Month: January 2008

Robin at Storagemojo tears into the latest buzzword-enabled marketing phrase, cloud computing. Robin’s thesis is that there are impediments to moving to the cloud, those being bandwidth and the “non-magic” nature of Google’s infrastructure.
I don’t agree with his ascribing blame for the bandwidth issue to Cisco. It really is not their issue. Bandwidth providers in the US are the primary culprit … we have been behind the curve for quite some time in terms of bandwidth delivered to business/homes. The reason for this is the same as the reason for the RIAA suits against their end user base … protecting a business model and existing investment by avoiding newer technology that would cause significant capital expenditure.

Read moreComputing in the clouds …

I am working … no … struggling to “build” OFED 1.2.5.4 for our systems. OFED, for those who are not aware, is the bolus of drivers/infrastructure to support infiniband. I won’t get into the IB vs 10 GbE debate here, I see room for both technologies.
There is a catch. The people who develop OFED have made specific choices that make it, generally speaking, extraordinarily hard to debug incorrect builds of OFED, as they have integrated the build process into the packaging process using RPM. It is, as far as I am aware, simply not possible to separate the two.

Read moreThe need to keep building and packaging as separate operations

Updated a few things (bios) that I needed to. Reran tests. Remember, this is a sub $10,000 box (and it will do file and block IO … simultaneously if needed). Running RAID6 with one hot spare.

root@jr1:~# ./simple-read.bash
start at Wed Jan 23 13:49:54 EST 2008
10000+0 records in
10000+0 records out
1342177280000 bytes (1.3 TB) copied, \
1764.12 seconds, 761 MB/s
stop at Wed Jan 23 14:19:18 EST 2008

and its companion

root@jr1:~# ./simple-write.bash
start at Wed Jan 23 13:13:48 EST 2008
10000+0 records in
10000+0 records out
1342177280000 bytes (1.3 TB) copied, \
1800.36 seconds, 746 MB/s
stop at Wed Jan 23 13:43:48 EST 2008

The scripts (simple_[read|write].bash) are here:

Read moremore JackRabbit testing

this person at Interop news goes into, in depth. The business person in me had difficulty understanding the acquisition. Sun didn’t have a missing technological niche the MySQL filled. MySQL had all the standard problems of growing a business, compounded by the Open source revenue model, which effectively eliminates distribution/redistribution revenues.
There are many commercial outfits likely skirting the edge of legitimacy using MySQL in their shipping supported closed source products. They skirt the issue by claiming that the OS ships with the distro, so they don’t care, and won’t buy a commercial license. Why should they, its free … right?
Well, no. And this is one of the great unsolved issues in open source business models. You effectively foreclose redistribution revenue. So how can you recover revenue for your efforts and pay your ongoing costs … like people’s salaries … never mind making a profit, which the shareholders/owners really would like you to do?

Read moreA question I touched on briefly …

Built a new one for testing in the lab, though it looks like it may have a happy home elsewhere (along with some of its brethren) quite soon.
Previously, for our huge write test case, we had sustained about 612 MB/s way way outside cache for our 1.3 TB write. That was after the unit had finished building the array, and been quiesced.
We are about 88% built, the array is still cranking, and I wanted to see what it could do with a few bits tied behind its back. Note that the rebuild is getting 4:1 of the RAID controller CPU.

Read moreAnother day, another JackRabbit …

About two years ago, we were “invited” to pitch our business and plans to a local VC event. This was good, we were in the hunt for capital, and getting in front of lots of VC’s isn’t a bad idea. Well the “invited” part is in scare quotes, we had to compete with our executive summary. Ok, so we made it past the initial “competition” (hmmm notice the scare quotes).
We had to prepare our slides, our talks and some documents. No problem, we had most of them done anyway. Had some tweaking to do, practice, get feedback.
Not an issue, right? No, really not.
But lets put this aside for a moment.

Read moreYou live, you learn, hopefully you don't make the same mistake twice …

and it isn’t necessarily all positive. Well, ok, not on the acquisition, but on the current state of affairs prior to the acquisition. This is the interesting aspect of this. Sun is being viewed as a way to save MySQL.
Don MacAskill of smugmug has some interesting comments. Quoting Don:

Read moreFeedback is starting to emerge on the Sun|MySQL front