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.