Previous version of our JR5 unit, in the lab as a test bed for customers. Testing firmware and driver updates, among other things. Simple bonnie++ 1.96 run. You know I am not a huge fan of this as a load generator, or as a benchmark. Regardless, here is the output: [root@jr5-lab ~]# bonnie++ -u root -d /data -s 144g:1024k -f Using uid:0, gid:0. Writing intelligently...done Rewriting... done Reading intelligently...done start 'em.

Yeah, I have one of those in front of me now. The requirements are for all intents and purposes, impossible to simultaneously satisfy. Q&A; response from customer suggests that they may be willing to compromise some aspects, but not enough to actually satisfy their request. Sort of like “I want 1 PB … for free, with free lifetime 24x7 support, … , infinite bandwidth, infinite snapshots, infinite IOPs. And I want a pony.

Cloud computing is driving a disruptive change through a number of market places. It started long before virtualization, but virtualization really enabled much of what we have now. Remember, at the end of the day, the entire process is economic in nature. Cost per cycle does matter. When a vendor sells hardware, they are selling all the cycles of that hardware over the usable lifetime of the hardware. They push the atoms at the customer, and let the customer manage the economics of utilization.

Henry Newman, CEO/CTO of Instrumental, has a great article on Enterprise Storage Forum. Remember, what we call the storage bandwidth wall, e.g. the time in seconds to read/write your disk, is your capacity divided by your bandwidth to read/write that capacity. Its a height, measured in seconds, to take one pass through your data. If you can read/write at 1GB/s and have 1TB of data, your wall height is 1000GB/(1 GB/s) = 1000s.

I told you I was an addict. Problem statement is here. And you want to do it in the minimum number of characters (e.g. golf strokes) in your programming language. They give an example matrix, and their result (which is correct). So … what can you do for this? I used two languages: Octave/Matlab and Perl. The former is more of a ‘modeling’ language with formal programming bits atop it, and the latter is a classical programming language, quite notorious for its ability to be terse.

JR4 units with up to 72 TB per 4U, at our nice sustained 2+ GB/s data rates. JR5 units with up to 144 TB per 5U at 2.5+ GB/s data rates. You can order our systems with these units. Thats 720TB/rack of JR4’s with 20+ GB/s sustained, or 1152TB per rack of JR5’s with 20 GB/s sustained. Built into our siCluster units, they represent some of the fastest and most cost effective hardware to build storage, storage clusters, storage clouds, and so on.

This took guts. The (new) CEO of Nokia noting that there are issues going forward. Nokia has had great handsets. I still recall with great fondness, the E61 that I left in a taxi somewhere in London after visiting a customer … But Nokia hasn’t innovated in a meaningful way, hasn’t adapted well to the rapid change in market conditions. Like RIM, their phones are competent, excellent phones. Unlike Apple and Google/Android, their phones don’t have a great user experience.

From xkcd Heh … If you don’t know what a complex conjugate is, read this. Basically, if I have a function Ψ(x) which has a “real” part ψr(x) and an imaginary part ψi(x), with the ψ’s being real valued functions, so Ψ(x) = ψr(x) +iψi(x)), then multiplying Ψ(x) by its complex conjugate (Ψ(x) = ψr(x) - i*ψi(x) , where i =√(-1) ) yields: (ψr(x) + i*ψi(x)) * (ψr(x) - i*ψi(x))

[update] a bug in my reasoning (thanks Peter!) a Perl Golf addict. Not a recovering addict, but one that is active. What is Perl Golf? Well, as in real golf, you try to provide the minimal number of steps to a solution. In this case, you are to solve the specific puzzle. Detractors of Perl often make snarky comments about Perl’s equivalency to random line noise and other such nonesense. Sure … if it makes you feel good to say that … I am a fan of terse languages, I wrote programs (if you could call them that) in APL … a while ago.

Had some fun today with our SCSI target. Its a very nice system, very powerful. Not terribly easy to use. But it works well. We have tools we developed around it to make it easy to use. Creating iSCSI targets works nicely with our target code. It builds the target, sets up the infrastructure. Done with thin provisioning, its pretty fast and mostly painless. Well, it was until we discovered that the stack, while including /etc/initiators.