"utility computing" entries

Four short links: 12 May 2015

Four short links: 12 May 2015

Data Center Numbers, Utility Computing, NSA Art, and RIP CAP

  1. We Used to Build Steel Mills Near Cheap Sources of Power, but Now That’s Where We Build DatacentersHennessy & Patterson estimate that of the $90M cost of an example datacenter (just the facilities – not the servers), 82% is associated with power and cooling. The servers in the datacenter are estimated to only cost $70M. It’s not fair to compare those numbers directly since servers need to get replaced more often than datacenters; once you take into account the cost over the entire lifetime of the datacenter, the amortized cost of power and cooling comes out to be 33% of the total cost, when servers have a three-year lifetime and infrastructure has a 10-15 year lifetime. Going back to the Barroso and Holzle book, processors are responsible for about a third of the compute-related power draw in a datacenter (including networking), which means that just powering processors and their associated cooling and power distribution is about 11% of the total cost of operating a datacenter. By comparison, the cost of all networking equipment is 8%, and the cost of the employees that run the datacenter is 2%.
  2. Microsoft Invests in 3 Undersea Cable Projects — utility computing is an odd concept, given how quickly hardware cycles refresh. In the past, you could ask whether investors wanted to be in a high-growth, high-risk technology business or a stable blue-chip utility.
  3. Secret Power — Simon Denny’s NSA-logo-and-Snowden-inspired art makes me wish I could get to Venice. See also The Guardian piece on him.
  4. Please Stop Calling Databases CP or AP (Martin Kleppman) — The fact that we haven’t been able to classify even one datastore as unambiguously “AP” or “CP” should be telling us something: those are simply not the right labels to describe systems. I believe that we should stop putting datastores into the “AP” or “CP” buckets. So readable!
Four short links: 18 December 2013

Four short links: 18 December 2013

2013 Mispredicted, 2013 Accurately Predicted, RJ45 Computer, and Leakless Comms

  1. Cyberpunk 2013 — a roleplaying game shows a Gibsonian view of 2013 from 1988. (via Ben Hammersley)
  2. The Future Computer Utility — 1967 prediction of the current state. There are several reasons why some form of regulation may be required. Consider one of the more dramatic ones, that of privacy and freedom from tampering. Highly sensitive personal and important business information will be stored in many of the contemplated systems. Information will be exchanged over easy-to-tap telephone lines. At best, nothing more than trust—or, at best, a lack of technical sophistication—stands in the way of a would-be eavesdropper. All data flow over the lines of the commercial telephone system. Hanky-panky by an imaginative computer designer, operator, technician, communications worker, or programmer could have disastrous consequences. As time-shared computers come into wider use, and hold more sensitive information, these problems can only increase. Today we lack the mechanisms to insure adequate safeguards. Because of the difficulty in rebuilding complex systems to incorporate safeguards at a later date, it appears desirable to anticipate these problems. (via New Yorker)
  3. Lantronix XPort Pro Lx6a secure embedded device server supporting IPv6, that barely larger than an RJ45 connector. The device runs Linux or the company’s Evolution OS, and is destined to be used in wired industrial IoT / M2M applications.
  4. Pond — interesting post-NSA experiment in forward secure, asynchronous messaging for the discerning. Pond messages are asynchronous, but are not a record; they expire automatically a week after they are received. Pond seeks to prevent leaking traffic information against everyone except a global passive attacker. (via Morgan Mayhem)

Data Center Power Efficiency

James Hamilton is one of the smartest and most accomplished engineers I know. He now leads Microsoft’s Data Center Futures Team, and has been pushing the opportunities in data center efficiency and internet scale services both inside & outside Microsoft. His most recent post explores misconceptions about the Cost of Power in Large-Scale Data Centers: I’m not sure how many…

Sprint blocking Cogent network traffic…

It appears that Sprint has stopped routing traffic (called “depeering”) from Cogent as a result of some sort of legal dispute. Sprint customers cannot reach Cogent customers, and vice versa. The effect is similar to what would happen if Sprint were to block voice phonecalls to AT&T customers. Here’s a graph that shows the outage, courtesy of Keynote : Rich…

Video of Rich Wolski's EUCALYPTUS talk at Velocity

Rich Wolski gave a truly impressive talk at Velocity about an open-source software infrastructure for cloud computing called EUCALYPTUS . The API is compatible with Amazon's EC2 interface, and the underlying infrastructure is designed to support multiple client-side interfaces. EUCALYPTUS is implemented using commonly-available Linux tools and basic Web-service technologies making it easy to install and maintain. Watch and learn……