Author Archive
The NASCAR Sprint Cup Stock Car Series kicks its season off with a bang and, unlike other sports, starts the season off with the biggest event of the year rather than closing with it. Daytona Speed Weeks is a multi-week, many race event the finale of which is the Daytona 500. The 500 starts with…
Cooling is the largest single non-IT (overhead) load in a modern datacenter. There are many innovative solutions to addressing the power losses in cooling systems. Many of these mechanical system innovations work well and others have great potential but none are as powerful as simply increasing the server inlet temperatures. Obviously less cooling is cheaper…
Untitled 1 Urs Holzle did the keynote talk at the 2012 Open Networking Summit where he focused on Software Defined Networking in Wide Area Networking. Urs leads the Technical Infrastructure group at Google where he is Senior VP and Technical Fellow. Software defined networking (SDN) is the central management of networking routing decisions rather than…
Most of the time I write about the challenges posed by scaling infrastructure. Today, though, I wanted mention some upcoming events that have to do with a different sort of scale. In Amazon Web Services we are tackling lots of really hairy challenges as we build out one the world’s largest cloud computing platforms. From…
I met Google’s Wolf-Dietrich Weber at the 2009 CIDR conference where he presented what is still one of my favorite datacenter power-related papers. I liked the paper because the gain was large, the authors weren’t confused or distracted by much of what is incorrectly written on datacenter power consumption, and the technique is actually practical….
I love solar power, but in reflecting carefully on a couple of high profile datacenter deployments of solar power, I’m really developing serious reservations that this is the path to reducing data center environmental impact. I just can’t make the math work and find myself wondering if these large solar farms are really somewhere between…
Every couple of weeks I get questions along the lines of “should I checksum application files, given that the disk already has error correction?” or “given that TCP/IP has error correction on every communications packet, why do I need to have application level network error detection?” Another frequent question is “non-ECC mother boards are much…
In the past, I’ve written about the cost of latency and how reducing latency can drive more customer engagement and increase revenue. Two example of this are: 1) The Cost of Latency and 2) Economic Incentives applied to Web Latency. Nowhere is latency reduction more valuable than in high frequency trading applications. Because these trades…
Last week I wrote up Studying the Costa Concordia Grounding. Many folks sent me mail with interesting perspectives. Two were sufficiently interesting that I wanted to repeat them here. The first was from someone who was actually on the ship on that final cruise. The latter is from a professional captain with over 35 years’…
Don’t be a show-off. Never be too proud to turn back. There are old pilots and bold pilots, but no old, bold pilots. I first heard the latter part of this famous quote made by US Airmail Pilot E. Hamilton Lee back when I raced cars. At that time, one of the better drivers in…
Ordinarily I focus this blog on areas of computing where I spend most of my time from high performance computing to database internals and cloud computing. An area that interests me greatly but I’ve seldom written about is entrepreneurship and startups. One of the Seattle areas startups with which I stay in touch is Socrata….
Finally! I’ve been dying to talk about DynamoDB since work began on this scalable, low-latency, high-performance NoSQL service at AWS. This morning, AWS announced availability of DynamoDB: Amazon Web Services Launches Amazon DynamoDB – A New NoSQL Database Service Designed for the Scale of the Internet. In a past blog entry, One Size Does Not…
Occasionally I come across a noteworthy datacenter design that is worth covering. Late last year a very interesting Japanese facility was brought to my attention by Mikio Uzawa an IT consultant who authors the Agile Cat blog. I know Mikio because he occasionally translates Perspectives articles for publication in Japan. Mikio pointed me to the…
Years ago, Dave Patterson remarked that most server innovations were coming from the mobile device world. He’s right. Commodity system innovation is driven by volume and nowhere is there more volume than in the mobile device world. The power management techniques applied fairly successfully over the last 5 years had their genesis in the mobile…
If you work in the database world, you already know Phil Bernstein. He’s the author of Principles of Transaction Processing and has a long track record as a successful and prolific database researcher. Past readers of this blog may remember Phil’s guest blog posting on Google Megastore. Over the past few years, Phil has been…
While at Microsoft I hosted a weekly talk series called the Enterprise Computing Series (ECS) where I mostly scheduled technical talks on server and high-scale service topics. I said “mostly” because the series occasionally roamed as far afield as having an ex-member of the Ferrari Formula 1 team present. Client-side topics are also occasionally on…
