ARM Server Effort runs out of Steam, Calxeda shuts down

I was lucky to get to know the folks at Calxeda early on.  Back when I first talked to them in Apr 2010 they were called Smoothstone.

Are ARM Servers the disruptive change coming to Green the Data Center? Smooth-Stone is trying

At same time i was discussing the idea that Intel Atom chips would be put in Servers.

The efforts by ARM did help to wake up Intel that low power servers were a growing market.  Back in 2010 it was all about the # of cores.  Now Performance per watt is a standard measure. RAM and HD are more energy efficient.  SSD is more common.  PUE’s of 1.10 are no big deal.  Power supplies are 90% energy efficient.  Batteries are put on server boards by Googl and others.

A lot has changed in 3 1/2 years and during this time the demand for ARM based servers is higher, but no big buyers.  Why?  Intel made changes along with the rest of the server ecosystem to use less power.  

Intel Atom’s are used in low power cold storage systems.

And the x86 code base made it so much easier to recompile code for new chip designs to improve performance vs. porting to the ARM instruction set.  64 bit processors are just showing up in ARM.  Who wants to run a server on a 32 bit chip even if it has 4 cores.

GigaOm’s Stacey Higginbotham reports on Calxeda shutting its doors.  It is kind of sad, but most of my friends who think about chip designs agreed that Calxeda had a tough road to success.  Why?  Even with $100 Mil, it doesn’t last long when you are trying to create Silicon.

ARM server pioneer Calxeda shuts its office after running out of cash

by Stacey Higginbotham

2 HOURS AGO

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photo: (c) 2012 Pinar Ozger pinar@pinarozger.com

SUMMARY:

ARM server maker Calxeda has hit the skids after raising more than $100 million. The company said it will restructure but news reports have the firm shutting down.

Calxeda, a company that was founded in 2008 to build out ARM-based servers for the web world says it is in the process of restructuring its business after apparentlyrunning out of funding. A story by All Things D says that the company is shutting down.

We’ll see where the ARM server does take off.  In the meantime ARM dominates the mobile space.

And, Yahoo Mail story continues, Mail continues to be recovered

I wrote about how the Yahoo Mail problem seems like it could be like the Danger T-Mobile outage.  And a week later it does look more like it has amazing similarities.

Why am I continuing to follow this when almost all the rest of the media has dropped the story?  Because, I think the root cause is operation issues which is interesting to those who run mission critical services.  Think about it a storage system went out that affected 1% of the users.  Yahoo immediately restores from back-up bringing down mail for many users.  Somehow it would seem like if 1% were truly only affected, there could have been a better way to restore Mail Service.

Ironically the impact was much more than 1% loss mail.  Millions of their users had no mail for days.

Here is a replay of the events from their log.  On this thread you can see the history.

A description of the problem on Dec 9.

So, what happened?

On Monday, December 9th at 10:27 p.m. PT, our network operating center alerted the Mail engineering team to a specific hardware outage in one of our storage systems serving 1% of our users. The Mail team immediately started working with the storage engineers to restore access and move to our back-up systems, estimating that full recovery would be complete by 1:30 p.m. PT on Tuesday.

Yahoo Mail said it was up and running with updates from Marissa Mayer and the operations team that 100% restored was successful.

Update 12/14/13 10:40 am PST

Here are this morning’s updates:

• Account Access: 99.9% of affected users may access their accounts
• Outage Message Queue: 100% cleared
• IMAP access: 100% restored

We're making progress on restoring full access to messages for affected customers and will update again with more information. 

+ Update 12/13/13 5:00 pm PST

We have posted an update on the Yahoo blog here:http://yahoo.tumblr.com/post/69929616860/an-update-on-yahoo-mail

Users were still complaining.  Two days later there is another update that explains the problem getting to mail.  So, even though the queues were cleared for mail from Dec 9, the older mail was not restored.

+ Update 12/16/13 9:00 pm PST

We’ve restored access for users and continue to make progress on recovering email messages, folders and inboxes for those users who are still missing messages in their inbox.

As the engineering team continues the restoration process, we wanted to give a couple answers to the top questions we’re seeing:
 

Q:  “I’m missing emails in my inbox from certain dates, but can see everything else.”
A:  There are three periods of time at question when it comes to message restoration. Message restoration for each period can follow a different timeline.

• Emails from Dec. 9 - now: 100% of emails during this time period have been delivered
• Emails from Nov. 25 - Dec 9, 2013: 75% of emails from this period have been restored
• Emails prior to Nov. 25: 90% of emails from this period have been restored

After Dec 9 you have 100% of your mail.  Before that you have between 75% and 90%.  Somehow users don’t think that is mail restored.

And now Yahoo Mail users and Yahoo Customer support is in support hell.

Update 12/18/13 12:30 pm PST

Here’s the latest update from us answering some of your questions:

Q:  I’m on hold for a while when I call Customer Care.  What’s happening?
We’ve heard that some users are experiencing longer wait times than usual. We appreciate your patience while we work through a large volume of calls.  We are adding agents quickly to support this large volume of calls. Alternatively, you can click the link to the right here that says “Contact Customer Care.”  We’ll ask you to provide us with a few more details and then will follow up with you.  


Thank you for your patience.

