Data Center Advisors

Initially, I wasn’t planning to attend SC11, especially since this week I had several other meetings to participate in. However, as is common in this industry, I ended up heading to Seattle to meet with several people and companies at SC11 at the last minute for the day. I was able get into the exhibit hall early to explore the behind-the-scenes activities of many of the booths. Hitachi Ltd.’s HPC Group was present with a very impressive booth again this year.

A VSP was on display in the booth, next to what I call the world’s largest server blade. I don’t actually know if this is a fact or not, but it is very impressive to see this device used in this specialized field of computing. Also, there was the new HA8000-tc rack mount server for technical computing (I want/need some of these in the Innovation Lab).

I also hung out at the BlueArc booth, which now displayed new panels with “BlueArc – Part of Hitachi Data Systems” in large, vivid lettering. Nice! Sorry, I didn’t get a picture of this for some reason, but I’ll grab one from someone or someplace. I did hang out at the booth meeting with new BlueArc colleagues and old HDS colleagues, as well as customers of other vendors interested in knowing more about everything.

Probably one of the more interesting activities at the conference for me was the attention given to data intensive workloads specifically around “Big Data”. There were several events going on surrounding Big Data that, unfortunately, I was not able to attend. However, since the majority of my time and my team’s time is spent solving Big Data problems in the enterprise, this is an area and community we will continue to monitor closely. I have been using scale-out and HPC architectures to explain and solve the Big Data challenges in the enterprise and this is evidence of that approach. Stay tuned for more on this subject. Unfortunately, I was unable to attend any of the sessions, tutorials or BoFs this year. I didn’t even get a t-shirt or conference goodie bag. Hopefully, next year my schedule will allow for more time to participate and explore like I usually do.