Posts by Joe Kraska

For now, GNU GPL is an enforceable contract, says US federal judge

Re: Double edge

The statutory damages are $150K per work, when the infringement is willful. There's also the attorney's fees to consider, which are likely to be granted when the infringer set out to intentionally violate someone else's rights.

Flashing upstarts tempt tech titans' throbbing disks

Not sure the big boys need to do that

I'm not so sure that the storage titans need to buy up the flash upstarts.

For example, Dell has Compellent, EMC has FAST, and IBM has SVC: all of these technologies do block-based tiering, and therefore integrate flash into storage arrays in affordable and effective fashion. NetApp is the odd man out here, with no such strategy, but that's intentional, I am told.

Granted, many of the new flash start ups are doing dedup to make the use of the flash effective, and none of the above vendors have dedup at fast enough rates for SAN. Still, I'm not sure that this is enough of a discriminator, to justify a buy, except perhaps to take the upstart off the market (which is illegal, but often done anyway).

DIY SSD packs in CompactFlash card pair RAID rig

OCZ SSD's would be better

Check out the OCZ Core Sata 2 SSD drives. ~$300, 120MB/s read, 80MB/s write, lots of IOPS.

US dominates tech R&D

Supposing they paid well for PhDs?

The industry says they can't get enough PhDs, so they lobby congress to increase the limits. A little problem, however: they don't pay the PhDs particularly well. This leads to a generation of students investing in law, medicine and 'real professions' instead of engineering. What American industry wants is "cheap PhDs". This is extremely short sighted.

Joe Kraska

San Diego CA

USA

Voltaire saves glaciers with 20Gb/s Infiniband switch

I too find it odd

The oddest thing about the "ethernet will take over" positing is the comparative pricing of infiniband to 10GE. Infiniband is much cheaper. You'd think that it would therefore be "winning'.

Of course, if you look under the hood at the deployment issues, I'd say that if 10GE were here today at a good price point, and you were buying the right cards, you'd want to go with that. There are a few 10GE cards out there that can do RDMA, and therefore occupy the Infiniband niche. Conversely, when considering the use of Infiniband to occupy the ethernet niche.... well who wants to fuddle with IP-over-Infiniband drivers and the like?

Joe Kraska

San Diego CA

USA