[disclosure note: this is our space, so we have definite opinions on this] This was liable to be the only possibly path for Bluearc to continue outside of an IPO. The latter would probably not have gone well. They raised their last round of capital a year ago. Reading what I wrote then, it was fairly prescient. Since that was written, EMC acquired Isilon, Netapp acquired LSI’s Enginio and other products, Dell grabbed Compellent (different market), HP grabbed 3Par.

Last week, Gaussian Inc. started publicly talking about its GPU port of its Gaussian code. This is as conservative a development company as you will find. I know many other companies with ports (I won’t violate NDAs, which I’ve signed with a number of folks who post/comment here, and who read these … feel free to post a note/link to your accelerated app). We’ve seen the early adopters come and stay.

Just got an email from a vendor of workplace notices that reads I won’t use the exact verbiage I think is appropriate for this. So we’ve got an economy that’s struggling (well, we can euphemistically call it struggling), we have small businesses looking with great unease at future cost obligations due to new rules and regulations (one of which has been ruled unconstitutional, but the administration is pushing ahead on it anyway) … and the current administration is seeking to make sure that my companies employees know that they can organize, that I have to tell them this, and that its unfair if I don’t.

This is sad. I am not sure precisely who is beclowning themselves, but we see something that amounts to an ad hominem attack on a pair of researchers, who had the temerity to publish something that disagreed with the orthodoxy. Along the way, they are described as “uncareful” and “serial error” creators. Their paper has been ripped to shreds in blogs, and by a particular aspect of the media, as well as by various members of the orthodoxy.

икониThe day job uses lots of SSDs as well as disks in various of our products. We rely upon internal testing and external benchmarks (which tend to be poor at best, but a very rough zeroth order test) to select them. We had a pair of Intel 510 SSD units in for a customer, and they performed … just meh … not all that exceptional. Better than our OS drives, but not as good as the higher end SSDs.

иконографияSome Nehalem and Westmere units have … er … interesting unintended features … yeah, thats the politically correct way to say it. We like Intel and their products (and we’ve liked AMD in the past and their products). But we gotta call this one. As you watch dstat output, you see these occasional … hangs … for a few seconds. As if someone is monkeying with the clock. And that is, to a degree what appears to be happening.

This is a 5U 108TB (0.1 PB) usable high performance tightly coupled storage unit we are shipping to a customer this week. This is a spinning rust machine. We’ve been busy little beavers. Tuning, tweaking. And tuning. And tweaking. Did I mention the tuning and tweaking? Run status group 0 (all jobs): WRITE: io=196236MB, aggrb=4155.7MB/s, minb=4255.4MB/s, maxb=4255.4MB/s, mint=47222msec, maxt=47222msec Oh. My. But … it gets … better. Run status group 0 (all jobs): READ: io=196236MB, aggrb=5128.

A knob is something you can turn, in theory, to effect a change in output condition. In my business, I have a few knobs I can turn for customers to help them. We can be quite creative in this. We are often asked to help in cases where other companies would just start blinking rapidly. I like doing this. I really do enjoy working with customers and helping them solve their hard problems.

икони на светциWhats different about this one? Its ours, not space in someone else’s. Gives us more freedom, but also greater responsibility. One of the harder things to do is to figure out what to bring and show, and what to leave in the lab. Shipping stuff to the floor is expensive, time consuming, and a royal pain in the rear. Leaving it in the lab, and leveraging the network (not the wireless … oh god that was horrible last year) is probably a better option.

Took us long enough, but fundamentally, you have to work on getting the right team together. Someone I’ve known and respected for quite some time became available. I’ve been saying for a while we need someone just like him. So I didn’t miss the opportunity. Looking forward to reaching more customers and partners with him on board. More later …