What is the PUE of your cloud data center? Google's is 1.10, Microsoft's is 1.13 - 1.2, Amazon is ?

It is a pretty safe assumption that a Cloud Data Center has a low PUE.  The Cloud business is so competitive that the cost to run the power and cooling systems takes a direct hit out of profit margins so almost everyone should be driving more efficient systems.

How efficient are the cloud companies?  

Google is easy to figure out as they quote PUE quarterly here.

GigaOm's Stacey Higginbotham had a post on efficient data centers quoting PUE.

Microsoft gave Stacey a bunch of data, but not an exact number.

Microsoft sent me a bunch of information on its PUE figures for its newest data centers which range from 1.13 to 1.2. It doesn’t disclose the PUE for all of its data centers, however.

For Amazon, there is no clear answer.  Note: James Hamilton does not claim the PUE is representative of Amazon.  Given Amazon will let temperatures rise in warehouses for workers, it is hard to believe they wouldn't do the same for voiceless servers.

Amazon’s data center guru James Hamilton published a presentation on Amazon last year that assumed a PUE of 1.45 for the online retailer’s data centers.

Jeff Bezos invests in reinventing the Physics of the newspaper business buying Washington Post

Jeff Bezos has spent $250 mil of his own money to buy the Washington Post.

The LA Times discusses the possibility of Jeff Bezos creating a new business model for newspapers.

Washington Post buy: Can Jeff Bezos fix newspapers' business model?

Amazon's Jeff Bezos, buyer of the Washington Post, has shown success at experimentation and great patience about turning a profit.

I've worked on Publishing technologies way too long, starting in 1987 on displays, printers, fonts at Apple, then continued working on the publishing technologies at Microsoft.  Back in 1997 Bill Gates was focused on winning the battle for publishing vs. Apple.  Microsoft didn't win that battle.  Google changed the game sucking the air out of print advertising model.

Jeff Bezos in 1994 started Amazon.com and has seen the transition of Books and DVDs to digital. While this all going on Jeff has got an insider's look at the business models of media companies.  Jeff Bezos started college as a physicists and switched to computer science.

Bezos often showed intense scientific interests. He rigged an electric alarm to keep his younger siblings out of his room.^{[citation needed]} The family moved toMiami, Florida, where Bezos attended Miami Palmetto Senior High School. While in high school, he attended the Student Science Training Program at the University of Florida, receiving a Silver Knight Award in 1982.^[9] He was high school valedictorian.^[10] He attended Princeton University, with an intention to study physics, but soon returned to his love of computers and graduated summa cum laude, with a Bachelor of Science in Engineering in electrical engineering and computer science. While at Princeton, he was elected to the honor societies Phi Beta Kappa and Tau Beta Pi. He also served as the President of the Princeton chapter of the Students for the Exploration and Development of Space.^[11]

Jeff's love to understand how things work and make them better is what he did to retail.  Why can't he do the same with newspapers.  Once he figures out newspapers he can move on to other things that shape human perception.

Here is a progressive view of journalism.

So then what the hell is journalism?

It is a service. It is a service whose end, again, is an informed public. For my entrepreneurial journalism students, I give them a broad umbrella of a definition: Journalism helps communities organize their knowledge so they can better organize themselves.

Thus anything that reliably serves the end of an informed community is journalism. Anyone can help do that. The true journalist should want anyone to join the task. That, in the end, is why I wrote Public Parts: because I celebrate the value that rises from publicness, from the ability of anyone to share what he or she knows with everyone and the ethic that says sharing is a generous and social act and transparency should be the default for our institutions.

Is there a role for people to help in that process? Absolutely. I say that organizations can first help enable the flow and collection of information, which can now occur without them, by offering platforms for communities to share what they know. Next, I say that someone is often needed to add value to that process by:
* asking the questions that are not answered in the flow,
* verifying facts,
* debunking rumors,
* adding context, explanation, and background,
* providing functionality that enables sharing,
* organizing efforts to collaborate by communities, witnesses, experts.

Three books on data visualization

The Economist has a review of three books on data visualization.

Data Points: Visualisation That Means Something. By Nathan Yau. Wiley; 300 pages; $32 and £26.99. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

Facts are Sacred. By Simon Rogers. Faber and Faber; 311 pages; £20. Buy fromAmazon.co.uk

The Infographic History of the World. By James Ball and Valentina D’Efilippo. Collins; 224 pages; £20. Buy fromAmazon.co.uk

Here is a video that shows you how the books look.

