A Data Center Analyst View of Spanner: Google’s Globally-Distributed Database

GigaOm's Stacey Higginbotham posted on Spanner: Google’s Globally-Distributed Database.

Google’s Spanner: A database that knows what time it isBY Stacey Higginbotham

Google, which is notoriously secretive about technology advances, has opened up the vault and spit out a research paper on its Spanner database. And like other Google innovations, this one is hot. It’s a database that scales to millions of machines and trillions of rows.

The Research Publication is published here.

Abstract

Spanner is Google's scalable, multi-version, globally-distributed, and synchronously-replicated database. It is the first system to distribute data at global scale and support externally-consistent distributed transactions. This paper describes how Spanner is structured, its feature set, the rationale underlying various design decisions, and a novel time API that exposes clock uncertainty. This API and its implementation are critical to supporting external consistency and a variety of powerful features: non-blocking reads in the past, lock-free read-only transactions, and atomic schema changes, across all of Spanner.

To appear in:
OSDI'12: Tenth Symposium on Operating System Design and Implementation, Hollywood, CA, October, 2012.

Download: PDF Version

I have got a bit more time to go through the paper and I'll highlight parts I find interesting from a data center analyst perspective.

First thing caught my eye.

Applications can use Spanner for high availability,
even in the face of wide-area natural disasters, by replicating their data within or even across continents. Our
initial customer was F1 [35], a rewrite of Google’s advertising backend. F1 uses five replicas spread across
the United States.

What is F1?

And how does this relate to Spanner?

Google has 3 to 5 data centers in a geographic region.

Why 5, not just 3?

I had just written about Google's move to Chile had three more.  So, need to get used to looking for 5 Google data centers to support a geographic reason with 100ms latency, not just three.

I could go longer into the document, but I think the post will get too long.  Let's just stop with one point that is useful in looking at these two documents.  Google has 5 data centers within 100ms in a geographic region to support ad business which is where they make most of their money.

Google buys Nik SW, increasing investment in photography

Facebook bought Instagram, so most are focusing on Google's purchase of Nik SW for Snapseed. Apple has Aperture and iPhoto.  It doesn't look good for Adobe and Microsoft in the photography area.

Vic Gundotra announced the acquisition on Google+

Vic Gundotra

8:34 AM  -  Public

 

Welcome Nik Software!

Today I’m excited to welcome +Nik Software to the Google family! We want to help our users create photos they absolutely love, and in our experience Nik does this better than anyone. Check out the examples from some of the world’s greatest photographers, and you’ll see what I mean.

Yet, none of these announcements and Nik SW focus on Snapseed.

We are pleased to announce that Google has acquired Nik Software. For nearly 17 years, we’ve been guided by our motto, “photography first”, as we worked to build world class digital image editing tools. We’ve always aspired to share our passion for photography with everyone, and with Google’s support we hope to be able to help many millions more people create awesome pictures.

We’re incredibly grateful for all of your support and hope you’ll join us on the next phase of our journey as part of Google.

All our best!

The Nik Software Team

It looks like there is going to be a lot more photos in Google's data centers.

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.