Author Archive
Netflix is super interesting in that they are running at extraordinary scale, are a leader in the move to the cloud, and Adrian Cockcroft, the Netflix Director of Cloud Architecture, is always interesting in presentations. In this presentation Adrian covers similar material to his HPTS 2011 talk I saw last month. His slides are up…
I seldom write consumer product reviews and this blog is about the furthest thing from a consumer focused site but, every so often, I come across a notable tidbit that is worthy of mention. A few weeks ago, it was Sprint unilaterally changing the terms of their wireless contracts (Sprint is Giving Free Customer Service…
Yesterday the Top 500 Supercomputer Sites was announced. The Top500 list shows the most powerful commercially available supercomputer systems in the world. This list represents the very outside of what supercomputer performance is possible when cost is no object. The top placement on the list is always owned by a sovereign funded laboratory. These are…
Last week I got to participate in one of my favorite days each year, serving on the judging panel for the AWS Startup Challenge. The event is a fairly intense day where our first meeting starts at 6:45am and the event closes at 9pm that evening. But it is an easy day to love in…
As rescue and relief operations continue in response to the serious flooding in Thailand the focus has correctly been on human health and safety. Early reports estimated 317 fatalities, 700,000 homes and 14,000 factories impacted with over 660,000 not able to work. Good coverage mostly from the Bangkok Post is available at Newley.com authored by…
I’m not sure why it all happens at once but it often does. Last Monday I kicked off HPTS 2011 in Asilomar California and then flew to New York City to present at the Open Compute Summit. I love HPTS. It’s a once every 2 year invitational workshop that I’ve been attending since 1989. The…
Sometimes the most educational lessons are on what not to do rather than what to do. Failure and disaster can be extraordinarily educational as long as the reason behind the failure is well understood. I study large system outages, infrastructure failures, love reading post mortems (when they actually have content), and always watch carefully how…
One of the talks that I particularly enjoyed yesterday at HPTS 2011 was Storage Infrastructure Behind Facebook Messages by Kannan Muthukkaruppan. In this talk, Kannan talked about the Facebook store for chats, email, SMS, & messages. This high scale storage system is based upon HBase and Haystack. HBase is a non-relational, distributed database very similar…
Rough notes from a talk on COSMOS, Microsoft’s internal Map reduce systems from HPTS 2011. This is the service Microsoft uses internally to run MapReduce jobs. Interesting, Microsoft plans to use Hadoop in the external Azure service even though COSMOS looks quite good: Microsoft Announces Open Source Based Cloud Service. Rough notes below: Talk: COSMOS:…
From the Last Bastion of Mainframe Computing Perspectives post: The networking equipment world looks just like mainframe computing ecosystem did 40 years ago. A small number of players produce vertically integrated solutions where the ASICs (the central processing unit responsible for high speed data packet switching), the hardware design, the hardware manufacture, and the entire…
Last night EMC Chief Executive Joe Tucci laid out his view of where the information processing world is going over the next decade and where EMC will focus. His primary point was cloud computing is the future and big data is the killer app for the cloud. He laid out the history of big transitions…
We see press releases go by all the time and most of them deserve the yawn they get. But, one caught my interest yesterday. At the PASS Summit conference Microsoft Vice President Ted Kummert announced that Microsoft will be offering a big data solution based upon Hadoop as part of SQL Azure. From the Microsoft…
Earlier today we lost one of the giants of technology. Steve Jobs was one of most creative, demanding, brilliant, hard-driving, and innovative leaders in the entire industry. He has created new business areas, introduced new business models, brought companies back from the dead, and fundamentally changed how the world as a whole interacts with computers….
