Interesting Q1 so far for day job

Our Q1 is usually quiet, fairly low key. Not this one. Looks like lots of pent up demand. We are deep into record territory, running 200+% of normal, with possibility of more. Another new wrinkle is that our small investment round is mostly complete. This is new territory for us, and you may have noticed I’d backed off posting intensity over the last half year or so while this was going on. Its a long, complex, and annoying experience in many regards. I won’t detail it here. But I will say that we are grateful to those whom believed in our business enough to bet on it. Many other things are happening, not the least of which is the complete validation of what we’ve been talking about for years with tightly coupled computing. While the industry calls this “hyperconverged”, and we are fine to adopt that moniker, our points about this being pretty much the only realistic path forward to build scalable infrastructure (see what I did there? Didja?) are being trumpeted loudly by numerous companies and analysts. It helps when they raise $100M+ (dear lord!) to pursue this market, and the press continues very favorable reporting of it. This said, over the last 6 months, people have stopped asking us what tightly coupled/hyperconverged computing means, and started asking what are the issues. And that gets me to the last bit. Another of our core messages, we are starting to see people really get. Performance matters. You can’t cost effectively build/run inefficient systems at any scale, even in a cloud …. no …. especially not in a cloud, and hope to maximize the impact and effectiveness of your expenditure. Armies of crappy/inefficient machines shared amongst many people are inefficient machines. This is fine for web servers. This is double plus ungood for big data analytics and storage. You need performant, efficient systems for this. This has been our message with tightly coupled/hyperconverged systems. This is why our small machines bested machines with 2-4x processing power, 2-4x ram, and 10x number of spindles on STAC M3 tests over the years. As I say these days, you can’t fake performance. More soon. Really. The team wants me to blog more … and I am guessing this means at work.