Facebook's Infrastructure work in Seattle

Facebook is expanding its presence in Seattle and part of that work is in infrastructure.

The Seattletimes has an article with some details on what Facebook does in Seattle.

Q: Are the folks in Seattle doing infrastructure?

A:Yes they're doing all sorts of projects, but there's a good contingent of folks here doing infrastructure software. Many of the tools we use to manage and run the site are built here.

Q: Will you offer those tools?

A: We do, to the open-source community. A number of the projects we've built, we open-sourced. Actually much of our infrastructure — much more so than many of our competitors — is open-sourced.

We actually open-sourced the designs of our advanced datacenters. We built one of the world's most efficient datacenters not too far away from here — in Prineville, Ore. — and you can go online and download the CAD files for that building.

So if you want to build one just like it, we've got all the specs you need.

Q: Are you ever going to commercialize that stuff — and sell, instead of share it?

A: No, I think we want to see innovation in that part of the industry. We've got a great set of engineers and we can build more value by making the site faster and run better and getting more users to be happy with it. Who knows what we'll do in the future, but not any immediate plans for that.

Q: Does Seattle have special cluster infrastructure expertise or is it spread around the San Francisco Bay Area as well?

A: I think what Seattle has is a critical mass density of engineers. It's cool to be an engineer in Seattle; it's not a surprising thing. There's been a long enough history of it, a number of good universities like the University of Washington, a number of good tech companies like Amazon and Microsoft and Boeing who've been here.

It's that kind of culture and critical mass that is somewhat rare in the world and why we decided to come here specifically. That density of engineering is really valuable.

240 MW upgrade for Grand Coulee dam

It is pretty hard to run a data center without power and hydroelectric is some of the lowest cost power around.  KomoNews has an AP article on the 240 MW upgrade planned for Eastern Washington Grand Coulee Dam.

Part of the rehabilitation work will be efforts to boost the three smaller power generators to a capacity of 770 megawatts of power each, Vick said. That would produce 240 more megawatts of power. The three larger generator plants cannot have their capacity expanded in a cost-effective way, Vick said.

Besides upgrading the generators there is a bunch of other work to upgrade the surrounding infrastructure.

The 18 underground cables are oil-filled and pose a danger to catch fire as they age, Vick said.

An $18.5 million project currently under way will replace those underground cables with overhead power lines, suspended from towers that are up to 350 feet tall, Vick said. The new lines will be finished by December, he said.

Numerous smaller projects are also under way to modernize power production at the dam, including renovations of elevators, cranes, transformers and other equipment. A 200,000-square foot storage building is under construction.

Why I am not attending Uptime Symposium 2012

The following is an explanation of why I am not attending Uptime Symposium 2012

Many people ask me what Data Center conferences to go to.  Everyone is a little different.  The list of conferences to look at and I have attended are 7x24 Exchange, DatacenterDynamics, Uptime Symposium, Gartner Data Center Conference and Data Center World.

I've been going to Uptime for the last 5 years in Orlando, New York and Santa Clara.  I've had a great time at the conferences.

One of my best memories is my first Uptime Symposium and some of my friends said there was a Google guy attending.  i asked if they had talked to him.  When they tried to have a conversation it didn't go far.  24 hrs later I caught up with my friends and told them I had talked to the Google guy.  For an hour and a half and we sat next to each other during a few presentations.  The Google guy's best compliment is you are one of the few who get what is going on.  I have stayed friends with the Google data center guy who no longer works for Google.  And, that is why events like Uptime Symposium are so great to meet new people.

But, after 5 years, I find I am not meeting the new people, and it is too easy to gravitate to the people you know almost like a  reunion.  This year I was on the fence whether to go to Uptime Symposium or not. Many of my data center friends where skipping Uptime Symposium this year, and we said we would all see each other at 7x24 Exchange in Orlando.

For the past 4 years I have attended as media and even spoke on a media panel discussion at Uptime with Kevin Heslin, Matt Stansberry, and Rich Miller.  But, I am not a full time media guy.  And, I don't want to be one.  And that is the thing that helped me make the decision.  The policy has changed this year and only full time media people get media passes to Uptime.  i could attend the free expo and see the vendors.  Or I could pay the conference fee.  yah that is what I need I need to do is.  Not.

i'll miss a few people's presentation, but the nice thing is they can shoot me their presentations  if they want to me write a blog post.  I can read the slides and figure out what they are presenting.

