Author Archive
Our 1999 Mitsubishi 3000 VR4 For Sale. Black-on-black with 80,000 miles. $12,500 OBO. Fewer than 300 1999 VR-4s were produced for North America, and only 101 in black-on-black. We love this car and hate to sell it, but are living downtown Seattle and no longer need a car. It’s a beautiful machine, 320 HP, and…
Earlier this morning Amazon Web Services announced the public beta of Amazon Cloudwatch, Auto Scaling, and Elastic Load Balancing. Amazon Cloudwatch is a web service for monitoring AWS resources. Auto Scaling automatically grows and shrinks Elastic Compute Cloud resources based upon demand. Elastic Load Balancing distributed workload over a fleet of EC2 servers. Amazon CloudWatch…
A couple of weeks back, a mini-book by Luiz André Barroso and Urs Hölzle of the Google infrastructure team was released. The Datacenter as a Computer: An Introduction to the Design of Warehouse-Scale Machines is just over 100 pages long but an excellent introduction into very high scale computing and the issues important at scale….
High data center temperatures is the next frontier for server competition (see pages 16 through 22 of my Data Center Efficiency Best Practices talk: http://mvdirona.com/jrh/TalksAndPapers/JamesHamilton_Google2009.pdf and 32C (90F) in the Data Center). At higher temperatures the difference between good and sloppy mechanical designs are much more pronounced and need to be a purchasing criteria. The…
Chris Dagdigian of BioTeam presented the keynote at this year’s Bio-IT World Conference. I found this presentation interesting for at least two reasons: 1) it’s a very broad and well reasoned look at many of the issues in computational science and, 2) an innovative example of cloud computing is presented where BioTeam and Pfizer implement…
In the Randy Katz on High Scale Data Centers posting I the article brought up Google Dalles. The article reported that Dalles used air side economization but I’ve not seen the large intakes or louvers I would expect from a facility of that scale. Cary Roberts, ex-TellMe Networks and all around smart guy, produced a…
Earlier this week I got a thought provoking comment from Rick Cockrell in response to the posting: 32C (90F) in the Data Center. I found the points raised interesting and worthy of more general discussion so I pulled the thread out from the comments into a separate blog entry. Rick posted: Guys, to be honest…
This IEEE Spectrum article was published in February but I’ve been busy and haven’t had a chance to blog it. The author, Randy Katz, is a UC Berkeley researcher and member of the Reliable Available Distributed Systems Lab. Katz was a coauthor on the recently published RAD Lab article on Cloud Computing: Berkeley Above the…
I’m always interested in research on cloud service efficiency, and last week, at the Uptime Institute IT Symposium in New York City, management consultancy McKinsey published a report entitled Clearing the air on Cloud Computing. McKinsey is a well respected professional services company that describes itself as “a management consulting firm advising leading companies on…
In Where SSDs Don’t Make Sense in Server Applications, we looked at the results of a HDD to SSD comparison test done by the Microsoft Cambridge Research team. Vijay Rao of AMD recently sent me a pointer to an excellent comparison test done by AnandTech. In SSD versus Enterprise SAS and SATA disks, Anandtech compares…
My notes from an older talk done by Ryan Barrett on the Google App Engine Data store at Google IO last year (5/28/2008). Ryan is a co-founder of the App Engine team. · App Engine Data Store is build on Big Table. o Scalable structured storage o Not a sharded database o Not an RDBMS…
All new technologies go through an early phase when everyone initially is completely convinced the technology can’t work. Then for those that actually do solve interesting problems, they get adopted in some workloads and head into the next phase. In the next phase, people see the technology actually works well for some workloads and they…
Last week I attended the Data Center Efficiency Summit hosted by Google. You’ll find four posting on various aspects of the summit at: http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2009/04/05/DataCenterEfficiencySummitPosting4.aspx. Two of the most interesting videos: · Modular Data Center Tour: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zRwPSFpLX8I&feature=channel · Data Center Water Treatment Plant: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nPjZvFuUKN8&feature=channel A Cnet article with links to all the videos: http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-10215392-92.html?tag=newsEditorsPicksArea.0. The presentation…
In the talk I gave at the Efficient Data Center Summit, I note that the hottest place on earth over recorded history was Al Aziziyah Libya in 1922 where 136F (58C) was indicated (see Data Center Efficiency Summit (Posting #4)). What’s important about this observation from a data center perspective is that this most extreme…
Last week, Google hosted the Data Center Efficiency Summit. While there, I posted a couple of short blog entries with my rough notes: · Data Center Efficiency Summit · Rough Notes: Data Center Efficiency Summit · Rough Notes: Data Center Efficiency Summit (posting #3) In what follows, I summarize the session I presented and go…
The HotPower ’09 workshop will be held on October 10th at the same venue and right before the Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP 2009) at Big Sky Resort Montana. Hotpower recognizes that power is becoming a central issue in the design of all systems from embedded systems to servers for high-scale data centers. From…
Our 1999 Mitsubishi 3000 VR4 For Sale. Black-on-black with 80,000 miles. $12,500 OBO. Fewer than 300 1999 VR-4s were produced for North America, and only 101 in black-on-black. We love this car and hate to sell it, but are living downtown Seattle and no longer need a car. It’s a beautiful machine, 320 HP, and…
Earlier this morning Amazon Web Services announced the public beta of Amazon Cloudwatch, Auto Scaling, and Elastic Load Balancing. Amazon Cloudwatch is a web service for monitoring AWS resources. Auto Scaling automatically grows and shrinks Elastic Compute Cloud resources based upon demand. Elastic Load Balancing distributed workload over a fleet of EC2 servers. Amazon CloudWatch…
A couple of weeks back, a mini-book by Luiz André Barroso and Urs Hölzle of the Google infrastructure team was released. The Datacenter as a Computer: An Introduction to the Design of Warehouse-Scale Machines is just over 100 pages long but an excellent introduction into very high scale computing and the issues important at scale….
