… Ok, the speaker said far more than that. But one of his central theses is that in this “second” machine revolution, we are enabling data driven decision making, distributed decision and consensus, as well as expanding beyond the confines of specific expertise in a field. The latter I’ve heard described as cross fertilization … gather a bunch of smart people “together” and give them a problem spec. Let them run with it.

I read this announcement this morning. Our friends at Facebook releasing their reduced precision server side convolution and GEMM operations. Many years ago, I tried to convince people that HPC moves both down market, into lower cost hardware, as well as more widely into more software toolchains. Basically, the decades of experience building very high performance applications and systems will have value downstream for many users over time. GEMM is a generalized approach to a matrix multiply, which has been well optimized for HPC applications in various scientific libraries over time.

I’m attending SC18 next week. It’s been 3 years since I last attended (2015). Then we (@scalableinfo) had a large booth, lots of traffic, and showed off some of the first commercial NVMe high performance storage systems running BeeGFS over 100GbE. I am looking forward to talking with as many people as I can, to get their perspectives on things. To see what they are thinking, hear what they are doing, and in which direction they are going.

Neither one is a computer related. Both are based upon what I see as unmet needs for various groups. One is a definitely “gotta have” for one group. The other group, there is one “solution” on the market that I looked at, and it’s pretty pathetic. The other uses technology where it should be using chemistry, as the tech is simply way too expensive for mass use, and quite inflexible. Both are B2C.

Finding myself on the other side of the table in the consumer-vendor relationship has resulted in some eye opening experiences. These are things I look back on, and realize that I strenuously avoided doing during my Scalable days. But I see everyone doing it now, as they try to sell me stuff, or convince me to use things. One of the eye opening things is a bit of typecasting of sorts.

I’ve encountered this in my career, at many places. Sadly, early in my career, I participated in some of this. You are a zealot for a particular form of tech if you can see it do no wrong, and decry reports of issues or problems as “attacks”. You are a zealot against a particular form of tech if you cannot see it as a potentially useful and valuable portion of a solution stack, and (often gleefully) amplify reports of issues or problems.

First up, Tegile was acquired by Western Digital (WDC). This is in part due to WDC’s desire to be a one stop shop vertically integrated supplier for storage parts, systems, etc. This is how all of the storage parts OEMs needed to move, though Seagate failed to execute this correctly, selling off their array business in part to Cray. Toshiba … well … they have some existential challenges right now, and are about to sell off their profitable flash and memory systems business, if they can just get everyone to agree … This comes from the fact that spinning disk, while a venerable technology, has been effectively completely commoditized.

Information at this link. It is being called a “strategic transaction”, though it likely came about vis-a-vis Seagate doing some profound and deep thinking over what business it was in. Seagate has been weathering a storm, and has been working on re-orgs to deal with a declining disk market. They acquired ClusterStor as part of a preceding transaction of Xyratex. Xyratex was the basis for the Cray storage platforms (post Enginio).

I’ve written about approved vendors and “one throat to choke” concept in the past. The short take from my vantage point as a small, not well known, but highly differentiated builder of high performance storage and computing systems … was that this brand specific focus was going to remove real differentiated solutions from market, while simultaneously lowering the quality and support of products in market. The concept of brand and marketing of a brand is about erecting barriers to market entry against the smaller folk whom might have something of interest, and the larger folk who might come in with a different ecosystem.

Given that the (now former) day job has ended, I am selling some of the old day job’s assets on ebay. We’ve sold some siFlash, Unison, and have current listings for Arista and Mellanox switches. More stuff will be listed in short order, check it out here. Feel free to reach out to me at joe.landman at the google mail thingy if you want to talk about any of these things, or buy before I list them.

Though, when I look at the “great speed”, it is often on par with or less than Scalable Informatics sustained years before. From 2013 SC13 show, on the show floor, after blasting through a POC at unheard of speed, and setting long standing records in the STAC-M3 benchmarks … Article in question is in the Register. Some of the speeds and feeds: * 200 microsecs latency * 45GBps read bandwidth * 15GBps write bandwidth * 7 million IOPS But then … a fibre connection.

I should have something interesting to talk about over the next two weeks, though a summary of this is Scalable Informatics is undergoing a transformation. The exact form of this transformation is still being determined. In any case, I am no longer at Scalable. Some items of note in recent weeks. M&A;: Nimble was purchased by HPE. Not sure of the specifics of “why”, other than HPE didn’t have much in this space.

