A view of OSCON by Barton George

I wasn't able to make it to OSCON and one of the people I would have spent a lot of time with is Dell's Barton George.  I met Barton at Gartner Data Center Conference, and we frequently run into each other at other technology conferences.

Here are a few of Barton's OSCON posts.

OSCON: The Data Locker project and Singly

Who owns your data?  Hopefully the answer is you and while that may be true it is often very difficult to get your data out of sites you have uploaded it to and move it elsewhere.  Additionally, your data is scattered across a bunch of sites and locations across the web, wouldn’t it be amazing to have it all in one place and be able to mash it up and do things with it? 

OSCON: ex-NASA cloud lead on his OpenStack startup, Piston

Last week  at OSCON in Portland, I dragged Josh McKenty away from the OpenStack one-year anniversary (that’s what Josh is referring to at the very end of the interview) to do a quick video.  Josh, who headed up NASA’s Nebula tech team and has been very involved with OpenStack from the very beginning has recently announced Piston, a startup that will productize OpenStack for enterprises.

OSCON: How foursquare uses MongoDB to manage its data

I saw a great talk today here at OSCON Data up in Portland, Oregon.  The talk was Practical Data Storage: MongoDB @ foursquare and was given by foursquare‘s head of server engineering, Harry Heymann.  The talk was particularly impressive since, due to AV issues, Harry had to wing it and go slideless.  (He did post his slides to twitter so folks with access could follow along).

Is Foxconn using Robotics as its manufacturing push out of China?

Reuters has an article on Foxconn's plans for the use of robotics.

Foxconn to rely more on robots; could use 1 million in 3 years

Employees work inside a Foxconn factory in the township of Longhua in the southern Guangdong province in this May 26, 2010 file photo. REUTERS/Bobby Yip/Files

By Lee Chyen Yee and Clare Jim

HONG KONG/TAIPEI | Mon Aug 1, 2011 8:48am EDT

(Reuters) - Taiwan's Foxconn Technology Group, known for assembling Apple's iPhones and iPads inChina, plans to use more robots, with one report saying the company will use one million of them in the next three years, to cope with rising labor costs.

Foxconn's move highlights an increasing trend toward automation among Chinese companies as labor issues such as high-profile strikes and workers' suicides plague firms in sectors from autos to technology.

The one thing that caught my eye is Foxconn buying plants overseas.

Foxconn plans to buy a set-top plant in Mexico from Cisco Systems and is looking into investing more in Brazil, where it is already making mobile phone handsets.

It has bought LCD TV plants from Japan's Sony Corp in Mexico in 2009 and Slovakia in 2010 and is in cooperation talks with a number of top Japanese hi-tech firms, including Sharp, Canon and Hitachi.

Could server manufacturing be moving out of China as well in the future?

That's one way to solve the 100%+ tax for importing servers into Brazil.

Green Data Center Blog traffic almost 50,000 views a month

A few months ago I decided to change some ideas I was focusing on.  Part of any change normally you would worry about how it affects the traffic to your blog.  I purposely don't worry about the traffic as much as writing on things that I find interesting for my research, clients and just plain curiosity.  Frequently , I look at the traffic to see what people find interesting.

Yesterday I was watching my traffic as July 31 numbers for my blog looked like I would hit 50,000 views.  I got so close.  Note: I switched from TypePad to SquareSpace hosting in Feb which is why the Sept - Jan numbers are at 0.image

The exact numbers for Feb to July are.

image

I expect August to be lower traffic with summer holidays for Northern Hemisphere readers.  Here are the top 25 cities that hit my blog.

image

Thanks for visiting The Green (Low Carbon) Data Center blog.  I should  hit over 50,000 views by end of year. 

-Dave Ohara

Facebook updates Open Compute Project for the community, launches new look

If you go to OpenCompute.org you'll see a new look.

image

Facebook's Yael Maguire discusses the changes.

WELCOME!

WEDNESDAY, JULY 27, 2011 | Posted by Yael Maguire at 16:08 PM

Welcome to the new opencompute.org! This revamp focuses the site on projects and the community. Please bear with us as we work out our kinks, but we have a new streamlined project browser with links to some projects on GitHub! Our original specifications were created in Word and converted to PDFs, not a code-friendly manner to do open hardware development. We decided to switch our V2 specifications to MultiMarkDown, a simple text format used for the Web that easily converts to HTML and PDF. With this switch we now have a process for making contributions:

  1. Sign up on the site (link through Facebook).
  2. Sign an individual Contributor License Agreement (CLA).
  3. Get the code on GitHub.
  4. Make a patch to a spec and submit it to us at https://github.com/facebook/opencompute/issues

Facebook moves a Data Center Elephant, Dozens of Petabytes migrate to Prineville

Facebook has a post on migrating a huge Hadoop environment.  The post doesn't specifically call out the Prineville facility, but where else would they be moving to?

During the past two years, the number of shared items has grown exponentially, and the corresponding requirements for the analytics data warehouse have increased as well. As the majority of the analytics is performed with Hive, we store the data on HDFS — the Hadoop distributed file system.  In 2010, Facebook had the largest Hadoop cluster in the world, with over 20 PB of storage. By March 2011, the cluster had grown to 30 PB — that’s 3,000 times the size of the Library of Congress! At that point, we had run out of power and space to add more nodes, necessitating the move to a larger data center.

For those of you not familiar with what large data set Facebook would be moving.

y Paul Yang on Wednesday, July 27, 2011 at 9:19am

Users share billions of pieces of content daily on Facebook, and it’s the data infrastructure team's job to analyze that data so we can present it to those users and their friends in the quickest and most relevant manner. This requires a lot of infrastructure and supporting data, so much so that we need to move that data periodically to ever larger data centers. Just last month, the data infrastructure team finished our largest data migration ever – moving dozens of petabytes of data from one data center to another.

The post has lots of details and ends with a pitch to join the Facebook infrastructure team.

The next set of challenges for us include providing an ability to support a data warehouse that is distributed across multiple data centers. If you're interested in working on these and other "petascale" problems related to Hadoop, Hive, or just large systems, come join Facebook's data infrastructure team!

The data infrastructure team in the war room during the final switchover.

Curious I went to see what are the current job posts in the tech operations team.

Open Positions
Production Operations: Systems, Network, Storage, Database (14)
    Supply Chain, Program Management and Analysis (6)
    Hardware Design and Data Center Operations (12)