Contrast Google vs. Amazon talking about web services

News.com has its Google data center report. And, as Data Center Knowledge points out.

In each cluster's first year, it's typical that 1,000 individual machine failures will occur; thousands of hard drive failures will occur; one power distribution unit will fail, bringing down 500 to 1,000 machines for about 6 hours; 20 racks will fail, each time causing 40 to 80 machines to vanish from the network; 5 racks will "go wonky," with half their network packets missing in action; and the cluster will have to be rewired once, affecting 5 percent of the machines at any given moment over a 2-day span, Dean said. And there's about a 50 percent chance that the cluster will overheat, taking down most of the servers in less than 5 minutes and taking 1 to 2 days to recover.

A 50 percent chance that the cluster will overheat? This suggests that Google's approach, which packs 40 servers into each rack, is running pretty close to the edge in terms of thermal management. Or perhaps that Google has trouble anticipating when an area of its data center may develop cooling challenges.

And, as I wrote a post about gigaom.com, Nicholas Carr's posted as well on Understanding Amazon Web services.

There are two ways to look at Amazon.com: as a retailer, and as a software company that runs a retailing application. Both are accurate, and in combination they explain why Amazon, rather than a traditional computer company, has become the most successful early mover in supplying computing as a utility service. For Amazon, running a cloud computing service is core to its business in a way that it isn't for, say, IBM, Sun, or HP.

Now, if you were a customer who would you buy web services from?  Amazon or Google. 

Click to read more ...

Eaton Bets on Being Green, Barrons' writes a positive article

This week's Barron's writes a favorable review of Eaton, discussing its diversification into products for data centers and investing in breakthroughs in conserving energy.

Eaton's trucking business, meanwhile, is increasingly focused on energy efficiency. Just recently the company (ticker: ETN) won orders for 207 hybrid diesel-electric transit buses for Guangzhou, China, and 200 hybrid-electric vehicles for United Parcel Service (UPS).

"There's a real economic opportunity for companies doing progressive innovations to identify technologies which will allow breakthroughs in conserving energy," Cutler tells Barron's. "For Eaton, it really is a sweet spot of combining our customers' needs for more sustainable business along with our own base set of values."

And, for those of you who buy Eaton's data center products.

Eaton's new Powerware products for uninterrupted power-supply systems, which help lower energy costs of data centers, contributed to a more than 30% increase in sales last year to Russia and the Commonwealth of Independent States alone.

They are so green, they are being added to an environmental sustainability mutual fund.

Eaton's green leanings have prompted Portfolio 21, a global mutual fund based on environmental sustainability, to start building a position in the company.

If you want to see Eaton's green product and service commitment, check out http://www.eaton.com/EatonCom/Markets/Electrical/Sustainability/EatonsGreenProductsandServices/index.htm

Eaton is one company who can proudly say they have bet on Green successfully and are performing well in this economy.

Click to read more ...

Jeff Bezos Talks About Why Amazon is an innovator in Web Services

GigaOm has an interview Amazon's Jeff Bezos about Amazon Web Services.

This video confirms 2 reasons why I think AWS is successful. Being a retailer, Amazon has low margins and needs to be efficient. (they know how to do pricing to maximize profit.) And, being a retailer, they have to hit dates to meet retail schedules (no compromises on delivery).

Here are more details for you to digest.

• How and when Amazon began its cloud computing effort.
• Why Amazon has become an innovator with Amazon Web Services and how it relates to their core business of being an online retailer.
• Whether or not Wall Street recognizes Amazon’s cloud efforts.
• What’s next for Amazon Web Services.
• Whether or not Amazon has plans for a VC fund or for cloud computing startups.

For even more info about Amazon’s cloud computing efforts, join us at our upcoming conference, Structure ‘08, where CTO Werner Vogels will be delivering a keynote address.

Click to read more ...

Taking a Staycation?

MSNBC.com has an article about the idea of a "staycation".

Imagine the perfect summer vacation: Swimming in clear blue water, tennis and a little bicycling, barbecued meals, a concert under the stars, a ballgame with fireworks, maybe even a museum or two …. and all for free.

Well, okay, not for free – but for a fraction of what other people will pay.

How? By vacationing at home.

To save you the time I submitted my survey input to this article, and got the following results with the # of people who are going to stay home.  It's a bad time to be an airline company.

Are you planning a vacation closer to home this summer?   * 141 responses

Yes, fuel prices are just too high.
72%

No, I'm hitting the road.
23%

Not sure, I'll wait and see if pump prices come down.
4.3%

Not a scientific survey. Click to learn more. Results may not total 100% due to rounding.

I thought about going to IDC's Green IT conference, but I decided to stay home. Thanks to friends and the power of blogging/news reporters, I'll get most of the news from conferences, and just save the gas and stay home.

For those of you have haven't visited my office, this is my view, so I have an incentive to just stay put.

Click to read more ...

Amazon Web Services provides resizable compute capacity

AWS blog posts an entry they have added the capability to two new "high-cpu" instance types.

Amazon EC2 users now have access to a pair of new "High-CPU" instance types. The new instance types have proportionally more CPU power than memory, and are suitable for CPU-intensive applications. Here's what's now available:

The High-CPU Medium Instance is billed at $0.20 (20 cents) per hour. It features 1.7 GB of memory, 5 EC2 Compute Units (2 virtual cores with 2.5 EC2 Compute Units Each), and 350 GB of instance storage, all on a 32-bit platform.

The High-CPU Extra Large Instance is billed at $0.80 (80 cents) per hour. It features 7 GB of memory, 20 EC2 Compute Units (8 virtual cores with 2.5 EC2 Compute Units each), and 1,690 GB of instance storage, all on a 64-bit platform.

Behind the scenes amazon uses Citrix Xen for virtualization.

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, also known as "EC2", is a commercial web service which allows paying customers to rent computers to run computer applications on. EC2 allows scalable deployment of applications by providing a web services interface through which customers can request an arbitrary number of Virtual Machines, i.e. server instances, on which they can load any software of their choice. Current users are able to create, launch, and terminate server instances on demand, hence the term "elastic". The Amazon implementation allows server instances to be created in zones that are insulated from correlated failures.^[1]. EC2 is one of several Web Services provided by Amazon.com under the blanket term Amazon Web Services (AWS).

EC2 uses Xen Virtualization. Each virtual machine, called an instance, is a virtual private server and can be one of three sizes; small, large or extra large. Instances are sized based on EC2 Compute Units which is the equivalent CPU capacity of physical hardware.

1 EC2 Compute Unit equals 1.0-1.2 GHz 2007 Opteron or 2007 Xeon processor. The three available Instance sizes are sized as follows:

Small Instance

The small instance (default) is the "equivalent of a system with 1.7 GB of memory, 1 EC2 Compute Unit (1 virtual core with 1 EC2 Compute Unit), 160 GB of instance storage, 32-bit platform " [1]

Large Instance

The large instance is the "equivalent of a system with 7.5 GB of memory, 4 EC2 Compute Units (2 virtual cores with 2 EC2 Compute Units each), 850 GB of instance storage, 64-bit platform"

Extra Large Instance

The extra large instance is the "equivalent of a system with 15 GB of memory, 8 EC2 Compute Units (4 virtual cores with 2 EC2 Compute Units each), 1690 GB of instance storage, 64-bit platform."

Wouldn't it be great if enterprise IT was run this way. Amazon is figuring out how to sell compute better than anyone else, and that is their business as a retailer.

Click to read more ...