It can be really hard to get the media to publish complex concepts which is why companies will submit their own articles. Google's Luiz Barroso and Jeff Dean have an article on Google's Data Center challenge to provide low latency performance at scale.
There is a common belief that Google, Facebook, Twitter and any of the newer Web 2.0 companies have it easier because they have homogeneous environments vs. a typical enterprise. Well, Google has a paper that discusses how its homogenous Warehouse-scale computers are actually heterogenous and there is opportunity for performance improvements of up to 15%. In this table Google lists the number of micro architectures in 10 different data centers.
The WSJ has an article on Larry Ellison's efforts on Lanai. Embedded in the article are a lot of environmental issues. He says the hotel will be a model of sustainability—generating electricity from the sun, making its own fresh water, reusing "gray water for irrigation, and all the buildings will be made from light, renewable materials, like bamboo." ... In the near term, Mr. Ellison's most important challenge is to get a new desalination system in place to convert saltwater to fresh water. He wants to bring the number of gallons of available fresh water to 10 million daily from four million. But he also is forging ahead with other projects. He is setting up charging stations for electric cars and plug-in hybrids, and replacing Island Air's old-model Dash 8 aircraft with new ATR 72s. There is a vision to add commercial agriculture to the island. Water ...
Someone asked me how big a Google Cluster can be? I found the answer in a Google Research paper on flash storage top of page 8. Don't know if the number really helps the person who asked, but figured it couldn't hurt to point at the paper.
On Facebook's Lulea page you can see 25 photos of its data center. Here is video too.
If you told someone in the data center industry you could get 10-20% performance gain, people wouldn't believe you. If you said you had a new processor, memory, storage, or network architecture, you would have a higher chance of people thinking you tell the truth. Would you believe someone if they told you at the micro architecture level of servers, if you designed the software to access local memory vs. non-local memory on existing systems you could get a 10-20% performance gain?
Containers work if you want to have a unit of deployment with up to 2,000 servers. Google used containers early on, but doesn't use them anymore. Some of the biggest use of Containers is by Microsoft's data center group. DCD covers Microsoft discussing how containers contain outages.
It is kind of funny sitting at a low level in data centers discussing sites, power, cooling, etc, then sometimes pop your head up and get a big picture view what you can see. I was chatting with a Google person last week and I was thanking him for a response to an e-mail I sent a year ago to check on their data center calculations on their web site.
One of the conversations I have had with data center friends is when will Facebook bring its Lulea data center online. The project was publicly announced in Oct 2011. There was Swedish papers covering the commissioning process in May 2013.
When I was at the first Open Compute Summit I was sitting with a data center executive and when he heard about the air misters used in Facebook's 1st data center he said they were going to run into problems. We don't hear about misters in Facebook's data center any more and news has leaked out what may have helped convince putting humidity into the data center has issues. The Register broke the news in an interview with Facebook VP Jay Parikh. Facebook's first data center ran into problems of a distinctly ironic nature when a literal cloud formed in the IT room and started to rain on servers. Though Facebook has previously hinted at this via references to a "humidity event" within its first data center in Prineville, Oregon, the social network's infrastructure king Jay Parikh told The Reg on Thursday that, for a ...
Al Gore spoke at the "How Green is Internet?" event at Google, and at the 1:10 mark he says that he doesn't see the word "climate" in the word cloud for the event. Which then gets Al Gore launching into how important the climate is. During Eric Schmidt's talk he starts out saying how great Google is because "anybody says something slightly off ... you check.
I don't know about you, but it can hard to focus on a day long industry event. You start out ready, then your phone rings, txt msgs, and e-mail distracts you. Some of the presentations are good. Some have room for improvement. Sometimes you just get bored and your mind drifts.
Part of what I have an interesting time is discussing the influence and factions in the data center industry. It is hard to discuss the specifics in a blog entry especially when I want to build on a public disclosure. I started writing this post a couple of days ago and didn't decide to publish until Chris Crosby threw up his inbreeding post.
Security systems work by making it harder for things to get done. Security creates more friction in the system. If you have enough momentum you can overcome the friction, if you don't then you get stuck. If a cyber criminal has the login and password for a user, the security systems fail because he has taken the low friction path that gives him access.
Some of the folks out there have a US and EU focus on their data center services. Others see the double digital growth in emerging markets. Komonews reports on Boeing's 20 year forecast of airplane sales. The 20-year forecast, which Boeing puts out annually, predicts 60 percent of the demand for aircraft will come from Asia, Latin America and the Middle East. The rest comes from carriers in Europe and North America.
