Month: January 2017

A nice shout out in ComputerWeekly.com about @scalableinfo #HPC #storage

2017-01-25 by joe

See the article here. Surely though, widespread adoption is just a matter of time. With its PCIe connectivity, literally slotting in, NVMe offers the ability to push hyper-converged utility and scalability to wider sets of use cases than currently. There are some vendors that focus on their NVMe/hyper-converged products, such X-IO (Axellio), Scalable Informatics, and … Read moreA nice shout out in ComputerWeekly.com about @scalableinfo #HPC #storage

when you eliminate the impossible, what is left, no matter how improbable, is likely the answer

2017-01-25 by joe

This is a fun one. A customer has quite a collection of all-flash Unison units. A while ago, they asked us to turn on LLDP support for the units. It has some value for a number of scenarios. Later, they asked us to turn it off. So we removed the daemon. Unison ceased generating/consuming LLDP … Read morewhen you eliminate the impossible, what is left, no matter how improbable, is likely the answer

Virtualized infrastructure, with VM storage on software RAID + a rebuild == occasional VM pauses

2017-01-22 by joe

Not what I was hoping for. I may explain more of what I am doing later (less interesting than why I am doing it), but suffice it to say that I’ve got a machine I’ve turned into a VM/container box, so I can build something I need to build. This box has a large RAID6 … Read moreVirtualized infrastructure, with VM storage on software RAID + a rebuild == occasional VM pauses

A new #HPC project on github, nlytiq-base

2017-01-20 by joe

Another itch I’ve been wanting to scratch for a very long time. I had internal versions of a small version of this for a while, but I wasn’t happy with them. The makefiles were brittle. The builds, while automated, would fail, quite often, for obscure reasons. And I want a platform to build upon, to … Read moreA new #HPC project on github, nlytiq-base

There are real, and subtle differences between su and sudo

2017-01-19 by joe

Most of the time, sudo just works. Every now and then, it doesn’t. Most recently was with a build I am working on, where I got a “permission denied” error for creating a directory. The reason for this was non-obvious at first. You “are” superuser after all when you sudo, right? Aren’t you? Sort of. … Read moreThere are real, and subtle differences between su and sudo

Combine these things, and get a very difficult to understand customer service

2017-01-18 by joe

In the process of disconnecting a service we don’t need anymore. So I call their number. Obviously reroutes to a remote call center. One where english is not the primary language. I’m ok with this, but the person has a very thick and hard to understand accent. Their usage and idiom were not American, or … Read moreCombine these things, and get a very difficult to understand customer service

SSD/flash/memory shortage, day N+1

2017-01-16 by joe

There has been a huge demand of SSD/Flash/memory components from a number of end users. Sadly not the day jobs customers … but enough to deplete the market of supply. Watching basic economics at work is fascinating. Supply is highly constrained, while demand is rising. Couple that with a (mis)expectation of continuous falling prices across … Read moreSSD/flash/memory shortage, day N+1

A new (old) customer for the day job

2017-01-16 by joe

Our friends at MSU HPCC now are the proud owners of a very fast/high performance Unison Flash storage system, and a ZFS backed high performance Unison storage spinning disk unit. Installed first week of Jan 2017. As MSU is one of my alma mater institutions, I am quite happy about helping them out with this … Read moreA new (old) customer for the day job

Architecture matters, and yes Virginia, there are no silver bullets for performance

2017-01-16 by joe

Time and time again, the day job had been asked to discuss how the solutions are differentiated. Time and time again, we showed benchmarks on real workloads that show significant performance deltas. Not 2 or 3 sigma measurements. More often than not, 2x -> 10x better. Yet … yet … we were asked, again and … Read moreArchitecture matters, and yes Virginia, there are no silver bullets for performance

#Perl on the rise for #DevOps

2017-01-08 by joe

Note: I do quite a bit of development in Perl, and have my own biases, so please do take this into consideration. It is one of many languages I use, but it is by and large, my current go-to language. I’ll discuss below. According to TIOBE (yeah, I know), Perl usage is on the rise. … Read more#Perl on the rise for #DevOps