Woot … have it working nicely in the lab. A few more tweaks to the environment, and we should be able to test in the field. We’ve been comparing NFS booting, iSCSI booting, and ramdisk based booting for siCluster systems. We’ve been wanting to do more than PXE loads, and provide multiple levels of resiliency that we can using a technology like this. As it turns out, this dovetails beautifully into how we load our JackRabbit and DeltaV units in siCluster.

We’ve been gathering data on the new machine. So far, it has exceeded our expectations a bit. Its one of, if not the fastest … and not by a little bit mind you, spinning rust 24 drive SATA 2 server we’ve seen in the market. Obviously we are happy with this. Gathering more data. Will report soon.

Outright bidding war between Dell and HP for 3Par. HP topped Dells bid, so Dell responded. Press releases were released. They continued to walk do the aisle. And then HP upped its bid. Currently at $1.8B and climbing. Thinking about HPs strategy, I wonder if they really want 3PAR or if they really want to deny Dell the company. And how much the latter is worth to HP. They have some competitive technology in their portfolio.

* New revision of #[scalableinformatics](http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23scalableinformatics) #jackrabbit JR4 machine is positively roaring. > 2GB/s sustained read/write on 1TB writes/reads [#](http://twitter.com/sijoe/statuses/22183531579) Powered by Twitter Tools

Normally would suggest going to the Lustre site for details, though it hasn’t rolled over yet. So look here for 1.8.4 download, and here for 2.0 download. The 2.0 GA release has a changelog which is sparse, but to be expected. The 1.8.4 GA release changelog is here.

Again, this is our 5th generation JackRabbit unit, sold as individual servers or in siCluster storage clusters. Baseline bonnie++ results. Remember, I am not a fan of using this as a test engine, as I’ve noted in the blog a few times. Very basic, very simple test. Machine has 144GB ram, so we need to write 288GB for the test. It is configured for streaming IO, not random IO. RAID6’s, not RAID0.

So we have a new generation (5th) JackRabbit in the lab, for a financial services customer. Have lots of similar machines out to bit for next generation sequencing (NGS), and many other things. This is the initial bring up test run. I think you might like these numbers. First off, configuration: RAID6 volumes. These are NOT RAID0. I want to emphasize this. Primary storage are SATA 2 drives at 7200 RPM.

… building what is arguably the fastest JR4 unit to date, for a customer in financial services. Those folks really seem to like us. I’ll update as soon as I can. Should be interesting (barring any issues). Will do some baseline speed trials, and if things look good, we’ll hit the accelerator hard and see what it can do.

Good article by Declan McCullagh at CNET. By all means, read it all, but here are some choice quotes: If you adopt a business overtly hostile tax and regulatory regime, such as here in Michigan, you are going to drive businesses away, and cause those that are here to rethink investment. In growth, in people, … I am still trying to wrap my brain around Obamacare, and what it means to us as a small company.

[ Microsoft hit by cloudy downtime in US Two-hour outage for some hosted services ](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/08/24/microsoft_bpos_us_outage/) One very important leg that cloud stands upon is “I can get to my data and applications no matter what” subject to the availability of networking and clients capable of reaching that data. Sort of like “I can drive to Traverse City, no matter what”, subject to the availability of fuel and passable roads between where ever you are and Traverse City.