Archive For The “Ramblings” Category
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…
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…
Back in 2005, I maintained a blog accessible only inside of Microsoft where I worked at the time. Having the blog internal to the company allowed confidential topics to be discussed openly, but over time, I found much of what I was writing about might be useful externally. And I knew, if I wanted to…
Back in 2007, the audacious RE<C project was started. The goal of RE<C was simple: make renewable energy less costly than coal and let economics do the hard work of converting the worlds energy producers to go renewable. I blogged the project in Solving World Problems With Economic Incentives summarizing the project with “the core…
The internet and the availability of content broadly and uniformly to all users has driven the largest wave of innovation ever e experienced in our industry. Small startups offering a service of value have the same access to customers as the largest and best funded incumbents. All customers have access to the same array of…
It’s difficult to adequately test complex systems. But what’s really difficult is keeping a system adequately tested. Creating systems that do what they are designed to do is hard but, even with the complexity of these systems, many life critical systems have the engineering and production testing investment behind them to be reasonably safe when…
In the data center world, there are few events taken more seriously than power failure and considerable effort is spent to make them rare. When a datacenter experiences a power failure, it’s a really big deal for all involved. But, a big deal in the infrastructure world still really isn’t a big deal on the…
The last few weeks have been busy and it has been way too long since I have blogged. I’m currently thinking through the server tax and what’s wrong with the current server hardware ecosystem but don’t have anything yet ready to go on that just yet. But, there are a few other things on the…
Facebook recently released a detailed report on their energy consumption and carbon footprint: Facebook’s Carbon and Energy Impact. Facebook has always been super open with the details behind there infrastructure. For example, they invited me to tour the Prineville datacenter just prior to its opening: · Open Compute Project · Open Compute Mechanical System Design…
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…
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…
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…
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….
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…