Blog entry translated to Dutch, ComputerWorld.nl

December 14, 2010 Dave Ohara

I follow Barton George’s blog and twitter comments. While I was flying into LV, Barton was covering one of the Gartner keynotes and tweeted.

barton808 Barton George

by sean_kelley_ms

66% of folks here say they will be pursuing private cloud by 2014.#gartnerDC

After talking to a few folks including Barton I wrote a post the next morning that the Private Cloud will bring some really bad $h*!

What the Private Cloud will bring? Really Bad $h*!

I had a full day at Gartner DC LV conference. At the end of the day I got a good question on what I saw in the future. Cloud is top of the topics being discussed.

Within an hour computerworld.nl contacted me and asked if they could translate the article into Dutch. And, here is the Dutch version on computerworld.nl.

Private cloud leidt tot misbaksels

Gepubliceerd:08-12-2010 om 12:29 Auteur:Dave Ohara

Is cloud de toekomst? Afgelopen dagen heb ik doorgebracht op het datacenter congres van Gartner in Las Vegas. Daar kreeg ik een goed beeld van die toekomst.

Veel bedrijven denken na over het bouwen van private cloud. Maar hoeveel mensen weten hoe je een besturingssysteem voor de cloud opzet? Een tweet zoals je die heel veel voorbij zag komen op het congres:

Social Networking gives clues to data center location

December 14, 2010 Dave Ohara

Data Center site selection is part art and science. There are many Facebook partners looking for peering relationships with Facebook data centers. 600 million users is an appealing number. A graphic shows the users in an interesting display.

Here is background on the data to create the graph.

After a few minutes of rendering, the new plot appeared, and I was a bit taken aback by what I saw. The blob had turned into a surprisingly detailed map of the world. Not only were continents visible, certain international borders were apparent as well. What really struck me, though, was knowing that the lines didn't represent coasts or rivers or political borders, but real human relationships. Each line might represent a friendship made while travelling, a family member abroad, or an old college friend pulled away by the various forces of life.

Later I replaced the lines with great circle arcs, which are the shortest routes between two points on the Earth. Because the Earth is a sphere, these are often not straight lines on the projection.

When I shared the image with others within Facebook, it resonated with many people. It's not just a pretty picture, it's a reaffirmation of the impact we have in connecting people, even across oceans and borders.

Think about all the data Facebook has for its site selection process. Europe and Asia look like obvious next places.

Note as GigaOm points out there are some dark spots in the Facebook network.

There are gaps in the data, of course, with dark spots in China and other countries that block the social network (or have large competitors of their own, as Russia does with VKontakte), but the result is quite an amazing picture of a connected world. If that’s what an intern at Facebook can come up with, imagine what else would be possible with that data.

Dell DCS Cloud Evangelist, Barton George

December 13, 2010 Dave Ohara

One of the main lessons I learned and had ingrained in my thinking when I worked for Apple is focusing on quality and not quantity. This same idea rubs off when I pick who I look to network with. I have only 157 twitter followers, 1,200 RSS subscribers to www.greenm3.com. my linkedin connection is only 200, and 80 Facebook friends.

There are many who want these numbers to be as big as possible. I don’t really care about the quantity as much as the quality.

One of the good connections I found only a few weeks ago is Barton George who blogs at http://bartongeorge.net/

About

What I do, and have done, for a living

Last year I joined Dell as their cloud computing evangelist. As such I act as Dell’s ambassador to the cloud computing community (I had to supply my own sash). I also work with analysts and press and am responsible for messaging as well as blogging and tweeting (you can follow me on twitter at barton808 and you know where my blog is).

Prior to Dell I spent 13 years at Sun Microsystems in a variety of roles from manufacturing to product and corporate marketing. My last three years there I spent as an Open Source evangelist, avid blogger, and driver of Sun’s GNU/Linux strategy and relationships.

I was lucky to connect with Barton at Gartner DC LV and after an hour or so chatting he asked to interview me to discuss the data center ecosystem.

The Data Center ecosystem of players

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As I mentioned in a recent entry, last week I attended the Gartner Data Center conference where I learned a ton. One of the folks I learned a lot from was Dave Ohara who consults in the data center arena. Dave is uber connected in this space and pens the blog, Green (low carbon) Data Center blog. Dave provided a bunch of introductions while I was there and sat down with me to do the following short video on the ecosystem of data center players.

Some of the ground that Dave covers:

What he covers in his blog Green Data Center

How do you go about building a data center and who are the players in each phase e.g site selection -> architecture/engineering design -> construction…

What are some of the key disruptions coming to this long standing industry e.g. cloud, Google

I am looking forward to future conversations with Barton as he learns more about data centers. And my learning what Dell DCS’s group is doing in cloud computing.

