Amazon's James Hamilton throws in support for the idea of Blu Ray Cold storage

Facebook showed its proof of concept Blu Ray based cold storage solution at Open Compute Summit V.

Facebook has built a prototype system for storing petabytes on Blu-ray

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SUMMARY:

During the Open Compute Summit in San Jose, Facebook VP of Engineering Jay Parikh shared some big statistics for the company’s cold storage efforts, including those for a protoytpe Blu-ray system capable of storing a petabyte of data today.

James Hamilton posts on the idea of optical storage.

 

Next week, Facebook will show work they have been doing in cold storage mostly driven by their massive image storage problem. At OCP Summit V an innovative low-cost archival storage hardware platform will be shown. Archival projects always catch my interest because the vast majority of the world’s data is cold, the percentage that is cold is growing quickly, and I find the purity of a nearly single dimensional engineering problem to be super interesting. Almost the only dimension of relevance in cold storage is cost. See Glacier: Engineering for Cold Data Storage in the Cloud for more on this market segment and how Amazon Glacier is addressing it in the cloud.

 

This Facebook hardware project is particularly interesting in that it’s based upon an optical media rather than tape. Tape economics come from a combination of very low cost media combined with only a small number of fairly expensive drives. The tape is moved back and forth between storage slots and the drives when needed by robots. Facebook is taking the same basic approach of using robotic systems to allow a small number of drives to support a large media pool. But, rather than using tape, they are leveraging the high volume Blu-ray disk market with the volume economics driven by consumer media applications. Expect to see over a Petabyte of Blu-ray disks supplied by a Japanese media manufacturer housed in a rack built by a robotic systems supplier.

 

I’m a huge believer in leveraging consumer component volumes to produce innovative, low-cost server-side solutions. Optical is particularly interesting in this application and I’m looking forwarding to seeing more of the details behind the new storage platform. It looks like very interesting work.

Mark Zuckerberg Shows up at Open Compute Summit V

Mark Zuckerberg is the guest speaker, interviewed by Tim O’Reilly at Open Compute Summit V.  For the green data center crowd, Mark mentions the importance of data centers, energy efficiency and reducing the environmental impact.

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You’ll be able to watch the stream when it is archived.

  1. Open Compute Project @OpenComputePrj

    .@facebook's carbon savings in 1 year is the equivalent of taking 50,000 cars off the road for 1 year -Mark Zuckerberg at

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  2. Open Compute Project @OpenComputePrj

    Since adopting OCP designs in 2011, Facebook has saved enough energy to power 40,000 homes for 1 whole year -Mark Zuckerberg at

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  3. Quentin Hardy @qhardy

    And...here's Mark Zuckerberg! Showing the flag for open source cloud computing.

    Retweeted by Open Compute Project

29 years ago I joined Apple in 1985, and you can see when all the Apple employees joined in order

An Apple friend texted me yesterday morning that she found my name in the list of Apple Employees just posted on Fri Jan 24, 2014.

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I was just getting on a plane to SJ and we got a chance to catch up when I landed.  Her challenge was trying to find her name on the poster.  Knowing that I joined Apple in Mar 1985 helped her figure out where her name would be.  While looking out the window we saw Apple employees who probably weren’t even born when the Mac was shipped.  The summer of 1985 was when there layoffs due to slow sales of the Mac and hiring was quite slow for a year after I joined.  

Damn, feel old knowing I joined Apple 29 years ago. :-)

What is this list?  Apple created posters with all the Apple employees from #1 Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak to the present.  I was lucky to have a friend find my name, saving me the effort to figure out how I would get to the right poster.  There are ten different ones in the employee areas. Maybe this a test for the ex-Apple employees whether you have a friend who is still at Apple and will spend the time to find your name.

Apple puts up celebratory posters with names of every Apple employee, past and present

by Yoni Heisler

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Microsoft Windows Azure makes move Amazon Web Services refuses to make, Tell us what Server Hardware is used in the Cloud

Some people believe the cloud is great and solve all problems.  But, those who don’t believe the hype want to know more about the data center and the hardware in the cloud.  When AWS had outages in 2012, Digital Realty Trust was forced to make it clear that the AWS outages due to power problems were not in their facilities. 

Digital Realty, DFT: No Interruptions from Virginia Storm

July 3rd, 2012By: Rich Miller

 

A facility at the Digital Realty Trust data center campus in Ashburn, Virginia

The two largest wholesale data center operators in the northern Virginia market said their data centers performed flawlessly during last weekend’s electrical storms, maintaining electrical power during grid outages and keeping customers online.

Microsoft made the announcement yesterday. that it is sharing its server hardware designs it uses in its Cloud.

The Microsoft cloud server specification essentially provides the blueprints for the datacenter servers we have designed to deliver the world’s most diverse portfolio of cloud services. These servers are optimized for Windows Server software and built to handle the enormous availability, scalability and efficiency requirements of Windows Azure, our global cloud platform. They offer dramatic improvements over traditional enterprise server designs: up to 40 percent server cost savings, 15 percent power efficiency gains and 50 percent reduction in deployment and service times. We also expect this server design to contribute to our environmental sustainability efforts by reducing network cabling by 1,100 miles and metal by10,000 tons across our base of 1 million servers.

GigaOm’s Barb Darrow covered the release and makes the point that Amazon Web Services doesn’t share its server hardware designs it uses.

The great unmentioned player here is Amazon Web Services, which dominates the public cloud infrastructure space to date. While Amazon Distinguished Engineer James Hamilton talks broadly about data center energy efficiency, Amazon does not publicize its server designs.

Is the future of Clouds a transparency telling the users what hardware you are running on?  Seems like it is good for users bad for the Cloud Suppliers.

Disclosure: I spend some time working for GigaOm Research and know many of the GigaOm editorial staff.

Containers used to Build Starbucks Stores

Starbucks has more 20,000 stores worldwide, including 6 that are built from containers.

The first one is this one in Tukwila.

And, the latest is being built now.

New Starbucks drive through being dropped off in Ballard

New Starbucks drive through being dropped off in Ballard
By Jan 27, 2014

SEATTLE -- It's the pop-up of all pop-ups; a new Starbucks drive through being dropped off at the corner of NW 53rd St and 15th Ave NW. 

Full of dents from a career of moving goods across the globe, an oversized load crew and a crane operator lifted a 40-foot shipping container into place. The first of three containers to be delivered to this site, they will be fit together to create a new Starbucks drive through and walk up store in Ballard.