She’s dead Jim. OpenSolaris is officially no more. From the memo, I don’t expect to see ZFS outside of Solaris any time soon. Which, in light of the development of btrfs and ceph (among others) will matter less and less over time. [update] oh yeah … in my rush to get this up, I used “insert” and not “include”. So a quick $title =~ s/insert/include/g ; and it makes more sense.

Oracle is now going after Java centric products, specifically starting with Google. Java itself has largely failed as a write once run anywhere platform … it has always been a (not terribly good) solution in search of a (narrow) problem niche, trying to pretend to be a wide scale solution to all problems everywhere. And in that, it fails, miserably. There are two very painful aspects of web based applications I deal with on a daily basis.

[zUPDATE]: zOMG its like … ya know … I made a typo and hit the wrong load …. nodmraid works fine (along with some brokenmodule=… magic). As Emily Litella would say, never mind. This one is (again) causing me to pull some of my rapidly disappearing hair out of my head. We don’t do fakeRAID. For many reasons. We have a vanishingly small interest in dm*. We want to turn it off.

If you asked me years ago, I would have said, yes, of course it did. Now I am having second thoughts. Our processors have 4, 6, 8, 12 cores, and soon more like 16 and up. All sharing a set of pipes to RAM. Programming these can be done either with a distributed memory interface like MPI, or a much simpler interface like OpenMP. Vector processors ala GPU, Knights Ferry/Bridge are coming out which are little more than massive numbers of PEs and shared memory.

I argue that clouds are v3.0 of the original idea, ASP. ASP provided a remote hardware/software environment to run your apps. It didn’t have the benefit of virtualization, standard stacks like LAMP, etc. Plus it had high costs to get started. It was destined/doomed to fail. ASP v2.0 came about with “grids”. They were the buzzword for a while, and sought to provide a “utility computing” (remember that) model? Provide a platform, make access easy, and they will come.

Ok, raise your hand if you are using RAID as a backup. No, seriously. Those with your hands up … have you ever lost data? Want to? Keep using RAID as a backup. I don’t mean disk to disk backup. I mean not using a backup when you have a RAID. The RAID is your backup. What is the cost to replace all the material you have created over time stored on that RAID?

I like what we do, we are pretty good at it. Every now and then though, we have some …er … more interesting moments. Have a customer now who, for the past several invoices, has required us to engage legal counsel to get them to pay. This is ridiculous … I’ve thought of naming and shaming them, but its not worth it. Firing them as a customer is what the business books recommend.

I’ve been a strong proponent of real security … not security theatre … since I saw what crackers will do to unwitting customers. Most of the exploits I’ve seen over the past several years has been due to a very weak point of entry, coupled with some keylogger technology. I’ve watched otherwise secure Linux clusters be compromised easily, when a grad student running windows happily typed the root password sshing in.

A few weeks ago, I had a meeting in Chicago. Well, I would have had the meeting, had I not had a really bad kidney stone attack that week. Won’t get into that, other than to note that it hurt badly, and I wound up in a hospital and ER for ~3.5 days. Released that thursday, I had been scheduled to drive to Chicago that night. Given how saturated I was with pain meds, I didn’t think this was the wisest of ideas.

You knew something like this could happen … but probably, like most others, you never thought it really would. Unfortunately,it appears to have happened. The technologies in Oracle’s HPC quiver include SGE (aka GridEngine), Lustre, and several others. Lustre really doesn’t have use cases outside of HPC storage. The SGE product largely doesn’t have use cases outside of HPC (though you could use it in some fairly creative ways). We have customers with business dependencies on SGE.