I had an inkling that this might come to be. Compellent makes filer heads that connect to storage arrays on the back end. Units are thin provisioned with lots of tiering and migration bits built in. Compellent isn’t an HPC play. Really they are more an enterprise-y type of play. I do know a few Compellent people (hi Russ!), and the products will fill a hole in the Dell line. However, there are still other holes to fill, so I expect Dell to continue down its M&A; path.

Hit a corner case that resulted in a strange DB entry. Fixing that, and the installation initrd, and the initramfs/initrd build. Expect to release tomorrow.

We just updated our company internet connection. About 3.5x better download speed, about 6x better upload speed. Its on a multi-wan router, with second different technology path being slower and less expensive, but with a 5 second cutover. Something bad happens to one path, the other takes over. This happens seamlessly, most users won’t notice this as DNS is roundrobin’ed. This said, our multi-wan router is now a bottleneck. I’ve been looking at replacing it with either a faster appliance machine based multi-wan router, or a small Delta-V unit with enough NICs.

That was annoying. The update/upgrade path effectively wrote over the old configs without telling me. Snapshot script is up, and we will set up for weekly snapshots, and then deletion of the same after 12 weeks. Did I mention that this was annoying? On another note, we’ve had requests to refine/update the documentation, and we are doing that now. This is a work in progress, always will be, but we expect the docs to get much better in short order.

We updated the documentation server last week, and the wiki software, updated by the folks who write it, broke. I’ll try a few more things to fix it tomorrow/friday, but at some point I have to question my choice of wiki software. If the open source version breaks like this with a simple yum update, I don’t have much faith that the closed source variant with more features won’t break. So I am looking into foundation/large group led efforts.

Was in Dallas, College Station, and then Austin. I am starting to get concerned that hosting providers may not have the capability to work on machines beyond the level of popping out failed disks and replacing them. They appear to not be able to provide the level of service that our customer assured us that they could provide. Went down there and saw some terrible things done to some power connectors.

A few more things to do … we need a “make clean” like thing, and maybe a “make prepare” like thing. And we need to trigger a mkinitrd at the end when requested. Major things are the init.d script, but all it does is call a Yeah, we are trying to make this really simple. Really really simple. And make sure it works. Really works. Here is output with the –generate and –debug options.

I saw this today linked from DrudgeReport. In it we see a graph of auto company financing arms borrowing from the US Federal reserve. These are lending institutions. During the credit crisis (and I’ll argue now as well), credit dried up. Banks wouldn’t loan money. We ran into this ourselves a number of times. Required some creative action on our part. Not everyone was so lucky. But we are small, and not impacting a big part of the economy.

Last year around this time, I wrote a long set of posts on HPC in the first decade of the millenium. Posts start here (there are 7). I am gathering some of my thoughts together for an article. Its been an interesting year, with changes coming in both continuous and discontinuous (creative destructive) manners. We do live in interesting times, and I’ll try to detail what directions I see us going in.

This past week, I looked over a set of proposals from some academic groups. One of these proposals was attempting to budget for a particular design. What I noticed here was a tendency to do something … well … that badly misstates actual real costs of things, and substitutes them with something easy to find without any regard for the actual real costs of implementing the service. At the end of the day, IT is about providing processing, storage, and data interchange in the service of a task that can make effective use of the resources.