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May User group meeting … save the date!

The next UK user group meeting will be held on May 17th and 18th 2016. This will be our first venture into a two day event and we still have a fun packed agenda!

We’ll be opening user registrations in mid March, so check back for registration details and agenda then.

We’d like to thank our sponsors from ArcaStream, DDN, IBM, Lenovo, NetApp, Mellanox and OCF for supporting the user group with speakers and supporting the evening networking/social event on 17th.

ArcaStream
 DDN
IBM
 Lenovo
Mellanox
 NetApp
OCF
 Seagate
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Performance Round Table – Round Two

On January 12th, Paul Roberts, Patrick Byrne, Sophie Carsten and I ran a second iteration of performance talks with a small subset of UK Spectrum Scale users. As Paul covered in a previous post, the goal of the meeting was to have an informal chat with these users to gain insights on how they use their clusters, what issues they have concerning their cluster’s performance, and what we can do to help improve the product. We met in the IBM Manchester Development Lab, which allowed us to have developers from the performance, install and upgrade, and system health teams available to discuss the product.

As is the case with all Spectrum Scale User Group meetings, the participants were very happy and open to discuss their Spectrum Scale deployments with us. Since the meeting was designed to be an open and free-flowing meeting, there were a few issues raised by the users and our conversations ebbed and flowed from there.

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Looking back at 2015 …

Well, 2016 has begun, so I thought I’d take a look back at a year with Spectrum Scale. Actually, at the start of 2015, Spectrum Scale wasn’t even a term we were using – GPFS or Elastic Storage were the names we all had in our heads. I’ve heard various rumours about if Elastic Storage was ever meant to be used generally, if it was for the ESS server only, or the code name for the rebranding we eventually came to know as part of the Spectrum portfolio of products. Still, back at the start of 2015 things were different, the System X and GSS Lenovo divestiture was only just completing in the UK and protocol support for non native GPFS access was just an idea on a roadmap (unless you bought SONAS).

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GPFSUG @Computing Insight UK

This week was Computing Insight UK (CIUK) (formerly MEW), which is an annual HPC conference organised by STFC. For those not familiar, its like ISC or SC. Just on a much smaller scale – its a very different show to the major international events and I like being able to walk across the show floor (in 2 minutes) and also knowing ~60-70% of the people there… (and playing which sales person has changed vendor this year is a fun game).

As part of the programme for CIUK, we got a 2 hour “UG@” meeting in, but still we had a packed agenda. Although I’ve been chair of the group for a while, this is the first proper UK general meeting that I’ve been involved in organising so it was with a little trepidation that I took on booking the agenda! Luckily I have Claire to help – organising telecons, chasing me and others to help make sure it works on the day.

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