Recently, there was a nice and - besides the pronounciation confusion - interesting podcast on FLOSS Weekly featuring Pentaho:
http://twit.tv/show/floss-weekly/317
Posts by frank fegert
8 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Aug 2010
Big data, come to BIG DADDY: HDS gobbles upstart Pentaho
Traditional RAID is outdated and dying on its feet
Monday 3rd March 2014 11:54 GMT
Re: Interesting if cheap ...
Seconds on GNR not being cheap, if you care about being on a supported platform. The code for GNR is available in the standard GPFS packages, so it could technically be used on COTS hardware, but IBM decided to only support it with the GPFS-SS (x86 or P775). IMHO making it not competitively priceable against "traditional" storage systems. Unless "traditional" translates to DS8k, VMAX, USP-V, etc. that is ;-)
About a year ago i tried to get support via a DCR @ IBM for the combination of P730, IBM OEMed Brocade FC SAN and DCS3700 (OEMed LSI, same as NetApp E5400 and MD3660). Took IBM several months to come back with:
"GPFS Native RAID is hardware specific so it is only supported on the Power 775 and our GPFS Storage Server. That said, you can attach a GPFS Storage Server to their Power Systems via standard Ethernet and GSS is built with DCS3700 enclosures. [Name deleted] is working on a proposal that would allow existing DCS3700 customers to convert to GSS."
So the natural advice for the IBM folks to give to me as a customer was to by the whole shebang again, only this time labed as GPFS-SS.
My 2 cents is that, while GPFS is a very good and rock solid product and GNR is also an excellent idea, IBM will - again - manage to drown an otherwise excellent product by just being the IBM of "the good old days"[TM]. Unfortunately there are nowadays alternatives spawning left and right, so the cool crowd that IBM wants to cosy up to has not one bit of motivation to attach itself to that wallstreet steered leech.
Violin Memory is winning flash-supply race – Quadragon™ rivals
Friday 4th October 2013 08:56 GMT
Truely interesting times in the storage game ...
Technologically Violin seems to have caught-up on the whole FC attachment mess of its all flash arrays. Two years ago when we had Violin 3xxx and TMS 6x0 test units here, it was still as ugly as it could get, so decided to go with TMS instead. Earlier this week we saw some very promising high-level slides on the upcoming IBM/TMS products, so we too are very psyched to see how that whole flashy race will turn out ;-)
Mm, Linux-on-mainframe admin brains: IBM wolfs down Israeli upstart
HP's plunging storage revenues could yet be saved
Tuesday 28th May 2013 21:20 GMT
Sales dropping the ball at HP?
@work we're currently in the process of purchasing another 100TB of block storage - not that much, but we're a SMB. Since we're bound by the IBM SVC compatibility matrix we called up several vendors who are on that list. HP/3PAR was one of those who seemed to fit our needs/whishes. Got one "what do you want"/"hollywood principle"-call back from a 1st level sales droid, stating that our request will be passed on to storage sales. Nothing but silence since then. After two more attempts from our side to get in contact, we finally got the implied message, that apparently HP does not need our business. No hard feelings here, but also no sympathy for sales figures taking a dive @HP.
SWARMS of ZOMBIES unleashed on innocent bloggers
Tuesday 16th April 2013 08:21 GMT
More the "just" attacks against WP going ATM?
I've also noticed a recent upspike in user registration/login attempts towards DokuWiki based sites. The sources of the attempts are from all over the world, mostly from hosting providers, mostly Linux/Apache systems. I wonder if there is a connection between this, the WP attacks and the malicious Apache module injecting rogue iframes in the data-stream?
What is IBM up to in October?
Monday 30th August 2010 16:19 GMT
We too have heard some rumors ...
... about it being something in the vicinity of a "new storage system build by IBM" (not OEMed like the DS3/4/5k series) with some connection to the SVC. Sadly, no more in depth infromation was available.
To take a wild guess, i could imagine attaching a more dumb storage array to the SVC, while moving some of the array controller logic - like classic RAID or a XIV-type chunk based RAID - into the SVC.
If they'd also drop the outrageous SVC volume licensing prices by a significant portion we'd definately be game!
Biting the hand that feeds IT
