So the fine folks at Adobe have decided to yank the beta for 10.1 flash player for 64 bit Linux. And in a Kafkaesque manner, have suggested discussing this in the forum … which they marked as “read only”. Umm …. are they trying, purposely, to lend credence to Steve Jobs' points about closed technologies that are bug ridden? This project is being closed apparently due to a zero day hard-to-fix exploit … based upon a supposition that the recent flash exploits had been patched on some platforms.

An interesting post in computer world UK on why open source companies, and Redhat in particular are not larger. The raison d’etre for open source in business is an effective reduction in costs. The increase in quality over some of the closed source alternatives is also very attractive. Increased quality lowers costs. Of course, not all open source is better … witness the changes Ubuntu has made in their NVidia support, opting for the lower quality nouveau driver as compared to the very good NVidia driver.

Provider of a “cloud NAS” (getting to be a crowded market), and then doing strategy switching … hmmm. The Register has the story. Sounds like they tried to grab one of our mantras, apparently unsuccessfully. I am not sure if they are a competitor, we’ve never run into them. The register piece notes the crowded NAS landscape, but doesn’t seem to be looking at the cluster storage landscape which, I’d argue, was more of the parascale play.

This is interesting at some level, as it is ext3 with snapshots. It is also not as interesting as it is based on … ext3 … which isn’t exactly a high performance file system. Not to mention the 8TB limit on volumes, and 2TB on files. Haven’t seen customers run into the latter, have seen them run into the former. Head first, and hard. I’d argue that this capability would be better merged with ext4, though as I understand it, Ted T’so isn’t quite interested at this point.

I’ve written here in the past about this. I have concerns as we have multiple customers using Lustre, and the official roadmap for support/releases for Lustre is anything but assuring. Moreover, it completely forecloses upon independent appliance makers using Lustre without blessing from a competitive/engaged Oracle … it is left to the reader to decide whether this will or will not happen. As I had noted before, this throws a wrench in the works of the smaller fry like Terascala.

It appears that this is in process … no, not simply the ZFS on FUSE, but a full fledged kernel subsystem. This is interesting. ZFS is of course, the Sun file system which has had an altogether ridiculous amount of hype, while having a modest set of nice features. The Solaris and OpenSolaris was released under was not compatible with GPL, hence many people considered this OSino (Open Source in name only), as it was not legally possible to intermix the code between the largest GPL project (Linux) and the OpenSolaris code base.

Well, this link from 2 weeks ago in The Reg claims this. If this is the case, and I have no reason to doubt it, not only has thumper been EOLed, but Thor as well. We are already working out trade-in deals for customers with some of these EOLed bits. Looks like more in progress soon.

Our VOIP provider has some significant problems. A utility provider can’t make changes and then insist that we’ve changed something in our own network (we haven’t), as to the reason why the phones enter endless reboot cycles. Their firmware updates seem not to like traversing our router anymore. But we didn’t change our router. They did change their firmware. Since that change, we’ve had all manner of problems. So I think we are going to have to fire them and find a new provider.

We had a recent event that badly irked a customer, and rightly so. It took far too long for us to be able to get a replacement part for them. I want to talk about this a little. I won’t name the customer or partner, or the product. The punchline for the customer was that they got their replacement part more than a month late. For an enterprise shop. This was IMO unacceptable.

… that covers some basic things. Like cooling, power, IPMI, … We’ve seen a common thread throughout a number of data centers recently, where we’ve placed a machine. Occasionally, the airflow will be too low or, following the fads as of late, too warm, to be effective at cooling a high performance machine. More to the point, its great when your density per rack U is not that high to have warmer air or less air flow going.