where it was sold. Hynix. Yes, the memory chip/flash maker.

I’ve been saying for a while that M&A; is going to get more intense as companies gird for the battles ahead. I see component vendors looking at doing vertical integration … not necessarily to compete with their customers, but to offer them alternatives, reference designs, etc. and capture a portion of the higher margin businesses. This move gives Seagate control over Sandforce controllers, and PCIe flash. See this link for more info.

A 1.2PB single mount point Scalable Informatics Unison system, running an MPI job (io-bm) that just dumps data as fast as the little Infiniband FDR network will allow. Our test case. Write 2TB (2x overall system memory) to disk, across 48 procs. No SSDs in the primary storage. This is just spinning rust, in a single rack. This is performance pr0n, though safe for work. usn-01:/mnt/fhgfs/test # df -H /mnt/fhgfs/ Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on fhgfs_nodev 1.

I am not sure if this is specific to SuSE (customer requirement, don’t ask), but there is some extreme … and I really, positively mean, EXTREME … boneheaded insanity in the dhcp stack in the initrd construction in SuSE. Something that doesn’t lend itself well, to, I dunno … CORRECT AUTOCONFIGURATION OF NETWORK PORTS IN DISKLESS ENVIRONMENTS. Ok, what clued me in was this snippet from the console I’ve been struggling with for the past day.

At long last, and yes, I can’t believe I let this slip for years … Its available here at our git site

Day job website has been updated to something … modern. Hopefully nothing is broken … I think it looks great; the Dougs did a terrific job. Seriously, I wound up breaking DNS at the day job (by accident … really) yesterday, in order to try to rationalize something. Had to roll back our DNS servers to an older code drop. That and I had to spin up a new dedicated mail/dns internal server.

This has been bugging me for a long time, and we have to address this in every discussion we have. You can’t build cost effective scale out systems on cheap-ass hardware designs. Its woefully inefficient, the cost blows up to achieve the type of performance we can achieve often with an order of magnitude fewer systems (hey … thats less acquisition cost, less TCO, less power/cooling, lower management strain, smaller footprint, tastes great, less filling, …) The only way people recognize this is when they actually try it themselves.

I am happy for Sage and team, this is a good exit. Obviously we didn’t know this was happening, but I guessed something like this a few weeks ago. Bigger picture: Open source technologies have been capturing mindshare from closed source object, file, and block for a while. This will serve to massively amplify this. GlusterFS was niche until Red Hat bought it. Then it went mainstream. Ceph isn’t GlusterFS though.

Real differentiation, adding real value to something, is often hard to do. Fundamental changes often take time, and are often incremental in scope, so they don’t break everything. That is, unless you are so completely convinced that your way is better, that you try to force the market in that direction. Sometimes these gambits work. Sometimes they don’t. This is about one that did not work. I am convinced my Mac OSX laptop may be the best laptop I’ve used.

We’ve been cranking out the products to ship to customers, and I’ve been fretting over tests, as usual. And I finished my initial pass at the automated installer. It builds our new Debian based systems very nicely, though there is still a little human interaction. Working on it. And it should work perfectly for all Ubuntu as well. Have an install in Hollywood this week. New market for us, very interesting and it plays completely to our strengths.