Way way back in the early aughts (2000’s), we had built a set of designs for an accelerator system to speed up things like BLAST, HMMer, and other codes. We were told that no one would buy such things, as the software layer was good enough and people didn’t want black boxes. This was part of an overall accelerator strategy that we had put together at the time, and were seeking to raise capital to build.

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.

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.

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)?

ClusterHQ is now dead. They were an early container play, building a number of tools around Docker/etc. for the space. Containers are a step between bare metal and VMs. FLocker (ClusterHQ’s product) is open source, and they were looking to monetize it in a different way (not on acquisition, but on support). In this space though, Kubernetes reigns supreme. So competing products/projects need to adapt or outcompete. And its very hard to outcompete something like k8s.

This has been long in coming. I feel for the people involved. Violin makes proprietary flash modules and chassis, to provide an all flash “array”. The performance is somewhat “meh”, and the cost is high. Like most of the rest of the companies in this space, their latest model bits are quite a bit below Scalable’s 4 year old models, never mind the new stuff. Since the IPO, they’ve been on something of a monotonic down-direction in share price.

This article on The Register indicates that Oracle is now working actively to monetize java use. Given the spate of java hacks over the years, and the decidedly non-free nature of the language, I suspect we are going to see replacement development language use skyrocket, as people develop in anything-but-Java going forward. Think about the risks … you have a massive platform that people have been using with a fairly large number of compromises (client side certainly) … and now you need to start paying for the privilege of using the platform.

I work with many people, have regular email and phone contact with them, as well as occasional face to face meetings. We talk ideas back and forth, develop plans. I work on designs, coordinating everything that goes into those designs (usually built upon our kit). I work hard on my proposals, thinking many things through, developing very detailed plans. I share these with the people … our customers. And then the pinging begins.

This has happened multiple times over the last few months. Just variations on the theme as it were, so I’ll talk about the theme. The day job builds some of the fastest systems for storage and analytics in market. We pride ourselves on being able to make things go very … very fast. If its slow, IMO, its a bug. So we often get people contacting us with their requirements. These requirements are often very hard for our competitors, and fairly simple for us to address.

Article is here at Firstround capital. This goes to a point I’ve made many many times to customers going the cloud route exclusively rather than the internal infrastructure route or hybrid route. Basically it is that the economics simply don’t work. We’ve used a set of models based upon observed customer use cases, and demonstrated this to many folks (customers, VCs, etc.) Many are unimpressed until they actually live the life themselves, have the bills to pay, and then really … really grok what is going on.

I saw this analysis this morning on the Register’s channel site. This follows on the announcement of other layoffs and shuttering of facilities. A few things. First a disclosure: arguably, the day job and more specifically our Unison product is in “direct” competition with ClusterStor, though we never see them in deals. This may or may not be a bad thing, and likely more due to market focus (we do big data, analytics, insanely fast storage in hyperconverged packages) than anything else.

Two items of note here. First, Cavium acquires qlogic. This is interesting at some levels, as qlogic has been a long time player in storage (and networking). There are many qlogic FC switches out there, as well as some older Infiniband gear (pre-Intel sale). Cavium is more of a processor shop, having built a number of interesting SoC and general purpose CPUs. I am not sure the combo is going to be a serious contender to Intel or others in the data center space, but I think they will be working on carving out a specific niche.

We strive to do right by our customers. Sometimes this involves telling them unpleasant truths about choices they are going to make in the future, or have made in the past. I try not to overly sugar coat things … I won’t be judgemental … but I will be frank, and sometimes, this doesn’t go over well. During these discussions, I often see people insisting that their goal is X, but the steps Y to get there, will lead them to Z, which is not coincident with X.

Thus ended the plaintive cry of a management consulting hawking their wares, promising us high level meetings with “customers” with “budgets” in our space. This isn’t to say we don’t want more customers, we do. We always need more (and repeat) customers … this is the nature of our business. What we don’t need is pay-for-play. There is no shared risk, no incentive for the management consultant to deliver a set of business, as they are being paid, and that … the pay for play, is their business.

Saw this in a post on VentureBeat. Intel Capital has been an important player in the space for a while. What happens next to them is worth paying attention to. They’ve been in the thick of many interesting companies, though usually outside of Intel’s core foci. Somewhat beyond the normal corporate strategic VC roles. This could change a number of things for startups … new and existing. VCs have been sitting on the sidelines, or being less active over the recent past, and this is likely not to help the situation.

Short story here. I am not going to pour over their S-1 form to find interesting tidbits, others will do that, and are paid to do so. They are the first of several, though I had thought that Dell would acquire them before they hit IPO. I am guessing that the combination of the price for them, plus the EMC acquisition stopped this conversation. So now Nutanix is going to IPO.

