A Blog

So, I didn’t have much of a chance to update the blog with blow-by-blow action updates at SC this year.. Oops. However, the show was a blast. The Purdue team won the “lowest power consumption” award. It was certainly a surprise, given another team had a generally more efficient power design. In any case, we’re certainly happy we won an award.

I did not get much of a chance to walk around the floor between working both of Purdue’s booths. However, I did hear about and see one or two interesting things. The first was the new ethernet gear coming out of Voltaire. They can confederate several of their switch chassises to form a virtual switch that allows an LACP bond between the chassises to be active-active, which seems to be all the rage these days. After visiting the Voltaire booth, Cisco also has various solutions.. from the virtual port channel on the nexus gear and the virtual switch chassis on the catalyst gear. Also, it appears that perhaps Cisco will be implementing something like Woven’s multi-path layer 2 magic, so that could be fun too.

Lastly, the most interesting company on the floor that I saw was the “Two Guys and a Cluster” folks. Really, it’s just two guys that live on opposite coasts that help people acquire and run clusters. They seem to be a nice middle ground between a value-added cluster vendor and just buying hardware off a website and doing it all yourself. Their web address, with the start of an interesting blog, can be found here.