Archive For The “Services” Category
We’re back from China last Saturday night and, predictably, I’m swamped catching up on three weeks worth of queued work. The trip was wonderful (China Trip) but it’s actually good to be back at work. Things are changing incredibly quickly industry-wide and it’s a fun time to be part of AWS. An AWS feature I’ve…
Search is a market driven by massive networking effects and economies of scale. The big get better, the big get cheaper, and the big just keep getting bigger. Google has 65% of the Search market and continues to grow. In a deal announced yesterday, Microsoft will supply search to Yahoo and now has a combined…
MapReduce has created some excitement in the relational database community. Dave Dewitt and Michael Stonebraker’s MapReduce: A Major Step Backwards is perhaps the best example. In that posting they argued that map reduce is a poor structured storage technology, the execution engine doesn’t include many of the advances found in modern, parallel RDBMS execution engines,…
I presented Where does the Power Go in High Scale Data Centers the opening keynote at SIGMETRICS/Performance 2009 last month. The video of the talk was just posted: SIGMETRICS 2009 Keynote. The talk starts after the conference kick-off at 12:20. The video appears to be incompatible with at least some versions of Firefox. I was…
I’m a boater and I view reading about boating accidents as important. The best source that I’ve come across is the UKs Marine Accident Investigation Branch (MAIB). I’m an engineer and again, I view it as important to read about engineering failures and disasters. One of the best sources I know of is Peter G….
Our industry has always moved quickly but the internet and high-scale services have substantially quickened the pace. Search is an amazingly powerful productivity tool and available effectively to free to all. The internet makes nearly all information available to anyone who can obtain time on an internet connection. Social networks and interest-area specific discussion groups…
Don MacAskill did one of his usual excellent talks at MySQL Conf 09 this. My rough notes follow. Speaker: Don MacAskill Video at: http://mysqlconf.blip.tv/file/2037101 · SmugMug: o Bootstrapped in ’02 and still operating without external funding o Profitable and without debt o Top 400 website o Doubling yearly · SmugMug Challenge: o Users get unlimited…
Cloud services provide excellent value but it’s easy to underestimate the challenge of getting large quantities of data to the cloud. When moving very large quantities of data, even the fastest networks are surprisingly slow. And, many companies have incredibly slow internet connections. Back in 1996 MInix author and networking expert, Andrew Tanenbaum said “Never…
From an interesting article in Data Center Knowledge Who has the Most Web Servers: 1&1 Internet: 55,000 servers (company) OVH: 55,000 servers (company) Rackspace: 50,038 servers (company) The Planet: 48,500 servers (company) Akamai Technologies: 48,000 servers (company) SBC Communications: 29,193 servers (Netcraft) Verizon: 25,788 servers (Netcraft) Time Warner Cable: 24,817 servers (Netcraft) SoftLayer: 21,000 servers…
Earlier this morning Amazon Web Services announced the public beta of Amazon Cloudwatch, Auto Scaling, and Elastic Load Balancing. Amazon Cloudwatch is a web service for monitoring AWS resources. Auto Scaling automatically grows and shrinks Elastic Compute Cloud resources based upon demand. Elastic Load Balancing distributed workload over a fleet of EC2 servers. Amazon CloudWatch…
A couple of weeks back, a mini-book by Luiz André Barroso and Urs Hölzle of the Google infrastructure team was released. The Datacenter as a Computer: An Introduction to the Design of Warehouse-Scale Machines is just over 100 pages long but an excellent introduction into very high scale computing and the issues important at scale….
Chris Dagdigian of BioTeam presented the keynote at this year’s Bio-IT World Conference. I found this presentation interesting for at least two reasons: 1) it’s a very broad and well reasoned look at many of the issues in computational science and, 2) an innovative example of cloud computing is presented where BioTeam and Pfizer implement…
In the Randy Katz on High Scale Data Centers posting I the article brought up Google Dalles. The article reported that Dalles used air side economization but I’ve not seen the large intakes or louvers I would expect from a facility of that scale. Cary Roberts, ex-TellMe Networks and all around smart guy, produced a…
I’m always interested in research on cloud service efficiency, and last week, at the Uptime Institute IT Symposium in New York City, management consultancy McKinsey published a report entitled Clearing the air on Cloud Computing. McKinsey is a well respected professional services company that describes itself as “a management consulting firm advising leading companies on…
My notes from an older talk done by Ryan Barrett on the Google App Engine Data store at Google IO last year (5/28/2008). Ryan is a co-founder of the App Engine team. · App Engine Data Store is build on Big Table. o Scalable structured storage o Not a sharded database o Not an RDBMS…
Last week I attended the Data Center Efficiency Summit hosted by Google. You’ll find four posting on various aspects of the summit at: http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2009/04/05/DataCenterEfficiencySummitPosting4.aspx. Two of the most interesting videos: · Modular Data Center Tour: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zRwPSFpLX8I&feature=channel · Data Center Water Treatment Plant: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nPjZvFuUKN8&feature=channel A Cnet article with links to all the videos: http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-10215392-92.html?tag=newsEditorsPicksArea.0. The presentation…