(with apologies to Queen) Looks like Oracle/IBM have parted ways on Solaris. None of this bodes well for Solaris market share. If Oracle wants a private OS to run for Oracle’s apps, to compel people to buy its hardware/OS to run, then, well, it might pursue a strategy like this. Or maybe IBM demanded onerous terms. Or … Ok, we don’t know. But that agreement is coming to an end. Which suggests that Oracle isn’t interested in saving it.

Results from our baseline tests of our Delta-V unit is showing a sustained write speed north of 850 MB/s, and a sustained read speed north of 1 GB/s. I compare these numbers to some of our competitiors systems, and note that these are a bit higher than what we have seen reported from them in realistic configurations. These systems are slated to be iSCSI targets for the customer who bought them.

spent the weekend working on our DeltaV 4 unit, tuning it a bit. Previous write numbers were a bit lower than I liked. So we adjusted some of the configuration a little. This is what resulted (old write numbers were in the 450MB/s region for this test) Run status group 0 (all jobs): WRITE: io=31,748MB, aggrb=788MB/s, minb=807MB/s, maxb=807MB/s, mint=40264msec, maxt=40264msec This is way outside system cache. Its also faster than many of the hardware raid vendors machines in this size class, and far more cost effective.

… why are we still programming them with serial languages? And more to the point, why are these language compilers so terrible at converting serial code to parallel code? No, seriously … I know there are several constraints on the semantics of the serial language code processing. Debugging and exceptions for one … you wouldn’t want to signal a floating point exception in code that had nothing to do with the FPE in the first place.

Ok, well, maybe. This is about text editors, not political affiliations by the way. I’ve been using nedit for a while. I had just switched to it when I started working on my thesis … er … a while ago. It was nice, as the same editor worked nicely on Irix and OS/2. My thesis was written in TeX (and yes, it was assembled with a Makefile), nedit was a great editor for this … It was a terrific editor for Fortran programming, and not bad for C, Perl, C++, … But … as with all things … it is showing its age.

No … seriously … not. I spent the 2.5 of the last 4 days in hospital, and yesterday, had to go to the ER to deal with complications and some fairly incredible amounts of pain. I had to postpone phone calls, a trip to Chicago, etc. Not happy about this. And in the course of this, I learned I had yet another stone on the right. Let me reiterate. Toradol is your friend if you are in this way.

At the day job, we have another to finish building today, and then build the RAID. This is the 3rd unit of the new generation of Delta-V’s, and they are generally showing better overall performance than the older versions. Delta-V’s are cost optimized storage platforms, suitable for block and file storage targets, as well as very cost effective cluster storage platforms. You do need good performance on your storage devices … especially as the size of storage grows.

i’d like to file a bug report on my biochemistry … There is something not quite right about getting another stone so quickly Well at least I know what happens next. If you are ever in this situation yourself remember Toradol is your friend. Well hopefully this one will go easier than the previous.

So SSDs are upon us with a vengeance. No one is actively predicting the death of spinning rust … yet. But its in the back of many folks minds, even if they aren’t saying it now. Similar to the death of tape. Yeah, I know, its still around. Call that the long tail. Sequential storage mechanisms are going the way of the dodo bird. The issues everyone worries about are cost per data volume, and speed of access/recovery, not to mention longevity.

There is a back story on this. Basically writing documentation takes a while, and when it changes, you have to update many things. I personally find this task painful … in the sense of its hard to make small changes the way most documentation works. In addition, for years, we’ve been wanting to go “all electronic”. Paper and printed documentation gets lost or destroyed, you have to regenerate it … and oh, as noted above, its hard to make small changes.