About 6 years ago, I wrote this, about a benchmark test that did a 2TB write in 73s or so, on pure spinning disk. That result was just so far out there, compared to pretty much anything else available, in terms of performance density (single rack of storage units). The hardware was Scalable Informatics Unison storage, designed to be an IO monster in all respects. It was. Way ahead of its time.

Or as House MD may have put it So there you are, working on a system with a group, when you realize that something is out of kilter. And you think to yourself … It’s not DNS There is a no way it’s DNS It was DNS So your team works on resolving the issue. And the tooling they use … the tooling. Is from the late 80s/early 90s. There are so many … better … easier to use … tools.

On 1-March-2020, I wrote this article. In it I argued that the risk benefit/reward equations have been thrown out of kilter by the pandemic. Or maybe, rather than thrown out of kilter, maybe they are reverting to a more natural state, where risks that have been previously discounted, are now showing their true (or more nearly true) values. A former SGI colleague, and now HBS professor, Willy Shih, wrote a great article on how management might wish to adapt to this reconfiguration of risk strength/value.