Archive for the ‘Fishworks’ Category
Good-bye, Sun
In Februrary 1996, I came out to Sun Microsystems to interview for a job knowing only two things: that I wanted to do operating systems kernel development — and that I didn’t particularly want to work for Sun. I was right on the first count, but knew I was wrong on the second just moments [...]
Turning the corner
It’s a little hard to believe that it’s been only fifteen months since we shipped our first product. It’s been a hell of a ride; there is nothing as exhilarating nor as exhausting as having a newly developed product that is both intricate and wildly popular. Especially in the domain of enterprise storage — where [...]
John Birrell
It is with a heavy heart that I announce that we in the DTrace community have lost one of our own: the indomitable John Birrell, who ported DTrace to FreeBSD, suffered a stroke and passed away on Friday, November 20, 2009. We on Team DTrace knew John to be a remarkably talented and determined software [...]
Queue, CACM, and the rebirth of the ACM
As I have mentioned before (if in passing), I sit on the Editorial Advisory Board of ACM Queue, ACM‘s flagship publication for practitioners. In the past year, Queue has undergone a significant transformation, and now finds itself at the vanguard of a much broader shift within the ACM — one that I confess to once [...]
Moore’s Outlaws
My blog post eulogizing SPEC SFS has elicited quite a bit of reaction, much of it from researchers and industry observers who have drawn similar conclusions. While these responses were very positive, my polemic garnered a different reaction from SPEC SFS stalwart NetApp, where, in his response defending SPEC SFS, my former colleague Mike Eisler [...]
Eulogy for a benchmark
I come to bury SPEC SFS, not to praise it. When we at Fishworks set out, our goal was to build a product that would disrupt the enterprise NAS market with revolutionary price/performance. Based on the economics of Sun’s server business, it was easy to know that we would deliver on the price half of [...]
The Hunter becomes the Hunted
I recently came into a copy of Dave Hitz‘s new book How to Castrate a Bull. A full review is to come, but I couldn’t wait to serve up one delicious bit of irony. Among the book’s many unintentionally fascinating artifacts is NetApp’s original business plan, dated January 16, 1992. In that plan, NetApp’s proposed [...]
Catching disk latency in the act
Today, Brendan made a very interesting discovery about the potential sources of disk latency in the datacenter. Here’s a video we made of Brendan explaining (and demonstrating) his discovery: This may seem silly, but it’s not farfetched: Brendan actually made this discovery while exploring drive latency that he had seen in a lab machine due [...]
On Modalities and Misadventures
Part of the design center of Fishworks is to develop powerful infrastructure that is also easy to use, with the browser as the vector for that usability. So it’s been incredibly vindicating to hear some of the initial reaction to our first product, which uses words like “truly breathtaking” to describe the interface. But as [...]
Fishworks: Now it can be told
In October 2005, longtime partner-in-crime Mike Shapiro and I were taking stock. Along with Adam Leventhal, we had just finished DTrace — and Mike had finished up another substantial body of work in FMA — and we were beginning to wonder about what was next. As we looked at Solaris 10, we saw an incredible [...]