The NASCAR Sprint Cup Stock Car Series kicks its season off with a bang and, unlike other sports, starts the season off with the biggest event of the year rather than closing with it. Daytona Speed Weeks is a multi-week, many race event the finale of which is the Daytona 500. The 500 starts with…
Cooling is the largest single non-IT (overhead) load in a modern datacenter. There are many innovative solutions to addressing the power losses in cooling systems. Many of these mechanical system innovations work well and others have great potential but none are as powerful as simply increasing the server inlet temperatures. Obviously less cooling is cheaper…
Untitled 1 Urs Holzle did the keynote talk at the 2012 Open Networking Summit where he focused on Software Defined Networking in Wide Area Networking. Urs leads the Technical Infrastructure group at Google where he is Senior VP and Technical Fellow. Software defined networking (SDN) is the central management of networking routing decisions rather than…
Most of the time I write about the challenges posed by scaling infrastructure. Today, though, I wanted mention some upcoming events that have to do with a different sort of scale. In Amazon Web Services we are tackling lots of really hairy challenges as we build out one the world’s largest cloud computing platforms. From…
I met Google’s Wolf-Dietrich Weber at the 2009 CIDR conference where he presented what is still one of my favorite datacenter power-related papers. I liked the paper because the gain was large, the authors weren’t confused or distracted by much of what is incorrectly written on datacenter power consumption, and the technique is actually practical….
I love solar power, but in reflecting carefully on a couple of high profile datacenter deployments of solar power, I’m really developing serious reservations that this is the path to reducing data center environmental impact. I just can’t make the math work and find myself wondering if these large solar farms are really somewhere between…
Every couple of weeks I get questions along the lines of “should I checksum application files, given that the disk already has error correction?” or “given that TCP/IP has error correction on every communications packet, why do I need to have application level network error detection?” Another frequent question is “non-ECC mother boards are much…
In the past, I’ve written about the cost of latency and how reducing latency can drive more customer engagement and increase revenue. Two example of this are: 1) The Cost of Latency and 2) Economic Incentives applied to Web Latency. Nowhere is latency reduction more valuable than in high frequency trading applications. Because these trades…
Last week I wrote up Studying the Costa Concordia Grounding. Many folks sent me mail with interesting perspectives. Two were sufficiently interesting that I wanted to repeat them here. The first was from someone who was actually on the ship on that final cruise. The latter is from a professional captain with over 35 years’…
Don’t be a show-off. Never be too proud to turn back. There are old pilots and bold pilots, but no old, bold pilots. I first heard the latter part of this famous quote made by US Airmail Pilot E. Hamilton Lee back when I raced cars. At that time, one of the better drivers in…
Ordinarily I focus this blog on areas of computing where I spend most of my time from high performance computing to database internals and cloud computing. An area that interests me greatly but I’ve seldom written about is entrepreneurship and startups. One of the Seattle areas startups with which I stay in touch is Socrata….
Finally! I’ve been dying to talk about DynamoDB since work began on this scalable, low-latency, high-performance NoSQL service at AWS. This morning, AWS announced availability of DynamoDB: Amazon Web Services Launches Amazon DynamoDB – A New NoSQL Database Service Designed for the Scale of the Internet. In a past blog entry, One Size Does Not…
Occasionally I come across a noteworthy datacenter design that is worth covering. Late last year a very interesting Japanese facility was brought to my attention by Mikio Uzawa an IT consultant who authors the Agile Cat blog. I know Mikio because he occasionally translates Perspectives articles for publication in Japan. Mikio pointed me to the…
Years ago, Dave Patterson remarked that most server innovations were coming from the mobile device world. He’s right. Commodity system innovation is driven by volume and nowhere is there more volume than in the mobile device world. The power management techniques applied fairly successfully over the last 5 years had their genesis in the mobile…
If you work in the database world, you already know Phil Bernstein. He’s the author of Principles of Transaction Processing and has a long track record as a successful and prolific database researcher. Past readers of this blog may remember Phil’s guest blog posting on Google Megastore. Over the past few years, Phil has been…
While at Microsoft I hosted a weekly talk series called the Enterprise Computing Series (ECS) where I mostly scheduled technical talks on server and high-scale service topics. I said “mostly” because the series occasionally roamed as far afield as having an ex-member of the Ferrari Formula 1 team present. Client-side topics are also occasionally on…