2011 Data Center Fight Club–Google, Facebook, Twitter, Skype, & Zynga

December 30, 2010 Dave Ohara

In Data Centers a “Fight Club” metaphor can be used to describe the secrecy behind a competitive group. Where little is said out in the public. The big fight in 2009 was a Google vs. Microsoft for PUE and efficient data centers. PUE is now a common term and even used by some to specify data centers. 2010 Facebook has emerged as a competitor, and there are many other companies that tops in their category like Twitter, Skype, and Zynga.

TechCrunch discusses the talent wars for top engineers. Data Centers are not mentioned in the article, but none of these companies can exist without data centers.

Begun The Talent Wars Have – Why Twitter needs a London HQ: Google Engineers

by Mike Butcher on December 30, 2010

We’ve reported before about how the escalating warfor talent in Silicon Valley is effectively creating a kind of arms race between tech companies.

For example, Google is offering employees a 10% pay increase for 2011; companies like About.me are getting acquireddays after launch; and job postings in the IT industry are shooting to astronomical levels. Even Google’s Eric Schmidt has admitted to this battle.

Facebook, Google, Zynga and Twitter are hiring like crazy – and this insatiable desire for staff is likely to spill over into other countries. And perhaps the obvious first target outside of the Valley is London: English speaking, and a magnet for existing tech people in Europe working for US multinationals. And the latest to consider extending its reach there is Twitter. Europe is highly attractive to Twitter, since its advertising markets, particularly the UK where Twitter has exploded in adoption, are waiting to be milked.

Twitter’s first office outside of the US, will be headed up by Katie Jacobs Stanton, the company’s head of international strategy. Stanton was recently in London, where the UK government has been going all out to try to woo tech companies with its ‘East London Tech City’ policy.

What gets little press is the talent battles these companies have to find the best data center staff.

Signs of success as a platform, targeted for cyberattacks

December 30, 2010 Dave Ohara

CNN has an article referencing a McAfee report that iPhone, Facebook and Foursquare are 2011’s cyberattack targets.

2011 cyberattack targets: iPhone, Facebook, Foursquare

By John D. Sutter, CNN

December 29, 2010 10:25 a.m. EST | Filed under: Web

Apple products, including the iPhone, will be among the hot targets of cyberattacks in 2011, McAfee says.

(CNN) -- Spamming e-mail is so last year.

Malicious coders and all-out cybercrooks will target newer and hipper forms of digital communication in 2011, according to a report released Wednesday by McAfee, the computer security company.

Noting a "significant decrease" in the total volume of spam messages sent to e-mail, the company's annual "Threat Predictions" report says attacks on instant messaging services, Facebook, Foursquare, URL shorteners, smartphones like the iPhone and even long-protected Apple operating systems will increase in the coming year.

The changes are driven by how people use tech, the report says. As e-mail starts to die, so do e-mail-targeted scams.

Google, Microsoft, and other who are used to be targets will watch as others respond and staff up. Do you remember how much panic there was for MyDoom. Here is a wikipedia entry on computer viruses and worms http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_computer_viruses_and_worms

Fiber Optic Network at the extremes, metro and undersea cable

December 30, 2010 Dave Ohara

Internet Networks are in growth mode as profits and margins improve. WSJ has a post on growth in metro markets.

Fiber-Optic Networks Regain Some Glow

Data Traffic Turns Regional Operators Into Buyout Targets

By SHAYNDI RAICE

After the telecom bubble burst a decade ago, fiber was a dirty word.

Finding Fiber | A look at local providers

Zayo Group manages about 21,500 route miles of fiber in 146 markets across the U.S., including Philadelphia.

Zayo has purchased a series of smaller fiber companies, including American Fiber Systems, Memphis Networx and Columbia Fiber Solutions.

Lightower Fiber Networks, which operates a network in Boston and other Northeast cities, has about 5,500 route miles of fiber.

Lightower, which was spun off by utility National Grid and backed by private-equity firms, has bought five other fiber companies since 2008.

Now, the fiber-optic network business is enjoying a resurgence, particularly for metro fiber, the high-capacity lines that connect a city's office buildings, data centers and cellular towers to the Internet.

There have been 14 acquisitions in the industry this year alone and 45 since the fiber market began its turnaround in 2006, according to investment bank Cowen & Co.

"There's a shortage of metro fiber, and the demand is just going through the roof," said Rob Shanahan, chief executive of Lightower Fiber Networks, a fiber company serving the Northeast that has acquired five other companies since 2008.

CNET news has a photo essay on an Alcatel-Lucent undersea cable ship.

