Archive For January 29, 2009
I did the final day keynote at the Conference on Innovative Data Systems Research earlier this month. The slide deck is based upon the CEMS paper: The Case for Low-Cost, Low-Power Servers but it also included a couple of techniques I’ve talked about before that I think are super useful: · Power Load Management: The…
Wow, 2TB for $250 from Western Digital: http://www.engadget.com/2009/01/26/western-digitals-2tb-caviar-green-hdd-on-sale-in-australia/. Once its shipping in North America, I’ll have to update The Cost of Bulk Cold Storage. Update: Released in the US at $299: Western Digital’s 2TB Caviar Green hard drive launches, gets previewed. Sent my way by Savas Parastatididis. –jrh James Hamilton, Amazon Web Services 1200, 12th…
In Microslice Servers and the Case for Low-Cost, Low-Power Servers, I observed that CPU bandwidth is outstripping memory bandwidth. Server designers can address this by: 1) designing better memory subsystems or 2) reducing the CPU per-server. Optimizing for work done per dollar and work done per joule argues strongly for the second approach for many…
In The Case For Low-Power Servers I reviewed the Cooperative, Expendable, Micro-slice Servers project. CEMS is a project I had been doing in my spare time in investigating using low-power, low costs servers running internet-scale workloads. The core premise of the CEMS project: 1) servers are out-of-balance, 2) client and embedded volumes, and 3) performance…
I recently stumbled across: Snippets on Software. It’s a collection of mini-notes on software with links to more if you are interested in more detail. Some snippets are wonderful, some clearly aren’t exclusive to software and some I would argue are just plain wrong. Nonetheless, it’s a great list. It’s too long to read from…
The Conference on Innovative Data Systems Research was held last week at Asilomar California. It’s a biennial systems conference. At the last CIDR, two years ago, I wrote up Architecture for Modular Data Centers where I argued that containerized data centers are an excellent way to increase the pace of innovation in data center power…
Last night, TechCrunch hosted The Crunchies and two of my favorite services got awards. Ray Ozzie and David Treadwell accepted Best Technology Innovation/Achievement for Windows Live Mesh. Amazon CTO Werner Vogels accepted Best Enterprise Startup for Amazon Web Services. Also awarded (from http://crunchies2008.techcrunch.com/) Best Application Or Service Get SatisfactionGoogle Reader (winner)MintedMeeboMySpace Music (runner-up)Yelp Best Technology…
Back in 2000, Joel Spolsky published a set of 12 best practices for a software development team. It’s been around for a long while now and there are only 12 points but it’s very good. Simple, elegant, and worth reading: The Joel Test: 12 Steps to Better Code. Thanks to Patrick Niemeyer for sending this…
Earlier in the week, there was an EE Times posting, Server Makers get Googled, and a follow-up post from Gigaom How Google Is Influencing Server Design. I’ve long been an advocate of making industry leading server designs more available to smaller data center operators since, in aggregate, they are bigger power consumers and have more…