Sort of like Ayn Rand’s excellent Atlas Shrugged, when eventually enough barriers to building companies and forming wealth occur, they will stop trying. See the WSJ article about this. This impacts HPC, as smaller folks with good products, and awesome future products now see enough uncertainty that many are hedging their bets. Which means not taking as many risks. Or hiring as many people. Funny how that economy thing works. Jobs are created when entrepreneurs take risks that result in capital formation.

I’ve been behind on podcast viewing. Way behind. So today I was Rich Brueckner’s sidekick (queue sidekick music) on the InsideSC10 Recap. Link above takes you to the site, please do click it, as InsideHPC is in part supported by advertising revenue (scalability.org is a self funded effort). Video is also on Youtube, and you can see it here: Yes, I did almost say “develop that technology” when talking about people.

The conference is winding down. Tuesday was good, Wednesday was wild. Non-stop. I didn’t have a free moment. This was a good show. We got the siCluster-NAS formally launched (for less than $1000/usable TB with scalable bandwidth, we think it is pretty good). We got some nice financial services demos up running on the siCluster-NAS. We didn’t spend too much money to setup and run the demos. Tomorrow, Green-HPC gets announced (and I think Top500).

My bad, we’ve been very busy. I had expected to have them done by show time, and of course, I haven’t had time. We have all the data, I have to sit down with it, finish crunching it, and put it into our document. It will be done soon. Then we’ll post it on our web site and you can pull it down. siCluster benchmark report will have (older) results from a GlusterFS set of tests.

Starting this post in the morning. I’d like to see us get some traffic going to the booth #4517 right next to the Ethernet Alliance booth. So how can we generate traffic … sorry no extraordinarily attractive obviously non-geek humans there … well, there’s product interest (we are announcing siCluster-NAS this morning), there’s swag (courtesy of Intel), and some Scalable Informatics pens. How about a quid pro quo. Come by and engage with us, and we’ll reciprocate.

Doug says, “hey Joe, lets drive, so we don’t get soaked, and have better control over our leaving time.” Which makes sense. So into the GPS went the name, out came a set of directions, which we followed. The thing about GPSes … well … the data can tell you about where things are, from a driving perspective. But having signs up helps. Otherwise, you wind up walking in what amounted to a semicircle for 15 minutes in a blowing rain, and getting the uncovered sections of your clothes innundated with water.

We are in booth 4517-ish, right by the Ethernet Alliance in the Intel Channel Partner booth. Come by and say hello! We have a nice quick Kdb+ demo, and will be talking about our siCluster-NAS scale out NAS product.

We got in this morning. Security was … er … security. I feel like the TSA should buy me a nice dinner. And maybe call sometime (feeble attempt at humor on my part). One gets the feeling that they are actively discouraging air travel. Got in to the McKendrick-Breaux house, a nice B&B; very close to the convention center, and costing a similar amount to hotels there. Nice location, very close.

We are going to be there, in the Intel Channel Partner Pavilion (will find booth number and post it) on Monday and Tuesday. We have lots of work to do … and its Saturday. First, we have to finish up the siCluster-NAS bits. Expect PR on Monday (will send it to InsideHPC and try to get it into the SC10 PR stream). Need to finish web page and handouts for it.

What precisely is it people buy … is it a box full of parts they assemble themselves, or a service, or a turnkey solution? What they buy comes fundamentally from where they believe value to be. The buyer of boxes full of parts have value pegged to inverse of price. The lower the price the higher the value. The buyer of a service or a solution is looking for a specific set of expectations to be met.