High data center temperatures is the next frontier for server competition (see pages 16 through 22 of my Data Center Efficiency Best Practices talk: http://mvdirona.com/jrh/TalksAndPapers/JamesHamilton_Google2009.pdf and 32C (90F) in the Data Center). At higher temperatures the difference between good and sloppy mechanical designs are much more pronounced and need to be a purchasing criteria. The…
Chris Dagdigian of BioTeam presented the keynote at this year’s Bio-IT World Conference. I found this presentation interesting for at least two reasons: 1) it’s a very broad and well reasoned look at many of the issues in computational science and, 2) an innovative example of cloud computing is presented where BioTeam and Pfizer implement…
In the Randy Katz on High Scale Data Centers posting I the article brought up Google Dalles. The article reported that Dalles used air side economization but I’ve not seen the large intakes or louvers I would expect from a facility of that scale. Cary Roberts, ex-TellMe Networks and all around smart guy, produced a…
Earlier this week I got a thought provoking comment from Rick Cockrell in response to the posting: 32C (90F) in the Data Center. I found the points raised interesting and worthy of more general discussion so I pulled the thread out from the comments into a separate blog entry. Rick posted: Guys, to be honest…
This IEEE Spectrum article was published in February but I’ve been busy and haven’t had a chance to blog it. The author, Randy Katz, is a UC Berkeley researcher and member of the Reliable Available Distributed Systems Lab. Katz was a coauthor on the recently published RAD Lab article on Cloud Computing: Berkeley Above the…
I’m always interested in research on cloud service efficiency, and last week, at the Uptime Institute IT Symposium in New York City, management consultancy McKinsey published a report entitled Clearing the air on Cloud Computing. McKinsey is a well respected professional services company that describes itself as “a management consulting firm advising leading companies on…
In Where SSDs Don’t Make Sense in Server Applications, we looked at the results of a HDD to SSD comparison test done by the Microsoft Cambridge Research team. Vijay Rao of AMD recently sent me a pointer to an excellent comparison test done by AnandTech. In SSD versus Enterprise SAS and SATA disks, Anandtech compares…
My notes from an older talk done by Ryan Barrett on the Google App Engine Data store at Google IO last year (5/28/2008). Ryan is a co-founder of the App Engine team. · App Engine Data Store is build on Big Table. o Scalable structured storage o Not a sharded database o Not an RDBMS…
All new technologies go through an early phase when everyone initially is completely convinced the technology can’t work. Then for those that actually do solve interesting problems, they get adopted in some workloads and head into the next phase. In the next phase, people see the technology actually works well for some workloads and they…
Last week I attended the Data Center Efficiency Summit hosted by Google. You’ll find four posting on various aspects of the summit at: http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2009/04/05/DataCenterEfficiencySummitPosting4.aspx. Two of the most interesting videos: · Modular Data Center Tour: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zRwPSFpLX8I&feature=channel · Data Center Water Treatment Plant: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nPjZvFuUKN8&feature=channel A Cnet article with links to all the videos: http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-10215392-92.html?tag=newsEditorsPicksArea.0. The presentation…
In the talk I gave at the Efficient Data Center Summit, I note that the hottest place on earth over recorded history was Al Aziziyah Libya in 1922 where 136F (58C) was indicated (see Data Center Efficiency Summit (Posting #4)). What’s important about this observation from a data center perspective is that this most extreme…
Last week, Google hosted the Data Center Efficiency Summit. While there, I posted a couple of short blog entries with my rough notes: · Data Center Efficiency Summit · Rough Notes: Data Center Efficiency Summit · Rough Notes: Data Center Efficiency Summit (posting #3) In what follows, I summarize the session I presented and go…
The HotPower ’09 workshop will be held on October 10th at the same venue and right before the Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP 2009) at Big Sky Resort Montana. Hotpower recognizes that power is becoming a central issue in the design of all systems from embedded systems to servers for high-scale data centers. From…