Author Archive
Last week Fortune asked Mark Hurd, Oracle co-CEO, how Oracle was going to compete in cloud computing when their capital spending came in at $1.7B whereas the aggregate spending of the three cloud players was $31B. Essentially the question was, if you assume the big three are spending roughly equally, how can $1.7B compete with…
Airline overbooking isn’t evil. In fact, if done properly, it’s good for airlines, good for customers, and good for the environment. Sold seats are clearly good for airlines and their shareholders. High utilization is good for customers because it reduces seat costs for airlines which normally operate at single digit profit margins. In the consumer…
I’m a connoisseur of failure. I love reading about engineering failures of all forms and, unsurprisingly, I’m particularly interested in data center faults. It’s not that I delight in engineering failures. My interest is driven by believing that the more faults we all understand, the more likely we can engineer systems that don’t suffer from…
Laying fiber optic cables with repeaters along the ocean floor raises super-interesting technical challenges. I recently visited the CS Responder, a trans-ocean cable-laying ship operated by TE Connectivity. TE Connectivity is $13.3B global technology company that specializes in communication cable, connectors, sensors, and electronic components. Their subsidiary TE SubCom manufactures, lays and maintains undersea cable. TE SubCom has a base…
As part of my home blog, I often describe visit to plants, factories, and ships in the “Technology Series“. Over the years, we’ve covered mining truck manufacturers, sail boat racing, a trip on a ship-assist tug boat, a tour of Holland America’s Westerdam, a visit to an Antarctic ice breaker, a tour of a Panamax container…
Last week we held the 5th annual AWS re:Invent conference. This conference is my favorite opportunity to get into more detail with customers and partners and to learn more about some of the incredible innovations AWS customers are producing. The first year, I was impressed by the conference scale. Back in 2012 it still felt like…
This morning I’m thinking through what I’m going to say at the AWS re:Invent Conference next week and I suppose I’m in a distractable mood. When an email came in asking “what advice would you give someone entering the information technology industry in 2017?” I gave it some thought. This was my short take: Play…
David Patterson has had a phenomenal impact on computer architecture and computer science over the last 40 years. He’s perhaps most notable for the industry impact of the projects he’s led over these years. I first got to know his work back when the Berkeley Reduced Instruction Set Computer project started publishing. The RISC project…
March 14, 2006 was the beginning of a new era in computing. That was the day that Amazon Web Services released the Simple Storage Service (S3). Technically, Simple Queuing Services was released earlier but it was the release of S3 that really lit the fire under cloud computing. I remember that day well. At the…
Optical Archive Inc. was a startup founded by Frank Frankovsky and Gio Coglitore. I first met Frank many years ago when he was Director of the Dell Data Center Solutions team. DCS was part of the massive Dell Computer company but they still ran like a startup. And, with Jimmy Pike leading many of their…
I’m an avid reader of engineering disasters since one of my primary roles in my day job is to avoid them. And, away from work, we are taking a small boat around the world with only two people on board and that too needs to be done with care where an engineering or operational mistake…
This is a guest blog post on Perspectives from Colm MacCarthaigh, a senior engineer on the Amazon Web Services team that designed and built the new VPC Network Address Translation Gateway service that just went live yesterday. Over the last 25 years, Network Address Translation (NAT) has become almost ubiquitous in networks of any size. The…
Microservers and the motivations for microservers have been around for years. I first blogged about them back in 2008 (Cooperative, Expendable, Microslice, Servers: Low-Cost, Low-Power Servers for Internet-Scale Services) and even Intel has entered the market with Atom but it’s the ARM instruction set architecture that has had the majority of server world attention. There…
I’m Interested in data center resource consumption in general and power is a significant component of overall operating cost and also has impact on the environment so, naturally, it gets most of the focus when discussing data center resource consumption. As with all real issues, there is always a bit of hyperbole and some outright…
I love real data. Real data is so much better than speculation and, what I’ve learned from years of staring at production systems, is the real data from the field is often surprisingly different from popular opinion. Disk failure rates are higher than manufacturer specifications, ECC memory faults happen all the time, and events that…
Academic researchers work on problems they believe to be interesting and then publish their results. Particularly good researchers listen carefully to industry problems to find real problems, produce relevant work and then publish the results. True giants of academia listen carefully to find real problems, produce relevant results, build real systems that actually work, and…
