Go fast, turn left. Rare Bear Wins!

Last week I was visiting customers on the west coast and then went out to the Reno Air Races. A few of our customers attended the races also, and we had great time. Reno is great, there is no other way to describe it.

During the week I heard from several customers that they are starting to implement the Sun Thumper storage platform for their NFS operations. It is affordable and seems to meet many of their requirements. One customer said he liked the platform except for the weight of the unit when it is fully configured with drives. It comes in at about 200 lbs, so he is only planning on putting four units in a rack. The Thumper is loud, at least as loud as a F760 with the old FC8 or FC9 shelves, maybe a little louder and they draw about 4 amps per unit it seems.The thumper this customer has can deliver about 12 TB usable storage as configured with 750GB drives. One outstanding issue is that as configured it does not serve CIFS yet unless he mounts SAMBA, but it was a very interesting visit.