I read this post on GigaOm about Google's data center expansion being two story. And started laughing. Ooooh it's news that Google has a two story data center. Given Google's disclosed hot aisle containment with its chilled water to the rack it is pretty damn efficient for google to pipe water for cooling. This type of approach would work well in Singapore where Google is building as well which will probably be more than two stories. Moving water is so much more efficient than moving air. Google eyes two-story Oregon data center design to maximize efficiency by Jordan Novet 11 MINS AGO No Comments A A photo: Google SUMMARY: Google plans to build two stories inside a new data center building on its campus in The Dalles, Ore. It’s yet another method of optimizing critical infrastructure for the web giant. The Dalles Chronicle has the original ...
Google pushed up the videos for "How Green is Internet?" yesterday. Driving the industry forward Through industry collaboration, we aim to create a more sustainable technology sector and build products and services that benefit the environment. For example, we hosted events in 2009 and 2011 where we discussed with industry peers how we can improve on data center efficiency. In June 2013, we hosted the “How green is the Internet?” summit. The videos allow you to see the presentations.
I attended as media/press the 3rd Google Energy Summit. I had been to the 1st, and was briefed on the presentations for the 2nd. The third didn't focus on data centers as much and more asking questions and presenting data on the environmental impact of data centers and internet technologies. Urs Hoelzle has been the executive sponsor for each one of these events. Al Gore and Eric Schmidt for the first time presented their perspectives.
A friend asked me a month or so what is the next thing Amazon Web Services is going to do. I spent a bit of time researching ideas, then it hit me AWS will eventually be in major markets within the countries borders. A couple of months ago I was chatting with a journalist from Spain and we discussed the cloud, hosting, and AWS. Here is a post that ail give you an idea of the protectionist practices in Spain. Hedge funds and private equity groups have raised concerns about the risk of creeping protectionism in proposals made by Spanish diplomats to re-write European Union legislation to regulate their industries for the first time. He believed that a threat to IT jobs by moving to a public cloud outside the country would be met with protectionist enthusiasm to keep jobs in the high paying IT industry. The cloud is a ...
I frequently get asked what data center conference to go to. That is a tough question, because it depends on the person's objective. Are they an end user looking on how to get up to speed? Are they a vendor looking for customers? Are they looking to add to their knowledge by learning new things? I am going to share a journey through 10 data center conference that may give you some insight, but keep in mind my objective is different than most. My goal is to hang with friends who are the A team players and learn as much as I can from attending. Also, I get media passes for most of the events so my assessments are based on attending as media, not as a vendor or end user. Saying I want to hang with the A team players can come off as arrogant and elitist, but ...
Sometimes a typo can get you to laugh. I was reading DCK Rich Miller's post on the Google How Green is Internet? Event. And I saw that there are 30,000 servers connected to the Internet. Jon Koomey,a research fellow at Stanford University, says there are at least 1.6 billion devices connected to the Internet, including approximately 30,000 servers. (Photo: Rich Miller) Rich Miller's reporting is so impeccable it is funny to see an oops moment.
Today was Google's "How Green is the Internet Event?" Here is a full list of the speakers at the event. I got ample time with some of the people who are familiar to the data center industry. Presentations and videos will be posted most likely next week. I specifically didn't write anything about the event as I spent my time observing and networking with people there. One of the thing I decided to do was observe the other media attending. Katie Fehrenbacher threw up an early post. Al Gore: The information explosion is a tool to help solve the climate crisis by Katie Fehrenbacher 11 HOURS AGO 2 Comments A A SUMMARY: The Internet and the digital revolution can be a major player in fighting climate change, says Al Gore at a Google event. Forbes's Michael Kanellos has a post on the overall day. It is funny ...
At 7x24 Exchange a panel discussion with Google, AOL, and IBM discussed the challenges for Driving Data Center Performance. Panel Discussion Moderator:David SchirmacherSenior Vice President of OperationsDigital RealtyandPresident7x24 Exchange InternationalPanelists:Joe KavaVice PresidentGoogle Data Center OperationsTodd Traver, CDCDP, PMPData Center Strategy and Energy Efficiency Executive IBM Global Technology Services Michael J. ManosChief Technology OfficerAOL You those of you who haven't seen Mike and Joe on stage, they both have lots of energy.
GigaOm's Barb Darrow posts on IBM's acquisition of SoftLayer. Who would have thought 7 years ago when AWS launched that they would be a threat to IBM's business model. IBM’s acquisition of SoftLayer is a bid to make the IT giant relevant in a world where Amazon Web Services has come in from left field to snarf up workloads that IBM would very much like to own. That’s a big problem for Big Blue. Increasingly, IBM is not just competing with age-old hardware and software rivals like Oracle and HP, but also with Amazon. Going forward, IBM will butt heads more with Google and Microsoft, which have staked big claims in public cloud infrastructure. It is interesting to think of this as a battle between IBM's software developers and Amazon Web Service's software developers.