A story on Vietnam Business News caught my eye this weekend -- no, not a publication I 'usually' read, but thanks to a Google alert....
The story covers mobile data centers being offered in the Vietnamese market by Dot VN, Vietnam Internet Center and Elliptical Mobile Solutions (EMS). Once again, the marketing hype calls it "meeting Tier 4+ standard" -- not sure which Tier system they are talking about. :)
The mobile data center is being proposed to meet the demands of "a wide range of clients" and reduce "the size by 50% and save up to 50% of the initial investment." Dot VN will be the sole distributor of EMS solutions in Vietnam and non-exclusive distributor in Asia.
I've been interested in container data centers for a while -- so EMS interested me. Upon further research I found they are an Arizona based business that provides "high-tech enclosures for the mobilization, operation, environmental protection, and security of electronic equipment." They must have an IT background, because every one of their products is an acronym for something. I would not call what they make a 'data center' either, as it is just a single rack, or small enclosure with a pretty narrow focus/market.
They do list some interesting government/military applications for their product, and maybe this is where they shine. I remember when the Sun Blackbox container first came out -- they showed several applications where the Blackbox is deployed into remote areas where the technology needed served a very unique purpose.
Maybe you take an ISO shipping container, fill half of it with Bloom boxes and half of it with EMS R.A.S.E.R.'s and you have something!
P.S.: Does anyone know what's going to happen to the Sun Blackbox, post-Oracle acquisition??
Showing posts with label Sun. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Sun. Show all posts
Sunday, March 07, 2010
Monday, March 23, 2009
Monday Links
Just some quick links to things I found on the net today -- no time to comment; just things I found to be interesting.....
Check out the drawing in this IEEE Spectrum article. It looks like another approach to the Microsoft 4th Generation data center (outdoor container park)! The article is good also --- although it is kind of a summary of what has gone on the last 6-12 months....nothing new.
Power Grid Found Susceptible. I'm a big fan of SmartGrids, but like anything else they need to be EXTREMELY careful with this. Security firm IOActive is offering the security lesson....maybe a few rants from Christopher Hoff would help as well.
Just to show I'm not a complete Cisco fan-boy.... Force10 announced some big iron today. They unveiled a new line of switches and routers "designed to improve the performance, management and cost effectiveness of virtualized data center and cloud computing environments." Pretty cool stuff from an initial quick glance.
As many of you know, I blog from Iowa and simply can NOT escape the stupid stereotype about farmers. I've worked on a few IT projects in the past that were for, or benefited farmers, and so I thought this was interesting..... it's a map showing broadband in america -- percentage of farmers with high speed internet.
March 19 announcement from Rackable: "The CloudRack C2 servers can run at 104 degrees inside the data center, and they offload power supply to the rack to reduce energy wasted in converting AC electricity from the wall to DC electricity used by the box to 1 percent"
I'm usually on the same page as Om Malik.... but have to disagree with him on this one. He thinks Cisco should buy Sun, not IBM.
Check out the drawing in this IEEE Spectrum article. It looks like another approach to the Microsoft 4th Generation data center (outdoor container park)! The article is good also --- although it is kind of a summary of what has gone on the last 6-12 months....nothing new.
Power Grid Found Susceptible. I'm a big fan of SmartGrids, but like anything else they need to be EXTREMELY careful with this. Security firm IOActive is offering the security lesson....maybe a few rants from Christopher Hoff would help as well.
Just to show I'm not a complete Cisco fan-boy.... Force10 announced some big iron today. They unveiled a new line of switches and routers "designed to improve the performance, management and cost effectiveness of virtualized data center and cloud computing environments." Pretty cool stuff from an initial quick glance.
As many of you know, I blog from Iowa and simply can NOT escape the stupid stereotype about farmers. I've worked on a few IT projects in the past that were for, or benefited farmers, and so I thought this was interesting..... it's a map showing broadband in america -- percentage of farmers with high speed internet.
March 19 announcement from Rackable: "The CloudRack C2 servers can run at 104 degrees inside the data center, and they offload power supply to the rack to reduce energy wasted in converting AC electricity from the wall to DC electricity used by the box to 1 percent"
I'm usually on the same page as Om Malik.... but have to disagree with him on this one. He thinks Cisco should buy Sun, not IBM.
