The Real Data Center, lessons from The Real CSI, How reliable is the science behind forensics

PBS Frontline has a video on The Real CSI.

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Watch The Real CSI on PBS. See more from FRONTLINE.

Watching this video brings into questions of science behind fingerprints, blood tests and bite marks.

The one method that has trumped a bunch of these techniques is DNA testing.

It is interesting talking to the people who  have lots of data center experience, and in some ways it feels like these are the people who haved figured out the science of data centers, and what really works.

in the same way that fingerprints and blood testing are popular and accepted by the mass public, it doesn't necessary mean there is science behind the techniques.

Are you practicing data center science or using the common accepted methods?  There is a difference.

 

Thinking of Site Issues in addition to overall consumption, example Water Impact Index

Water is a fundamental to so much we do, but unappreciated except when it is scarce.  You are in the desert. Or more often you are in car full of kids driving and the kids are thirsty, and you forgot to stock up on drinks before you left.  The value of water is much higher now.

So, why shouldn't location and the site's availability of water be considered when thinking of environmental impact?

Veolia water illustrates this point comparing peanuts to tomato sauce.

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Another example is beef production.

A second example: the volume of water needed to produce one pound of beef – 1,857 gallons – appears to be the same regardless of whether the beef comes from a water-rich or water-poor area. But the impact on the water resource in two different states or, for that matter, two different areas of one state (East and West Texas, for example) can vary considerably.

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The question few environmental groups ask is what is the local impact?  If there is plenty of power from existing infrastructure, is it possible that a renewable energy plant could have a higher environmental impact?

Most don't want to think about this issue, because it complicates the call to action. Save our planet, renewable energy is the answer, in some places. :-)

 

AWS increases its hiring, 360 jobs in US, 180 jobs outside US

Werner Vogels posts on the AWS jobs available.

Do You Want to Help Build the Next AWS Service?By Werner Vogels on 19 April 2012 02:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Over the past several years I’ve spent much of my time traveling around the world speaking about distributed systems. From building infinitely scalable data stores, architectures for high performance computing, to the challenges imposed by the CAP theorem, there are wonderful, complex, fascinating problems to be solved in the area of distributed computing. During my travels I’ve met thousands of brilliant engineers who are leveraging the cloud to deliver exciting new products and revolutionize IT as we know it. One thing that’s become obvious to me is that there are innovative, inspiring developers in every corner of the planet from Australia to Iceland and from Israel to Peru.

The specific jobs posts are here.

And that leads me to another distributed problem – finding good engineers to help AWS build the next generation of cloud computing services. We’ve got a big vision and to realize it we need to find qualified engineers to join us on our journey. A quick look at the AWS career web sites reveals that we are hiring hundreds of people around the world.

Click here for our current job openings in the U.S.

Click here for our current job openings in Europe, Asia, and South Africa

When you scroll through the US postings https://us-amazon.icims.com/jobs/search?pr=1&in_iframe=1. What is interesting is how many of the job positions have been opened over the past couple of weeks.

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Om Malik posts on Facebook's Data Centers

We are all so used to reading DatacenterKnowledge, DatacenterDynamics, and Mission Critical that news like Facebook's data center is old within hours.

Gigaom's Om Malik only writes about one post a day, and today he wrote about Facebook's data center.

As Facebook grows, so do its data center needs

By  Apr. 20, 2012, 12:10pm PT No Comments

I often get asked the question of what Facebook will do with the ginormous amount of money it will raise as part of its forthcoming initial public offering that will value the company in excess of $100 billion? I don’t know how they will put all of it to use, but a nice piece of it will go towards maintaining and building out is backend infrastructure. The company on Thursday announced that its second data center in Forest City, N.C., is now serving live user traffic.

I think Gigaom's repeated questions on data centers is what got them to recruit me as an analyst for GigaOm Pro.