I remember my two stints at IBM T.J. Watson very well … first as a summer student (college hire for summer), and then as an engineer after finishing undergraduate. It was a wonderful place. I really enjoyed it. Not simply computer nerd heaven, but physical scientist nerd heaven as well. IBM famously was the company that resisted layoffs and downsizing for a long time. But it eventually gave in, and was forced into RIF actions during their troubled times in the 1990’s and 2000’s.

… I’ll have hit 10 years of blogitude … bloggerisms … er … generation of large amounts of noise and heat, and hopefully at least a little light? Mebbe?

… that the day job is building atop our siCloud platform. In the article (definitely read it!) there is an great discussion about what the fundamental differences are between what Lucera is aiming for and what more traditional commodity cloud vendors are focused upon. When it comes down to it, the difference is architecting for density of VMs in the commodity cloud versus architecting for performance and low latency in the performance cloud (Lucera’s).

Strange question. Its really a question about block storage in general than FC in particular, but I have a sense that FC may be the first to go down as it were. Ok … I’ve been looking up mechanisms to help customers in a media editing environment. Their preferred file system depends, to a degree, upon IP over FC for connectivity. They need to interconnect Mac OSX machines, Linux and Windows machines to the same storage resources.

Posted to the xfs list: SGI is stepping out of maintainer roles for xfs, xfsprogs, xfsdump, and xfstests. This removes me from the MAINTAINERS entry. Signed-off-by: XXXXXXXXXXXXXX --- [SGI will continue to host oss.sgi.com as a repository for the XFS open source git trees, mailing list, and documentation as is provided today. And will also continue to participate in a less formal role.] Thanks! -Ben MAINTAINERS | 1 - 1 file changed, 1 deletion(-) SGI the original creator of xfs, almost 20 years ago, is removing itself from the pathway going forward.

We’ve sold our first Unison storage cloud to replace an Isilon unit for a bioinformatics core. Performance and density matter, and we have both. About to deploy next phase of cloud for one of our partners … Setting up an exciting trade show presence … Working on an extension of what we’ve been wanting to build for a long time … and now it looks like its in reach. Oh … my … this is huge …

For those who don’t get the reference, “going Galt” points back to the masterpiece novel “Atlas Shrugged” by Ayn Rand. In it, one of the characters is named John Galt, and part of what he does, early in the novel, is convince those whom create jobs, and wealth in the country, to abandon their efforts, as the government lurches harder and farther to the redistributionist world view. Indeed, the country eventually goes full on socialist in the story, where people are not allowed to quit work, take a better job, and so forth.

Much has been happening in the HPC tier 1 vendor space. Some of it has made the news, much has not. The TL;DR version: I believe that most of the tier 1 HPC capability may have been wiped out over the last few months. 1 tier 1 and a bunch of tier 2 are left. Basically, the HPC market has a number of tiers within it, and product mixes across these tiers.

I can’t name her, at her request, but this is my progeny singing for her high school battle of the bands. They took second place. Fantastic job, offspring of mine!

Over at InsideHPC, Rich pointed to an blog by Henry Newman about the changing face of SSD. I’d argue that its not just SSD, but storage in general. But Henry, as usual, nails it. Henry opines To a degree, we see them at least investing in the technologies behind the up market devices. At “worst” acquiring them. Because as Henry points out Very much so. Look at Seagate and WD with their micro NAS appliances.