Journalist taking Photos of NSA's Utah Data Center gets a good scare

Forbes has a post by Kashmir Hill on what happened when she took some pictures at the NSA's Utah Data Center.

Surprise Visitors Are Unwelcome At The NSA's Unfinished Utah Spy Center (Especially When They Take Photos)

 

 

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Officers said the sign was jokingly programmed this way by a construction worker

Most people who visit Salt Lake City in the winter months are excited about taking advantage of the area’s storied slopes. While skiing was on my itinerary last week, I was more excited about an offbeat tourism opportunity in the area: I wanted to check out the construction site for “the country’s biggest spy center.”

Many of you have had the hassle of dealing with prying eyes from journalists, and this journalist had a bit of a scare.

My outing to the facility last Thursday was an eventful one. I can confirm that the National Security Agency’s site is still under construction. It was surprisingly easy to drive up and circle its parking lot. But if you take photos while there, it is — much like Hotel California – very hard to leave.

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“Were you taking photos?” he asked. I said that I was. He responded, “You’re going to need to delete those.”

Can imagine sitting in your car with the following thoughts?

We sat in the car some more, while they — I assume — ran background checks on us, Googled us, checked my Forbes credentials, poked around my Facebook page and called other supervisors, and perhaps a Public Information Officer to decide what to do about us. After maybe another 15 minutes, an aggressively chummy man with piercing blue eyes, wearing a sweater and slacks, came out to the car. He introduced himself as a special agent and asked us to explain why we were there, with an aside to Officer #1 that he wanted him to record everything. Dryer offered a lengthy explanation, including all of the classes I’d spoken to. Agent Federman responded with a direct question: “Did anyone send you to take those photos and do you plan to distribute them to enemies of the United States?”

The journalist had an hour that I am sure you all would say "duh" what did you think was going to happen when you got close to the facility.

It was an intimidating hour. While I’ve interviewed federal agents for stories, I’ve never been interrogated by them before. We may have been treated as gently as we were because I’m a mainstream journalist with a prominent platform and because I was accompanied by a lawyer. I was grateful that I could hold up “professional journalist” as my own badge; it felt protective.

Can you imagine if the journalist was by herself with a telephone lens on the facility without her lawyer friend?  Big SUVs driving over to her at high speed from multiple directions.

Simcity's disaster going online, 92% resolved

Simcity choose to make its latest version online only.  And, has found out what it means to be a 24x7 service with painful PR results and customer frustration.

I am sure for the data center crowd this is an entertaining event.  Here are some nuggets that have me questioning what they were thinking to start with.

In their latest update they sing the praise of resolving issues.  Well, 92% of them.

I’m happy to report that the core problem with getting in and having a great SimCity experience is almost behind us. Our players have been able to connect to their cities in the game for nearly 8 million hours of gameplay time and we’ve reduced game crashes by 92% from day one.

In the third update they said they upgraded their servers.  The initial were 11.  I think the EA folks gave the operations team a bit too little money.

First things first: we’ve been making great strides towards improving our servers. In addition to adding several new ones the past couple of days (including the addition of Antarctica today), we’ve been applying upgrades to 11 of our initial servers. What does this mean? We’ve beefed up these servers to allow for a larger capacity that will not only allow more players to get in, but will also help address a lot of the connection issues we’ve been addressing.

And, they figured out they needed a test server.

Also, we’ve released a new Test server today. As you may have guessed by the name, we’ll be using this server to test changes and new features before we deploy them to all of our other servers. Before you ask, yes, you can play on it. In fact, we’d be grateful if you did. Just note, because this is a test environment, you may experience some unstableness as we push new data to improve non-test servers.

Q: What is it for? 
A: This server is used by us the SimCity developers, and players to test changes and new features before they are released across all the other servers. This test server will improve our ability to deploy these updates as quickly and accurately as possible.

Bet you are a bunch of people inside the company saying, we should have gone to the cloud instead of deploying our own physical servers.  Especially if all you had to start with was 11.

US Gov't Data Centers to focus on being Efficient after closing down the excess capacity

NextGov has a post on the next move by the US Federal Gov't to create new metrics to asses the efficiency of remaining data centers after closing many.

The Office of Management and Budget wants to focus less on simply closing federal data centers and more on making sure the government’s existing data center stock is operating as efficiently as possible, an OMB official said Thursday.

That’s why federal Chief Information Officer Steven VanRoekel’s office plans to roll its three-year-old data center consolidation initiative into a separate program called PortfolioStat, which audits agencies’ commodity information technology budgets to root out waste and inefficiencies, said OMB Portfolio Manager Scott Renda, who works in VanRoekel’s office.

The strategy is to focus on metrics.

