Amazon's James Hamilton throws in support for the idea of Blu Ray Cold storage

Facebook showed its proof of concept Blu Ray based cold storage solution at Open Compute Summit V.

Facebook has built a prototype system for storing petabytes on Blu-ray

by Derrick Harris

36 MINS AGO

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SUMMARY:

During the Open Compute Summit in San Jose, Facebook VP of Engineering Jay Parikh shared some big statistics for the company’s cold storage efforts, including those for a protoytpe Blu-ray system capable of storing a petabyte of data today.

James Hamilton posts on the idea of optical storage.

Next week, Facebook will show work they have been doing in cold storage mostly driven by their massive image storage problem. At OCP Summit V an innovative low-cost archival storage hardware platform will be shown. Archival projects always catch my interest because the vast majority of the world’s data is cold, the percentage that is cold is growing quickly, and I find the purity of a nearly single dimensional engineering problem to be super interesting. Almost the only dimension of relevance in cold storage is cost. See Glacier: Engineering for Cold Data Storage in the Cloud for more on this market segment and how Amazon Glacier is addressing it in the cloud.

This Facebook hardware project is particularly interesting in that it’s based upon an optical media rather than tape. Tape economics come from a combination of very low cost media combined with only a small number of fairly expensive drives. The tape is moved back and forth between storage slots and the drives when needed by robots. Facebook is taking the same basic approach of using robotic systems to allow a small number of drives to support a large media pool. But, rather than using tape, they are leveraging the high volume Blu-ray disk market with the volume economics driven by consumer media applications. Expect to see over a Petabyte of Blu-ray disks supplied by a Japanese media manufacturer housed in a rack built by a robotic systems supplier.

I’m a huge believer in leveraging consumer component volumes to produce innovative, low-cost server-side solutions. Optical is particularly interesting in this application and I’m looking forwarding to seeing more of the details behind the new storage platform. It looks like very interesting work.

Microsoft Windows Azure makes move Amazon Web Services refuses to make, Tell us what Server Hardware is used in the Cloud

Some people believe the cloud is great and solve all problems.  But, those who don’t believe the hype want to know more about the data center and the hardware in the cloud.  When AWS had outages in 2012, Digital Realty Trust was forced to make it clear that the AWS outages due to power problems were not in their facilities. 

Digital Realty, DFT: No Interruptions from Virginia Storm

July 3rd, 2012By: Rich Miller

 

A facility at the Digital Realty Trust data center campus in Ashburn, Virginia

The two largest wholesale data center operators in the northern Virginia market said their data centers performed flawlessly during last weekend’s electrical storms, maintaining electrical power during grid outages and keeping customers online.

Microsoft made the announcement yesterday. that it is sharing its server hardware designs it uses in its Cloud.

The Microsoft cloud server specification essentially provides the blueprints for the datacenter servers we have designed to deliver the world’s most diverse portfolio of cloud services. These servers are optimized for Windows Server software and built to handle the enormous availability, scalability and efficiency requirements of Windows Azure, our global cloud platform. They offer dramatic improvements over traditional enterprise server designs: up to 40 percent server cost savings, 15 percent power efficiency gains and 50 percent reduction in deployment and service times. We also expect this server design to contribute to our environmental sustainability efforts by reducing network cabling by 1,100 miles and metal by10,000 tons across our base of 1 million servers.

GigaOm’s Barb Darrow covered the release and makes the point that Amazon Web Services doesn’t share its server hardware designs it uses.

The great unmentioned player here is Amazon Web Services, which dominates the public cloud infrastructure space to date. While Amazon Distinguished Engineer James Hamilton talks broadly about data center energy efficiency, Amazon does not publicize its server designs.

Is the future of Clouds a transparency telling the users what hardware you are running on?  Seems like it is good for users bad for the Cloud Suppliers.

Disclosure: I spend some time working for GigaOm Research and know many of the GigaOm editorial staff.

AWS first outage of 2014, Jan 3 12:50a

I was disconnected from the internet this weekend and one of my developer friends said AWS was out in the East Coast and I couldn’t find much on the outage.

