“I was intrigued when a colleague sent me a link to an article
by Henry Newman referring to a ‘firestorm’ touched off by some
remarks he recently made in another article he wrote. The first
article addressed the scalability of standalone Linux file systems
vs. standalone symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) file systems such as
IBM’s GPFS or Sun’s ZFS. His point was that in
high-performance computing environments requiring a single file
system to handle large files and provide streaming performance, an
SMP file system that pools CPU and memory components yields the
best performance.“Newman begins his followup piece by writing, ‘My article three
weeks ago on Linux file systems set off a firestorm unlike any
other I’ve written in the decade I’ve been writing on storage and
technology issues.’ He refers later on to ’emotional responses and
personal attacks’ I’m no stranger to such responses myself, so it’s
not that I doubt they occurred, but in poking around on message
boards and the various places Newman’s article was syndicated I
haven’t been able to uncover any of that controversy in a public
place…”