… 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.

This was making the rounds last week. Oracle seems to have a leak in its process, creating labels that trigger event notifications for people, for their packages. Solaris was decimated. More details at the links and at The Layoff. Honestly I had expected them to reach this point. I am guessing that they were contractually obligated for at least 7 years to provide Solaris/SPARC support to US government purchasers. SGI went through a similar thing with IRIX.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

In this article on the venerable Next Platform site, Addison Snell makes a case against some of the presumed truths of cloud computing. One of the points he makes is specifically something we run into all the time with customers, and yet this particular untruth isn’t really being reported the way our customers look at it. Sure, you are paying for the unused capacity. This is how utility models work. Tenancy is the most important measure to the business providing the systems.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Violin has had a rather tumultuous time in market. Post IPO, they’ve not had a great time selling. They have an interesting product, but with SanDisk coming out with their kit, and many others in the competitive flash array space, this can’t be a fun time for them. They don’t have a large installed base to protect, and their competitors are numerous and fairly well funded. Add to the mix that, as a post-IPO public company, they no longer have the luxury of not hitting targets … they will get slaughtered in the market.

[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”.

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”.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This is sad. Here’s the really sad parts of this Not only did they close the parks, but they turned off the web sites The park employees are being ordered to make life as hard as possible for the patrons. None of this had to happen. Had the democrats decided that, ya know, in a political environment where negotiation is the key to advancing agendas, and not a burnt ground strategy, chances are they would be able to get some of what they wanted.

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.

Link here. Don’t want to tax ALL businesses … out of business? Just some of them? Are you mad? Are you freaking kidding me? Pulling my leg? Very sad. Very very sad. The government should be seeking to reduce taxes to make sure businesses grow, and hire, and spend. Mr. President, the entire role of government in business should be to get out of the way, lest you slow down growth, employment, and spending.

Yes, actually we do. Too many. Turns out that little law of supply and demand does in fact hold true. The higher the demand for something in limited supply, the higher the price (wages) you will pay for it. By applying forces to this law, you impact a number of outcomes. That is, if you start monkeying around with the supply, sure, you can adjust the price you pay for the STEM.

Watching the slow motion train wreck in Cyprus made me wonder exactly whom the target of the money grab was. And more importatly, whether or not the people making demands had any clue that their victory was, at best, Pyrrhic, and at worst, a serious contagion. Any financial system in operation is built upon various levels of trust, implicitly in the case of the least risky capital storage system. You know that you can trust, within reasonable expectations and parameters, that capital that you deposit there can be retrieved later.

Quite possibly. We have a toxic mixture of overspending, insufficient revenue to cover the spending, and a borrowing limit. Several ideas have been floated over the last few weeks, including minting a $1T USD coin and depositing in the federal reserve. Thats $1012 USD folks. This is sort of like quantitative easing, aka printing more money, but far far worse. Anyone whom has ever been early into a startup and watched the value of their options get diluted with each new capital infusion knows exactly what this is.

[update] This pretty much says it all. [update 2] … and … they … fold. A bad deal, about to be voted into law. As they said, elections have consequences. Whatever happens, they (WH and Senate) now own it. No cuts, just taxes. Even though our problem is way too much spending and mis-targeted tax increases. Less than 10 hours into the new year for us here in GMT-5. There is some aspect of humanity whereby many view this as a hopeful time, a chance to “begin anew”.

[update] There’sa good piece on the impact upon the potential negotiations and its impact upon one party. As I noted below, any deal done between 1-Jan and now will be a bad deal. The only way to get real spending cuts is to go over the cliff, so lets do this. I don’t care about the political fortunes impact. I care about the long term impact upon the country of out of control spending.

is drinking your own koolaid, consuming your own product, believing the wishful thinking that underlies your most serious predictions. Like this. Just like in catastrophic AGW, there’s one single chart that belies all the claims as to how “well” the “stimulus” package did. Its a damning chart. Here it is. [ ](http://www.aei-ideas.org/2012/11/is-this-as-good-as-it-gets-novembers-dismal-new-normal-jobs-report/) And worse, if you look at how the recovery compares to others … its not going very well at all.

Saw this linked on from zerohedge. Understand that, to a degree, this is a sales pitch for this persons' new fund. But the reasoning behind doing what they are doing is fascinating to me. Along with a description of what happened to the global financial markets. Definitely worth the view just for the history and an analysis of macroeconomic trends.

A few prefaces … First, I disagree with the premise throughout this article that our governor is timid. He is, IMO, and in many people’s opinion, doing a great job. Governor Romney is very similar to Governor Snyder in many ways. Timidity really isn’t apparent. I guess that people see someone making a cost-benefit analysis for engaging in a particular debate, or pushing for a particular outcome, and deciding to forgo a particular fight, as being timid.

This is epic. As originally seen on @mndoci ’s twitter stream. Short version: Those who don’t have a clue, really … REALLY … shouldn’t write lengthy journal articles about what they don’t have a clue about. Lest they get smacked down. Like this. For some reason, its an article of faith for many people, who largely do not understand why, that the big drug companies are EEEEVVIIIILLL (hope I used enough I’s there).