This one has been in the rumor mill for a while. NetApp has been needing something to play well in the all flash array space, and it now has something. This said, the array space is very much on the decline certainly with respect to dumb JBODs and smart “filer heads”. That design is being retired in favor of smarter and hyperconverged systems. Such as Unison with Ceph, Forte, and related HCI (hyper converged infrastructure) systems.

Oh no … we didn’t say “face melting” … did we? Oh. Yes. We. Did. The interview is here at the always wonderful InsideHPC.com You can see the video itself here on YouTube, but read Rich’s transcript. I was losing my voice, and he captured all of the interview in text. Take home messages: Insane IO/Networking/processing performance, small footprint, tiny price, available for orders now.

In Feb 2013, I opined (with some measure of disgust) that people were looking at various software packages as silver bullets, these magical bits of a stack which could suddenly transform massive steaming piles of bits (big … uh … “data” ?) into golden nuggets of actionable data. Many of the “solutions” marketed these days are exactly like that … “add our magic bean software to your pipeline and you will gain insight faster.

Assuming everything goes as planned (HA!) we should have a number of very cool things at SC15. * 100Gb [Unison storage system with BeeGFS](https://scalableinformatics.com/unison) * 100Gb [Unison Ceph](https://scalableinformatics.com/unison) system * 100Gb connection to a partner/customer booth * Forte 100Gb is awesome. The first time I ran an iperf bidirectional test, saw 20GB/s … it blew me away. 40/56GbE is old hat now, and 10GbE is in the rapidly receding past.

I mentioned previously that we have some new (shiny) things … and it looks like you’ll be able to hear about them at my talk. See the schedule for timing information. This said, please note that we have a terrific line up of people giving talks: Fintan Quill from Kx on kdb+ … which is an awesome market leading Big Data Time Series analytics and database tool that runs absolutely balls-out insanely fast on our architecture Christian Mohrbacher from Thinkparq on BeeGFS … the primary parallel file system we are leveraging for Unison parallel file system appliances * Mark Nelson from Inktank/Red Hat on Ceph … the reliable block and object storage system that we’ve built into our Unison Object/Block Storage appliance * Doug Eadline from Basement Supercomputing on Hadoop, and likely showing a Limulus deskside Hadoop appliance * Phil Mucci from Minimal Metrics on optimization problems for systems and code.

From Term Sheet (required reading BTW) Read it all. The thing about bubble valuations and unicorns … neither one will last very long. Pure Storage IPOed this week and they aren’t doing as well in the public markets as their private market valuations might suggest. This is not to say they aren’t a good company, or don’t have a good product. This is saying that the demand for “unicorn” valuations from the buy side is … well … weak.

Our friends at Lucera are in number 6 for best use of HPC in a financial services category. Our Unison product is at number 11 for Best HPC Storage Product or Technology. And I did a write in for #21 for us :D. Our friends at Mellanox have their 100Gb EDR Infiniband technology at number 14. Please do vote (early, not often).

The Register reports this morning, that Seagate has acquired DotHill. DotHill makes arrays and their kit is resold and rebadged by many. In general the array market (high end) is in a decline, and doesn’t show signs of turning around (ever). The low and mid market, including some of the cloud bits is growing. I am not sure about the OCP stuff, but the low end bits are where we are seeing 4, 8, and 12 drive arrays show up as completely commoditized gear.

We started the company on 1-August-2002. I remember arguing with a senior VP at SGI over his decision to abandon linux clusters in Feb 2001. That was the catalyst for me leaving SGI, but I was too chicken to start Scalable then. I thought I could do better than them. I went to another place for 15 months or so. Tried jumpstarting an HPC group there … hired lots of folks, pursued lots of business.

Article is here, take it as a rumor until we hear from them. My comments: First, M&A; is hard. You need a good fit product wise (little overlap and great complementary functions/capabilities), and a culture/people fit matter. Second, sales teams need to be on-board selling complete solutions involving the acquired tech. Sometimes this doesn’t happen, for any number of reasons, some fixable, some not. Third, Cisco is out of the storage game if this is true.

The Register has a great article on storage unicorns. Unicorns are not necessarily mythical creatures in this context, but very high valuation companies that appear to defy “standard” valuation norms, and hold onto their private status longer than those in the past. That is, they aren’t in a rush to IPO or get acquired. The article goes on to analyze the “storage” unicorns, those in the “storage” field. They admix storage, nosql, hyperconverged, and storage as a service.

