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Here is the video on Youtube with Mark Zuckerberg and Tim O’Reilly.
The talk starts out with the first summit in Palo Alto. Frank and I were chatting and we laughed about how Mark pointed out the challenge to host the first event.
The web traffic so far is only 329. I am interested in how many others watch this video. It is nice to see a Founder care about the environment and data centers.
I am a West Coast guy, and try to keep my client base on the west coast. I don’t think I have ever visited a DC agency for business other than the President’s Photography department to research the use of RAW images and other features for photography in Windows 15 years ago.
I know the Federal Government is a different world, and when I read Stacey Higginbotham’s post on visiting a DC conference it clarified the differences.
5 ways Washington DC is very different than Silicon Valley
14 HOURS AGO2 Comments
photo: Stacey Higginbotham/GigaomSUMMARY:Silicon Valley and Washington D.C. are on opposite coasts and often seem like opposite worlds, but learning how they differ might help bridge some very real gaps in how tech policy is talked about and implemented.
Paper is the note taking medium, not a computer.
The tool of choice is paper, not a computer. I can scan the rows of people at our Structure conference and see the lids of many a MacBook or the glow of tablets, but here, while there were some folks typing in their notes, more were jotting things down on paper. And in conversations with people, only one ever pulled out a phone; and that was because someone was calling her. FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler even told me after an onstage interview that people are more productive wearing a watch than using their phones to check the time because the phones then distract them. People clearly have smart phones, but they aren’t using them like they are a tether to a more interesting world.
The one thing I don’t think I could get used to is the fact that people sit in the presentations as a higher priority than networking.
When you attend a conference in DC, you actually attend the conference. The sessions were packed and the screening room was overflowing with people watching the proceedings. There are few people wandering the halls doing deals or networking outside of the breaks.
The rest of the post remind of the other 3 things that explain how different it is to do business in DC.
There are some people who will not change the habit of reading printed books. Many times these same people have to print something to read it. They will make statements that they love the feel of the book and enjoy to hear the sound of the pages turn. These same people probably miss the retail bookstores that used to be in all the malls.
I’ve watched the eBooks effort at Microsoft stumble, and when Amazon launched the Kindle some enthusiastic friends convinced me to buy one. And, I now rarely buy a printed book, and for years accumulated a collection of Kindle eBooks.
There are some books that just don’t work on the Kindle. Like Photography ones. I would then turn to the Library and check out books.
I also went through the phase of putting the Kindle books on the smartphone and tablet. Recently, I decided to get a Kindle Paperwhite, thinking that if I only read 10% faster it is worth it. The best thing about the Paperwhite is when I read a book, I am less tempted to switch and read mail or surf the web. I read and focus.
The other change I made is to stop buying Kindle eBooks. I now buy a Kindle eBook maybe once every 3-4 months, sometimes less. Amazon.com’s algorithms know what I am doing. I choose to rent the Kindle eBooks from the Library, and rent 3-4 times the amount of books I used to buy just to try out different books.
I worked on all kinds of print technology - fonts, graphics, printers, high end RIPS, scanners so I know the technology. Sometimes it is best to move on, and leave the technology behind. The technology of printing and buying books.
Much has been discussed on Hybrid Clouds. One way to think about the problem of what should be in Public vs. Private cloud is what would Amazon do moving from Public Shipping companies to add capacity with a private delivery fleet. Why? Because sometimes thinking how to solve a problem from a different perspective can show you a different way to think about the problem.
If you were going to move some of your Cloud Compute out of AWS what should you move? The easiest or the most valuable? Another way to think is what could you move to your Private Cloud that would give you the most savings, leaving the rest to run in AWS.
Let me use local shipping as an example. Here in Seattle UPS, Fedex and other local contract companies deliver packages for Amazon. If Amazon was going to add private delivery to the mix what should they add? Those thing that are the easiest? Those things that are the most valuable? You could, but that doesn’t necessarily get the maximum value out of a local private delivery service. If Amazon has 10 trucks for routes and knows the shipments coming through, why not pick those shipments that can have the most savings vs. shipping with the Public carriers? The complexity is a good problem for compute algorithms to calculate those shipments that can be handled in a day with the at the lowest cost and the most amount of freight saved. This difference is what ends up in Amazon’s pocket at the end of the day, and provides future negotiating leverage with the Public Carriers.
Sometimes what people are thinking goes into a public cloud vs. private is not a clear financial reason. If you cannot run it cheaper in house, then move it back to Public, and put something else in the private cloud.
Just something that hit me after reading the Everything Store book.
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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
36 MINS AGONo Comments
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.
