2010 meant great changes for Techno-Musings. What will 2011 bring?
by Michael Hay on Jan 5, 2011
The past year was all about expansion — expansion of my family with the birth of my son, expansion of my role at HDS and expansion of the Techno-Musings blogger roll. These were all exciting and very positive changes in their own ways and make me very excited for what 2011 will bring.
Following Hu’s lead, as we start the year, I want to share with you three of the most popular posts on Techno-Musings during 2010 (based upon a combination of traffic and comments).
1. The Quality of a Strawberry
One of the biggest stories of 2010 was the Toyota recalls. Being in Japan gave me an interesting vantage point as the whole crisis unfolded, so I decided to share some of this by discussing the great track record and commitment to quality that Japanese companies have showed over time, including Hitachi.
2. Infiniband, a Dead Man Walking?
Proving the power of a good headline, I used the fact that infiniband was put into several new products last year as an opportunity to open up the discussion on this topic. Here was my introduction:
Specifically, I’ve been watching as IB has been put into several appliances of late: Oracle Exadata, Clusterix KVS, etc. There are a series of well oiled uses too such as RDMA for HPC, NetApp’s usage for internode communications, SGI’s mapping of NUMAflex on top of IB, XSigo’s use for I/O aggregation, etc. However, these are all niche plays and IB was meant to be the I/O messiah in the datacenter — or solve world hunger, I forget — but alas IB hasn’t really lived up to the hype. With all of that in mind is there a replacement on the horizon? (Mind you by replacement I’m thinking 3+ years out…)
This was one of Ken Wood’s first post on Techno-Musings and it was one that generated healthy conversation in the comments. Here was his opening to the post:
So I’ve been looking into the benefits of Solid State Storage Devices over Hard Disk Storage Drives. Personally, I’m more infatuated by the performance advantage than the power advantage, but both play in this discussion. In fact, one solves the problem of the other as I’ll try to show. If you do a search on “ssd hoax”, the first hit that should pop up is an article from Tom’s Hardware, here, dating back to June 2008. The initial experiment was to find out how much an SSD device extended a laptop’s battery life over a standard hard disk.
Thank you all for reading Techno-Musings over the past year. Happy New Year to all and here’s to a great 2011!
