OpenSolaris future is very much in doubt. There is a shelf life on this product, it expires 16-August-2010, unless Oracle decides to communicate actively with the project. I had suggested this previously, that OpenSolaris is likely under serious review by Oracle. What possible business model could they have for OpenSolaris to be accretive to Oracle’s bottom line, when they give it away, and others get support revenue from it? Well there are several possible, but they involve some changes to licensing, and support models.

As noted in the previous post, the EC2 CC1 bit is likely to be game changing for commercial users. The market is undergoing one of its transformations, but I am seeing two different, actually complementary trends, occurring at the same time. When these changes have happened in the past, a process of creative destruction has occurred. That is, something old was destroyed, and in the process, something new flourished. The changes driving this market in the past has been the cost per computing cycle, and the up-front purchase/lease costs.

Amazon announced the EC2 availability for HPC users. As per the article on InsideHPC, previous incarnations of EC2 didn’t really work well for low latency jobs or large runs. They still have a storage issue (e.g. storage performance and parallel IO), that we’d be happy to help with. Why is this potentially game changing for the market? A number of reasons. You can exploit a complete pay-as-you-go view for whatever you want to boot up (minus accelerators).

The US Cyber command, a new … er … entity in the US that, er … will protect us … somehow … has an interesting seal. On that seal is a “cipher” of some sort. Well that “cipher”, 9ec4c12949a4f31474f299058ce2b22a appears around the inner ring of the seal. Wired noticed this and had a contest to de-cipher it. The Register noticed this, and, as all deep techies might say, ya know, it looks a heckuva lot like an md5 hash of something.

Chalk this up to “you knew this would happen”. NetApp is going after ZFS storage vendors, folks who use ZFS in their products, as infringing upon NetApp patents. Yes Virginia, this includes open source vendors. Anyone wanna take bets as to whether or not the license fees will be “set low”? I have my doubts. ZFS directly impacts NetApp’s business model. It is unlikely that they will use RAND pricing. Well … their version of “reasonable” may not mean the same thing as others version of “reasonable”.

I know … I know … 1% isn’t much of the top500. But its progress. This is for siCluster storage clusters … not the computing cluster portion. None in the top 10, but we are working on it.

EMC is … um … gently nudging … with great force … customers off of atmos. One of the points we talk about with our customers is the concept of freedom from bricking in a physical sense. That is, our hardware and software stack will let you keep on using it and having it supported and supportable, even if we decide to turn the company into something unrelated to HPC and storage.

While EMC is not really an HPC player in a significant sense, business analytics and informatics is definitely an HPC process. Greenplum has a modified version of Postgresql that is parallelized quite well. And they have been using it to target specific market segments inhabited by Teradata and others. So along comes EMC and snaps them up. There are probably several good and interesting reasons for this. One that hasn’t escaped me is that EMC sees many of its partners in the world creating vertically integrated offerings.

For our readers outside the US, the 4th of July is our Independence day. It has become terribly commercialized. Its meaning has been subjugated to other imperatives. I personally find this sad, as the freedoms we enjoy here in the US are sadly not enjoyed everywhere … and the meaning of this day in our history is being diluted. Our freedoms come at a cost, sometimes a terrible one. We ought to remember this on our day of independence.

link to original See more funny videos and funny pictures at CollegeHumor.