Amazon Web Services abstraction of SSD in the cloud

GigaOm's Derek Harris has a phttp://gigaom.com/cloud/amazons-dynamodb-shows-hardware-as-mean-to-an-end/ost on AWS new Dynamo service.

Amazon’s DynamoDB shows hardware as means to an end

By Derrick Harris Jan. 18, 2012, 11:55am PT No Comments

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Somewhat lost in the greater story of Amazon Web Services’ new DynamoDB NoSQL database is that the new service runs atop a solid-state storage system. However, by abstracting those SSDs underneath a higher-level application service, AWS has once again demonstrated its cloud wisdom by illustrating how new hardware presents greater opportunities than Infrastructure-as-a-Service alone.

AWS doing solid-state drives is a big deal in the world of cloud computing, where users have been wondering for years when the company might start offering SSDs as a service. Other cloud providers already offer bare SSDs as a service, and more certainly are thinking about it with the advent of companies such as SolidFire that are specifically targeting cloud providers with solid-state arrays. The idea is that they’ll be necessary to run I/O-intensive applications such as databases and ERP, which many large organizations consider mission-critical but which many cloud providers aren’t yet equipped to handle.

I speculated on the arrival of SSD to AWS 2 years ago.

When will solid state memory server be an option in AWS instances?

THURSDAY, JANUARY 7, 2010 AT 12:47AM

modifyremoveorganizepost follow up

I was having another stimulating conversation in silicon valley last night, and one of the ideas that made sense is for solid state memory servers to be part of the cloud computing option.  It’s just a matter of time.  Amazon has their current instance offerings with a division of performance and memory.

It took longer than I thought, but SSD has arrived to the AWS and I am sure it will be a standard expectation for high data IO services.

Wikipedia going dark forces people to change, like look at alternatives

GigaOm has a post on Wikipedia going dark for 24 hrs to protest anti-piracy bills.

Has Wikipedia broken faith with users by going dark?

By Mathew Ingram Jan. 18, 2012, 9:34am PT 9 Comments

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Among the websites and services that went dark on Wednesday to protest the anti-piracy bills that are currently making their way through Congress, one of the more controversial is Wikipedia. A number of critics — including some regular contributors to the “open source” encyclopedia — say the site shouldn’t be taking an advocacy position on such an issue, since it is supposed to represent a neutral point of view. But if anything, it could be argued that the internal process that led to that decision is actually a great illustration of how Wikipedia functions.

Going dark for 24 hrs reminds me of when the green energy efforts asks people to go dark, no electricity for an hour, forcing people to look for alternatives that don't use energy.  If you are researching a topic like I was 5 minutes ago, and you hit a dark wikipedia page.

How many people will choose to contact their representatives vs. pick another source for information?

The blackout has woken up critics.

Among those criticizing the encyclopedia for its day-long blackout (which the Wall Street Journal said will affect more than 10 million users) was tech blogger Paul Carr, writing for the new site PandoDaily. In his post, Carr argued that Twitter CEO Dick Costolo was right when he said blacking out a global business to protest a U.S. law is “foolish,” and that Wikipedia was making a grave mistake by taking such a position, especially since the site just spent months trying to raise money from users to pay its bills:

[T]o shutter Wikipedia — a crowd-funded international encyclopedia — in protest of a single national issue is even worse. It’s idiotic, it’s selfish and it sets a horrible, horrible precedent.

no cost notification on cell networks, missed calls as a messaging bus

I remember being in college where some people would call someone like their parents with a collect call.  "will you accept a collect call from Dave Ohara. My parents respond no." and, know I want them to call me.  No cost to me, and my parents foot the bill.  I never did this, but it is the idea behind India's use of missed calls on cell networks as a messaging bus.

GigaOm's Katie Fehrenbacher discusses the idea.

India’s “missed call” mobile ecosystem

By Katie Fehrenbacher Dec. 13, 2011, 6:00am PT 55 Comments

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Imagine you want to use your cell phone to, say, order take-out food or chat with a friend, but you don’t want to pay for making the call, or the text message. The answer to that ultra-low-cost question is India’s fascinating growth of the “missed call” ecosystem, where callers who aren’t willing to spend on, well, really anything, use the “ring once, hang up” to signal to commerce companies and friends alike on the receiving end that they want to communicate with them.

It’s essentially the poor man’s text message: a free way to nudge another person or company, but which comes in just one flavor. Indian cell phone subscribers, of which there are 900 million accounts, have a monthly average revenue per user of $3, which is rock bottom low for even a developing market.

How big is this?  In India missed calls could be used as a messaging bus from half the users.

While the missed call system is increasingly fodder for entrepreneurs, the phenomenon has been a slight problem for the cell phones companies in India, as the free service seems to make up a significant portion of cellular traffic. According to a study from the Learning Initiatives on Reforms for Network Economies (Lirne) a couple of years ago, over half of Indian cellular subscribers made missed calls to convey a message.

Katie follows up today with a post on the use of missed calls for controlling remote irrigation water pumps.

This week Pluggd.in, an Indian site focused on Indian entrepreneurs and startups, profiled a startup called RealTech Systems which has developed an irrigation control system for farmers that uses cell phone networks and missed calls. Essentially a farmer installs the company’s Real Mobile Starter Control product at an irrigation pump, and the device uses a SIM card and a missed call to turn the pump on and off remotely.