Last week Fortune asked Mark Hurd, Oracle co-CEO, how Oracle was going to compete in cloud computing when their capital spending came in at $1.7B whereas the aggregate spending of the three cloud players was $31B. Essentially the question was, if you assume the big three are spending roughly equally, how can $1.7B compete with…
Airline overbooking isn’t evil. In fact, if done properly, it’s good for airlines, good for customers, and good for the environment. Sold seats are clearly good for airlines and their shareholders. High utilization is good for customers because it reduces seat costs for airlines which normally operate at single digit profit margins. In the consumer…
I’m a connoisseur of failure. I love reading about engineering failures of all forms and, unsurprisingly, I’m particularly interested in data center faults. It’s not that I delight in engineering failures. My interest is driven by believing that the more faults we all understand, the more likely we can engineer systems that don’t suffer from…
Laying fiber optic cables with repeaters along the ocean floor raises super-interesting technical challenges. I recently visited the CS Responder, a trans-ocean cable-laying ship operated by TE Connectivity. TE Connectivity is $13.3B global technology company that specializes in communication cable, connectors, sensors, and electronic components. Their subsidiary TE SubCom manufactures, lays and maintains undersea cable. TE SubCom has a base…
As part of my home blog, I often describe visit to plants, factories, and ships in the “Technology Series“. Over the years, we’ve covered mining truck manufacturers, sail boat racing, a trip on a ship-assist tug boat, a tour of Holland America’s Westerdam, a visit to an Antarctic ice breaker, a tour of a Panamax container…
Last week we held the 5th annual AWS re:Invent conference. This conference is my favorite opportunity to get into more detail with customers and partners and to learn more about some of the incredible innovations AWS customers are producing. The first year, I was impressed by the conference scale. Back in 2012 it still felt like…
This morning I’m thinking through what I’m going to say at the AWS re:Invent Conference next week and I suppose I’m in a distractable mood. When an email came in asking “what advice would you give someone entering the information technology industry in 2017?” I gave it some thought. This was my short take: Play…
David Patterson has had a phenomenal impact on computer architecture and computer science over the last 40 years. He’s perhaps most notable for the industry impact of the projects he’s led over these years. I first got to know his work back when the Berkeley Reduced Instruction Set Computer project started publishing. The RISC project…
March 14, 2006 was the beginning of a new era in computing. That was the day that Amazon Web Services released the Simple Storage Service (S3). Technically, Simple Queuing Services was released earlier but it was the release of S3 that really lit the fire under cloud computing. I remember that day well. At the…
Optical Archive Inc. was a startup founded by Frank Frankovsky and Gio Coglitore. I first met Frank many years ago when he was Director of the Dell Data Center Solutions team. DCS was part of the massive Dell Computer company but they still ran like a startup. And, with Jimmy Pike leading many of their…
I’m an avid reader of engineering disasters since one of my primary roles in my day job is to avoid them. And, away from work, we are taking a small boat around the world with only two people on board and that too needs to be done with care where an engineering or operational mistake…
This is a guest blog post on Perspectives from Colm MacCarthaigh, a senior engineer on the Amazon Web Services team that designed and built the new VPC Network Address Translation Gateway service that just went live yesterday. Over the last 25 years, Network Address Translation (NAT) has become almost ubiquitous in networks of any size. The…
Microservers and the motivations for microservers have been around for years. I first blogged about them back in 2008 (Cooperative, Expendable, Microslice, Servers: Low-Cost, Low-Power Servers for Internet-Scale Services) and even Intel has entered the market with Atom but it’s the ARM instruction set architecture that has had the majority of server world attention. There…
I’m Interested in data center resource consumption in general and power is a significant component of overall operating cost and also has impact on the environment so, naturally, it gets most of the focus when discussing data center resource consumption. As with all real issues, there is always a bit of hyperbole and some outright…
I love real data. Real data is so much better than speculation and, what I’ve learned from years of staring at production systems, is the real data from the field is often surprisingly different from popular opinion. Disk failure rates are higher than manufacturer specifications, ECC memory faults happen all the time, and events that…
Academic researchers work on problems they believe to be interesting and then publish their results. Particularly good researchers listen carefully to industry problems to find real problems, produce relevant work and then publish the results. True giants of academia listen carefully to find real problems, produce relevant results, build real systems that actually work, and…