The Coming Wave of Declustered RAID

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks at the coming wave of declustered RAID solutions designed to address the problem of ever-increasing RAID rebuild times. With 5 Terabyte drives in the wings, RAID cluster rebuild times are becoming impractical.

Dan is impressed with what IBM is doing in this area with GPFS.
Henry thinks these larger drives harken the death of RAID-5 and RAID-6.
Rich has been keeping a close watch on Xyratex and their ClusterStor GridRaid implementation.
Read the original paper on Declustered RAID by Garth Gibson and Mark Holland.

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The RONNIEE Network Architecture

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks at the newly announced RONNIEE Network Architecture from A3 Cube. Rich did a slidecast with their CTO this week, but Dan and Henry need to know more and see this thing for themselves.

Following that, the conversation veers off into a grab bag of tech news for the week:

• Dan's is still recovering from a rootkit that infected his business computer. We seem to recall that he was always backlogged before this happened, but we'll let it slide.
• Henry is lamenting the lack of Google Fiber coming to Minnesota. Since Google tends to piggyback on the fastest Internet pipes, it looks like the state will forever be a third-world country in terms of bandwidth.
• Rich is excited about the Outernet project, which hopes to launch a series of satellites that will provide free Internet connectivity worldwide to anyone who wants it.

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insideHPC Acquires the Exascale Report

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team discusses the recent acquisition of The Exascale Report by insideHPC. Exascale-level computing remains a daunting challenge that is still years away, and Rich is excited to take it on as an editorial focus. The good news is that he'll be moving the publication away from its subscription model to make it free for all to read.

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Cray 2013 Earnings Bellwether the HPC Market

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team takes a look at Cray’s 2013 earnings report. By all accounts, the company had a banner year with a total revenue of $525.7 million. What does this mean for the overall HPC Market? Who will be the winners and losers as the Tier 1 vendors shift around? Tune in to find out.

Henry Newman Rants About Flawed Hard Drive Study

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks at a recent study of hard drive reliability by Backblaze. Henry had a cow, writing in Enterprise Storage Forum that the study lacked technical rigor and drew dubious conclusions. Then Slashdot picked it up and all Hell broke loose.

Of course, Rich and Dan can't help but fan the fire.

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Lenovo Acquires IBM's x86 Server Business

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team gives their take on the recent news that IBM will soon be exiting the x86 server business. Lenovo looks to have gotten a great price, but will this mean to the Cloud and HPC market?

HPC Data Center Evolution

In this podcast, Fritz Ferstl from Univa leads a fireside chat on the continuing HPC Datacenter Evolution.