The sixsided machine

Short commute today, working from the Nashua office which has its benefits.

For one, I don't have to sit and wait for 25 minutes where Rte 3 meets 495 and the five lanes converge into 3 lanes.

Working here though is sometimes a bit depressive. The office filled by engineers that been working for the same company their entire lives. Well that is not completely true, they were acquired 20 years ago. When this other huge computer company disintegrated and was chomped up by hungrier sharks.

The atmosphere is very much the one of a sealed off cave, people have been working independently more or less from the rest of the company on the west coast. Their own products stopped selling long time ago so now all the engineers are working on either supporting what they once created or are sent of working for other teams. You can find the most interesting books on shelves on software that were designed in an era where one didn't have to worry about the bottlenecks introduced by the Internet. No one is really interested in doing anything new and management is only trying to maintain their headcount.

For the ones who have seen Office Space, this place is the same, it looks the same, there is the same sets of people who's only contribution is that they have 'People skills'. Or rather they know people from having been employed at the same company for 20 plus years or so.

Anyways, the reason I'm here is to discuss the latest marvel a box with so much computing power no one knows how to utilize it. It brings back memories of when I got my first Amiga, which had a palette of 4096 colors, coming from a computer with 16 colors it seems insane to have that much colors. This computer though is as big as a regular refrigerator and the amount of memory that this machine packs is mind-boggling. The only problem is that we don't quite know how to use it yet.

I read this post about Azuls Zing launch where the conclusion was

"The result is that the 11U Vega appliances could do the JVM work of somewhere between hundreds and thousands of physical servers running a Java stack. And yes, a lot of people thought these performance gains were just not possible."

I certainly belong to the group of people who have a hard time to understand how that statement can be true. Also it seems to miss the elephant in the room, the high availability (HA for short). I dearly would like to see the models how HA is calculated for a monolithic box like this. Scaling is easy, scaling safely is almost impossible.