DCIM ≠ ECMA - 400 Smart Data Centre Resource Monitoring and Control Standard, Why Not?

I was chatting with Intel’s Henry Wong at Intel Developer Forum and he mentioned the ECMA-400 standard.

Introduction 

Operation of data centres requires management of storage, computation, communication, electrical energy and temperature to achieve the required quality of service and efficiency parameters. Often, however, the separate management of Information Technology (IT), electrical energy (or power) and cooling Resource islands yields a sub-optimal result. 

This Standard provides Messages that facilitate integrated or “smart” monitoring and control of Resources in those islands. The Messages are exchanged between the Management Function and Resources. The Standard acknowledges that those Resources may be composed of other Resources (e.g. a rack may contain servers, ventilators, etc.). In addition, e.g. those servers may be viewed from their computing, energy consumption or dissipation aspects which this Standard models as Resource Components and groups into IT, power and fluid Domains, respectively.

This specific seems like it should be associated with DCIM, but when I ran a google search on “ecma 400 dcim”  the results showed up without DCIM and when DCIM was used the 400 didn’t refer to the standard.

DCIM = ECMA-400 should be the state

DCIM ≠ ECMA-400 is the current state.  When will someone fix this?  Seems like someone out of all the DCIM vendors would be looking at working the ECMA-400.  

• Smart Data Centre Resource Monitoring and Control - Ecma ...

  www.ecma-international.org/.../ECMA.../ECMA-400....

   

  Ecma International

   

  Annex A (normative) ECMA-400 Edition 1 Resource configuration options ............. ................................. 27. A.1. SDC VM Allocation Option.

  Missing: dcim

• Index of Ecma Standards - Ecma International

  www.ecma-international.org/.../Stnindex.htm

   

  Ecma International

   

  ECMA-328 · ECMA-341 · ECMA-370 · ECMA-383 · ECMA-389 · ECMA-393 · ECMA-400. Safety, EMC and EMF, Acoustical Emissions, Environmental Product  ...

  Missing: dcim

• 2 - AltaTerra Research

  www.altaterra.net/.../Zen-and-the-Art-of-Data-Center-Greening-and-Ener...

   

   

  So his breakdowns are: 1) 480/277V AC, 2) 400/230V AC, 3) 48V DC, 4) 380V .... as the EPA, ECMA and Climate Savers that promote a similar goal and vision.

  
  

  
  

  
  

Telling Story with Pictures, Blurry is OK

When you take pictures, the presence of blur, by being out of focus, motion of camera, or motion of subject ruins the shot you took.  But, when it comes to action sports blur can tell the story of motion.  Yesterday I was at my son’s football game and was on the chain gang.  That gave me a chance to take pictures close to the action.  Using a dslr wouldn’t work and using a smartphone wouldn’t either.  I used my Sony RX100 which is prosumer compact camera, it has a full size sensor at 20 megapixel with a leica lens, so it can capture photos that look as good as a dslr. Working the chains I couldn’t be distracted fussing with the camera so I put it in programmed mode and just shot away, pointing the camera in the direction of the action and not looking at the screen.  The following are shots that tell a story.

The below shows left red defender in focus.  The ball runner is blurred with motion, but his left hand extended is not.  The right defender’s movement makes it look like he isn’t significant threat.

I was panning with the runner so he is in focus whereas everyone else is blurry in their movement relative to him.

The kids running towards me are clear, the defender to the right is crossing.  So he is blurred showing his speed towards the ball carrier.

At the start of a play everyone is clear, except the ball which is moving faster so it is blurry.

Normally with my camera I would focus on getting shots with no blurriness like.

The ball carrier being tackled is in focus as he is moving slower than the rest and he is moving towards the camera.

Everyone is moving in the same direction.  There is little blur as 5 defenders are after the ball carrier.

Here are a few more.  You get the idea. These blurry pictures worked well to tell the action of the game.  I guess blurriness is not such a bad thing.

Here is a photo with little blur.  Final score 33-0.

Where can you find the 4 DCIM companies in THE Magic Quadrant? Gartner Data Center World 2014 exhibitor floor of course

The media picked up on 4 DCIM companies who made the Magic Quadrant.