Terascala appears to have been disassembled, with much of the team going to Cray. Terascala started out selling internally developed storage appliances for Lustre. They developed deployment, monitoring, and management tools. Their UI was reasonably good. Then they struck up a deal with Dell and a few others. In doing so, they largely stopped their appliance sales. Put their code upon their partners hardware. This did generate more force multipliers for them in sales, but it cost them some of their differentiation … unless their boxes were entirely undifferentiated, where it would reduce their overall costs to avoid selling undifferentiated hardware.

I was heads down all day yesterday working on a few things. Apparently this is widely known now, but I saw it late last night. Micron is being pursued by a group affiliated with Tsinghua University. There is a political angle to this group, as they are connected to the government through their management. Why is this interesting (the acquisition potential that is). Well, there are 4 basic Flash fabs out there these days.

[update] TL;DR this appears to be rumor/speculation. One would think that such an acquisition would be prominent on Nutanix’s web site. Its April fools, in May. /sigh Huge in the hyperconverged space (which, not so curiously, is where the day job is), and its setting up the battle lines between the major software/hardware players. Cisco was already number 5 hardware vendor, and was bragging about “beating the white boxes”. The last may be more wishful thinking than reality.

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.

[full disclosure: day job has a relationship with Diablo] Russell just pointed this out to me. The short (pedestrian) version (I’ve got no information that is not public, so I can’t disclose something I don’t know anyway): Netlist filed a patent infringement suit against Diablo, and then included SanDisk as they bought Smart Storage, whom worked with Diablo prior to Smart being acquired by SanDisk. Netlist appears to have won an, at least temporary, injunction against Diablo.

The day job’s products have never been stronger, fit together as well, or had as great a story arc as they do today. We can deliver denser, faster, easier to setup and manage systems quite easily. Our application stacks run atop this system on our ample computing power, and we provide massive network pipes in/out, as data motion is hard. Many more cool things are coming, but for now, we are working very hard on building something awesome.

I don’t get this. Yeah, sure, your contacts are curated, and I don’t accept everyone. I need to see some aspect of a connection and be pretty sure they wont spam me personally or try to spam my contacts. So when I find out that this is what happens, I want to block their access to me. Which usually means un-connecting with them. So why does LinkedIn make this effectively impossible on the phone apps?

[Update] As I had wondered, and other suggested to me, this number (25%) was likely a click bait fabrication. Forbes and others also “fell for it.” I’ll admit I did as well. It was too large to ignore, but it also didn’t make sense. Close down mainframe and storage? Seriously? Lets call this what it is, an internet rumor that was busted. Paraphrasing Mark Twain “An internet rumor can travel around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes”.

Its that time of year, when the inventory fairies come out and begin their counting. Math isn’t hard, but the day job would like a faster and easier count this year. So, the day job is working on selling off existing inventory. We have 4 units ready to go out the door to anyone in need of 70-144TB usable storage at 5-6 GB/s per unit. Specs are as follows: 16-24 processor cores 128 GB RAM 48x {2,3,4} TB top mount drives 4x rear mount SSDs (OS/metadata cache) Scalable OS (Debian Wheezy based Linux OS) 3 year warranty As this is inventory reduction, the more inventory you take, the happier we are (and the less work that the inventory fairies have to do).

A “gut feeling” is, at a deep level, a fundamental sense of something that you can’t necessarily ascribe metrics to, you can’t quantify exactly. Its not always right. Its a subconscious set of facts, ideas, concepts that seem to suggest something below the analytical portion of your mind, and it could bias you into a particular set of directions. Or you could take it as an aberration and go with “facts”.

Scalable’s booth is #3053. We’ll have some good stuff, demos, talks, and people there. And coffee. Gotta have the coffee. More soon, come by and visit us!

Interesting changes in the corporate M&A; or disaggregation arena. With M&A;, you are looking to build market strength by acquiring valuable IP, assets, brands, names, teams, capabilities, trade secrets, special sauces, etc. You do that to make your group stronger and more capable of handling the challenges ahead. With a disaggregation, you slice off disparate portions of the business, and set them free to pursue their own path. This is what was rumored a few weeks ago with EMC, a possible split of the federated businesses.

In the last few days, issues around EMC have become publicly known. EMC is the worlds largest and most profitable storage company, and has a federated group of businesses that are complementary to it. The CEO, Joe Tucci, is stepping down next year, and there is a succession “process” going on. Couple this to a fundamental shift in storage, from arrays to distributed tightly coupled server storage, such as Unison, which is problematic for their core business.

