There are some real nuggets of value in “the cloud”&tm; but as with “The Grid”&TM; there is a serious land grab underway, where everything is … er … cloudy. Yeah, thats a good phrase … cloudy. Though nebulous fits as well. And of course, clouds being water vapor … and often ice crystals … I couldn’t resist, my apologies. More seriously, some analyst houses are noticing the massive over-hyping. Now I am not a great fan of Gartner.

In a previous article, I railedon the concept of IT designing clusters. I pointed out many flaws we have seen when this happens. I’d like to do the same thing with storage. This will be brief. Recently had a customer for our consulting ask us with deep incredulity, how one of our older 24 drive 7200 RPM SATA drive units could so thoroughly demolish (on benchmark testing) a brand new 24 drive 15kRPM SAS drive unit.

On InsideHPC, John West has an interesting story on disruption in HPC markets, and predictions on success or failure of a business. There are some interesting tidbits evident throughout the article. This made me smile. Our Delta-V encompasses these ideas. Its designed to be a lower end storage target. The tools we have developed around it (and are continuing to develop) to enable simplified management are meant to make dealing with large numbers of these devices very easy.

This news item on InsideHPC made me smile. In short, the HPC application vendors do see the value in decreasing the cost of hardware for their HPC users. It keeps more money available for end users to purchase licenses, even in the face of declining budgets. There are other problems, such as the software license cost now being substantially higher than the cost of the hardware to run the HPC codes on, but that is another problem.

If you haven’t seen this yet, have a look at what the InsideHPC team are up to. They are hosting a poll on who (people/groups) are providing the most impactful leadership in HPC. The post and poll are here. By all means, do go and express your opinion via the poll, and drop a comment to John and the crew on this award.

We just shipped (at 5pm tonight) the storage cluster. I didn’t announce any performance data for it. I can say that this unit has 24 RAID adapters. And QDR IB … 8 ports (going to 16 as soon as the extra cables arrive). It is using GlusterFS as the cluster file system. This project has kept us very busy over the last month. We have more in queue that we are working on.

A new, updated, more stable RAID driver was used for our RAID card, and … while it was more stable, it has a significant performance regression when used with our updated kernel (actually any kernel 2.6.23 and beyond). Should have a fix soon.

Same hardware, booting into baseline kernel vs an updated version of our kernel. Normal testing on our part has our updated kernel at a significant performance advantage to the baseline. Imagine my surprise when, while trying to diagnose an issue on a machine we are building, we found baseline to be significantly faster. The only thing that has really changed between this and the older kernel is a newer driver for RAID.

I had posited in the past that, apart from the odd design and old vehicle destruction, that yes, it was a good thing in terms of generating additional sales. I argued that it didn’t go on long enough. Germany has had one in force for months, and it seems to have done a great deal of good, though there was no requirement for destruction of the turned in car, it could be scrapped, or broken down for parts, or … Ok.

We are running some burn-in tests on the JackRabbit storage cluster. 6 of 8 nodes are up, 2 need to be looked at tomorrow. On one of the nodes, we have 3 RAID cards. Because of how the customer wants the unit, it is better for us to have 3 separate file systems. So thats what we have. They will all be aggregated shortly (hopefully tomorrow) with a nice cluster file system and some infiniband goodness.