“You’re going to see more focus on the right kind of metrics, efficiency metrics” Renda said. “[We’ll be] thinking about PUE [an energy measurement], thinking about storage, thinking about density measures that really talk to how efficient your infrastructure is. The goal with PortfolioStat is an efficient infrastructure that’s serving the mission of the agency. Consolidation is done to support that program and mission.”

This is a strategy that probably got the consensus of many of the IT decision makers and the vendors who do a lot of consulting for these people.  Don't ever think a big move like this is not done without a vendor helping to say "yeh this is a great way to make you more efficient."  Meanwhile they are figuring out the initiatives that will replace the legacy systems and upgrade them to the latest technology.

Notice the idea is focused on metrics to make a more efficient infrastructure. 

If it was up to me, I would focus on the supply chain of who are the best performing vendors and where are the quality issues that cause huge wastes.  Then determine the metrics that support the monitoring of quality of the system including the quality of the vendors.

But, I don't do any federal gov't work and my partners have no desire to slow ourselves down by adding federal as a market segment.

The problem with metrics is it can take you down the wrong path.  

Much like the work that John Boyd to fight the bureaucracy in Washington that was building faster fighter jets and he was telling people no, you want jets that are more maneuverable.  The ability to change direction, add speed, dump speed is what wins.  The trouble is there were no metrics for that.  And the vendors liked a nice easy if it goes faster with less fuel then it is better approach.

Doesn't it kind of make sense that you want a more maneuverable infrastructure vs. an efficient metric driven machine?

Two different ways to attend SXSW

Last year a group of data center guys and I went to SXSW for the first time.  CNET News has a post on their recommendation which I'll highlight and then give you a different way.

How to win at SXSW -- and live to brag about it

CNET reporter Daniel Terdiman has been going to South by Southwest for years. When a friend asked for advice on how to get the most out of SXSW, he had plenty of suggestions.

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So where to begin? A lot of people will tell you to RSVP for everything you get invited to. That's sound advice, because there's a million things going on during SXSW -- parties, panels, special events, bar-b-ques, meetups, and so forth -- and you don't even stand a chance at getting into many of them if you don't RSVP.

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If you do decide to go to big parties, be prepared to wait in line for an hour, often even if you have a VIP wristband. Once in, you're going to be crammed into a bar, or a club, or a restaurant, it's going to be too loud to talk, and you'll have to wait in line again for a drink. That's fun?

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People think SXSW is mostly about the parties, but a lot of folks have forgotten that there's amazing panels, keynotes, and discussions on the schedule. Bre Pettis, the CEO of MakerBot is keynoting, and so is Elon Musk, CEO of both SpaceX and Tesla. Al Gore's talking, and so is Neil Gaiman. How great is that?

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People will tell you to take a night off, since SXSW is so intense. My approach is a little different: Dive in full-force every day and night you're there. But let yourself sleep in if you need to. Do not -- and I mean this with all my heart -- make plans for earlier than 10 a.m. You'll just be too tired. Because if you go to bed early at SXSW, you're definitely doing it wrong.

We did things a different way, and had a blast going to great parties, meeting great people, seeing some good bands.  Oh yeh, and had some great data center discussions.

First we rented a house 3 miles out of town.  We didn't register for the conference.  We contacted people and said hey were in town for SXSW want to come over to our house to chat.  People came over, relaxed in the backyard. They told us parties we should go to and they'll get us in. Invited a few other people who had been at the conference, let them give us an update of what was interesting.  Heard about more parties.  Went out for the evening.  Stayed out late.  Slept in, then did the same thing the next day.

Didn't wait in lines.  Which means we missed talking to random people standing in line.  That was kind of fine for us given we had very low expectations of running into data center people randomly. 

How does this work?  You have to have the right people in the house that people want to come over and chat with.  Oh yeh, and two of the guys were Texan natives who now live on the coasts which means they know a lot of people in Texas that helped the networking.

We wanted to go again this year, but we're all too busy now.  People were disappointed we weren't going back this year.  We'll try to go next year.

Saving Server RAM power using Mobile DRAM

Wired has an article on being more energy efficient in the data center using mobile DRAM.  What few people know is RAM is a top energy consumer in servers after the processors.  More than HD for many servers that are meant for memory intensive applications.

Over the past decade, the very concept of the server has evolved. Once, servers were giant machines jam-packed with processors and memory that focused on processing speed above all else. But nowadays, most servers are smaller and cheaper, and they consume less power. Services like Google Search and Microsoft Bing run on thousands of commodity machines, not the big beefy database servers hawked by companies like Oracle. When you’re serving millions of people across the globe, you can’t afford those power-hungry machines.

Here is the paper referenced in the wired article.