4th Facebook Open Compute Summit, Jan 16-17, 2013 in Santa Clara

I've had a few people ask what conferences I plan on going to next.  I'll be at 7x24 Exchange Phoenix in November.  This week I'll be at GigaOm Mobile in SF.  Thinking about a few others too, but nothing solid.

One that I was reminded of today is the 4th Facebook Open Compute Summit which is Jan 16- 17 2013 in Santa Clara, CA.

Attend a summit! The next OCP Summit will be held in Santa Clara, California on January 16th and 17th. Stay tuned for more information.

There aren't a whole lot of details, but I have gone to all three and have learned a lot and met great people.  What more do you want from a conference?

If you are interested in presenting or sponsoring the event you can go to the link for contacts.

APC's UPS achieve ENERGY STAR qualification

An answer in the consumer and small business market to save energy is to disconnect those Vampire Electronics.  Those devices that use power even when you don't need them.  But, one of the devices you can't unplug is your UPS device with the emergency battery back-up for those devices that need to survive power outages.  But, as any of who have focused on a better PUE you know the UPS can be huge user of power and cooling capacity in your data center.

The EPA has recognized this issue with UPS's and has been working on ENERGY STAR program for UPS.  Schneider Electric announced they are one of the first to qualify.

Schneider Electric’s Uninterruptible Power Supply Products First to Achieve ENERGY STAR® Qualification

 Power protection devices achieve inaugural approval in ENERGY STAR program’s new category

 

WEST KINGSTON, R.I. – September 5, 2012 – Schneider Electric, a global specialist in energy management, today announced select Back-UPS™ and Smart-UPS™ (uninterruptible power supply) models have become the first-ever UPSs to earn the ENERGY STAR qualification under the federal program’s new UPS category. Acknowledged for meeting standardized energy efficiency requirements and passing the program’s testing, the selected Smart-UPS and Back-UPS products have been recognized for their abilities to both save customers money while helping to protect the environment.

So, how much energy can you save compared to a device that is not ENERGY STAR?  Here is some info from the EPA site.

Did You Know?

If all Uninterruptible Power Supplies sold in the United States in 2012 meet the ENERGY STAR requirements, the energy cost savings will grow to $471 million and prevent greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to the emissions from more than 636,000 vehicles.

...

ENERGY STAR certified UPS can cut energy losses by 30-55%. A 1000 kVA UPS used in a large data center could save $18,000 annually.

Here are the range of devices that the ENERGY STAR UPS program covers.

ENERGY STAR UPS covers from the small devices beneath your desk protecting your computer to 8-ton versions designed to temporarily provide a megawatt of power to large data centers.

UPS Topology Typically Referred To As:	Referred To In ENERGY STAR Specification As:	Typically Sized Up To:	Typically Used For:
Passive Offline Standby	Voltage and Frequency Dependent (VFD)	1,500 VA	small offices, personal home computers and other less critical applications
Line Interactive	Voltage Independent (VI)	5,000 VA	small business, Web, and departmental servers
Online Continuous Double Conversion	Voltage and Frequency Independent (VFI)	1,000 kVA	data centers

Pictures of Apple's Solar Farm

GigaOm's Katie Fehrenbacher reports on Apple's Solar Farm.

Behold Apple’s massive solar farm from the sky [photos]

• BY Katie Fehrenbacher
• 33 Comments

A TV station in North Carolina snapped these still video clips of the solar farm being built next to Apple’s data center. It looks like it’s getting close to being completed.

I did an interview with North Carolina’s TV Station WCNC-TV this morning about the data center cluster in their state. After the interview they kindly sent me these aerial video stills that they took from a plane above Apple’s solar farm, next to its data center in the city of Maiden.

Google hits #5 spot in Server Mfr Ranking, The Big Users defining the market

Wired has a post that has people's attention that HP, Dell, and IBM are no longer the dominant Server force of the past.  Part of the past is the reliance on IDC and Gartner to get a view on the market.

It should be noted, however, that research operations such as IDC and Gartner don’t have the best view into direct sales by the ODMs — let alone Google’s highly secretive hardware operation — and these hidden parts of the market are increasingly important. It’s the big web players that are moving away from the HPs and the Dells, and most of these same companies offer large “cloud” services that let other businesses run their operations without purchasing servers in the first place.

What is catching people's attention is that Google is the #5 manufacturer.

But just four years later, Bryant says, the landscape has completely changed. Today, she explains,eight server makers account for 75 percent of Intel’s server chip revenues, and at least one of those eight doesn’t even sell servers. It only makes servers for itself. “Google is something like number five on that list,” Bryant told us on Monday evening, during a dinner with reporters in downtown San Francisco.

But, the overall pattern that is occurring is Google, Amazon, Facebook, Tencent, and Microsoft are investing and demanding server innovation that the big OEMs (HP, Dell, and IBM) are not necessarily set up to serve.  Which then brings up the ODMs of Quanta, Tyan, Supermicro, ZT Systems and others who are rising up the ranks.

As Bryant points out, other companies are now buying machines directly from “original design manufacturers,” or ODMs, in Asia, working to cut costs in much the same way. This includes Facebook, and according to a former employee of one large ODM, it includes Amazon as well.

These ODMs in general don't have the marketing budgets to have IDC and Gartner analyze and report their sales. 

Would you trust an Intel executive or IDC/Gartner and a vendor to give a report on the state of the server market?

But an HP spokesperson said her comments were inconsistent with the latest server market stats from research outfit IDC, which still put the combined market share of HP, Dell, and IBM at 73.9 percent, down slightly from 78.2 percent in 2008.

Mac Book Pro Retina with Mountain Lion screen flicker, solved by turning off WebGL

Update Mar 12, 2013.  It looks like the real problem is resolved in 10.8.3 update.  I currently have beta 12D76 and 12D78 and the problems look like they went away.  http://www.greenm3.com/gdcblog/2013/3/12/bunch-of-retina-macbook-pro-problems-went-away-with-1083-bet.html

It looks like a lot of people had this same problem as many times I was getting hits to this blog post.

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One of my friends just traded in three of his old Macs and got a MacBook Pro Retina.  I’ve had mine Retina MacBook Pro for a couple of months, and it’s worked great.

Except for yesterday it started to have an intermittent screen flicker problem.  At seemingly random times, the screen would flicker, refreshing parts of the screen, mostly from in the bottom 50%.  This was a real pain given the Retina Display is one of the main features of the new MacBook Pro.  After looking at some mac forums to see about the problem, and found no good answers.  Wondering whether I would have a warranty event which would be another pain.

I remembered I was playing around with MapGL in Google maps, and Safari was not compatible.

In order to use MapGL I needed to enable WebGL in the “Develop” pull down menu in Safari.  That’s when the screen flicker problem started after WebGL was turned on.

So, let’s turning off WebGL, reboot.  Screen flicker problem is gone.  Wooh!  glad there is nothing wrong with my hardware and I am not hunting all over to figure out how to fix a screen flicker problem.

For you Mac users, which is about 22% of GreenM3 readers, you may find this screen flicker MapGL tip useful.  

I am surprised that 4.94% are from iPhone and 3.86% are from Android.

Here are the smallest % of readers.  It is funny to think these devices hit this blog.