The Grid Guy

I knew it couldn’t possibly end there …

I recently sent Jon Toigo (DrunkenData) a formal response to questions he and some of his readers had about Data ONTAP GX, NetApp’s scale-out storage architecture.

In a followon comment, one of Jon Toigo’s readers, who failed to indicate his affiliation, but whose name links to LeftHand Networks :-), wrote:

“It’s nice to see NetApp being open about its GX architecture. This being said, the architectural deficiencies were clearly spun in a positive light with marketing hype.”

So, in the interest of educating that reader (and perhaps some other readers) about scale-out storage and the scale-out computing revolution, I thought I’d take the opportunity here to share some of my experience and personal observations. (more…)

Distributed Resource Management (DRM) solutions had their origin as simple batch schedulers capable of dispatching jobs to “free” cpu resources for technical computing applications.  Over the years, these systems have evolved to provide a wide range of job management services that include sophisticated rule-based dispatching mechanisms, environment replication, preemption, checkpoint/restart, and reporting.  Now, as some of these technical computing approaches find their way into the core of the enterprise, DRM is establishing itself as a key technology to enable Enterprise Grid computing models.

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It was only 25 years or so ago that Dinosaurs ruled the earth.

No, really.  Computing Dinosaurs, that is.

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