I’ve been trying to help Scalable Informatics customers understand these market realities for a while. Unfortunately, to my discredit, I’ve not been very successful at doing so … and many groups seem to assume supply is plentiful and cheap across all storage modalities. Not true. And not likely true for at least the rest of the year, if not longer. This article goes into some depth that I’ve tried to explain to others in phone conversations, private email threads.

See the article here. They mention Axellio, and on The Reg article on their ISE product, they say “X-IO partners using Axellio will be able to compete with DSSD, Mangstor and Zstor and offer what EMC has characterised as face-melting performance.” Hey, we were the first to come up with “face melting performance”. More than a year ago. And it really wasn’t us, but my buddy Dr. James Cuff of Harvard.

This is a fun one. A customer has quite a collection of all-flash Unison units. A while ago, they asked us to turn on LLDP support for the units. It has some value for a number of scenarios. Later, they asked us to turn it off. So we removed the daemon. Unison ceased generating/consuming LLDP packets. Or so we thought. Fast forward to last week. We are being told that LLDP PDUs are being generated by the kit.

Not what I was hoping for. I may explain more of what I am doing later (less interesting than why I am doing it), but suffice it to say that I’ve got a machine I’ve turned into a VM/container box, so I can build something I need to build. This box has a large RAID6 for storage. Spinning disk. Fairly well optimized, I get good performance out of it. The box has ample CPU, and ample memory.

Another itch I’ve been wanting to scratch for a very long time. I had internal versions of a small version of this for a while, but I wasn’t happy with them. The makefiles were brittle. The builds, while automated, would fail, quite often, for obscure reasons. And I want a platform to build upon, to enable others to build upon. Not OpenHPC which is more about the infrastructure one needs for building/running high performance computing systems.

Most of the time, sudo just works. Every now and then, it doesn’t. Most recently was with a build I am working on, where I got a “permission denied” error for creating a directory. The reason for this was non-obvious at first. You “are” superuser after all when you sudo, right? Aren’t you? Sort of. Your effective user ID has been set to the superuser. Your real user ID still is yours.

In the process of disconnecting a service we don’t need anymore. So I call their number. Obviously reroutes to a remote call center. One where english is not the primary language. I’m ok with this, but the person has a very thick and hard to understand accent. Their usage and idiom were not American, or British English. This also complicates matters somewhat, but I am used to it. I can infer where they were from, from their usage.

There has been a huge demand of SSD/Flash/memory components from a number of end users. Sadly not the day jobs customers … but enough to deplete the market of supply. Watching basic economics at work is fascinating. Supply is highly constrained, while demand is rising. Couple that with a (mis)expectation of continuous falling prices across the board leads to interesting conversations with customers. We’ve tried to set expectations appropriately, but we’ve been bitten in the past by doing just this.

Our friends at MSU HPCC now are the proud owners of a very fast/high performance Unison Flash storage system, and a ZFS backed high performance Unison storage spinning disk unit. Installed first week of Jan 2017. As MSU is one of my alma mater institutions, I am quite happy about helping them out with this kit. They’ve been a customer previously; they had bought some HPC MPI/OpenMP programming training in the dim and distant past.

Time and time again, the day job had been asked to discuss how the solutions are differentiated. Time and time again, we showed benchmarks on real workloads that show significant performance deltas. Not 2 or 3 sigma measurements. More often than not, 2x -> 10x better. Yet … yet … we were asked, again and again, how we did it. We pointed to our architecture. But, they complained, isn’t it the same as X (insert your favorite volume vendor here)?