Tuesday, March 10, 2009
AST-Global Data Center Container
Data Center Knowledge had an interesting article today on the AST-Global data center container, displayed at CeBIT. Does anyone know what the tie is between AST and IBM (i.e.: the IBM PMDC container is made by AST, or the AST container is made by IBM)?
I did a search for AST-Global, not being very familiar with them and found an interesting Power Point presentation by Pablo Fernandez of AST. Slide 53 is interesting... "The future is MOBILE" and then he lists how containers are better than traditional data centers: "Short term projects, disaster recovery, remote locations, hostile environments, space limitations and expensive real-estate".
Slide 55 goes on to talk about the "PMDC Data Center Park". This is an entire data center park, built with multi-PMDCs -- no building, just concrete slab. This of course made me think of the Microsoft 4th Generation data center concept from Michael Manos back in December last year.
Scalability and mobility, along with protection and potential efficiency gains are really making the case for data center containers. I never thought I would list 'mobility' as an attractive feature of a data center, but it is growing on me. After a phone call I had today discussing containers, I think I will sit down and really pour through the container offerings from IBM, HP, Sun, Dell, Rackable, Verari and others. It may not be the solution for every need or company, but I think (at this stage) there is definately more to it than what I am seeing.
I did a search for AST-Global, not being very familiar with them and found an interesting Power Point presentation by Pablo Fernandez of AST. Slide 53 is interesting... "The future is MOBILE" and then he lists how containers are better than traditional data centers: "Short term projects, disaster recovery, remote locations, hostile environments, space limitations and expensive real-estate".
Slide 55 goes on to talk about the "PMDC Data Center Park". This is an entire data center park, built with multi-PMDCs -- no building, just concrete slab. This of course made me think of the Microsoft 4th Generation data center concept from Michael Manos back in December last year.
Scalability and mobility, along with protection and potential efficiency gains are really making the case for data center containers. I never thought I would list 'mobility' as an attractive feature of a data center, but it is growing on me. After a phone call I had today discussing containers, I think I will sit down and really pour through the container offerings from IBM, HP, Sun, Dell, Rackable, Verari and others. It may not be the solution for every need or company, but I think (at this stage) there is definately more to it than what I am seeing.
Wednesday, December 31, 2008
2008 Review
I feel somewhat obligated to do an end of the year post. It's in fashion, it's that reflective time of year, and well....why not. I've been saving up a bunch of items, so here we go.....
First - there have been any number of '2008 review' articles and blog posts, but here are some of my favorite year-end stories:
The big story of the year (for me anyway) was the Iowa floods in June. I witnessed a lot during those few weeks/months and was very fortunate to not be directly affected. I saw both good and bad business continuity plans being executed and came out with a number of very valuable lessons learned.
I am a big picture person. I like to see the 10,000 foot view and then analyze the heck out of it to the associated impacts, outcomes and possibilities. A short while back I ran across a report from the National Intelligence Council titled Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World. Although I didn't read the entire 120 pages, here are some things that stood out to me:
In October I started tracking data center stocks a little closer. I created a Google spreadsheet and used the capitalization-weighted method to make an index of the stocks I chose to track. The stocks are all data center industry companies and I post regular updates for what the price is as often as I can. It started in October at $23.13 and closed today at $19.63
I have a few million feeds in my Bloglines account. I removed a couple dozen the other day and need to work on prioritizing what I read in there. My favorite new blogs that I am reading are:
This blog had a pretty good year overall....the biggest problem is just finding the time to sit down and write. Coverage of the Michael Manos speech at the Spring Data Center World conference was by far the most read post of the year. Much of this was due to a link from the popular blog by James Hamilton. I was happy to see that my Data Center Site Selection white paper from 2007 had the second highest number of visits. The top states that visited my blog (in order) were California, Iowa, New York, Texas, Washington, Illinois, Virginia, Massachusetts, Florida, Nebraska, and Wisconsin.
As many of you know, I live in Iowa and am a big advocate of the upper Midwest. Iowa had a lot of activity in 2008 with the Google data center in Council Bluffs, the Microsoft West Des Moines announcement and TEAM Companies making several announcements (opening Madison data center and breaking ground in Des Moines).
On to 2009!!
Data Center Containers were a huge story in 2008 and I think that will continue in 2009. I saw the Sun Blackbox again this year, and the Rackable Icecube at Data Center World. I have a number of posts in mind to review and analyze containers, but more on that later...
