Facebook and Open Compute disrupt the Server Market

Stacey Higginbotham has a post on Facebook/Open Compute's announcement that disrupts the server market.

Sitting next to Stacey I get a chance to see what she is going to write before it posts and she does a good job of summarizing Frank Frankovsky's opening keynote.

Facebook and Open Compute just blew up the server and disrupted a $55B market

by Stacey Higginbotham

21 MINS AGO

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photo: Stacey Higginbotham

SUMMARY:

Facebook took aim at the hardware business back in April 2011 with the launch of the Open Compute open hardware program, and Wednesday is fired the killing blow at the $55 billion server business.

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The launch of two new features into the Open Compute hardware specifications on Wednesday has managed to do what Facebook has been threatening to do since it began building its vanity-free hardware back in 2010. The company has blown up the server — reducing it to interchangeable components.

With this step it has disrupted the hardware business from the chips all the way up to the switches. It has also killed the server business, which IDC estimates will bring in $55 billion in revenue for 2012.

Open Compute Jan 2013, momentum builds

At the Open Compute Summit, there are 1,900 attendees, three times that last event in San Antonio.

So, what is new?

Frank's beard is bigger.  Frank is the founder of the Open Compute Project.

Yet some things don't change with Frank he is still in tennis shoes, jeans, and plaid shirt.

I got a chance to chat with Frank briefly before the conference and the board is spending a lot of time thinking about how to keep the momentum.  

Just walking in the door I saw a dozen good friends and met a couple of new people.

I'll have a lot more to write over the next few days.

123 spots left for Netflix's Open Source Open House Feb 06, 2013

GigaOm's Barb Darrow posted on Netflix's Open Source announcements, including an open house event where 77 of 200 spots are fill, leaving 123 open.

Netflix wants open-source developers, cloud alternatives

by Barb Darrow

7 HOURS AGO

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SUMMARY:

Want to hear about the latest and greatest in Netflix’s home-grown technology? The company will host an open-source open house for developers on February 6. The goal is to recruit top-flight developers and to encourage construction of alternatives to Amazon Web Services.

Netflix released anthor monkey theme tool.

Most recently,  it open-sourcedJanitor Monkey to automate the cleanup of unused cloud resources. In all, Netflix has put source code for sixteen Netflix-built AWS tools on Github, Cockcroft said.

Janitor Monkey is a much funner name than garbage collection.

Janitor Monkey - Keeping the Cloud Tidy and Clean

 

 

By Michael Fu and Cory Bennett, Engineering Tools 

One of the great advantages of moving from a private datacenter into the cloud is that you have quick and easy access to nearly limitless new resources. Innovation and experimentation friction is greatly reduced: to push out a new application release you can quickly build up a new cluster, to get more storage just attach a new volume, to backup your data just make a snapshot, to test out a new idea just create new instances and get to work. The downside of this flexbility is that it is pretty easy to lose track of the cloud resources that are no longer needed or used. Perhaps you forgot to delete the cluster with the previous version of your application, or forgot to destroy the volume when you no longer needed the extra disk. Taking snapshots is great for backups, but do you really need them from 12 months ago? It's not just forgetfulness that can cause problems. API and network errors can cause your request to delete an unused volume to get lost. 

Off to Open Compute Summit in Santa Clara, Jan 16- 17

This week is the Open Compute Summit in Santa Clara.  Registration is still open, so you can still sign up.

Summit IV – 2013

The fourth Open Compute Summit is January 16-17, 2013, at the Santa Clara Convention Center – 5001 Great America Parkway in Santa Clara, CA, USA. It’s sponsored by these organizations.

Registration is now open, and is still free, so register today!

Join the Open Compute Project group on Facebook for all OCP announcements.

AGENDA

To see full details of the agenda, please click here.

SUMMIT LOGISTICS

Wednesday, January 16

• 7:30a – 9:00a Registration
• 8:00a – 9:00a Breakfast/Sponsor Booths Open
• 9:00a – 12:00a Keynotes, Announcements and Presentations from Industry Luminaries
• 12:00a – 1:00p Lunch
• 1:00p – 6:00p Executive Sessions/Sponsor Presentations/Hardware Hackathon
• 3:00p – 6:00p Technical Tracks (registration required — see below)
• 6:00p – 6:30p Shuttles to Cocktail Reception
• 6:30p – 10:30p: Cocktail Reception – Computer History Museum

Thursday, January 17

• 8:00a – 9:00a Registration Opens/Breakfast/Sponsor Booths Open
• 9:00a – 12:00p Continuation of Technical Tracks/Hardware Hackathon
• 12:00p – 2:00p Lunch
• 2:00p – 5:00p Plenary/Hackathon Prizes/Round Up
• ~5:00p – Summit Concludes

Analysis of USA Geopolitic strengths, focuses a lot on water

Stratfor has an geopolitical analysis of the USA.

Part of this analysis focuses on the strength of the water systems.

The most distinctive and important feature of North America is the river network in the middle third of the continent. While its components are larger in both volume and length than most of the world's rivers, this is not what sets the network apart. Very few of its tributaries begin at high elevations, making vast tracts of these rivers easily navigable. In the case of the Mississippi, the head of navigation -- just north of Minneapolis -- is 3,000 kilometers inland.

The network consists of six distinct river systems: the Missouri, Arkansas, Red, Ohio, Tennessee and, of course, the Mississippi. The unified nature of this system greatly enhances the region's usefulness and potential economic and political power. First, shipping goods via water is an order of magnitude cheaper than shipping them via land. The specific ratio varies greatly based on technological era and local topography, but in the petroleum age in the United States, the cost of transport via water is roughly 10 to 30 times cheaper than overland. This simple fact makes countries with robust maritime transport options extremely capital-rich when compared to countries limited to land-only options. This factor is the primary reason why the major economic powers of the past half-millennia have been Japan, Germany, France, the United Kingdom and the United States.

Water is a low cost transport system that supports economic growth.  Water is also critical to run power plants which is not touched on in the Stratfor report.  It would seem that the abundance of water in the USA support its geopolitical strength and the development of the data center industry.