Reporter uses Facebook's Rooftop to check out Apple's data center in Prineville

Facebook has been getting some news with the opening of its cold storage facility.

http://sustainablebusinessoregon.com/articles/2013/10/exclusive-a-look-at-facebooks.html?s=image_gallery

http://www.bendbulletin.com/article/20131016/news0107/310160339/

http://readwrite.com/2013/10/16/facebook-prineville-cold-storage-photos#awesm=~oluaddHy6afA5O

What is funny is one reporter used the Facebook rooftop to check out Apple’s data center.

As it turns out, Apple's complex, code-named "Pillar"—and completely devoid of any markings identifying it as an outpost of the Cupertino company—is a literal stone's throw from Facebook's Prineville, Ore. hub. Tracking down the location of Apple's stealth site was just as easy as peering southeast from Facebook's roof, which ironically offered what was probably the best view in town. The Facebook employees pointed it out to me while cracking jokes about its apparently not-so-secret alias.

Construction began on the Apple data center last October, and now the first phase's main building (the large black one) appears to be complete, to the untrained, telephoto-lens equipped eye, anyway. Eventually the project will encompass two full 338,000-square foot data centers sprawling across Apple's 160-acre Prineville plot. And because everything is spookier and more fascinating when it's built out in the desert, we bring you the photographic fruits of our Veronica Mars-style investigation of Apple's Area 51.

Hybrid as a Cloud choice, Webinar on Oct 31, 2013

I am on a webinar on Oct 31, 2013 10a PT on Hybrid Clouds.  Hope you can join in the discussion that David, Ted, and I will have with Paul Miller as moderator.

Balancing performance and cost in hybrid clouds

October 31, 2013
10:00am — 11:00am PDT

SPONSORED BY

FEATURED PANELISTS

David S. Linthicum SVP, Cloud Technology Partners

Dave Ohara Founder, GreenM3

Ted Chamberlin Vice President Market Development, Coresite

MODERATED BY

Paul Miller

A hybrid cloud strategy is not a destination. It is an ongoing balancing act in which enterprises weigh a shifting landscape of cost, security, and performance against business needs.

Decision criteria have never been murkier. What used to be “showstopping” issues such as regulatory requirements for private connectivity or a need for real-time data access can now be overcome through secure, low-latency secure interconnections–for a price. The challenge for IT is pairing applications, services, and data sets with the right balance of public and private cloud services, at the right price.

Single Point of Failure brings down Obamacare, Data Services Hub is down

CNN reports on the latest Obamacare outage.  A single point of failure in the Data Services Hub on Sunday caused the site to not be able to finish transactions.

I think the US Government is learning single points of failure are bad.  They need redundancy.  Verizon has the contract for the data hub, seems like AT&T should have been in there as well.  Anyone who has run a 24x7 service would never single source their network connectivity.

A malfunction in key technology behind the Obamacare websiteleft users unable to apply for health coverage Sunday.

Joanne Peters, a spokeswoman for the Department of Health and Human Services, a vendor networking issue at Verizon subsidiary Terremark was to blame. Peters said the vendor had "experienced a failure in a networking component," and the attempted fix crashed the system.

Google Floating data center, may be a store

Now there is more news out there that the reported Google Floating Data Center is a Google Glasses Store.

San Francisco's bay barge mystery: Floating data center or Google Glass store?

After CNET reported Google may be building a floating data center in San Francisco Bay, a report suggested it's actually a floating Google Glass store. Either way, it's almost certainly Google.

One of the Good Things About Obamacare's IT disaster is the possibility of the end of Waterfall Development in Government IT

This whole Obamacare IT stuff is going to keep going for a while.  The rest of the Tech industry can sit on the sidelines and let the US government and its vendors take the hit for outages, security breaches, bad customer service.

One of the possible outcomes is the end of Waterfall development.  The WSJ journal reports on a call for openness and transparency in development.  Words that sound like Agile Development.

The administration "must be fully transparent in their efforts to get the website working. Anything less than complete disclosure and accountability is not acceptable," she said.

Here is one amongst many comparisons of Agile vs. Waterfall.

Agile Vs Waterfall Model

It is worth mentioning here that the Waterfall model is the primitive model type and has been implemented in the development phase time after time. Hence in the due course if time developers found many drawbacks in this model which were later rectified to form various other development models.The common element to all of them being the basic phases of the waterfall approach. We can hence conclude that Agile is also another of its successors which has all the advantages of the primitive waterfall model and has also rectified the disadvantages in this evolved model.