Tonight was/is Beobash. ?First time I stopped drinking the beer, and started buying the beer. ?Was very nice, but we were (collectively and individually) exhausted. ?Snapped a few pics. ?Will try to have them up tomorrow. ?Very nice venue. ?Very good crowd. Booth (#SC11 booth 4101) is up. ?Amazingly, everything seems to be working. ?Even missed shipping a few things (yes, yes we did), and for the most part, was able to fix that.

Somewhere over Montana, around Helena. ?Bumpy weather up ahead. ?Finished PR v1 for siFlash, Doug is editing. ?Will get this out tomorrow at a few venues (we’ve promised one specific one will be first). Working on the presentations for the booth. ?siFlash intro, the whole arc with big data, siCluster and our JackRabbit and DeltaV point storage units, and Tiburon. ?And the use cases presentation. ?Didn’t have time to get permission to get company name usage permission (e.

Finally got this out the door. There were some issues in doing so … our CRM tool seemed to get brain-freeze. Test emails worked fine. But the real ones? Nah … fuggedaboutit. So here it is, in all its glory. We try our best (really) not to spam. I don’t like it and I know our customers don’t like it. Storage Solutions As a high performance big data storage specialist, Scalable Informatics is well positioned to provide your company with fast, effective, dependable, and cost-effective storage solutions.

Ok. Lets call this an absolutely wild ride so far. I mean, its freaking insane. I cannot remember working so hard and so fast. First off Tiburon, our cluster software package (designed mostly for HPC Storage, and cluster like things) has been an insanely awesome trouper. It just works. And I mean that in a jaw dropping manner. It just freaking works. Part of it may be due to the simplicity of the thing.

The object of my attention this morning is dracut, the replacement for the venerable mkinitrd in the RHEL/Fedora lines. Dracut has great promise, in that it is being built as a construction kit for initial ramdisk for booting Linux. Unfortunately, like mkinitrd, it has a number of … er … failures. Happily it has a concept of an shell you can drop into if things go pear shaped. mkinitrd generates initrd’s that will often simply kernel panic with no way to debug.

Got a mess-of-data. Whole load of it. Need to analyze it. Again and again and again. Don’t want to cut n paste. Or write too much code. Need to automate plot generation. This reminded me of my thesis many (cough cough) years ago. I used a Makefile to automate driving TeX. And image formatting, and final document assembly. Yes, to write my thesis, I typed “make”. Sure enough, same type of process, different decade (cough millennium).

We setup a nice Ubuntu cluster for a customer in the financial services world recently. They wanted something that was similar enough to what they knew, and was as close to painless for them to use as possible. Make it like a Ubuntu system. And make it easy to manage. Real easy. The issue was and is, pretty much none of the major cluster distros really support Ubuntu. A few have some hacks to enable some level of support.

I’m gonna need another vacation soon. This is nuts. Got a bunch of machines going out to the UK next week, a set of SSDs off to Sweden, machines to Texas, and California. New orders from the east coast (a number of repeat customers). Oh … and trying to get our demo systems built, and ready, and the demos up. And get the presentations together. And the PR done. And the investment thingy (gotta nudge the lawyer again, really wanted to announce this by SC11).

[the guru sits down and starts typing with nonchalance] Complex software stacks lead to complex and often opaque failure modes. [slight bow, stands up, leaves room] Infiniband …. WHY WHY WHY WHY WHY … (grumble)

From the register … This is interesting, as LSI appears to be girding for the next gen in storage. Flash (the PCIe variant) and SSD (the disk channel variant) are on the rise, and things that add value in that chain will be quite interesting acquisitions. We work closely with Virident, and it wouldn’t surprise me if they, or Texas Memory Systems were acquired by a larger entity. This isn’t consolidation in the classical sense, this is girding for future battle.