The problem, as Pluggd.in puts it, is that many farmers have to walk many miles to get to the pumps for their farms, but once they reach the pump sometimes the power to run the irrigation system isn’t available — unreliable power is one of the biggest infrastructure problems throughout much of India. The farmers can use the product to check to see if power in the area is turned on, and then run the irrigation accordingly — from miles away.

CIO and Supply Chain Expertise = Dell's New CIO

Being a CIO is typically equated with managing information systems which typically has people who have technology backgrounds.  Another way to look at IT as a flow of information which can optimized like a supply chain logistics.  One guy who is supply chain expert is Frank Frankovsky at Facebook who is ex-Dell.

Speaking of Dell, Dell's new CIO has a supply chain expertise from GM.

Adriana Karaboutis, recruited in March 2010, is the new global CIO and reports directly to Brian Gladden, Dell's CFO. She was previously vice president of global operations and technology IT, which means she was responsible for Dell's supply chain, procurement, and product development systems.

Dell CIO Adriana Karaboutis

Prior to coming to Dell, Karaboutis was global manufacturing and labor information officer at General Motors, which means she was responsible for all of the systems that are used for car assembly and parts stamping. Before that, she was in charge of GM's purchasing and supply chain systems.

Karaboutis spent six years at GM, and before that,15 at the Ford Motor Company, starting out as a programmer/analyst and rising up through the ranks to run manufacturing, supply chain, purchasing and finance systems.

The official Dell press release is here.

Dell announced today that Adriana Karaboutis has assumed the role of Global Chief Information Officer, responsible for continuing to drive Dell’s IT organization evolution, from managing an efficient and innovative global information infrastructure, to creating innovative breakthroughs that provide technology advances for the company and its customers.

Ms. Karaboutis was previously vice president of IT at Dell supporting product groups, manufacturing, procurement and supply chain operations. In her experience at Dell, she has led a transformation of Dell’s manufacturing operations, rolling out a new manufacturing execution system globally. She also led the roll out of Dell’s consolidated product offering system, which simplified the supply chain by reducing the number of product configurations, a critical part of the company’s cost-reduction efforts. In addition, she has helped Dell’s newly acquired companies transition quickly and smoothly to Dell’s operations.

CIO's view of the Data Center, a 2006 perspective from Lars Rabbe at Yahoo

I wrote a blog post on Lars Rabbe back in Nov. 2011

Data Center Thought Leadership, accumulated by companies or people?

WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 16, 2011 AT 8:44AM

DatacenterKnowledge just posted on the Yahoo Factor in data centers referring to Kevin Timmons, Lars Rabbe, Scott Noteboom, and Tom Furlong.

But, after spending the past 3 days chatting with the current Data Center Thought Leadership who were at 7x24 Exchange, I think we would have all had a good laugh.  Scott Noteboom is not part of this crowd as once you walk into Apple, you disappear from the data center crowd.  Kevin Timmons escaped this situation and is now CTO of Cyrus One and was busy meeting and greeting at 7x24.  Tom Furlong was circulating after his presentation on the Open Compute Project and Facebook's data centers.  Lars Rabbe is busy flying around the world between Estonia, Palo Alto (Skype bldg), and Redmond (Microsoft HQ).

For your public consumption i found this 2006 ZDNet CIO video where Lars discusses how data centers need to be built differently.

In the transcript which has some character set mapping issues (apostrophes) are lots of mentions of data centers.

LARS RABBE:

How people react to the products and what makes a better product in terms of what is it that appeals to people inside the product and how the product interacts with you. On the side of data center innovation we are really working on expanding, let’s say, the processing footprint worldwide. We’re at the point now where the data center industry has really been left behind by the growth of the internet companies and we, along with other companies, are now building our own data centers. And we’re taking the opportunity while we’re building these data centers to really think about “is the conventional data center really what fits our needs�, and it turns out in a lot of areas that it really doesn’t, that we can do things much better if we design our own data center from the ground up. We’d recently broke ground on a data center in the Pacific Northwest and we’re going to be applying a bunch of new technologies there, some of which we’re actually inventing ourselves in terms of how do you put together the data center, how do you take best advantage of the power because that is one of the biggest issues when you are running a data center. The cost of power, so saving power is a big deal.

DAN FARBER:

Of course.

Yeh!!! a CIO that talks power efficient data centers.

LARS RABBE:

And, in general we’ve got to save power. So the ability to make a much more power efficient data center is what will make a big difference.

DAN FARBER:

Now it seems that every company that’s reaching large scale is building new data centers and building them more efficiently in the areas where the cost of electricity is much cheaper. But it seems to me that that’s an opportunity for shared innovation as opposed to each company doing it on its own and inventing its own kinds of innovations to drive those data centers. Do you see that as a possibility?

Here is one of the best comments.

LARS RABBE:

I think there are some competitive advantages in some of this and there are certainly some of these things that we will patent because we consider them to be significantly different. But I also agree that if we come up with ideas that as such will make the industry more power efficient we absolutely will share those and we are using the same contractors also. I’m sure those contractors in turn will leverage those ideas for future construction and future concepts of data centers.

The Green Data Center idea was discussed back in 2006 by Lars.  How is that for Thought Leadership?