Attending DataCenterDynamics SF, July 16

I'll be at my favorite data center event, Data Center Dynamics in SF on July 16.

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Some interesting topics are:

Industry Executive Roundtable - Are We Reaching an Inflection Point in Our industry?
Challenging Pre-Conceptions of How Data Centers and IT Infrastructure Are Designed, Built and Operated.

 

Executive Roundtable: Game Changers – The Impact of the Cloud, Unified Computing and Applications

 

The Model Data Center:
Operational Management of Data Centers through Simulation
Sherman Ikemoto, General Manager, North America - Future Facilities Inc

 

If you haven't gone to a DCD conference you're missing out on a chance to connect with your peers in the area.

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Analyst predicts how music Droid will eat Apple's lunch

Barron's reports on an interview with Charter Equity Research Managing Director Ed Snyder.  Who is Ed Synder?

Snyder is a former telecom engineer, who has been covering the telecom industry since Alexander Graham Bell called for Watson. And I have found him mostly right about things telephony, with wires or without. One of his basic tenets throughout the evolution of wireless phones has been that music is the killer application. The key to Apple's (ticker: AAPL) strategy of linking the iPod Touch, iPhone and iPad with one operating system, the iOS family, has been iTunes' central role in managing music, applications and software updates. The easy, seamless ability to transfer music from the iPod via iTunes to the first iPhones was a huge factor in the Apple smartphone's acceptance and continued success. That, in turn, is driving iPad sales.

Ed brings up Music as the killer app for Google.

Now, Snyder suggests that music is the application that could provide Google's (GOOG) open-source Android OS the chance to leap over Apple. The analyst predicts that the next-generation music platform, which is likely to be cloud-based, will be the major battlefield in the smartphone war over the next year or so.

And mentions data centers as a key to Google's strategy.

Snyder says that Google must offer a content-delivery system similar in function to iTunes, but based in a cloud—meaning music is stored in one of Google's famous data-center clusters somewhere and delivered via the Internet and over airwaves to various devices. (ITune libraries sit on the local hard drive of personal computers). He thinks that Google should strike deals with (or, I suppose, buy) one of the many cloud-based streaming-music services already used on wireless devices.

Smartphones, Music, and Data Centers are Google's opportunity to eat Apples' lunch.

How a Droid Could Eat Apple's Lunch

By MARK VEVERKA | MORE ARTICLES BY AUTHOR(S)

Apple's iPhone reigns supreme, but a veteran telecom analyst argues that the momentum belongs to Google's Android system.

APPLE 'S IPHONE IS THE undisputed king of the smartphones, but there is swelling sentiment that Google's Android platform may steal the crown in the end.

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I built my datacenter in 5 minutes - AWS sticker

AWS has a trade offer for AWS fans. 

Amazon will send you the following stickers in exchange for.

  • Some stickers from your company or group.
  • A picture of your team, perhaps enhanced with your company or product logo.
  • An interesting piece of SWAG.
  • A blog post detailing the ways in which your company puts AWS to use, complete with an architecture diagram.

    • If you'd like some stickers, send us your offering and include a self-addressed envelope (we'll take care of the postage) to the following address:

    Amazon Web Services
    Attn: AWS Stickers
    P.O. Box 81226
    Seattle, WA
    98108-1300

    Hopefully, by writing this blog entry one of my AWS friends can get me some stickers. :-)  I want the datacenter one.

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    Reliable data center power, do you think about cybersecurity threats on power plants and the grid?

    About 4 years ago I met some interesting folks from Idaho National Laboratory, a DOE group at an OSIsoft user conference who work on cybersecurity threats on power plants and the grid.  Information Week covers NSA joining the cybersecurity threat.

    NSA Launches Infrastructure Cybersecurity Program

    The "Perfect Citizen" program will seek to help mitigate cyber attacks on critical infrastructure like power plants, air traffic control systems and the electrical grid.

    By J. Nicholas Hoover
    InformationWeek
    July 9, 2010 08:00 AM

    The National Security Agency plans to launch a program aimed at assessing vulnerabilities and developing capabilities to help secure critical infrastructure like power plants, air traffic control systems and the electrical grid.

    In an e-mail sent Thursday evening to InformationWeek, NSA refuted parts of an earlier Wall Street Journal report that the effort, called Perfect Citizen, would monitor communications or place "sensors" on utility company systems, instead calling it "a research and engineering effort."

    The Idaho National labs has a web site with their efforts.

