Archive For The “Services” Category

Amazon Event in Palo Alto (10/11@5pm)

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…

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Glacier: Engineering for Cold Data Storage in the Cloud

Earlier today Amazon Web Services announced Glacier, a low-cost, cloud-hosted, cold storage solution. Cold storage is a class of storage that is discussed infrequently and yet it is by far the largest storage class of them all. Ironically, the storage we usually talk about and the storage I’ve worked on for most of my life…

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EBS Provisioned IOPS & Optimized Instance Types

In I/O Performance (no longer) Sucks in the Cloud, I said Many workloads have high I/O rate data stores at the core. The success of the entire application is dependent upon a few servers running MySQL, Oracle, SQL Server, MongoDB, Cassandra, or some other central database. Last week a new Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)…

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I/O Performance (no longer) Sucks in the Cloud

Many workloads have high I/O rate data stores at the core. The success of the entire application is dependent upon a few servers running MySQL, Oracle, SQL Server, MongoDB, Cassandra, or some other central database. The best design patter for any highly reliable and scalable application whether on-premise or in cloud hosted, is to shard…

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Why there are Datacenters in NY, Hong Kong, and Tokyo?

Why are there so many data centers in New York, Hong Kong, and Tokyo? These urban centers have some of the most expensive real estate in the world. The cost of labor is high. The tax environment is unfavorable. Power costs are high. Construction is difficult to permit and expensive. Urban datacenters are incredibly expensive…

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Official Report of the Fukushima Nuclear Accident Independent Investigation Commission Executive

Last night, Tom Klienpeter sent me The Official Report of the Fukushima Nuclear Accident Independent Investigation Commission Executive Summary. They must have hardy executives in Japan in that the executive summary runs 86 pages in length. Overall, It’s an interesting document but I only managed to read in to the first page before starting to…

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Urs Holzle @ Open Networking Summit 2012

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…

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Power Management of Online Data-Intensive Services

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….

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Communicating Data Beyond the Speed of Light

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…

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Amazon DynamoDB: NoSQL in the Cloud

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…

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Global Netflix Platform: Large Scale Java PaaS Running on AWS

Global Netflix Platform: Large Scale Java PaaS Running on AWS

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…

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Free Lessons in Industrial Design & Customer Experience

Free Lessons in Industrial Design & Customer Experience

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…

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42: The Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything

42: The Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything

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…

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Storage Infrastructure Behind Facebook Messages

Storage Infrastructure Behind Facebook Messages

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…

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Microsoft COSMOS at HPTS

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:…

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EMCs Joe Tucci on the Cloud and Big Data

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…

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