A few blog posts back I mentioned that video was going to be the killer app. While this is not any big revelation I realize, I think it has been a gradual thing that has many side affects and will continue to grow rapidly in 2009. I've read things about Cisco really attacking the home entertainment market, YouTube , Hulu , Joost , Vimeo and others had great years, and the infrastructure market to support video distribution is growing. The CDN market (I believe) is set to have a great 2009 and we may see some M&A action here. Video podcasts (or what ever you want to call them) are growing in number as well. Some of my regulars include:
Happy New Year!!!
First - there have been any number of '2008 review' articles and blog posts, but here are some of my favorite year-end stories:
- MIT Technology Review: The year in Computing
- CIO Magazine: The Top 10 Cisco Stories of 2008
- Seeking Alpha: What's Next for the Colocation Sector?
- Data Center Knowledge - Top 10 Stories of 2008
The big story of the year (for me anyway) was the Iowa floods in June. I witnessed a lot during those few weeks/months and was very fortunate to not be directly affected. I saw both good and bad business continuity plans being executed and came out with a number of very valuable lessons learned.
I am a big picture person. I like to see the 10,000 foot view and then analyze the heck out of it to the associated impacts, outcomes and possibilities. A short while back I ran across a report from the National Intelligence Council titled Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World. Although I didn't read the entire 120 pages, here are some things that stood out to me:
- Page 33: ".... nine factors can contribute to a modern National Innovation System: fluidity of capital, flexibility of the labor pool, government receptivity to business, information communication technologies, private sector development infrastructure, legal systems to protect intellectual property rights, available scientific and human captial, marketing skills, and cultural propensity to encourage creativity."
- Page 40 has a an interesting map showing world population by age range, in 2005 and 2025.
- Page 63 has a chart breaking down likely energy sources (coal, gas, hydro, oil, nuclear, biomass, others) from 1980 to 2025.
In October I started tracking data center stocks a little closer. I created a Google spreadsheet and used the capitalization-weighted method to make an index of the stocks I chose to track. The stocks are all data center industry companies and I post regular updates for what the price is as often as I can. It started in October at $23.13 and closed today at $19.63
I have a few million feeds in my Bloglines account. I removed a couple dozen the other day and need to work on prioritizing what I read in there. My favorite new blogs that I am reading are:
- Stevey Clayton : Geek in Disguise
- John Gannon - Yet Another VC Blog
- Errata Security
- Microsoft Data Centers
- Gianpaolo's blog
This blog had a pretty good year overall....the biggest problem is just finding the time to sit down and write. Coverage of the Michael Manos speech at the Spring Data Center World conference was by far the most read post of the year. Much of this was due to a link from the popular blog by James Hamilton. I was happy to see that my Data Center Site Selection white paper from 2007 had the second highest number of visits. The top states that visited my blog (in order) were California, Iowa, New York, Texas, Washington, Illinois, Virginia, Massachusetts, Florida, Nebraska, and Wisconsin.
As many of you know, I live in Iowa and am a big advocate of the upper Midwest. Iowa had a lot of activity in 2008 with the Google data center in Council Bluffs, the Microsoft West Des Moines announcement and TEAM Companies making several announcements (opening Madison data center and breaking ground in Des Moines).
On to 2009!!
Data Center Containers were a huge story in 2008 and I think that will continue in 2009. I saw the Sun Blackbox again this year, and the Rackable Icecube at Data Center World. I have a number of posts in mind to review and analyze containers, but more on that later...
A few blog posts back I mentioned that video was going to be the killer app. While this is not any big revelation I realize, I think it has been a gradual thing that has many side affects and will continue to grow rapidly in 2009. I've read things about Cisco really attacking the home entertainment market, YouTube , Hulu , Joost , Vimeo and others had great years, and the infrastructure market to support video distribution is growing. The CDN market (I believe) is set to have a great 2009 and we may see some M&A action here. Video podcasts (or what ever you want to call them) are growing in number as well. Some of my regulars include:
- Cisco TechwiseTV
- TED Talks
- Google Tech Talks
- Hak5
Happy New Year!!!
Inspiration is for amateurs ; the rest of us just show up and get to work.
