So we are on the long march to #SC11 (we are booth 4101, please do stop by!). Figuring out the final bits of the booth content. Working on presentations. Hoping we will have enough disks for the demos I am working on putting together. Then the fun stuff. The mugs: Doug and I had fun with these. Aren’t giving them out to everyone … you have to really cozy up to us for one … and we will have a Keurig coffee/tea maker there so we can fill em.

… but I do know that the analysis has some … er … flaws. Yeah. Flaws. I’ll ignore their sample size issue for the moment (though it does go to the size of their error bars … I hope they appreciate the inverse functional relationship between these two). Take two sets of data with error bars. Put them down on the same graph. The data from each set overlaps within the error bars of the other set.

We run (as you might imagine) lots of benchmarks. We do lots of system tuning. We start with null hypotheses and work from there. Sometimes you can call that the baseline expected measurements. Your call on what you want to call it. But a measurement implicitly implies a comparison to a known quantity. In the case of the baseline or null hypothesis, you measure what you should believe to be a reasonable configuration, the way it would be used.

So I started playing with Iris on my android phone. Not because of Siri envy, but because I heard it was … er … interesting. I started out with the usual … Me: “What is the airspeed of an unladen swallow” Iris: 28 miles per hour Ok, that was interesting. Then I asked a few other fact based questions, should be easy to answer. Finally, I wanted to see if there was some humor in what it might say (not that Iris has a personality that wishes to express humor, but possibly on the part of its programmers, or in the search results).

So we have our site at a nice small light industrial site. Good pricing, reasonable location. Been here 3+ years. The landlord is about to lose the property to either the bank due to their missing paying their mortgage, or the state, because they haven’t paid property taxes. Oh, and they haven’t paid water or trash collection bills. Found out about all of this last week when we were in NJ installing a cluster.

Imagine you have a fixed sized resource. Imagine you can completely consume that resource from 1 client. Now make this two clients, and completely consume the resource. Which is of fixed size. Each client will get 1/2 (on average) of the resource. Now make this four clients, and completely consume the resource. Which is of fixed size. Each client will get 1/4 (on average) of the resource. Don’tcha just love that anti-scaling behavior?

Most folks, when they build Fibre Channel systems, aren’t assuming a very high IOP rate. No, really. Each channel of an FC8 connection is about 1GB/s, which with 4k operations (neglecting overheads and other things), would give you about 256k IOPs. To date, most of these units have been connected to spinning disks, which, individually might max out at 300 IOPs. So from their design perspective, you could put about 874 disks per connection, assuming a perfect configuration, to max out the data channel.

If you haven’t seen the meme running around /. and other places, its that the BEST paper(s) “confirm” (note the scare quotes) AGW. The only problem with this is that its not true. They confirm that GW (climate change) is real (and I am not sure anyone disputes that). Its the “A” part that is the issue. Its been happening for billions of years. Takes some special sort of (not to mention massive amounts of) hubris to elevate a recent planetary occupant to a special status.

Wow … After getting back from the UK and Sweden, a whole slew of orders came in from several existing and new customers. And booth prep (remember, we are in 4101, stop by and say hello!). And logistics … and support … and box tuning (in house, at customer sites, …) and quoting, and performance monitoring/analysis for several customers (including one where strace seems to have missed child IO processes …).

… when you prepare a unit for benchmarking … mebbe … mebbe … its not such a good idea to configure it in … I dunno … super-conservative mode which … er … effectively nukes most of the performance? Mebbe? Maybe normal default config mode … which is pretty much what we should have done … is whats needed? FWIW: for the unit we are bringing to #SC11, 2 initiators over 10GbE iSCSI were running this baby to 850+k IOPs, 4k block random read write (30% mix on write, mostly read) sustained for an hour for well over 100GB of data (far far larger than internal caches).