Author Archive
It’s a clear sign that the Cloud Computing market is growing fast and the number of cloud providers is expanding quickly when startups begin to target cloud providers as their primary market. It’s not unusual for enterprise software companies to target cloud providers as well as their conventional enterprise customers but I’m now starting to…
Great things are happening in the networking market. We’re transitioning from vertically integrated mainframe-like economics to a model similar to what we have in the server world. In the server ecosystems, we have Intel, AMD and others competing to provide the CPU. At the layer above, we have ZT Systems, HP, Dell DCS, SGI, IBM,…
Earlier this week, I was in Athens Greece attending annual conference of the ACM Machinery Special Interest Group on Management of Data. SIGMOD is one of the top two database events held each year attracting academic researchers and leading practitioners from industry. I kicked off the conference with the Plenary keynote. In this talk I…
The Amazon Technology Open House was held Tuesday night at the Amazon South Lake Union Campus. I did a short presentation on the following: • Quickening pace of infrastructure innovation • Where does the money go? • Power distribution infrastructure • Mechanical systems • Modular & Advanced Building Designs • Sea Change in Networking Slides…
Earlier today Alex Mallet reminded me of the excellent writing of Atul Gawnade by sending me a pointer to the New Yorker coverage of Gawande’s commencement address at the Harvard Medical School: Cowboys and Pit Crews. Four years ago I wrote a couple of blog entries on Gawande’s work but, at the time, my blog…
As a boater, there are times when I know our survival is 100% dependent upon the weather conditions, the boat, and the state of its equipment. As a consequence, I think hard about human or equipment failure modes and how to mitigate them. I love reading the excellent reporting by the UK Marine Accident Investigation…
The European Data Center Summit 2011 was held yesterday at SihlCity CinCenter in Zurich. Google Senior VP Urs Hoelzle kicked off the event talking about why data center efficiency was important both economically and socially. He went on to point out that the oft quoted number that US data centers represent is 2% of total…
Guido van Rossum was at Amazon a week back doing a talk. Guido presented 21 Years of Python: From Pet Project to Programming Language of the Year. The slides are linked below and my rough notes follow: · Significant Python influencers: o Algol 60, Pascal, C o ABC o Modula0-2+ and 3 o Lisp and…
I invited Nikhil Handigol to present at Amazon earlier this week. Nikhil is a Phd candidate at Stanford University working with networking legend Nick McKeown on the Software Defined Networking team. Software defined networking is an concept coined by Nick where the research team is separating the networking control plane from the data plane. The…
This note looks at the Open Compute Project distributed Uninterruptable Power Supply (UPS) and server Power Supply Unit (PSU). This is the last in a series of notes looking at the Open Compute Project. Previous articles include: · Open Compute Project · Open Compute Server Design · Open Compute Mechanical Design The open compute uses…
Google cordially invites you to participate in a European Summit on sustainable Data Centres. This event will focus on energy-efficiency best practices that can be applied to multi-MW custom-designed facilities, office closets, and everything in between. Google and other industry leaders will present case studies that highlight easy, cost-effective practices to enhance the energy performance…
Last Thursday Facebook announced the Open Compute Project where they released pictures and specifications for their Prineville Oregon datacenter and the servers and infrastructure that will populate that facility. In my last blog, Open Compute Mechanical System Design I walked through the mechanical system in some detail. In this posting, we’ll have a closer look…
Last week Facebook announced the Open Compute Project (Perspectives, Facebook). I linked to the detailed specs in my general notes on Perspectives and said I would follow up with more detail on key components and design decisions I thought were particularly noteworthy. In this post we’ll go through the mechanical design in detail. As long…
The pace of innovation in data center design has been rapidly accelerating over the last 5 years driven by the mega-service operators. In fact, I believe we have seen more infrastructure innovation in the last 5 years than we did in the previous 15. Most very large service operators have teams of experts focused on…
A bit more than a year back, I published Computer Room Evaporative Cooling where I showed an evaporative cooling design from EcoCooling. Periodically, Alan Beresford sends me designs he’s working on. This morning he sent me a design they are working on for a 7MW data center in Ireland. I like the design for a…
Brad Porter is Director and Senior Principal engineer at Amazon. We work in different parts of the company but I have known him for years and he’s actually one of the reasons I ended up joining Amazon Web Services. Last week Brad sent me the guest blog post that follows where, on the basis of…