Here is one post.

Amazon Cloud Services Down, Netflix, Other Sites Unreachable

January 3, 2014 

By Paul Thomson :: 1:16 AM

Update: As of 2:45 AM, it appears that Amazon’s cloud services are coming online again.

With the northeast in the grips of a deep freeze and blizzard, many people are stuck indoors tonight, hunkered down in front of the glowing screens of laptops and televisions. What they’re likely not doing, is watching Netflix and surfing on some parts of the social web, however.

Around 12:30 AM, an outage occurred with Amazon’s cloud storage service, throwing many databases and applications offline. Some of the affected sites include Netflix, Amazon streaming media, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Steam, Tumblr, and various blogs and websites that depend on Amazon’s services to host and deliver their data.

The outage appears to be centered in one of Amazon’s East Coast data centers, according to Tweets from various sources trying to pinpoint the problem, but no official status update has been given from Amazon yet.

Given the amount of outages in East Coast AWS we have chosen to try and use AWS West and our clients are more on the west coast. 

We’ll see what AWS outages look like in 2014 vs. 2013.  Here is an slideshare analyzing past AWS outages.  And the conclusion is most outage are caused by process issues.

Oracle gets ready to compete against AWS

I had a nice Holiday break with no landline, cell coverage, internet access, or broadcast TV from Dec 26 - Dec 31.  I was sick with a bad cold for 3 days of bed rest and I only had a kindle and saved movies to pass the time.  It was a forced withdrawal which actually was good medicine in itself. 

One of the things I missed is this post by my GigaOm friend Barb Darrow on Oracle’s intent to make 2014 a year to compete against AWS.

“Down at the infrastructure level, we intend to be price competitive with Amazon and Microsoft Azure and Rackspace. So we intend to compete aggressively in, what I will call — commodity not being a bad word — the commodity Infrastructure-as-a-Service marketplace,” Ellison told analysts on the company’s second quarter earnings call last week.

That Oracle IaaS is envisioned as a platform to run all that higher-end Oracle software goodness. The idea, Ellison continued “is to sell our customers infrastructure as a service and the same customer a highly differentiated platform as a service will let us get better margins and highly differentiated suite of enterprise applications for the cloud.”

I was chatting with an Oracle data center executive at 7x24 Exchange and we joked about how the Sun acquisition slowed Oracle’s data center expansion and how Oracle has learned the Sun data centers were not that great, and they were now expanding their existing facilities and building more.

In a research note, Nomura Securities analyst Rick Sherlund, pointed to Oracle opening up its 17th data center worldwide as proof that its building out infrastructure for this cloud push.

AWS coming to China in 2014

AWS has a press release detailing the arrival of AWS to China.

PRESS RELEASE

Dec. 18, 2013, 3:22 a.m. EST

Amazon Web Services Announces Upcoming China Region for its Cloud Computing Platform

AWS signs memorandums of understanding with the Beijing and Ningxia governments to develop cloud computing services

 

SEATTLE, Dec 18, 2013 (BUSINESS WIRE) -- --Xiaomi, Qihoo 360, TCL, Tiens, NQ Mobile, FunPlus, Kingsoft, Mobotap, and Papaya Mobile among the growing Chinese business community already using AWS

AMZN +1.03% -- Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS, Inc.), an Amazon.com company, today announced the upcoming limited preview of its China Region for the AWS cloud computing platform. This will be the fourth AWS Region in Asia Pacific and the tenth Region globally. In the limited preview, which will be deployed in early 2014, a select group of China-based and multinational companies with customers in China will be invited to begin using AWS Cloud services in the AWS China Region to build their businesses and run their applications in the cloud. Businesses and software developers can apply for access to the limited preview in the AWS China Region today athttp://www.amazonaws.cn .

One nugget in the AWS blog is the business is a bit different in China than other sites.

Our business model will be slightly different here than in the other AWS Regions. You will need to create an AWS account that is specific to the Region. We will be posting additional information on AWS China website as it becomes available.

Here is the news China AWS site.  Below is the site with Google Translate to english.