Gartner has released its first Magic Quadrant (MQ) report on Data Center Infrastructure Management, laying out the market and positions for several DCIM providers across the four quadrants of leaders, challengers, visionaries and niche players.

I went to Gartner Data Center World website to see if the above are exhibitors.

Have you ever known a company who makes the Magic Quadrant not be at a Gartner event?  So what came first being in the Magic Quadrant or being a Gartner Exhibitor?  Or was it simultaneous?  You get it.  There I go getting myself Black Listed again.  :-)

Fix those LinkedIn typo mistakes, 113 years at Microsoft is not right

There is a wave of people going through the process of creating resumes and LinkedIn profiles given latest layoffs.  One of my friend asked if I knew person x who had been at the company 26 years.  Yes.  Curious I looked up his LinkedIn profile, and saw this.

Group Program Manager

Microsoft Corporation

September 1901 – Present (113 years 1 month)

Suggestion.  Ask your friends to proof read your LinkedIn profile.  It is too easy to make a typo mistake.

Using Talko, A Review by Two Technical Guys

Talko shipped on Tuesday Sept 23 and the first person I connected with is David D’Souza.  David shares a tweet with another friend using Talko.

David D'Souza @davidds · 20h

friend's reaction to talko: it's weird talking to my phone

So what is Talko?  To some it is just iMessage copied.

Talko looks like a solution to the problem that iOS 8's Messages has already solved

Mark Hachman@markhachman

• Sep 23, 2014 1:24 PM
• e-mail
• print

Oh dear. On Tuesday, software giant Ray Ozzie launched Talko, an app that promises to “save the telephone call”—and basically copies Apple’s iOS 8 Messages feature in the process.

David D’Souza and I used Talko on Tues Sept 23, discussing the usefulness of the app.  David and I are both ex-Microsoftees and got to know each other during the Win95 days.  So we are of old guys who now focus on mobile and cloud now leaving behind the days of Desktop OS far in the past.  OMG, Win95 is going to be 20 years old next year.  David has an iPhone 6 Plus with 64 GB.  I have a iPhone 6 with 128 GB.  Talko is iOS only, but Android is the future. 

We both made the comment that Talko does what iMessage does, but given it is a Ray Ozzie project it is going to have Lotus Notes type of collaboration which is why there is the idea of teams.  Gigaom’s Barb Darrow highlights the notes and offline feature.

And — this is important — if there is no connectivity, you can still record whatever you need to say for later playback. “As you can imagine from my history, it’s important to have offline capability,” Ozzie said in a recent interview at Talko’s Boston office. One of Lotus Notes’ selling points was that users could work offline and then sync their changes to the workgroup mothership when connectivity was re-established.

The user experience is a bit awkward.  I accidentally hit the voice feature.  Switching between voice and typing can be hard.  We spent most of the time typing and discussed those users who don’t like to type.  What, there are users who don’t like to type?  Yes.  And these are the same people who liked the push to talk feature.  We discussed this user scenario in more detail as I focus on the enterprise market with another business.  Sorry not telling you the specifics on the users as it is too valuable to just throw out there.

One of the premium features to be sold is the long term record of discussions.  I mentioned some users I know like using voice because it supports future discussions of my word vs. their word and there is no permanent record.  If there is a permanent record then people could get stuck in my word vs. their word discussions.  Notice how few phone calls are recorded, and the few times phone calls are recorded are during discussions with financial institutions.

Ray Ozzie is most likely skipping the short term viral strategy getting millions of users and sell for a billion or two.  He is taking lessons learned from Lotus Notes, making mobile and cloud the platform, adding voice as a big feature, collaboration for teams.

Can you imagine what Ray would have had to do in the past to launch his service?  Now he can build on AWS and Azure.

As Ozzie has said in his few public comments to date about Talko, the availability of capable, inexpensive cloud services, open-source software and ever-smarter smartphones has enabled the creation of very rich services like this. Startups no longer have to sweat the plumbing whereas a decade ago new companies spent most of their seed capital buying pricey servers and commercial software just to get down the chute.

Next step is to try and use Talko with the family and see what they say.  David D’Souza and I are not fair representation of typical users. :-)