What about the stuff I learn from watching Uptime presentations?  The #1 thing I learn at data center conferences is how much further ahead I am vs. what is being presented.  How?  Working in the tech industry in product development for over 30 years is a great background to figure out tough problems.  The data center insiders I know and the research i do has me thinking of things years out.  I blog about things, including presentations I think my friends and clients would find interesting.  One of the best parts of running this blog is how quickly I can have conversations with people given they have been reading my posts.

What about The 451 Group and their expertise?  I have never had a conversation with an Uptime person other than Matt Stansberry.  So, not an issue.

i will be in SJ the week of Uptime Symposium  though and a bunch of us are getting together.  Some are attending Uptime, many are not.  Here is a blog post on the social event last year.

With my current plan to attend 7x24 Exchange twice a year, I think I am reaching the main people I want to.  I meet new people there all the time as there is much more time to socialize.  To meet new people I go to GigaOm events, not another data center event.

Uptime Symposium was great at its time to learn the data center vendor ecosystem.  Who has the marketing money and what messages they are presenting.

I totally understand Uptime Institute's change in policy. I would like to thank them for letting me attend in the past, and making it easier for me to get off the fence.

China's 2011 Server market exceeded 1 millions units in 2011

IDC released news on China regarding the server market.  The post is in Simplified Chinese, and thanks to Google translate here is some of the information.

General-purpose server market reached 1.0122 million units in 2011

http://www.idcps.com 2012-02-29 11:20:20 It168 The degree of concern ( 386 ) Forum

IDC Review February 29: Recently, the Ministry of National Electronic Information Industry Development Institute (CCID) officially released the 2010-2011 China's server market research report ". The report shows that the 2011 general-purpose server market reached 1.0122 million units, up 25.3 percent, three times the global average, the engine of growth of the worldwide server market. From the performance of various manufacturers, Hewlett-Packard, Dell, IBM breakdown of the top three markets, Hewlett-Packard to maintain share, Dell more than IBM, the second place, the tide of domestic brands continue to maintain domestic sales, the industry further consolidated. CCID report shows that the server market in 2011 generally showed healthy trend, the rapid growth of large servers in more than four of them become the biggest bright spot of the market.

The government and Internet was biggest growth areas.

The two industries of the Internet, the government contribution to the major increment in the market. The procurement of online video, online games, e-commerce and other Internet areas of strong growth, by its pull, telecommunications, the growth rate of 59% in 2011 the fastest growing industries

Is your memory as real as you think, looking at photos change it

To run a data center requires hundreds of things to be done correctly.  Mistakes are made, and an assumption in people just forget.

An interesting different explanation is your memory is malleable.  You forgot, but then you saw images that made it seem like you did the task correctly.

A Photo is Worth a Thousand Ways to Change Your Memory

Most of us realize that memory is fallible. We forget things all the time–car keys, passwords, whether we turned off the oven, etc.  But how many of us would admit that our memory is susceptible to change from the outside? That’s different from simply forgetting–something everyone does on their own–because someone else changing our memory requires “getting in our heads” so to speak, right?

If you forget to work on one area out of many.  It is possible that your correct execution of the tasks mask your error.

Participants were presented with a series of objects on a table, and for each object were asked to either perform an action or imagine performing an action (i.e. “crack the walnut”).  One week later, the same participants were brought back and randomly presented with a series of photos on a computer screen, each of a completed action (i.e. a cracked walnut), either one, two or three times. Other participants were not shown any photos.

One week later, they were brought back to complete a memory test in which they were presented with action phrases (i.e. “I cracked a walnut”) and asked to answer whether they had performed the action, imagined performing it, or neither, and rate their confidence level for each answer on a scale of one to four.

The results: the more times people were exposed to a photo of a completed action, the more often they thought they’d completed the action, even though they had really only imagined doing it.  Those shown a photo of a completed action once were twice as likely to erroneously think they’d completed the action than those not shown a photo at all.   People shown a photo three times were almost three times as likely as those not shown a photo.