Will DC market get a boost from a new chip and WS2003 end of life?

Saw this Barron’s post on how the data center market could get a boost.

The two catalysts are: 1) Intel's (ticker: INTC ) new Grantley server platform and 2) the [Microsoft ( MSFT )] Windows Server 2003 expiration. Intel, Hewlett-Packard ( HPQ ), Western Digital ( WDC ), Seagate Technology ( STX ), SanDisk ( SNDK ), F5 Networks (FFIV ) and A10 Networks ( ATEN ) could benefit.

Data-center spending last year declined for the first time since the 2009 banking crisis, falling by 1.4% to $152.8 billion. The appetite for data-center equipment through Intel's lens has been robust for cloud, high-performance computing and telecom customers, with these segments combined growing 20%-plus over the past two years. However, demand from enterprise customers has been underwhelming, declining by 1% on average. Life cycles on enterprise equipment have clearly been stretched, pointing to a large, aging installed base of information-technology (IT) equipment that could be ripe for modernization.

I am bit skeptical on whether this will impact the data center market, and will check with some other people I know.  On the other hand, most of the data center people I talk to are open source linux type of people.  The point of this Barron’s article is the large 32-bit Windows Server 2003 market that will have have reached end of life.

With industry estimates of roughly 10 million servers that are still running 32-bit applications on WS2003, the installed base is sizeable enough when combined with Grantley power/performance benefits to drive a cyclical recovery even if 35% of these legacy workloads migrated to cloud alternatives.

Doodle 4 Google 2014 winner draws a water purification system

June 9, 2014 the Doodle 4 Google 2014 winner was on the home page.  All of you google search users saw it.  For those Bing users, this is what was on the page.  What is it?  It is a water purification thing drawn by 11 year old Audrey Zhang when she learned not everyone has clean water.

"To make the world a better place, I invented a transformative water purifier. It takes in dirty and polluted water from rivers, lakes, and even oceans, then massively transforms the water into clean, safe and sanitary water, when humans and animals drink this water, they will live a healthier life."
- Audrey Zhang, 11

Here is a video for the contest.

If your medical records have 95% errors, how many other parts of your system have errors?

Part of the beauty of all that data out there is most you never use, and almost no one worried about the quality of the data when it was entered.  Now that Big Data is hot and machine learning is too, your data history is ready to be used.  But, how about those errors?  What errors?  WSJ writes on medical health care and makes the point that up 95% of the records have errors and doctors are asking patients to review their medical records.

Health-care providers are giving patients more access to their medical records so they can help spot and correct errors and omissions.

Studies show errors can occur on as many as 95% of the medication lists found in patient medical records.

Errors include outdated data and omissions that many patients could readily identify, including prescription drugs that are no longer taken and incorrect data about frequency or dosage.

Any one who has worked on asset management or ewaste and end of life of hardware discover how inaccurate inventory management can be.

If you don’t think of the quality of data, then you’ll have a much harder time using your data history.

Satellite dishes may come back to data centers

Remember when high availability data centers like military ones had satellite dishes.  With the growth of satellite connectivity dishes may be coming back to be part data centers.  WSJ reports on Google buying a satellite-imaging startup.

The Skybox team will initially work with Google's Maps business. Google Maps uses images from roughly 1,000 sources currently. Most of these images of the Earth are updated every few months or years. If Skybox can help Google update this information daily, it could help people respond to incidents, such as disasters, more quickly and help direct responses.

However, longer term, Skybox's technology may also help with Google's goal of spreading Internet access more widely.

"Skybox's mission is about more than just imaging," said David Cowan, partner at Bessemer Venture Partners, which invested in Skybox. "Skybox is disrupting how satellites are deployed in space and that has implications for the types of global communication challenges that Google plans to address."

Adding Cell Network to a Helicopter can help you find People

Mobile devices are the electronic device people carry more than anything else, but when you have no cel coverage your device is only as good as the stuff you have downloaded that doesn’t require a data connection.

Someone asked the question what if you could be a Cell Network in a helicopter?  You can’t provide cell coverage, but you can find people who are lost.  Range Networks posts on this idea in Iceland.

That is what you get with coast guard helicopters flying about with an OpenBTS-based solution on board, scouring the Icelandic highlands for (extremely) lost souls during large-scale search & rescue missions.

Rögg of Reykjavik, led by technical director Baldvin Hansson, has created a complete system using OpenBTS and Range's SDR1 for a helicopter-mounted network which can pick up cell phone signals up to 35 km away, map them on iPad tablets, and lead the crew to swoop in and rescue someone while the up to 500-person search party is still pulling on its boots. They call it Norris for short, the Norris Positioning System officially. (But nothing to do with GPS - they use the timing advance value from the GSM connection to map the location.)

It's not just faster, it's better -- they used to fly around and...look! Any rain, snow or fog usually meant nothing to see, so they would ground the Super Puma helicopter and send everybody slogging. Now they have a tool which makes a fast rescue under even inclement conditions possible.

Wired posts on how an OpenBTS cel network can be a small fraction of a proprietary solution.

Range has already brought GSM service–the same type of network that carries voice calls and text messages elsewhere in the world–to Macquarie Island, a small island just outside the Antarctic Circle. This is preferable to walkie talkies or Wi-Fi because it provides wider coverage while using less energy. And although the network has a satellite uplink to connect it with the rest of the world, it doesn’t depend on satellites for local communications, which is essential to the safety of field researchers.

GSM networks like the one on the island usually cost about a million dollars to build, says Range Networks CEO Ed Kozel. But Range is able to bring the technology to Antarctica for just a few thousand dollars using an open source platform called OpenBTS, short for Open Base Transceiver Station. All you need to run a GSM network with OpenBTS is radio software and an off-the-shelf Linux server. “The legacy infrastructures are why most operators are so expensive to run, but we took a clean slate approach,” Kozel explains.