-Chuck Close
-Chuck Close
Thursday, November 27, 2008
Sun Donates a Blackbox to China's Disaster Reduction Center
Sun Microsystems has donated a Modular Data Center to the China National Disaster Reduction Center to help the Chinese Government. The WHIR News site has the complete details of the story.
Wednesday, November 19, 2008
SuperComputer 2008 Conference
SC08 (The International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis) has been going on this week and there are a number of interesting links as a result:
Enjoy
- Stacey Higginbotham at GigaOm points out that the conference is really (or has become) a Data Center conference.
- The Austin American-Statesman previews the conference and points out that Sun will bus people to their Ranger installation at UT, and Dell will bus people to UT's main campus to see Stallion, their advanced computer visualization system.
- Nortel 100G to carry critical network traffic for SC08 conference.
- MercuryNews.com reports that Intel, Cisco and Sun are helping develop a supercomputer for the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
- NVIDIA announces Tesla "personal supercomputer"...... umm...... ok
- Oak Ridge National Laboratory selects DataDirect Network Storage to power one of the largest and fastest file systems in the world. "48 S2a9900 High Performance storage platforms deliver up to 240 Gigabytes per second of performance across 10 Petabytes". Wow!
- DataDirect Networks also won the HTCWire's Editors' Choice Award for best HPC Storage Product for 2008.
Enjoy
Wednesday, July 16, 2008
Containers, Clouds and Rumors
There has certainly been a lot of news in the industry this week and although I haven't completely caught up yet (I'm attempting to take vacation this week), here is a quick run-down of what I have seen so far.....
- First and foremost, my apologies for getting some figures wrong in my Systems Management News article. I said that Microsoft has 220 containers and 30,000 servers ; well, let's just say I need to stop writing articles so late at night. :) Going back to my own post of the AFCOM keynote that Michael Manos gave, at 1000 to 2000 systems per container it is more like 300,000 servers total.
- Containers were a hot story today, as HP announced the POD (Performance Optimized Datacenter).
- There were a couple of good articles on Cloud Computing I ran across. The first one, from Douglas Gourlay at Cisco is a nice wrap-up of the hype-filled term and how it is really just a technology shift that is happening across many layers and industries. I agree that the term cloud doesn't really mean much today -- I think we'll look back in a few years and realize that things were really just getting moving in terms of true Cloud Computing. He mentions workload portability, which I have been intrigued with for a while and was why I followed Platespin, who was acquired by Novell back in February. Doug's mention of the fictional Skynet made me realize that Cisco is so good that aiming for clouds isn't enough - they are into outter space newtorking!
- Another Cisco story this week is the press release about enhancements to IP over DWDM. I am still (somewhere in my spare time) trying to pursue my CCDA certification and DWDM technology is well..... pretty cool stuff. You should read the press release for yourself, but the main news is that they have doubled the reach of the CRS-1 40Gbps IPoDWDM to an industry leading 2,000 kilometers without regeneration.
- The second cloud computing article was very interesting -- for some rumors! Reuven Cohen from Enomoly gossips about project "Red Dog" from Microsoft. I remember reading about this before (because of the Clifford the Big Red Dog reference). It's basically saying that this project is meant to be an "EC2 for Windows" cloud offering. The second rumor is that of a Chinese cloud project "under a hydro dam", which when complete may exceed a million servers. For whatever reason, my hunch is that Sun is involved in this.
Tuesday, July 15, 2008
Systems Management News - Containers
My latest column at Systems Management News is out. I couldn't hold back any longer....I had to talk about containers. I could probably go 3 more columns worth on the topic, but I attempt to cover the major manufacturers who have come out with container products: Sun, Rackable, Verari, and IBM.
Check out the column here
Check out the column here
Sunday, June 01, 2008
Sun Microsystems Project Hydrazine
Maybe I'm still hyped-up on the talk from Brian Wilson at Sun, but Project Hydrazine is pretty cool.
Brian talked about a needs pyramid of the different parts of Information Technology. It was an interesting analysis, and (of course), Sun provided solutions at many of the steps up the pyramid. An article I read tonight really kind of brought it home for what Sun is offering. I've slowly come back to really like Sun as a company and where they are going. Their entry into the cloud computing arena is a pretty formidable one and worth a look.
Project Hydrazine was announced recently and packages a lot of things together to make an attractive solution. Check out this article from Talkbie or the Sun project page here.