Validating Kindle 3 Sales of Millions sold this quarter

December 13, 2010 Dave Ohara

One of my technical helpers is getting a Kindle 3 for Xmas and we were talking about setting it up for the family. At $139 it is hard to argue with as a gift, and they know I’ll be totally into how to set it up and I know the tip for what happens if the Kindle 3 locks up and has a frozen screen.

Today CNET news digs into the Kindle Community to find some data on the #' sold. How well is the Kindle 3 selling?

Amazon: 'Millions' of Kindles sold this quarter

by David Carnoy

Amazon continues to hint at very strong sales numbers for the Kindle without giving exact figures.

(Credit: Amazon)

Last week, Barnes & Noble's chairman Len Riggio mentioned in an interview that his company was producing 18,000 Nook Colors per day, straining to keep up with holiday demand. This week it's Amazon's turn to trumpet Kindle sales, but it isn't CEO Jeff Bezos doing the talking. The company sometimes prefers to do its PR via its own "Kindle Community" message boards.

In this case, the little nugget of info was embedded in a thank you to customers for helping Amazon sell millions of Kindles and a reminder that the device is offering the latest, "most advanced" E Ink Pearl display (which the e-ink Nook doesn't have).

"Thanks to you, in just the first 73 days of this holiday quarter, we've already sold millions of our all-new Kindles with the latest E Ink Pearl display," the post reads. "In fact, in the last 73 days, readers have purchased more Kindles than we sold during all of 2009."

Going to my own data source my blog entry on resetting the Kindle here is the past 3 months of traffic. Note there is no big drop off in hits to my blog entry. I think my blog entry gives some pretty solid evidence of Kindle 3 sales. I wonder how much my data analytics is worth to the Barnes and Noble Nook guys. Smile

What is kind of scary is there are 13,000 page views for frozen Kindles.

Top 10 search terms.

Another top traffic entry I have is on the top 5 data center construction companies.

Best Container/modular Data Center approach 2010? SGI's Ice Cube is one choice

December 13, 2010 Dave Ohara

Figuring out which Container Modular Data Center is confusing as many companies have added container/modular data center capabilities - HP, SGI, Dell, IBM, Sun, Lee Technologies, Digital Realty Trust, IO DataCenters.

Which company do you pick?

Who has the best container?

Let me give you a different question to ask.

Who has the best engineering for containers?

Now it can be confusing to figure out. When you look at the big name companies, many times the end user has no idea who does the engineering work. The engineers stay in the office being an engineer. The people out at the trade shows are the sales people who know how to engage customers and sell.

DataCenterKnowledge has a post on SGI's latest ICE Cube modular data center at Gartner DC LV 2010.

Inside SGI’s Air-Cooled Modular Data Center
December 13th, 2010 : Rich Miller

Data Center Knowledge recently got a detailed video tour of the retooled SGI ICE Cube modular data center, which features fresh air cooling.

SGI was one of the early players in the container data center sector with its water-cooled ICE Cube portable unit. Last week the company unveiled a retooled ICE Cube modular data center that can be cooled entirely by air. The fresh air cooling allows the unit to run outdoors in cool climates, improving energy efficiency by foregoing mechanical refrigeration. At the Gartner Data Center Conference, SGI’s Patrick Yantz gave DCK a detailed tour of the new unit. Patrick provides an overview of the new orientation of the ICE Cube module, which allows easy expansion, and demonstrates how SGI’s software management package can remotely throttle fans up and down. This video runs about 13 minutes.

SGI Modular data center

Here is the marketing site for Ice Cube Air.

Back to the engineer, Patrick Yantz has been working on this container stuff for a while. Here is a video of Patrick presenting in Nov 2009 at Microsoft's PDC. http://tv.devexpress.com/#PDC09AzureBox

Patrick Yantz shows a shipping container, ahem, “air handling unit” that houses the hardware where your data will actually live in the Azure cloud.
So, if you’re a fan of hardware then check out this great walking tour with Patrick Yantz. Patrick is a Cloud Architect with Data Center Services team. And Patrick knows exactly what these shipping containers full of servers need to work anywhere in the world.

So, now you know one of the engineers out there who design modular/container data centers. While others toured the Ice Cube in LV. I was able to look at the same unit at SGI in Fremont the week before Gartner DC LV.

BTW, Patrick's boss was Daniel Costello, ex-Microsoft data center engineering manager, now at Google. The data center engineering is a small community.

If you want to know which container/modular data center look for the engineers who designed the solution.

Here are some pictures I took of the SGI Ice Cube Air.