Q:  I still can't access my account, what can I do?
We believe we've restored access for all users related to the outage. If you're having trouble accessing your account, please reach out to customer service so that we can provide you with 1:1 support.

Previous updates

+ Update 12/17/13 2:45 pm PST

We continue to work on recovering email messages, folders and inboxes for users who are still not seeing some messages in their inbox. In the last 24 hours, we've seen an accelerated rate of message recovery for affected users. Additionally, we are reaching out directly to the impacted users with an update specifically related to their accounts. 
 
We believe that we have restored access for all affected users, but if you are still having trouble accessing your account for any reason, please contact Customer Care at 1-800-318-0612.

AWS coming to China in 2014

AWS has a press release detailing the arrival of AWS to China.

PRESS RELEASE

Dec. 18, 2013, 3:22 a.m. EST

Amazon Web Services Announces Upcoming China Region for its Cloud Computing Platform

AWS signs memorandums of understanding with the Beijing and Ningxia governments to develop cloud computing services

 

SEATTLE, Dec 18, 2013 (BUSINESS WIRE) -- --Xiaomi, Qihoo 360, TCL, Tiens, NQ Mobile, FunPlus, Kingsoft, Mobotap, and Papaya Mobile among the growing Chinese business community already using AWS

AMZN +1.03% -- Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS, Inc.), an Amazon.com company, today announced the upcoming limited preview of its China Region for the AWS cloud computing platform. This will be the fourth AWS Region in Asia Pacific and the tenth Region globally. In the limited preview, which will be deployed in early 2014, a select group of China-based and multinational companies with customers in China will be invited to begin using AWS Cloud services in the AWS China Region to build their businesses and run their applications in the cloud. Businesses and software developers can apply for access to the limited preview in the AWS China Region today athttp://www.amazonaws.cn .

One nugget in the AWS blog is the business is a bit different in China than other sites.

Our business model will be slightly different here than in the other AWS Regions. You will need to create an AWS account that is specific to the Region. We will be posting additional information on AWS China website as it becomes available.

Here is the news China AWS site.  Below is the site with Google Translate to english.

1.5% sales tax savings, Apple's Remote Data Center Receiving Opportunity

GigaOm’s Katie Fehrenbacher went more in depth on Apple’s Reno Data Center than I did.

Apple makes progress on its solar-powered data center in Reno, but (of course) it’s controversial

by Katie Fehrenbacher

18 MINS AGO

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SUMMARY:

Apple’s Reno data center is already underway, but not surprisingly it’s a bit controversial: Apple has a deal for an 85 percent reduction on its property taxes.

In Katie’s post she points to another article about the receiving operations that is behind schedule. On page 2 of the article is an extra 1.5% sales tax savings.

Key to the sales tax break, however, is the ability to ship the computer equipment to a storefront inside a tourism improvement district. Under Nevada law, state officials can exempt a company from all but 2 percent of its 7.5 percent sales tax obligation. But if Apple opens a receiving center within such a district, it can whittle that remaining 2 percent down to 0.5 percent.

Let’s do simple math and just assume there is $15 million of capital equipment to be put in the 2.5 MW $15 million data center.  So the tax savings is $225,000 for this phase.  Is it worth it to build a receiving building, unload the material from a truck, unpack it, and put it back on a truck, ship it to the data center, unload it again, audit the material.  Doesn’t seem like it would be.  If Apple bought $1 billion of gear the tax savings is $15 million, but Apple needs to build the receiving operations, staff it, and run an extra processing step.  The numbers don’t make sense when you get into the details.

“They need it to work for them and their bottom line, and they’re struggling to make that pencil.”

...

“Owning or leasing a building, staffing the building, making sure the building is secure, paying for the operating costs and paying to transfer the equipment back and forth, and you’re starting to spend some money,” Hill said.

Disclosure:  I do part time freelance work for GigaOm Research.

We'll see if people innovate the use of Robotics in Data Centers

3 years ago I started researching the use of robotics in data centers when someone asked what will change the way data centers are built and operate.  I put this post up back in June 2011 on a robotics expert I saw who was using robotics in interesting scenarios.

President Obama’s media event was fluffy with little technical content.  Especially compared to the hour I spent on the same day listening to Hugh Durrant-Whyte, CEO of NICTA, ex research director at Australia’s robotics efforts.

Hugh Durrant-Whyte 

Research Director 
Professor of Mechatronic Engineering, Appointed 1995

At the Australian Centre for Field Robotics, USYD

My research focuses on two main areas; navigation of autonomous vehicles and senor data fusion. 
In navigation I pioneered the application of Kalman filter and target-tracking methods to the problem of robot localisation. This has had substantial impact in robotics; Many operational mobile robots now use these methods for localisation. I also introduced the revolutionary Simultaneous Localisation and Mapping (SLAM) method. Interest in SLAM is now exploding. My research work is now focused on general probabilistic SLAM problems appropriate to very unstructured, outdoor and underwater, environments.

DatacenterKnowledge has a guest post on the subject of robotics in the data center.  This is the first of three part series.

This week Data Center Knowledge presents a three-part series on data center automation and the potential role of robotics.

I’ll see if the end comes to the same design conclusions I came at how data centers could be changed.