Ex-Microsoft Security Evangelist works for AWS, shouldn’t he have been transferred to Azure instead of fired?

December 17, 2009 Dave Ohara

A new AWS technical evangelist has a blog entry.

Hello, world!

Good day, everyone. I'm Steve Riley. In July 2009 I joined the AWS evangelism team. I spent my first few months absorbing information about all our offerings and am now getting back on the road again, speaking at various events and user groups and meeting with customers. I came from Microsoft, where I was in the telecommunications consulting practice for three years and in the Trustworthy Computing group for seven. I was a global security evangelist there and also worked closely with our chief security officer and enterprise security architect communities. I'm continuing that work here at Amazon Web Services, concentrating on enterprise deployment of cloud computing, all things cloud security, and of course the Windows Server aspects of our offerings.

I'm very excited to be part of AWS. The cloud is the future, and I look forward to meeting many of you and working together. As with all of us on the team, I'm here to help you succeed. More information in the links below.

My personal blog -- information security, cloud computing, travel, music, politics

My Twitter

I also watch and respond to the AWS Twitter

Our LinkedIn group

My old Microsoft blog -- Windows security, security process and practice

My book -- Protect Your Windows Network

A biography

Steve has a nice map of the Amazon EC2, S3, and CloudFront from one his presentations that is on his presentation page.

What I found interesting is Steve Riley was laid off from Microsoft’s security group, trustworthy computing.

Good bye, and good luck

Friends, as a part of Microsoft’s second round of restructuring, my position was eliminated yesterday and my employment with Microsoft has ended.

Shouldn’t Steve been transferred to Windows Azure instead of being laid off, and being hired by Amazon Web Services?

Christian Belady’s history of PUE

December 9, 2009 Dave Ohara

Christian Belady has a post on the Inflection Point for Efficiency in the data center which provides an early history of PUE as a data center metric.

In my opinion, it wasn’t until 2006 that the industry really did go through a paradigm shift. While there were a few of us who had been pushing efficient computing approaches for over a decade), we had limited success in moving the industry until 2006. What happened in 2006? I think the notion of establishing an industry efficiency metric and data center metrics were born. I thought it would be interesting to recap those milestones based on my perspective:

Christian provides three milestones you can read in his post. Here is the third milestone.

April 23-26, 2006: High-Density Computing: Trends, Challenges, Benefits, Costs, and Solutions

This symposium was the Uptime Institute’s first and it focused on Density trends. However, it was this conference where I first presented an Efficiency Metric called PUE which seemed to capture the attention of many of the attendees. As a result, I published a paper on PUE with my good friend Chris Malone later in the year at the Digital Power Forum. At this same conference, AMD’s Larry Vertal and Bruce Shaw sat down with Paul Perez (my former VP) and I to discuss the idea of starting a consortium called the Green Grid. Ten months later the Green Grid was officially announced with one of its first whitepapers evangelizing metrics and in particular PUE.

and Christian, takes times to reflect.

So our industry woke up in 2006 and while the Gartner graph does show we have work ahead of us, I do think we can say that in less than four years the industry has made great strides (and perhaps I shouldn’t complain so much!).

What we need from Christian is Part 3 on what his prediction of the future is as he is already proven to make history.

He did do this in 1998 and ten years later. /2008/03/christian-belad.html

Mar 27, 2008

Christian Belady's Bottom Line Opinion 10 years ago, We Need A Better System

Microsoft's Christian Belady was going through his old presentations and found a public presentation on The Big Picture, A Philosophical Discussion to Make US Think. Download Cbelady.pdf The presentation is an accumulation of predictions he was making in the late '90s as part of making a case for more efficient computing while at HP.

…

Summary
Power is not just a….
•component problem
•System problem
•Data center problem
•Utility Infrastructure problem
We have a huge opportunity to solve these problems as one system and optimize the solution.
WE NEED A BETTER SYSTEM!

Big Picture
Bottom Line
We need to cooperate to solve these problems on a much larger scale.
Develop consortiums to address these global issues and influence the industry, government and culture proactively.
We need to ensure that we have a better world.

Part 2 of Microsoft’s Azure Container, looking closer there are server fans

November 19, 2009 Dave Ohara

I wrote the post on Microsoft’s Azure Container referencing InformationWeek’s Bob Muglia quote.

Bob Muglia: In Chicago, we used the previous generation of container. The one on the show floor incorporates advances coming out of Microsoft Research. Our servers have no fans in them

Thanks to smart reader’s ears, they point out there are server fans.

If you listen to this video you hear the server fans that are too familiar. So InformationWeek’s statement of fanless servers must be a misquote.

If I wanted I could reach out to Microsoft friend to go take a closer better picture of the back of the servers to get a picture of the fans. But, I am not going to call a favor for something that you can all hear if you listen to the video.

Microsoft Container has evaporative water cooling

November 18, 2009 Dave Ohara

Information week has an interview with Microsoft President Bob Muglia. Which reveals Microsoft’s container is providing evaporative cooling in the containers.

InformationWeek: There's a next-generation container on the show floor?

Bob Muglia: In Chicago, we used the previous generation of container. The one on the show floor incorporates advances coming out of Microsoft Research. *~~Our servers have no fans in them.~~ Ambient air is drawn over a membrane onto which a small amount of water is released. I think it's two gallons an hour. The slow release of water drops the temperature of ambient air coming in through a system of louvers by 20 or 25 degrees and that's sufficient to keep the servers cool enough. You have to realize servers run comfortably at 95 degrees. Maybe you and I are not comfortable working at 95 degrees, but servers are.

*Note: this quote is struck out due to a reader pointing out the server fan noise. See this post for specifics.

Dell Servers inside Windows Azure Cloud Containers at PDC 09

November 18, 2009 Dave Ohara

Here is a youtube video of the Windows Azure container at PDC 09.

With Dell inside.

Steve Clayton has an image.

DataCenterKnowledge has a post as well.

Optimized for Outdoors?
The Generation 4 container on display at PDC looks to be completely optimized for outdoor use, with a design that relies upon fresh air (”free cooling”) rather than air conditioning. While we’re not on-site at PDC and haven’t been able to inspect the container, it features louvers on the exterior of the container to draw fresh air into the cold aisle and expel hot air from the rear of the hot aisle. Here’s a look at a video of the container shot by a PDC attendee:

The container features the branding for Windows Azure, Microsoft’s developer-focused cloud computing platform. Windows Azure will run at facilities in Chicago, San Antonio, Dublin, Amsterdam, Singapore and Hong Kong.