Detroit had filed for bankruptcy protection a while ago. The rationale for this was simple, they simply did not have the cash flow to pay for all their liabilities. They had limited access to debt markets for a number of reasons, and they couldn’t keep cranking up the taxes on residents and businesses in the city to generate revenue. They were between a rock and a hard place. I have a soft spot in my heart for Detroit.

… appears to be normal working hours from a location that is not your office, home … I am supposed to be on vacation. A short one, as there are simply far too many things on my plate (notice my recent posting frequency?). Instead, I am trying to solve problems for customers, sign NDAs, handle support calls. What was the purpose of vacation or holiday again? I keep forgetting.

This has been a point of contention for us for years. Our office has multiple network attachments, using Comcast is part of it. This is the main office, not the home office. Latency on the link, as measured by DNS pings, have always been fairly high, in the multiple 2-3ms region, as compared to our other connection (using a different provider and a different technology) which has been consistently, 0.5ms for the last 2 years.

Ok, didn’t see this acquirer coming, but PLX being bought … yeah, this makes sense. Avago looks like they are trying to become the glue between systems, whether the glue is a data storage fabric, or communications fabric, etc. PLX makes PCIe switches and other kit. PCIe switch and interconnection is the direction that many are converging to. Best end to end latencies, best per-lane performance, no protocol stack silliness to deal with.

I am lucky. I fully admit this. There are people out there whom will tell you that its pure skill that they have been in business and been successful for a long time. Others will admit luck is part of it, but will again, pat themselves on the back for their intestinal fortitude. Few will say “I am lucky”. Which is a shame, as luck, timing (which you can never really, truly, control), and any number of other factors really are critical to one being able to have the luxury of doing what we are doing.

… and believe it or not, I forgot to mention it. This is the first time in company history that we had a backlog going into Q1. Orders being built and tested on the last work day of the year. We grew, not the amount we had originally forecast, but we understand why (and sadly have little control over that aspect). We are working very hard on our appliances … I am blown away as to how perfect a fit they are for folks.

The day job had been talking to and working with Calxeda for a while. They’ve been undergoing some changes over the last few months as they worked to transition from an evangelist to a systems builder. The day job just got a note that they are restructuring. What this specifically means to an outsider, I am not sure, though I could speculate. HP has a vested interest in them. I wouldn’t be surprised to see a rapid asset acquisition.

Story at The Register. Usually you give a CEO some time to right a listing ship. I pointed out in a recent post that there are some significant grumblings about Violin and in fact about most of the flash-as-rack-appliance space. I had noted We’ve run into them a few times in competitive situations, so take what I write about them with an appropriate mass of NaCl. All the pure-play flash array vendors have to answer a basic question about their existence.

Lets see if this actually materializes. Its pretty obvious as to how hard the media folks tried to spin this with the title. A good rubric for how the US media treats the president and his opposition could be found in this cartoon. With that in mind, read the title of that article, and then note this little tidbit on the inside: Notice the scare quotes around the word treason. Treason has a very straighforward definition in the US Constitution.

is due, in significant part, to bad law and bad policy enshrined in law. Ideological view points are hard coded in the firmware of Michigan. Which allows lawsuits and results such as this. It cannot be overemphasized how bone-headed this particular law is. That one can never, under any circumstances, reduce pensioner benefit values. This means, if you ever struck a bad deal, like Detroit, and many others in Michigan have, you have no choice but to continue this bad deal for eternity.

This brings me no joy. I went to grad school in Detroit. I like this city. It has character, it has guts, it has potential. It also has no cash to continue operations. And that sucks. Detroit filed for chapter 9 bankruptcy a few hours ago. There are many reasons for this, but there are a number of specific ones, that are generalizable to businesses as well. First, population decline has led to a tax revenue decline.

[Update] That didn’t take long. Looks like the government is angry about all of this. The leak of the leaks that is. And they are going to try to find the culprit, and prosecute them. Any “Mea Culpas” from them on the fact that this is … I dunno … illegal? Er … no. Most transparent admin … evuh??? I read something last week which made me laugh. It read “tomorrow is Thursday, time for a new scandal”.

Take a gander. Some things are missing, and our marketing folks are developing the content where needed, and revising it where we have existing content. Its quite refreshing to see this. It will get better over time. Its running in our facility now, and likely we’ll have a few clones in the cloud as well. But thats for later.

… the guy driving the car rental bus recognizes you and talks about how often you’ve been there.