Brian talked about a needs pyramid of the different parts of Information Technology. It was an interesting analysis, and (of course), Sun provided solutions at many of the steps up the pyramid. An article I read tonight really kind of brought it home for what Sun is offering. I've slowly come back to really like Sun as a company and where they are going. Their entry into the cloud computing arena is a pretty formidable one and worth a look.
Project Hydrazine was announced recently and packages a lot of things together to make an attractive solution. Check out this article from Talkbie or the Sun project page here.
Tuesday, May 27, 2008
Tuesday Links
Just a random collection of links I have come across today (mostly from surfing digg.com)
- Gates, Jobs and Woz - historical perspective slideshow on the Science Channel. BTW-- If anyone would like to buy an Apple IIGS Woz limited edition, let me know.
- 56 types of geeks :)
- Extravagant designs by Luigi Colani
- Did anyone else notice Google Maps now has a "more" button that turns on layers for photos and Wikipedia?
- Maybe Norway will be the next hot spot for Data Centers.... Here is an interesting article on their sea-based wind parks. The photo above comes from Panoramio, within a Google Maps search of Norway.
- Although there is not much new, the Economist has a nice article -- "Down on the Server Farm"
- Dell had a really good blog post last week on cloud computing: "Within Layer 1 - Power"
- As a follow-up to my post on Sun last week - I also listened to a podcast interview of Jonathan Schwartz on Giga Om.
- Here is a preview of Windows 7 and Multi-touch
Wednesday, May 21, 2008
Sun Blackbox Tour 2008
Earlier today I attended a meeting / event for Sun Microsystems. The Blackbox (S20) was back in Des Moines and although I saw it last year, I was curious to see it again. I'll get to the blackbox in a minute. The guest speaker for this year's event was Brian Wilson, Sun's Director and CTO - Market Development. He was an awesome speaker and I came out of his presentation inspired, with 3 pages of notes.
Brian started by briefly explaining how Sun has transformed over the past few years. Scott McNealy was a good CEO, but Jonathan Schwartz defintely shook things up when he took the healm. Jonathan promotes a new "transparency" for Sun and their interactions with customers and the industry. Sun has also become very 'agnostic' in its hardware and software platforms. Brian noted that Sun is actually more of a software company now than hardware. The challenge that Jonathan and Brian are presented with is... "how can Sun stay in business when customers can do more with less". Rather than give a typical marketing answer to this question, he went into the Sun answer with an overhead projector drawing. For those younger folks reading this -- here is the Wiki article on what an overhead projector is. :) I won't try to replicate Brian's drawing, but the thrust of it is that the focus is moving away from the enterprise where "IT=cost", and over to the service providers where "IT=weapon". The three drivers for this change in focus are the Internet, High Performance Computing, and the SaaS providers.
Some other notes or quotes I had from his talk:
Ok -- now on to the Blackbox: Unfortunately, Sun did not send the latest version of the S20 to Des Moines. The container was essentially what I saw last year. The two notable differences in the product were that they have added a fire suppression system to it, and this time they had a Sun branded Chiller unit sitting on the truck in front of the Blackbox. Other changes include better cable management and the ability to move an entire cabinet (easily) in and out of the container. They state that you can place anyone's hardware inside the container and there are configuration alternatives you can take; for instance, adding fewer, but deeper cabinets to accommodate special equipment that needs the depth. It was overheard that there are 8 Blackboxes in production today, but the pipeline of interested parties is pretty large. The United Airline story about putting containers in their hangers in Chicago was mentioned a few times.
Overall I am glad I attended the event and I think the whole container story is starting to really sink in with me. I by no means think it is "the" answer, but there are some very plausible scenarios where it can be used and I think Sun entered the game pretty early and as such has a good chance at succeeding. Here are some pictures I took of the Blackbox.
Brian started by briefly explaining how Sun has transformed over the past few years. Scott McNealy was a good CEO, but Jonathan Schwartz defintely shook things up when he took the healm. Jonathan promotes a new "transparency" for Sun and their interactions with customers and the industry. Sun has also become very 'agnostic' in its hardware and software platforms. Brian noted that Sun is actually more of a software company now than hardware. The challenge that Jonathan and Brian are presented with is... "how can Sun stay in business when customers can do more with less". Rather than give a typical marketing answer to this question, he went into the Sun answer with an overhead projector drawing. For those younger folks reading this -- here is the Wiki article on what an overhead projector is. :) I won't try to replicate Brian's drawing, but the thrust of it is that the focus is moving away from the enterprise where "IT=cost", and over to the service providers where "IT=weapon". The three drivers for this change in focus are the Internet, High Performance Computing, and the SaaS providers.
