Saturday March 22, 2008

Back in October of 2006 when we announced Project Blackbox, I joked about the advent of what I called Suezmax Datacenters -- ships loaded with Blackbox containers offering incredible amounts of compute and storage capacity.

How forward-looking of me. :-) The buzz now is all about floating datacenters or data ships. Companies are buying cheap old ships that will be docked and connected to shore power and data. These ships will offer acres of floor space for massive amounts of compute and data and will use sea water as an integral part of their cooling systems. The first such ship is apparently going to be deployed in San Francisco at Pier 50.

I haven't heard any talk of Blackbox as part of these deployments, but if containers revolutionized the shipping industry, perhaps they are also a good fit for quickly moving customized chunks of compute and data in and out of these floating datacenters. Time will tell...

We call them Sun StorageTek QFS and Sun StorageTek SAM these days, but long-time HPC people will remember them simply as QFS and SAM (or collectively as SAM-QFS), the very well-respected file system and archive management software created by LSC, Inc and acquired by Sun back in 2001. These products are very well-known and widely-used in certain segments of the HPC market, particularly those with high-performance SAN requirements and with a need for kick-butt streaming IO performance. More recently, these products have had some huge successes in non-HPC areas, demonstrating that they not only scale and offer high performance, but that they have enterprise-class stability as well.

The big news is that we've open sourced SAM-QFS. The latest development bits are now available for download on OpenSolaris.org, modulo a few pieces owned by 3rd parties which we either need to rewrite or will release if permission is obtained. Ted Pogue has done a nice writeup about all of this, including pointers to the discussion forums for the SAM/QFS OpenSolaris project.

Take a look at Sun's 2001 press release about the LSC acquisition (but do NOT click on the lsci.com link--it has been reaped by spammers.) We were talking about Open Storage, even in 2001. As Bob Porras points out, we have now created an entire open source storage stack with this release. How cool is that?

I just received an email from Amazon, recommending a book, The TreasureHunter's Gem & Mineral Guides To The U.S.A.: Where & How to Dig, Pan And Mine Your Own Gems & Minerals: Northeast States. Admittedly, they did a good job of predicting this title might be attractive to me. However, the single review on the Amazon site gives the book only a single star and provides some fairly damning evidence that the book is, in fact, totally useless. Hardly an incentive to make a purchase...or to trust future Amazon recommendations.

While I do understand that opinions vary widely across many Amazon reviews and they should not be the final arbiters in a buy/no-buy decision, I would think the Amazon recommendation engine would make some attempt to factor the reviews into their ratings. Or, at the very least, the marketing email should include the overall reviewer rating in the advertisement.