see here This is a chapter 7, dissolution, not a chapter 11 restructuring. Assets to be sold, likely to Toshiba. I expect more of these from other vendors. SSD space has been needing a consolidation for a while. STEC purchased by WD, Smart by Sandisk has removed most of the high end of the market from the startup side. Pliant was grabbed by Sandisk previously. Whom else remains? On the low-midrange of the market, you have Intel, Micron, and a few others.

Basically, if you go to this site, provide your information, use the code “beobash13”, you get a nice discount on your next purchase from Scalable Informatics until the end of 2013. The rules are simple. Basically you provide your contact information, let us know what products you want to talk about, buy them and pay for them by the end of the year. We are offering something like a 10% discount for this.

This took a bit, as the API is documented, but wasn’t quite working for some reason. But now we’ve linked our signup page to drop data directly into zoho. This was made harder by the XML based API not working as documented. I posted a forum note, after searching on the forum for answers. Others had the same questions. I built a simple testing code, and it didn’t work. Posted this to the forum.

[Disclosure: we do have a business relationship with Basement Supercomputing] (this is a longer version of the beowulf item I posted) Years ago, I came to the conclusion that there was no personal supercomputing market after we tried with a deskside system … what I called a “muscular desktop” with a great deal of IO, processing, ram, and graphics. We just could not find the right niche for this, and we were being badly undercut in price by the Dell-like companies of the world, selling low end boxes that were … good enough … for a small set of tasks.

From a post to the beowulf list: I didn’t get a chance to see many booths … I did get free the last hour of Thursday to wander, and made sure I got to see a few people and companies. What I observed (and please feel free to challenge/contradict/offer alternative interpretations/your own views) will definitely be colored by the glasses we wear, and the market we are in. not so many chip companies (new processor designs, etc.

That was a wonderful show. People got to see what we were about, our new appliances, our performance. I see many possibilities. This is good. Some key takeaways: We have the fastest densest systems in market. Our usable performance far outpaces our nearest competitors configurations which are not in a reasonable config (hello … 60+ raw JBOD? or RAID0 … seriously? And no one has challenged them on this?) our partners rocked.

Day 1 was incredible. Day 2 topped day 1 by a fair amount. I had realized yesterday that I had forgotten to put up our speedometer website which pulled data directly from the siFlash hardware on the real IO performance. I had this unit running hard, and the IO operations were moving quite well. So I put up the web page on my laptop, and this is what we saw 30GB/S.

When I mess up, I don’t normally do it in a small way. I jump in hard, head first. I made an assumption about something I did not have all the facts about today, and began to tear into someone whom did not deserve this treatment, after making him wait for me at our booth. Yeah, this was a major screw up on my part. Addison, I hope you will forgive me, and accept my humble apology.

A good day at the booth. The talks were well attended, and speakers and their topics were interesting. Our partners in the booth: Kx, Veristorm, Basement Supercomputing, Sandisk, XtremeData, and Inktank are phenomenal. We announced many new products, all on display at our booth, and the partners working with us on these products were there to talk about the applications. What we didn’t show off were the speedometers measuring the performance live on the systems.

I read this on Gigaom. In it, there is a claim of the densest storage on the market coming from Quanta, and a full rack of them would be about 3/4 ton (about 682 kg). Amazon uses a “special” design that comes in more than a ton according to the article. So I decided to look into what a simple 42U rack of say 10 of our bad boys would come out with weight wise.