It’s a clear sign that the Cloud Computing market is growing fast and the number of cloud providers is expanding quickly when startups begin to target cloud providers as their primary market. It’s not unusual for enterprise software companies to target cloud providers as well as their conventional enterprise customers but I’m now starting to…
Great things are happening in the networking market. We’re transitioning from vertically integrated mainframe-like economics to a model similar to what we have in the server world. In the server ecosystems, we have Intel, AMD and others competing to provide the CPU. At the layer above, we have ZT Systems, HP, Dell DCS, SGI, IBM,…
Earlier this week, I was in Athens Greece attending annual conference of the ACM Machinery Special Interest Group on Management of Data. SIGMOD is one of the top two database events held each year attracting academic researchers and leading practitioners from industry. I kicked off the conference with the Plenary keynote. In this talk I…
The Amazon Technology Open House was held Tuesday night at the Amazon South Lake Union Campus. I did a short presentation on the following: • Quickening pace of infrastructure innovation • Where does the money go? • Power distribution infrastructure • Mechanical systems • Modular & Advanced Building Designs • Sea Change in Networking Slides…
Earlier today Alex Mallet reminded me of the excellent writing of Atul Gawnade by sending me a pointer to the New Yorker coverage of Gawande’s commencement address at the Harvard Medical School: Cowboys and Pit Crews. Four years ago I wrote a couple of blog entries on Gawande’s work but, at the time, my blog…
As a boater, there are times when I know our survival is 100% dependent upon the weather conditions, the boat, and the state of its equipment. As a consequence, I think hard about human or equipment failure modes and how to mitigate them. I love reading the excellent reporting by the UK Marine Accident Investigation…
The European Data Center Summit 2011 was held yesterday at SihlCity CinCenter in Zurich. Google Senior VP Urs Hoelzle kicked off the event talking about why data center efficiency was important both economically and socially. He went on to point out that the oft quoted number that US data centers represent is 2% of total…
Guido van Rossum was at Amazon a week back doing a talk. Guido presented 21 Years of Python: From Pet Project to Programming Language of the Year. The slides are linked below and my rough notes follow: · Significant Python influencers: o Algol 60, Pascal, C o ABC o Modula0-2+ and 3 o Lisp and…
I invited Nikhil Handigol to present at Amazon earlier this week. Nikhil is a Phd candidate at Stanford University working with networking legend Nick McKeown on the Software Defined Networking team. Software defined networking is an concept coined by Nick where the research team is separating the networking control plane from the data plane. The…
This note looks at the Open Compute Project distributed Uninterruptable Power Supply (UPS) and server Power Supply Unit (PSU). This is the last in a series of notes looking at the Open Compute Project. Previous articles include: · Open Compute Project · Open Compute Server Design · Open Compute Mechanical Design The open compute uses…
Google cordially invites you to participate in a European Summit on sustainable Data Centres. This event will focus on energy-efficiency best practices that can be applied to multi-MW custom-designed facilities, office closets, and everything in between. Google and other industry leaders will present case studies that highlight easy, cost-effective practices to enhance the energy performance…
Last Thursday Facebook announced the Open Compute Project where they released pictures and specifications for their Prineville Oregon datacenter and the servers and infrastructure that will populate that facility. In my last blog, Open Compute Mechanical System Design I walked through the mechanical system in some detail. In this posting, we’ll have a closer look…
Last week Facebook announced the Open Compute Project (Perspectives, Facebook). I linked to the detailed specs in my general notes on Perspectives and said I would follow up with more detail on key components and design decisions I thought were particularly noteworthy. In this post we’ll go through the mechanical design in detail. As long…
The pace of innovation in data center design has been rapidly accelerating over the last 5 years driven by the mega-service operators. In fact, I believe we have seen more infrastructure innovation in the last 5 years than we did in the previous 15. Most very large service operators have teams of experts focused on…
A bit more than a year back, I published Computer Room Evaporative Cooling where I showed an evaporative cooling design from EcoCooling. Periodically, Alan Beresford sends me designs he’s working on. This morning he sent me a design they are working on for a 7MW data center in Ireland. I like the design for a…
Brad Porter is Director and Senior Principal engineer at Amazon. We work in different parts of the company but I have known him for years and he’s actually one of the reasons I ended up joining Amazon Web Services. Last week Brad sent me the guest blog post that follows where, on the basis of…