The author of this article hit upon exactly a point that came to my mind as well.  Should these books have even been in print.

But should these books have been published on paper at all? Today’s most impressive works, like “Wind Map”, were created to be online. Future infographics will be digital, data will stream in real-time and viewers’ interactions will determine what is presented. When this happens, what constitutes a good infographic will change. The revolution has just begun.

It's been a dream of companies like Adobe and others to allow the creation of online books.  But it is a challenge of the distribution channel not just creation

The one company that could take the above books online and allow them to make money would be Amazon.com.  Wouldn't it be cool if there was an AWS service that allowed you to create book-like content, make it interactive. posting video, etc.  Or Google could do this or maybe even Apple.

Greenpeace praises Apple's Green Data Center efforts, shifting target to Amazon and Microsoft

Silicon Republic reports on Apple's latest solar project in Reno by interviewing Greenpeace's Gary Cook.

The good guys are.

"With Google, Facebook, and now Apple all announcing major new deals in recent months for new renewable energy to power their data-centre operations, the race to build an internet powered by renewable energy is clearly in full swing," he said.

The bad guys are.

"Microsoft and Amazon - both of which still power their internet using the dirty electricity that causes global warming - ought to take notice," he said.

"In the race for a clean internet, Apple is leaving both of those companies in the dust."

We'll see if Google, Facebook, and/or Apple get an advantage with a low carbon data center strategy.  They are all probably relieved that Greenpeace will focus on their competitors - Amazon and Microsoft.

Amazon's Cloud coming to a country near you, mini-me AWS instances is inevitable

A friend asked me a month or so what is the next thing Amazon Web Services is going to do. I spent a bit of time researching ideas, then it hit me AWS will eventually be in major markets within the countries borders.

A couple of months ago I was chatting with a journalist from Spain and we discussed the cloud, hosting, and AWS.  Here is a post that ail give you an idea of the protectionist practices in Spain.

Hedge funds and private equity groups have raised concerns about the risk of creeping protectionism in proposals made by Spanish diplomats to re-write European Union legislation to regulate their industries for the first time.

He believed that a threat to IT jobs by moving to a public cloud outside the country would be met with protectionist enthusiasm to keep jobs in the high paying IT industry.

The cloud is a disruptive force that will challenge current IT operations, bringing automated standardized environments that require a small fraction of IT hardware and staff.  Requiring nationalized citizens to operate the IT environment is an easy impediment for moving to a cloud in another country in the USA or other places that are the cloud hubs.  This still leaves opportunities for the hosting companies in the country to provide IT services within the borders.

Now imagine this.  AWS gets 200kW of colocation space.  Ships in 4 cabinets of optimized cloud gear with room for another 16.  Ships the bits uninstalled on storage.  Has nationalized citizens run scripts that create the environment.  And launch a country specific AWS instance.  Local sales force drive sales and gets feedback on what needs to be added to remove barriers for companies to move into AWS.

What in this seems like it hard for AWS to do?

AWS's price point would be substantially lower than the local hosting company.  It is kind of like the infamous Wal-mart effect for retailers unable to compete with the low prices and selection.  Amazon.com can apply the same to hosted IT services in a country.

An example of markets that AWS mini-me could go are the locations that have edge locations.

EU (Ireland) Region

EC2 Availability Zones: 3    Launched 2007

AWS Edge Locations

• Amsterdam,
  The Netherlands (2)
• Dublin, Ireland
• Frankfurt,
  Germany (2)
• London, England (2)
• Madrid, Spain
• Milan, Italy
• Paris, France (2)
• Stockholm, Sweden

I have tested this idea on over 2 dozen people and they all say this makes total sense.

And GigaOm's Barb Darrow has shared the idea with the rest of the industry.

Coming from Amazon — lots of Mini-Me clouds for government work?

by Barb Darrow

JUN. 6, 2013 - 10:29 AM PDT

3 Comments

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photo: Getty Images

SUMMARY:

Amazon’s GovCloud targets U.S. state, federal and local government workloads. Here’s betting AWS will replicate that model abroad.

With my opinion added.

Right now, I should note that AWS had no comment on this story which is, after all largely speculation. But others who know data center technology and customer requirements agree this game plan makes sense. “There are lots of government workloads out there that require special handling — to protect citizen information etc. There’s a market for this,” said David Ohara, GigaOM Pro analyst and founder of Greenm3.