From this article one gets the impression that Windows will not be supporting Itanium anymore. Way back during the initial marketing onslaught of Itanium, it was said to be the architecture for the next 25 years for Intel. That was a decade ago. It seems to be losing software support fairly rapidly though. Its hard to see this lasting another 15 years … let alone 5 years. Linux still has Itanium support for now, but fewer users of it are out there.

One of the things smaller companies want to do is to build alliances that are mutually beneficial … be they reseller relationships, or partnerships where the sum of the two partners offerings provides significant tangible benefits for customers. Enhance offerings, provide more value to customers. These need to be two way streets … they can’t be a one way flow, if they are to have real value. We’ve built some partnerships over the past few years, some very good, some, not as good, that have ranged between one way “tell us what you will do for us” scenarios, to what we thought were bilateral efforts at promoting mutual business.

We’ve had a chance to do a compare/contrast in recent months between GlusterFS and Lustre. Way back in the 1.4 Lustre time period, we helped a customer get up and going with it. I seem to remember thinking that this was simply not something I felt comfortable leaving at a customer site without a dedicated file system engineer monitoring it/dealing with it 24x7. Seriously, it needed lots of hand-holding then. Have a recent 1.

About a decade or more ago, there was a “fight” if you will, for the future of high performance computing systems application level programming interfaces. This fight was between proponents of SMP and shared memory systems in general, and DMP shared-nothing approaches. In the ensuing years, several important items influenced the trajectory of application development. Shared memory models are generally easier to program. That is, it’s not hard to create something that operates reasonably well in parallel.

Years ago, we helped a customer set up a Lustre 1.4.x system. This was … well … fun. And not in a good way. Right before the 1.6 transition, we had all sorts of problems. We skipped 1.6, and now we have set up a Lustre 1.8.2 system, and have several on quote now for various RFPs. From our experience with the 1.8.2 system … I have to say, I have a sense that it is brittle.

… and not being able to. Seems most of the folks at Sun/Oracle haven’t heard of Lustre. I had to explain it to them on several calls yesterday. They didn’t understand why someone would want to pay for support of a GPL licensed system … er … ah … mebbe we found some real nice gotchas, and want to get Sun to work on them, and give us a hand in ameliorating them?

Sun/Oracle has decided to change strategy around Solaris. What does this do for Nexenta and others, with business dependencies upon OpenSolaris? We looked to OpenSolaris for a more up-to-date, less buggy Solaris. We are looking at this for one of our siCluster offerings … this might have to change now. Makes sense from an Oracle perspective though.

SCO lost. As I had said to some local colleagues who were (for reasons I could not grasp) swayed by SCO’s arguments, this would not end well for SCO. And it didn’t. The game is effectively over. Its time to wind down SCO as an entity in an orderly manner, to distribute the remaining value to those that SCO owes money to.

ACLU seems to have taken down the BRCA gene patent from Myriad Genetics. This could actually change a chunk of the drug development business model. I am not sure if this is a good thing (the business model change), though I also didn’t think that one could patent what is effectively naturally generated prior art. Patents are about reducing theory to practice, and then providing a temporary monopoly on the use of that reduction to practice.

Way back in the day, data centers used to be cold. Cold air came in, and usually in hot-aisle/cold-aisle configs, left through the back. Power per rack was measured in a few thousand watts. Cooling per rack could be mebbe one ton of AC. Up to two in the worst case. Then stuff got denser. Somewhere along the line someone decided they could run their stuff at higher temperatures. This works fine for machines that are actually mostly open space (blades, sparsely populated server systems, …).