Some other notes or quotes I had from his talk:
- AT&T (who has a large Sun footprint), spends over $1 Billion per year for power.
- Book recommendation -- Empires of Light ( a favorite of Jonathan Schwartz also)
- Sun opened their Santa Clara data center and Brian took a tour. He was very impressed, talked with his tour guide and ended up finding out that those involved with the design and build of the data center ended up reporting to the Sun CFO. This was particularly interesting to Brian -- let the person in charge of paying the bills for the data center drive the build (and efficiency) of it!
- Blackbox: 25kW per rack, in 1/8 the space
- "Some" business do actually want to move their data centers -- examples being the U.S. Military and media companies covering Olympic events for periods in other countries.
- Sun entered the data center switch business. Internal code name Magnum. This is the big dog. It is an Infiniband core switch, with capacity for 3,456 server nodes and does a lot for switch consolidation and thus reduction/elimination of space and cabling.
- Best kept secret : TCP offload engine .....interesting stuff.
- Brian noted a database shift (in parallel with earlier statements about IT=cost vs. IT=weapon. 90% of enterprise databases are Oracle, while 90% of web 2.0 databases are mySQL
- Sun does NOT use raised floor in their data centers.
- They feel it is their corporate responsibility to share data center design knowledge and lessons learned with the industry.
- 3 take-aways: 1) Sun hardware runs on other vendors chips (Intel/AMD). 2) They push extreme efficiency. 3) Build a digital service delivery platform (i.e.: LAMP , SAMP , or MARS (mySQL, Apache, Ruby, Solaris) )
Ok -- now on to the Blackbox: Unfortunately, Sun did not send the latest version of the S20 to Des Moines. The container was essentially what I saw last year. The two notable differences in the product were that they have added a fire suppression system to it, and this time they had a Sun branded Chiller unit sitting on the truck in front of the Blackbox. Other changes include better cable management and the ability to move an entire cabinet (easily) in and out of the container. They state that you can place anyone's hardware inside the container and there are configuration alternatives you can take; for instance, adding fewer, but deeper cabinets to accommodate special equipment that needs the depth. It was overheard that there are 8 Blackboxes in production today, but the pipeline of interested parties is pretty large. The United Airline story about putting containers in their hangers in Chicago was mentioned a few times.
Overall I am glad I attended the event and I think the whole container story is starting to really sink in with me. I by no means think it is "the" answer, but there are some very plausible scenarios where it can be used and I think Sun entered the game pretty early and as such has a good chance at succeeding. Here are some pictures I took of the Blackbox.
Thursday, February 14, 2008
Sun Preps for Infiniband
I (admittedly) don't know much about Infiniband. I know what it is, but I just don't hear that much about it and have not used it in my experience. Well, it looks like Sun is taking a gamble on it.
Sun touts many advantages of Infiniband vs. Ethernet in the race for the unified network. Infiniband is poised to beat Ethernet to the 40Gbit/sec mark and products are expected to have latency as low as 60-70 nanoseconds.
I'm going to have to agree with quotes made in the EETimes article and say that Ethernet advances may be slow going due to IEEE red tape, but Infiniband just doesn't have the market share that Ethernet does and data center managers are looking to reduce the types of fabrics, not increase.
Check out the EETimes.com article here
Sun touts many advantages of Infiniband vs. Ethernet in the race for the unified network. Infiniband is poised to beat Ethernet to the 40Gbit/sec mark and products are expected to have latency as low as 60-70 nanoseconds.
I'm going to have to agree with quotes made in the EETimes article and say that Ethernet advances may be slow going due to IEEE red tape, but Infiniband just doesn't have the market share that Ethernet does and data center managers are looking to reduce the types of fabrics, not increase.
