On the same day we reported on the uncertain future for HPC compiler company PathScale, we are sad to learn that another HPC vendor, Scalable Informatics, is closing its doors. For the last 15 years, Scalable Informatics, the HPC storage and system vendor founded by Joe Landman in 2002, provided high performance software-defined storage and compute solutions to a wide range of markets — from financial and scientific computing to research and big data analytics. Their platform was based on placing tightly coupled storage and computing in the same unit to eliminate bottlenecks and enable high-performance data and I/O for computationally intensive workloads.
In a letter to the community posted on the company website, founder and CEO Joe Landman writes:
We want to thank our many customers and partners, whom have made this an incredible journey. We enjoyed designing, building, and delivering market dominating performance and density systems to many groups in need of this tight coupling of massive computational, IO, and network firepower.
Sadly, we ran into the economic realities of being a small player in a capital intensive market. We offered real differentiation in terms of performance, by designing and building easily the fastest systems in market.
But building the proverbial “better mousetrap” was not enough to cause the world to beat a path to our door. We had to weather many storms, ride out many fads. At the end of this process, we simply didn’t have the resources to continue fighting this good fight.
Performance does differentiate, and architecture is the most important aspect of performance. There are no silver bullets, there are no magical software elements that can take a poor architecture and make it a good one. This has been demonstrated by us and many others so often, it ought to be an axiom. Having customers call you up to express regret for making the wrong choice, while somewhat satisfying, doesn’t pay the bills. This happened far too often, and is in part, why we had to make this choice.
This is not how we wanted this to end. But end it did.
Thank you all for your patronage, and maybe in the near future, we will all be …
Landman shares additional thoughts about this difficult situation here: Requiem.