it at thinking sysadmin

Cloud Computing: Is the Cloud There Yet? – A Brief History: A mostly negative look at the prospects for cloud computing. Although the arguments it makes are fairly reasonable, the article appears to presume that cloud computing is an all-or-nothing proposal, not a tool for only some tasks. Also odd – “Many routine tasks which are not processor intensive and time critical are the most likely candidates to be migrated to cloud computing” seems wrong (think Sun’s network.com, or how SmugMug uses EC2). Further, the article seems to ignore that big pharma and financial institutions are the largest users of AWS. Still, all in all, a perspective worth considering. (Originally seen at InsideHPC.com.)
What he said! – scalability.org: Joe Landman on “IT clusters. They are not HPC clusters by any stretch of the imagination. They don’t really work well. Some things sorta-kinda work. Lots of things don’t or cannot. You have some interesting failure modes.” I’ve seen exactly what he’s talking about from the biosciences arm of a large hardware/services company, where they sold something that was high margin, poorly configured, had a lousy interconnect, and, yes, was running RHEL. The article’s use of “IT” as a disparaging term was also interesting. (Also seen at InsideHPC.)
EMC flashing CLARiiON? – Rumor that flash from EMC is slowly starting to march down-market.

thinking sysadmin