Equinix Adds Time Service to settle disputes in electronic trades

One of the architectural principles for designing solutions is the concept of time.  I learned this concept from watching friends at OSIsoft and Thetus.  DatacenterDynamics reports on Equinix adding a time stamp service to trades.

EQUINIX PUTS TIME STAMPS ON ELECTRONIC TRADES

Could put an end to disputes amongst finance brokers

11 September 2014 by Nick Booth - 

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Data center provider Equinix is to offer clients a time-stamping service for electronic trading which can be used in any of the important financial markets across the globe.

The risk compliant service, based on Perseus Telecom’s High Precision Time (HPT) system, will be available in financial service strongholds such as Chicago, Frankfurt, London, New York and Tokyo and should make it cheaper and safer to verify electronic trades.

The finance industry is required to time-stamp all trades to US NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) standard timing. The Perseus system works to sub-nanosecond accuracy, giving an objective measure to determine which trades occurred first. It means companies no longer have to connect directly to NIST, and will be safer from disruption and malicious attacks that can occur with a GPS connection.

There are many other ways time can support addressing problems.

2 years Wired reported on Google’s use of GPS for its WW database problems.

This week, as reported by GigaOm and ZDnet, Google published a research paperdetailing the ins and outs of Spanner. According to Google, it’s the first database that can quickly store and retrieve information across a worldwide network of data centers while keeping that information “consistent” — meaning all users see the same collection of information at all times — and it’s been driving the company’s ad system and various other web services for years.

Spanner borrows techniques from some of the other massive software platforms Google built for its data centers, but at its heart is something completely new. Spanner plugs into a network of servers equipped with super-precise atomic clocks or GPS antennas akin to the one in your smartphone, using these time keepers to more accurately synchronize the distribution of data across such a vast network. That’s right, Google attaches GPS antennas and honest-to-goodness atomic clocks to its servers.

Theory of Information System in Construction Industry, not BIM, BIM, BIM, "The Collective Potential"

When someone talks about an Information System for construction. You many times hear BIM, BIM, BIM, BIM, BIMMITY, BIM as the answers.  Reminds me of the Monty Python skit where everything has SPAM.

Thinking BIM will solve your information problems in a construction project is short sighted.  Why?  If you don’t consider the quality of the data and how you reconcile perception issues of the data, then you can end up with an Information system that is not as trustworthy as you expect.

Rejected information is the result of a conscious determination that the information is not valid based on differences of opinion of perceived untruth.

If this topic has your interest, then you may enjoy reading “The Collective Potential” by Andreas Phelps.  I’ve traded some e-mail with Andreas and have read book quickly, and reading it again.  The fun I am having is testing answers on how to address the issues that Andreas brings up.  So far, I haven’t been stumped yet.  The nice thing of spending 26 years at HP, Apple, and Microsoft, and now 8 years on my own, there are lots of people I know to chat about information systems. I haven’t had the urge to write a book, but this may be a subject that may get me to write a longer paper.

The Collective Potential: A Holistic Approach to Managing Information Flow in Collaborative Design and Construction Environments Paperback

by Andreas Floros Phelps (Author)

Information flow is the foundation of any project. However, the major limiting factor is not the lack of information, but the inability to effectively integrate useful information into a project. By bringing together the fields of organizational science, organizational behavior, and information science, this book explores the interplay of social, technical, and technological factors influencing information flow. By understanding these concepts, managers can strategically leverage the social and technical characteristics of their project team, processes, and tools to enable positive iterations of trust and learning. These serve as the basis for effective information flow and result in significant improvements in information sharing, decision-making, and project outcomes. This unique perspective provides holistic insights regarding the management of team interactions, project planning, and the overarching structure and strategies used within the architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) industry. These findings have significant implications for the: 1) The types of competencies and tools needed in the AEC industry; 2) How the industry approaches management and integration; and 3) The types of organizational structures and innovative strategies that will allow teams to make the best use of their valuable knowledge and realize their greatest collective potential.

The transformation from Hardware to Software based Operations, AT&T's Network Transformation

I started my career in manufacturing and distribution logistics, then moved to hardware, and eventually operating systems and other software.  Most of what drove the changes in what I do is got bored and was looking to learn new things.  But, most people don’t like to change, they like predictability of what needs to be done. 

In AT&T’s Domain 2.0 document is a long list of transition they plan on making going from a hardware approach to a software approach.  

I don’t know about you, but I like the right side of the list much better than the left side.  The left side is easier from a micro management of what needs to be done, but it misses the customer focus which dominates the right side.  

