Definitely an accomplished architect, there are a lot of fine construction details in these photos. So much that it makes the IT/low voltage installation look like a hack job.
Corporate IT is kind of a parallel universe to me, so it is interesting to see how widely used these products are and how impactful these types of events are.
There are a few broad categories to building one of these platforms.. core virtualization ("relatively easy"), device model ("medium hard"), storage management ("hard"), management plane ("medium hard").
VMWare popularized x86 core virtualization and defined their own device model because they were the early market leader. But the device model is pretty bizarre and I haven't been particularly impressed by the guest driver quality over the years. VMFS and vSAN seem good for storage, the latter being better than anything open source. Management plane was mediocre, I remember it took a while to move off Flash and fat clients while cloud vendors were showing none of that was necessary from inception, and everything is kind of in a walled garden by design (embedded DB etc).
I had a lot of positive experiences with VMware (ESXi + vCenter). Every time I had a new project, I tried to keep it as simple as possible and it worked wonderfully. SAN, Distributed Switches, Automatic VM migrations to balance CPU usage etc.
VSAN was a weird one until I understood the logic behind it, but the licensing costs kind of brought on-par to buying a SAN and be happy.
Antiquities and heirlooms can be a good stable investment, the same reason people trade art or watches or guns or cars. Some of these are fun to use without reducing value.
Most of these things have large categories that are inherently disinflationary. You can't make a new authentic vintage Ferrari. Whether they are fungible is the main problem and case by case. But you generally don't do it to build wealth, it's an expression of it that happens to have yields if taken seriously.
The mystery of how a computer works is what drove me. I was interested in the mass produced microprocessor based systems. Once I found per integrated circuit system it became a combination of logic and hand crafted boards.
This is is the area I focused on. I'm now at point where I would rather shed objects than collect them. I will probably hold on to the rarest handmade objects. The mass produced from the late 70's to the early 2000's I would like to get rid of.
I run a web to text usenet gateway and it has been an interesting challenge to scale it to deal with this. Article fetch and retrieval is extremely efficient but I apply JWZ threading and that can cause a single article to make a number of overview requests which are more expensive depending on the depth. I solve it currently with caching but will eventually implement a thread backend on the NNTP side to keep thread roots updated at insertion time and it will be a very cheap read request.
One persistent thought is what are people doing with this data? I get that people want to train models, but I also have a hard time believing there are more than a hundred companies with the resources to spider the web like this and actually do anything meaningful with all that data. Academics, researchers, and people working on lower level innovation are probably well off with CommonCrawl.. only people trying to make frontier models really need fresh and endless data right?
Wow this is a deep dive, most people focus on the PC era. The Ultima/Impression were some of the very first commercial PCI cards, behind maybe NCR SCSI. Another interesting vendor in that era was Number Nine.
Number Nine was amazing. But even more amazing was the computer integrator / producer that shipped their computers with Number Nines. The company Intergraph.
I haven't thought of Number Nine in years, but the mention reminded me that the BIOS on some of their cards displayed a Beatles lyric quote during boot.
The way it's written is ambiguous as it could also just mean the peak demand rate, not a capacity peak. I was doing some benchmarks for something recently and noticed how tricky it is to capture all the nuance of a test in prose.
its not a drop in. There is no reasonable way of replacing a huge existing cassandra cluster with scylladb. You have to transition as it was a new database.
Directly and indirectly, there are a lot of other knock on effects. Value objects (only recently being added) help. You could treat it similar to an HFT application, having ephemeral workers that don't do GC and dies on heap exhaustion, with a NIO coordinator that tries to avoid all garbage creation. But why at this point, square peg round hole.
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