    National Security

    SCADA/Cyber/Power Grid Security

    INL National SCADA Test Bed web site

    Comprehensive computer and cyber security programs are an essential element for today’s personnel computers as well as for the digital control systems that operate our nation’s infrastructure systems such as transportation and telecommunication systems and facilities such as chemical and water treatment plants.

    Leveraging the Laboratory’s more than 50 years of experience in developing, operating, and maintaining complex control systems for nuclear reactors and other infrastructure systems, the INL created a Critical Infrastructure Test Range complete with full-scale infrastructure systems, remote and secure testing grounds, and an expert staff to aid the utility and control systems industry in developing tools and solutions to improve cyber security.

    In 2004, the departments of Energy and Homeland Security established two multi-year programs at INL to protect the nation’s infrastructures against attacks from hackers, virus writers, disgruntled employees, terrorist organizations and nation states.

    The National Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) Test Bed is funded by the Department of Energy and works in collaboration with Sandia National Laboratory to systematically analyze, test, and improve cyber security features in the control systems that operate the nation’s electric power grid. SCADA systems are also commonly found in the water and oil and gas industry.

    And there is Department of Homeland Security site as well.

    Control Systems Security Program (CSSP)

    The goal of the DHS National Cyber Security Division's CSSP is to reduce industrial control system risks within and across all critical infrastructure and key resource sectors by coordinating efforts among federal, state, local, and tribal governments, as well as industrial control systems owners, operators and vendors. The CSSP coordinates activities to reduce the likelihood of success and severity of impact of a cyber attack against critical infrastructure control systems through risk-mitigation activities.

    What is the gov'ts role and who should you contact to understand the cybersecurity threats to your power infrastructure?

    Even so, the program raises unanswered questions about the government's role in -- and undefined turf over -- protecting the nation's critical infrastructure from cyber attacks, what technologies and processes might be used in such an effort, how any such effort would protect critical infrastructure owners' independence as well as privacy, and whether the effort should be public rather than classified.

    I need to go back and find the business cards for the Idaho National Lab guys I talked to.  I think there would know some answers.

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    As network speeds increase optical switching research increases with green and energy efficient benefits

    Initially, I saw MIT's news announcing 100 times faster with less energy consumption, and dismissed the news.

    An Internet 100 times as fast

    A new network design that avoids the need to convert optical signals into electrical ones could boost capacity while reducing power consumption.

    Larry Hardesty, MIT News Office

    In today’s Internet, data traveling through optical fibers as beams of light have to be converted to electrical signals for processing. By dispensing with that conversion, a new network design could increase Internet speeds 100-fold.

    June 28, 2010

    The heart of the Internet is a network of high-capacity optical fibers that spans continents. But while optical signals transmit information much more efficiently than electrical signals, they’re harder to control. The routers that direct traffic on the Internet typically convert optical signals to electrical ones for processing, then convert them back for transmission, a process that consumes time and energy.
    In recent years, however, a group of MIT researchers led by Vincent Chan, the Joan and Irwin Jacobs Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, has demonstrated a new way of organizing optical networks that, in most cases, would eliminate this inefficient conversion process. As a result, it could make the Internet 100 or even 1,000 times faster while actually reducing the amount of energy it consumes.

    But, then here comes news from European Commission on Optical switching and green photonics.

    C-3PO Strives for Green Photonics

    JULY 8, 2010 | Craig Matsumoto | Post a comment

    A European Commission-funded project is giving the optical components sector some green street cred by aiming to squeeze the power requirements for certain types of photonic devices.

    The three-year project is being called Colorless and Coolerless Components for Low-Power Optical Networks, which participants are shortening to C-3PO.

    Yes, sci-fi geeks, they named it after a breakfast cereal.

    ADVA Optical Networking (Frankfurt: ADV) is announcing its involvement today, but C-3PO got introduced to the world a couple of weeks ago.

    The author tries to tie in why energy efficient networks are important and the relationship with virtualization.

    Photonics are not the biggest power suck in the network. But C-3PO participants reason thatevery piece of the network will eventually need a green checkup. "Every single layer in the complete network has to be considered, and that means network architectures, maybe even application architectures, systems, components, and safe or sleep modes. Optics can't be excluded," Grobe says.

    The data center, as a whole, is a more obvious power hog, but Grobe points out that this problem is being addressed by virtualization, a process that lets users tap servers and storage that are widely distributed. Virtualization is made possible by high-speed optical networks. Thus, low-power optics will have some role in defining data-center power usage.

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