#1 thing to protect your Smartphone when Lost or Stolen, Keep it Connected, then find it

I wrote a post on the 5 things to protect your iPhone.  I’ve read some other posts on features like Find My iPhone, Activation Lock, etc.  After reading about the silliness of privacy int’l thinking phones can be track when off, I decided it is better change the order of what to do in a focus on the most important first.

Rule #1 for finding your lost or stolen phone - keep it connected to the network.  If disconnected or off you will not be able to ring it, GPS find it, lock it, or erase it.

On iOS7 disable access to control center from the “access on lock screen” which allows anyone to put your phone in airplane mode, then put it in their pocket.  You can’t ring it, or find it now.

In Android, I can't find a way to get to airplane mode from the lock screen.  

Rule #2 use the OS’s find iPhone activation lock or Android Device Manager

iOS7 use activation lock in Find my iPhone.

Android use Android Device Manager.  I just tried the feature on my Galaxy Note 3 and it rings it even with volume muted. Sweet! 

If your phone is connected then you can find it.  A thief could hard reset your phone which on some devices would turn it off, but on most the phone reboots and it is back on the network.

I hope this helps you out and your friends.  My 12 year old daughter is providing mobile tech support to her friends showing how they turn off “control center” in iOS7.   I’ll see if I can get my son to do the same on his bus which is where this problem started.  If my son had done this, he would probably have his phone, but I would not have figured this out and shared it with many more people in this post.

Here is someone who could design a kick ass DCIM system - Pat Helland Software Architect

One of my software buddies sent me a video link pumped that the presentation discussed the power of immutable distributed systems.  When I saw the presentation I saw it was by ex-Microsoft Software Architect Pat Helland.  In 2010, Pat moved to the Bing team to work on back end infrastructure to support the search environment.  

Last Fall, I switch to work on Bing Infrastructure and have been very, very busy (and having a wonderful time).  The projects I’m working on include COSMOS and Autopilot.  COSMOS is a petabyte store (working towards being an exabyte store) which runs over tens of thousands of inexpensive computers.  In addition to reliable storage, COSMOS supports Dryad based computation with application development in SCOPE which is a SQL-like language.  Some public papers include: SCOPE and COSMOS, and Partitioning and Parallel Plans in SCOPE and COSMOS.  The Autopilot team in OSD (Online Services Division which includes Bing) makes hardware selections for our ever-increasing bunch of servers, networking, systems support, automatic deployment and load balancing.  See  Autopilot.  I have been having a blast working with the team in Bellevue and a team in Beijing with lots of talented people.

FYI, Pat now works as a software architect at Salesforce and this video got me to reconnect to Pat through LinkedIn.

Pat is a guy who could definitely design a DCIM system.  Below is the presentation my developer friend got pumped about. I watched it too and agree Pat describes the ideas it takes to build a system for a complex data environments.

Warning this video can be hard to watch if you don't already think about software designs and believe immutability changes everything.  Other great points are "normalization is for sissies" and "accountants don't have erasers."

Immutability Changes Everything - Pat Helland, RICON2012 from Basho Technologies on Vimeo.

I hadn't chatted with Pat for probably 5 years to discuss data centers.  He was just getting started studying data centers, and he gave a presentation on green data centers in 2008.

Green Computing through Sharing
Reducing both Cost AND Carbon

Data centers consumed 1.5% of the total electricity in the US in 2006 and are on track to double as a percentage every five years. It is about 2% of the US total in 2008. Western Europe’s use is increasing at a slightly faster rate (from a slightly lower base percentage). The consumption of electicity within data centers is of significant financial and environmental importance.

Where the heck is all this power going? Why is the electrical load increasing so much? What can be done about it?

This talk will examine both traditional and emerging data center designs. We will start by examining how a data center is laid out, constructed, and managed. We will show two emerging trends: the change to designing data centers for the optimization of power and the emergence of new economies of scale in data centers which is contributing to the drive towards cloud computing. Microsoft is actively moving to compete in the space of cloud computing as we are seeing at the PDC (Professional Developers Conference) a few weeks before TechEd EMEA Developer.

Next, we will examine the sources of waste in the system today and examine why so many of our resources are underutilized. Because we are reluctant to share computing resources, they are left idle much of the time. Why is this currently the dominant choice? What can be done in the design of applications, systems, and data centers to make them more green (both carbon and cash)? What can developers do to make a difference?

It was a pleasure chatting with Pat 5 years ago, and I look forward to connecting with him again, and discuss how immutability changes everything.  :-)