Data Centers–best of both world’s creators and servers

February 17, 2011 Dave Ohara

Andy Kessler has an article in WSJ that asks a good question.

Is Your Job an Endangered Species?

Technology is eating jobs—and not just obvious ones like toll takers and phone operators. Lawyers and doctors are at risk as well.

By ANDY KESSLER

So where the heck are all the jobs? Eight-hundred billion in stimulus and $2 trillion in dollar-printing and all we got were a lousy 36,000 jobs last month. That's not even enough to absorb population growth.

For you data center geeks you can sigh with a bit of relief.

Technology is eating jobs—and not just toll takers.

Andy makes the point there are two types of workers.

Forget blue-collar and white- collar. There are two types of workers in our economy: creators and servers. Creators are the ones driving productivity—writing code, designing chips, creating drugs, running search engines. Servers, on the other hand, service these creators (and other servers) by building homes, providing food, offering legal advice, and working at the Department of Motor Vehicles. Many servers will be replaced by machines, by computers and by changes in how business operates. It's no coincidence that Google announced it plans to hire 6,000 workers in 2011.

Hey Data Centers are for creators and it has the servers.

Andy makes a little doom and gloom.

But be warned that this economy is incredibly dynamic, and there is no quick fix for job creation when so much technology-driven job destruction is taking place. Fortunately, history shows that labor-saving machines haven't decreased overall employment even when they have made certain jobs obsolete. Ultimately the economic growth created by new jobs always overwhelms the drag from jobs destroyed—if policy makers let it happen.

What do you think your job will be in 10 years?

Cloud is for everyone inculding Solaris users–JoyentCloud

February 17, 2011 Dave Ohara

Everyone needs to be in the cloud. Microsoft markets the cloud with this commercial.

Microsoft Cloud Commercial

On a Sun Blog here is post on Joyent.

Tuesday Feb 15, 2011

Solaris cloud

Interesting what the folks up at JoyentCloud are up to with the Solaris-based cloud offering. From the first looks of it (and knowing who is involved in engineering of it all), it appears as precisely what you'd expect a cloud infrastructure to be: (a) performant (b) 100% reliable (c) robust (d) affordable (e) compliant

And, here is a Joyent page just for the Solaris users.

Special Offer for Solaris Users

We love Solaris users, so we want to give you the opportunity to try out the best cloud services available – which just happen to run on Solaris.

If you want to run your web app or website on the most efficient, performant, and cost-effective cloud infrastructure in the business, you need to try Joyent. Our Open Solaris-based SmartMachines (kind of like a Windows-based virtual machine but better) outperform Amazon EC2 on a number of fronts: Joyent CPU is 5x faster; Disc I/O is 14x faster; and Memory I/O 3x faster.

Who needs inefficient, non-performant infrastructure when you have access to SmartMachines from Joyent? We invite those of you who are building high performance web applications to try out a 1GB SmartMachine for just $45 per month (that’s $80 off the regular price). This monthly price is good for as long as you keep your SmartMachine.

At this fantastic price, we can only allow 1 per customer. This offer is good through March 4, 2011.

Order Instantly Online

If you don’t have an account on my.joyent.com, sign up now to facilitate the purchase process. Then come back here and click on Buy Now to get your special promo price.

(Full Disclosure: Sun was one of my past clients. I no longer work for Sun or Oracle, but my brother does work at Oracle.)

Simulate Load with Space Heaters, following Matt Stansberry at Uptime

February 17, 2011 Dave Ohara

Matt Stansberry and I last ran into each other at Gartner Data Center conference, but since then he has made the switch to Uptime Institute.

Esteemed Author Matt Stansberry Joins Uptime Institute’s Expert Team

Veteran Data Center Industry Editor to Enhance Uptime’s Institute’s Thought Leadership and Educational Resources

NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Uptime Institute (Institute) today announced the addition of senior technology editor, Matt Stansberry, as the organization’s Director of Content and Publications. Stansberry, a well-known industry expert, has researched data center trends for nearly a decade and wrote an award winning book on data center energy efficiency. Stansberry will focus on the development of research-driven publications and programming by tapping into the Institute’s expert leadership, the Site Uptime Networks (Network), and industry-at-large.

Matt writes some interesting stuff and just posted on the first Tier 3 certified data center in Saudi Arabia. One of the more entertaining pictures is this one.

Chris Brown, the UIPS Consultant who led the effort said a lack of readily available load banks in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia led to the improvised use of heaters to simulate IT load for commissioning and testing.

FedEx opens its Green Data Center in Colorado, PUE = 1.28

February 16, 2011 Dave Ohara

CSRwire has FedEx’s press release about its new green data center.

FedEx Unveils "Green" Data Center in Colorado Springs

Akamai’s Real Time Web Monitor–Attacks, Traffic and Latency

February 16, 2011 Dave Ohara

Akamai has a cool Real-time Web Monitor web page.

Akamai monitors global Internet conditions around the clock. With this real-time data we identify the global regions with the greatest attack traffic, cities with the slowest Web connections (latency), and geographic areas with the most Web traffic (traffic density).