Check out the EETimes.com article here
Tuesday, January 29, 2008
Tuesday Links
- Now I have to change my Google Alerts from Sun Blackbox to Sun Modular DatCenter S20
- Cisco has a cool 3D view of the new Nexus 7000 series switch
- Here is a nice introductory write up on the anatomy of a DNS DDoS amplification attack
- Peter Christy has a nice article explaining the Cisco TrustSec architecture
- Google's $10 million investment in eSolar
- Continuing yesterday's post on wind energy - check out Marquiss Wind Power - ducted wind turbine
Wednesday, December 19, 2007
Sun BlackBox in Australia
It seems like the Sun BlackBox has arrived in Australia.
Check out Tom Worthington's post/review of it here
Check out Tom Worthington's post/review of it here
Sunday, December 16, 2007
MLB and Orbitz Case Studies
Network World is probably in the top 3 for my favorite magazines and web sites to visit. They really do a good job of capturing the news, but also delivering some good interviews that demonstrate real world use of the technologies they cover. Two particular stories caught my attention recently that I enjoyed:
The first was a story of Major League Baseball Advanced Media -- I visit mlb.com and stlcardinals.com frequently. The article interviews Ryan Nelson, director of operations for MLB Advanced Media. MLB uses Joyent services to 'dial-up' and 'dial-down' their use of servers and compute power based on the seasonal load and needs. I had heard of Joyent before, but never really looked into them. It's a pretty cool service, and seeing how MLB.com uses their service helps solidify the concept. Yes, it's another company jumping on the "cloud computing" bandwagon, but they offer some pretty innovative solutions, coupled with some cool Sun hardware and technologies. I had a brief introduction to Sun virtualization technology at the Blackbox event earlier this year, but if you haven't checked Solaris Zones it is worth a look. MLB has data centers in New York and Chicago, and thanks to the infrastructure they have setup they can move utilization between centers (for upgrades and such) on the fly. It sounds like Ryan Nelson has a pretty cool job playing around with this infrastructure and new technology. Check out this interview/article here
The second article (thanks for the link Ben) from Network World is about travel web site Orbitz. Like everyone else in the industry, Orbitz is trying to go green -- or as CIO Bahman Koohestani put it, "taking his IT operations carbon neutral". One thing that I liked about Orbitz (in this article) is that they know how much energy they use, monitor their use on a daily basis, and they know how much cooling they use for various parts of their operations. Going green is great, but keeping very close tabs on energy use and mining the data is even better (in my opinion). Orbitz has two large data centers in the Chicago area and Koohestani touts it as an excellent place to locate data centers. Chicago is RED hot now days for data centers. Like other stories we have seen about company strategies -- Orbitz is slashing the number of servers used, and consolidating data center operations world wide. The article has all of the details about how they are greening its IT operations.
The first was a story of Major League Baseball Advanced Media -- I visit mlb.com and stlcardinals.com frequently. The article interviews Ryan Nelson, director of operations for MLB Advanced Media. MLB uses Joyent services to 'dial-up' and 'dial-down' their use of servers and compute power based on the seasonal load and needs. I had heard of Joyent before, but never really looked into them. It's a pretty cool service, and seeing how MLB.com uses their service helps solidify the concept. Yes, it's another company jumping on the "cloud computing" bandwagon, but they offer some pretty innovative solutions, coupled with some cool Sun hardware and technologies. I had a brief introduction to Sun virtualization technology at the Blackbox event earlier this year, but if you haven't checked Solaris Zones it is worth a look. MLB has data centers in New York and Chicago, and thanks to the infrastructure they have setup they can move utilization between centers (for upgrades and such) on the fly. It sounds like Ryan Nelson has a pretty cool job playing around with this infrastructure and new technology. Check out this interview/article here
The second article (thanks for the link Ben) from Network World is about travel web site Orbitz. Like everyone else in the industry, Orbitz is trying to go green -- or as CIO Bahman Koohestani put it, "taking his IT operations carbon neutral". One thing that I liked about Orbitz (in this article) is that they know how much energy they use, monitor their use on a daily basis, and they know how much cooling they use for various parts of their operations. Going green is great, but keeping very close tabs on energy use and mining the data is even better (in my opinion). Orbitz has two large data centers in the Chicago area and Koohestani touts it as an excellent place to locate data centers. Chicago is RED hot now days for data centers. Like other stories we have seen about company strategies -- Orbitz is slashing the number of servers used, and consolidating data center operations world wide. The article has all of the details about how they are greening its IT operations.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)