Aboard an Alcatel-Lucent undersea cable ship (photos)

September 5, 2010 6:00 AM PDT

This is one of Alcatel-Lucent's repeaters, which are used to amplify the signal at various points along the cable. This repeater, a model from two years ago, has a throughput of around 1.5 terabits per second.

Read more: http://news.cnet.com/2300-1035_3-10004733-11.html?tag=mncol#ixzz19c8nU4tp

The project highlighted is an Africa cable.

Philippe Dumont is in charge of Alcatel-Lucent's submarine network business. The market for such deployments, he said, has remained "quite stable" over the last couple of recessionary years, which "came as quite a surprise" to Alcatel-Lucent.

Dumont said the biggest cabling project in the world right now is Africa, but the connectivity being deployed there will be quite different from what people in the U.K. are used to. "Access to the Internet in Africa is mostly based on mobile," he said. "You will not see DSL, but you will see mobile broadband through smartphones and USB dongles."

Read more: http://news.cnet.com/2300-1035_3-10004733-2.html?tag=mncol#ixzz19c93vlIx

Estimating the size of Amazon Web Services using instances

December 30, 2010 Dave Ohara

Jack of all Clouds has a one year perspective on his method to count the EC2 instances on AWS to gauge the growth of amazon web services.

Recounting EC2 One Year Later

December 29th, 2010 | Published in Analysis | 9 Comments

It’s been over a year since my original Anatomy of an EC2 Resource ID post. In what became my little claim to fame in the industry, I uncovered the pattern behind those cryptic IDs AWS assigns to every object allocated (such as an instance, EBS volume, etc.). The discovery revealed that underlying the IDs is a regular serial number that increases with each resource allocated. While this may sound technical and insignificant, it turned out to be very valuable: it enabled, for the first time, a glimpse into the magnitude of Amazon’s cloud.

The numbers gathered in that post back in September 2009 showed that approximately 50,000 instances were being spun up every day on EC2 (in the us-east-1 region). So what’s happened since? I joined forces with CloudKick, providers of a cloud management and monitoring platform, to dig up more data. Here’s what we found: (click to expand to an interactive chart)

The chart above plots the number of instances launched per day, from mid-2007 till present day. Growth is, well, unmistakable. A couple of peaks dominate the landscape around February and October 2010, peaks which somewhat correlate to availability of new AWS services (see interactive map). The evidence is highly circumstantial though as I find it hard to draw a direct conclusion on how these specific events pushed the daily launch count as high up as 150,000.

Let’s zoom out now and look at EC2′s growth over the years:

What can you determine from these numbers?

Responding to my previous research, a top Amazon official commented that a count of instance launches doesn’t really reflect anything meaningful (like the actual customer base, server count or revenues – all of which we’d all love to figure out). I respond that it’s examining the numbers one year later that provides the real value: it’s like looking at a mysterious dial on your car’s dashboard: even without understanding the exact parameter measured, if it shoots up then there’s a decent chance you’re driving faster.

Watching my frozen kindle post. It is interesting to see after 5 days traffic is twice the normal amount. I would assume Amazon sold a significant number of Kindles as Xmas gifts.

The numbers alone may not tell you the answer, but they give you a hint on magnitude and direction.

Northern Ireland without Fresh Water, frozen pipes burst

December 30, 2010 Dave Ohara

Many are looking at cooler climates to put data centers in to allow more hours of free cooling. One downside of a cool climate is freezing weather. Who cares? What if your pipes are frozen and burst?

MSNBC has an article on Belfast Ireland’s lack of fresh water.

Thousands without fresh water in N. Ireland

Water crisis stretches into ninth day after frozen pipes burst following cold spell

Peter Muhly / AFP - Getty Images

Some 40,000 people are struggling to cope without water supplies in Northern Ireland, where frozen pipes have burst leaving some without fresh water for nine days. People have been forced to join long queues for bottled water.

BELFAST — Northern Ireland's government will hold an emergency meeting to address the country's mounting water crisis as tens of thousands of people remained without water for a ninth day.

Engineers are struggling to repair pipes that burst after the recent cold spell's sudden thaw.

Long lines formed Thursday at emergency water points, and Scotland trucked in bottled water for distribution to help families. Doctors are warning that a lack of clean water for drinking and washing could cause a health crisis.

Pressure is mounting on state supplier Northern Ireland Water (NI Water), the company at the center of the crisis, to restore service.

If you think you could truck in water, you may find the government has all the tankers booked.

Government ministers will discuss the possibility of bringing in more water tankers as officials say it could take several days to fix the problem.

And, you may find the rate of tankers you would need is unsustainable if you need multiple days of supply.

I have heard a few stories of data centers shut down when a water main breaks, and one of these days it will be in the news as a major IT data center is shut down due to lack of water.