please do bear with me.

It does seem that Larry Ellison and his team are focused where they think Sun’s real value lies. From an article today in The Register, some of these plans are showing up in the press. For those not sure if things are done with, the JAVA symbol appear to be going going … gone. You can still find a few reminents here. And one of its last 10Q filings, here. As I noted previously, Oracle isn’t dumb.

We get RFPs all the time. Some of these RFPs are genuine “show us good things so we can consider them.” Many are “we really want to buy something quite specific, but the rules won’t let us specify then.” Some of them have requirements or limits that make me think of a kid saying … “and I want a pony too”. Such RFPs usually have a combination of reasonable sounding elements, right up to the point where they demand the pony.

I had some karate fun over the weekend, participating at a tournament in Michigan. First tournament, never done this before. Ok, in high school, I did wrestling. Same long waits punctuated by fast action, in a make or break mode. The school I attend is here. Great instructors, nearly infinite patience for newbies like me. As long as I don’t screw up the player, here is the bo kata. I took second place in the over 35 group (and in the 18-34 group … long story, don’t ask, but I am happy to have done better than some of them young whippersnappers :) ) I’ll put the sparring video up later.

The acquisition has been given a green light in Europe. Now … as to what this means after nearly 10 months of uncertainty to Sun’s remaining customers, the ones that haven’t fled to other vendors, may be a moot question. What this means to various markets is also unknown. We haven’t seen much focus of Oracle in HPC. Indeed, this is a tiny market for Sun (its not their forte), and given that Sun will be a small part of Oracle …

In this article on H-online, they noticed that the Microsoft bots are … er … aggressive. In the past, we’ve had to disable their 65.55.x.* access to our sites as they did not respect robots.txt. In the past year or so, they have behaved generally well, though we do notice the occasional blip. I suspect that their crawlers aren’t terribly smart. Google’s, yahoo’s, and many others are pretty sophisticated. No real problems with them anymore.

I’ve argued that RPM … well … building RPMs is bothersome, in part because RPM is a moving target. Its hard to actually build a reasonable package that works correctly on all RPM based or accessible distributions. But this is nothing compared to the pain that windows people feel. I never knew how much of a stinking pile of week old bits that windows software installation was … that is … until I needed to install a package, a simple basic storage controller package … on a windows 2008 x64 server.

Yuppers. Updated the bios for the brand new 6 core AMD chips. And whammo. Motherboard was toast. Yessiree toast. A door jam. A square frisbee. So I swapped it out for a motherboard we are using for testing. On the plus side, scalableinformatics.com is now being served by a shiny new Nehalem E5504. On the down side … I have a new square hockey puck. The exact same size and shape as the motherboard which used to be in Scalableinformatics.

The year is going hard and fast, right out of the gate. Multiple RFPs and new customers. New bits of business left and right. And lets not forget the support side … this is using up lots of time as well. Sales hire is almost done … not to offload, but to augment. Need to do a technical hire too, soon. More around Tuesday. I have some documentation I have to finish up, and rerun a whole lotta benchmarks for some customers.

Storage changes In the beginning of the millenium, Fibre Channel ruled the roost. Nothing could touch it. SATA and SAS were a ways away. SCSI was used in smaller storage systems. Networked storage meant a large central server with ports. SANs were on the rise. In HPC you have to move lots of data. Huge amounts of data. Performance bottlenecks are no fun. FC is a slow technology. It is designed to connect as many disks as you can together for SAN architecture.