So here I am, toiling in the salt mines (just don’t tell my wife its not really that bad), trying to eek out a living selling, servicing, and supporting some insanely fast storage kit to a range of customers, when I hear that Instagram had sold for $1B. My first thought. What the 4K (phonetic, just don’t say it out loud) is Instagram? And what did it do that made it worth $1B?

… when I was at SGI … oh … 16 years ago or so, someone, for some reason sent me an email where they made some specious claims. I calmly pointed out to them where I caught their error, what the error was, and how they could fix it. They then proceeded to attack me in email, and started bugging me on my work phone. Later, after I had left SGI and started Scalable, someone had posted some rather poorly thought out discussion of something, and attacked me (again) for some rather idiotic reasoning.

I am starting to think so. Had a little discussion with someone I thought would be professional, who made some interesting claims, and didn’t quite like it when challenged. And it devolved from there. I guess it is funny to see someone try to explain stuff to me, who doesn’t quite know my background, or experience, or … I’ve heard from others who believe that LinkedIn is as complete a waste of time as Facebook.

Some idiots have taken our companies phone number, inserted it into their caller-id bits (seemingly with SIP phones), and have been harassing people. So we get frustrated people calling us, asking us if we called them. No we didn’t. I hate phone marketeers as much as everyone. This is really annoying. Can’t see any rational reason for this other than someone trying to steal the companies reputation.

One of our customers has become fed up with the issues they’ve run into on Gluster. Started about a year ago, with some odd outages in the 3.0.x system, and didn’t improve with 3.2.x … in some instances it got worse. RDMA support in 3.0.x was pretty good, there were other bugs (which were annoying). The migration to 3.2.x was rocky. Libraries left from 3.0.x were somehow picked up and some things just failed.

Have a customer with a hard problem. They need to handle very high data rate traffic, VPNs, and all manner of things. Imagine a GbE in (or more). They asked us to build a firewall that could handle this. Most of the appliance firewalls have some capability, but few will really survive a serious traffic onslaught. Most use very low power processors, on purpose, because most of the time the traffic isn’t intense.

ok, not really. Late last night, while benchmarking some alternative mechanisms to connect {MD,OS}S to their respective {MD,OS}T for a Lustre design we are proposing for an RFP, I decided to revisit SRP. I liked SRP in the past, it was a simple protocol, SCSI over RDMA. How could you go wrong with this? Well, I found out last night. I put our stack on a DeltaV connected with a 10GbE and QDR IB ports to our respective switches.

About the job prospects for your future, when you make the career and training choice to be a scientist. Or “If I knew then what I know now, I would have followed a different path”. I spent some time visiting my parents recently, and I groused to them that after ~7 years in grad school, I was, ostensibly, a PC technician. Yeah, I am running a profitable and growing company, making some of the fastest storage available.

… half open. [update] video [FLOWPLAYER=http://scalability.org/wp-content/videos/screencast_video.flv,480,315] I won’t show the fio output until I get the unit back and get some more testing in. Also, I’ve discovered something … I guess … depressing about fio, in that what it reports for performance isn’t necessarily what the storage subsystem sees. This isn’t just fio, its pretty much all tools that talk to the file/storage API at a high level. The low level actual results (you have to grab data from the OS reporting infrastructure to see this) differ, sometimes wildly, from the high level API results.

Spoke to lots of interesting people. Ran some benchmarks. Will talk about those next post. Found hits on the corporate site from a Yahoo stock board. Ok, that was interesting. Had a number of great conversations … before, during, and after the show. I am still in NY, working on a siCluster at a data center.