Some updates coming soon

I should have something interesting to talk about over the next two weeks, though a summary of this is Scalable Informatics is undergoing a transformation. The exact form of this transformation is still being determined. In any case, I am no longer at Scalable. Some items of note in recent weeks.

1. M&A;: Nimble was purchased by HPE. Not sure of the specifics of “why”, other than HPE didn’t have much in this space. HPE also tends to destroy what it buys (either accidentally by rolling over it, ala ibrix, or on purpose). Simplivity was also purchased by HPE. This gets them a HC stack. But … same comment as above. Intel has been on an acquisition tear. Buying folks to try to get into driverless cars, defeat NVidia, etc.
2. scaling back: DSSD was killed. NVMe over Fabrics. SAN for NVMe. At first I thought this was a good idea. I no longer think this. SANs are generally terrible ideas, a 1990s/2000s architecture with a number of critical assumptions that have not been true for a while (at least a decade) now.
3. government budgets: Scaling back across the board, apart from defense. See this link for more. Some are yelling that the sky is falling. Others realize that this is not true, but more correctly understand that fiscal restraint now, while painful, will prevent far harder austerity in the future. Though there are those whom are turning this hard economic reality into a political fight (and they shouldn’t, but they are).
4. The economy is looking up in the US. This seems to be correlated with the election (which, I am still trying to understand). Real hiring, not the faux version we saw over the last 8 years, is on a tear. There are reductions in U6 (aka the real unemployment numbers). This is, surprising, but positive.