I’ve been posting frequently on networking issues with the key point being the market is on the precipice of a massive change. There is a new model emerging. · Datacenter Networks are in my way · Networking: The Last Bastion of Mainframe Computing We now have merchant silicon providers for the core Application Specific Integrated…
If you read this blog in the past, you’ll know I view cloud computing as a game changer (Private Clouds are not the Future) and spot instances as a particularly powerful innovation within cloud computing. Over the years, I’ve enumerated many of the advantages of cloud computing over private infrastructure deployments. A particularly powerful cloud…
I got a chance to chat with Eric Baldeschwieler while he was visiting Seattle a couple of weeks back and catch up on what’s happening in the Hadoop world at Yahoo and beyond. Eric recently started Hortonworks whose tag line is “architecting the future of big data.” I’ve known Eric for years when he led…
Netflix is super interesting in that they are running at extraordinary scale, are a leader in the move to the cloud, and Adrian Cockcroft, the Netflix Director of Cloud Architecture, is always interesting in presentations. In this presentation Adrian covers similar material to his HPTS 2011 talk I saw last month. His slides are up…
I seldom write consumer product reviews and this blog is about the furthest thing from a consumer focused site but, every so often, I come across a notable tidbit that is worthy of mention. A few weeks ago, it was Sprint unilaterally changing the terms of their wireless contracts (Sprint is Giving Free Customer Service…
Yesterday the Top 500 Supercomputer Sites was announced. The Top500 list shows the most powerful commercially available supercomputer systems in the world. This list represents the very outside of what supercomputer performance is possible when cost is no object. The top placement on the list is always owned by a sovereign funded laboratory. These are…
Last week I got to participate in one of my favorite days each year, serving on the judging panel for the AWS Startup Challenge. The event is a fairly intense day where our first meeting starts at 6:45am and the event closes at 9pm that evening. But it is an easy day to love in…
As rescue and relief operations continue in response to the serious flooding in Thailand the focus has correctly been on human health and safety. Early reports estimated 317 fatalities, 700,000 homes and 14,000 factories impacted with over 660,000 not able to work. Good coverage mostly from the Bangkok Post is available at Newley.com authored by…
I’m not sure why it all happens at once but it often does. Last Monday I kicked off HPTS 2011 in Asilomar California and then flew to New York City to present at the Open Compute Summit. I love HPTS. It’s a once every 2 year invitational workshop that I’ve been attending since 1989. The…
Sometimes the most educational lessons are on what not to do rather than what to do. Failure and disaster can be extraordinarily educational as long as the reason behind the failure is well understood. I study large system outages, infrastructure failures, love reading post mortems (when they actually have content), and always watch carefully how…
One of the talks that I particularly enjoyed yesterday at HPTS 2011 was Storage Infrastructure Behind Facebook Messages by Kannan Muthukkaruppan. In this talk, Kannan talked about the Facebook store for chats, email, SMS, & messages. This high scale storage system is based upon HBase and Haystack. HBase is a non-relational, distributed database very similar…
Rough notes from a talk on COSMOS, Microsoft’s internal Map reduce systems from HPTS 2011. This is the service Microsoft uses internally to run MapReduce jobs. Interesting, Microsoft plans to use Hadoop in the external Azure service even though COSMOS looks quite good: Microsoft Announces Open Source Based Cloud Service. Rough notes below: Talk: COSMOS:…
From the Last Bastion of Mainframe Computing Perspectives post: The networking equipment world looks just like mainframe computing ecosystem did 40 years ago. A small number of players produce vertically integrated solutions where the ASICs (the central processing unit responsible for high speed data packet switching), the hardware design, the hardware manufacture, and the entire…
Last night EMC Chief Executive Joe Tucci laid out his view of where the information processing world is going over the next decade and where EMC will focus. His primary point was cloud computing is the future and big data is the killer app for the cloud. He laid out the history of big transitions…
We see press releases go by all the time and most of them deserve the yawn they get. But, one caught my interest yesterday. At the PASS Summit conference Microsoft Vice President Ted Kummert announced that Microsoft will be offering a big data solution based upon Hadoop as part of SQL Azure. From the Microsoft…
Earlier today we lost one of the giants of technology. Steve Jobs was one of most creative, demanding, brilliant, hard-driving, and innovative leaders in the entire industry. He has created new business areas, introduced new business models, brought companies back from the dead, and fundamentally changed how the world as a whole interacts with computers….
I’ve been posting frequently on networking issues with the key point being the market is on the precipice of a massive change. There is a new model emerging. · Datacenter Networks are in my way · Networking: The Last Bastion of Mainframe Computing We now have merchant silicon providers for the core Application Specific Integrated…
If you read this blog in the past, you’ll know I view cloud computing as a game changer (Private Clouds are not the Future) and spot instances as a particularly powerful innovation within cloud computing. Over the years, I’ve enumerated many of the advantages of cloud computing over private infrastructure deployments. A particularly powerful cloud…
I got a chance to chat with Eric Baldeschwieler while he was visiting Seattle a couple of weeks back and catch up on what’s happening in the Hadoop world at Yahoo and beyond. Eric recently started Hortonworks whose tag line is “architecting the future of big data.” I’ve known Eric for years when he led…