Fun Project, Video System for Ski Race Team at Crystal Mountain

The Crystal Mountain Alpine Club (CMAC) is the race ski club my kids ski with.  Last year the new president asked me to take on the project to add a video system to one of the race hills (Gold Hill).  Below is a map with distances.

When they first approached me they were pumped to use wireless.  But, here a few problems.  There would be 4 access points - Start, 2 midpoint access points, and finish.  The suggested wireless equipment had no data on working in snow and rain.  There is a Verizon Cel tower at the top of lift.

Good things is we can get access to each ski lift tower and there is power available.  Snow making gear is being installed this summer which adds additional areas to add conduit.

After talking to some friends at Corning Fiber I had enough information to look at single mode fiber with one pair going between each of the 4 access points, another pair from the start to finish, and one more pair as backup.  After a bit more time thinking this through I got worried that having 4 access points/switches to get a signal from the start to finish would have issues with performance and a failure in a switch or fiber would affect the overall availability of the system.

Given we were now using single mode fiber we could run the fiber from the race hill to the lodge, allowing video distribution to areas in the lodge when there is a race.  Also we could put switch gear and servers in the lodge instead of only having the heated start shack.

One way to solve the problem of having up to 4 switches in the fiber optic network is to home run the fiber optic run to each of the switches on the ski lift towers.  So we would now have 4 pairs of fiber optic, home running to the lodge and after the splice add another home run with the 4 pairs to the start shack.  There are now fewer switches in any video feed run.  There are 4 fiber optic cables we can isolate and run each at 1 gbps for the video stream from each individual switch/access point.  If a connection from the lodge fails to a given switch, we can see if we have connection from the start shack to the same switch.  If both connections don't work, then most likely the switch on the ski tower is bad.  We can also set up the switches with two network connections with fail over.

I'll be writing more on this project as we get into more of the details.  As far as I know no one has gone through this much effort to think through the network and operating issues in a video system for a ski racing with snow and rain conditions.

Will I go to DCD Internet July 30-31, 2015 in SF? Yes - Speakers Look Good

DatacenterDynamics built its events on being in many cities around the world.  They have scaled back and their next US event is in SF on July 30-31.  Looking at the speaker list convinced me it was worth going to.  What you will not find is Uptime Institute, 451 Group, or Gartner on the speaker list.  They are competitors.  Is it really that bad that you don't have analysts there presenting?  All to often they are trying to sell you on their services.  (So glad I stopped doing that analyst stuff years ago.  Was not fun and too many times you would just make up stuff to support the sale.)  :-)

It is interesting that Uptime Institute is planning on going to Dallas from Santa Clara in 2016 whereas DCD is sticking to SF one of its most popular shows.  Here is a list of DCD's shows.

The other indicator of how well the show is doing financially are the # of sponsors.  I had written about the sponsors at 7x24 Exchange vs. Uptime Symposium. http://www.greenm3.com/gdcblog/2015/5/18/uptime-symposium-vs-7x24-exchange-sponsors.

Below is the DCD sponsor list.  Now some of you may want to go to a show with less sponsors, but those sponsorship dollars is what help pays for the event.

A Story of Rebuilding a Steinway, reminds me of the hidden complexity in Data Centers

For those of you who subscribe to Amazon Prime you can watch "American Grand." The web site for the movie is here.  http://www.pianomovie.com

One of the stories coming across from the main character Richard Davenport is how there are barriers between those who play pianos and those who make and maintain pianos.

“Most pianist are ignorant about their instrument and as a group they are more uninformed than players of other musical instruments.”

Take this quote and modify it to .

"Most cloud staff are ignorant about their hardware environments and as a group they are more uniformed than other technology developers of the technology they deploy on."

You could say it is because that is because it is the cloud and they shouldn't care.  After watching American Grand, another view you may have is some of greatest race care drivers have intimate knowledge of how their cars are made and maintained.

The best cloud infrastructure executives are curious about all the details and care.

Maybe only those who are driven to be the best care about the details they cannot see.

Why I liked "Becoming Steve Jobs" Book

I just spent the last 21 days slowly reading the book "Becoming Steve Jobs."  The book has glowing reviews from many.  And Apple executives present and past think this is a better story than the other Steve Jobs book.

I worked at Apple from 1985-1992 so I didn't interact with Steve when he was there.  These were the days of John Sculley.  From an outsider I watched the rise of Pixar and even saw the Luxor Jr at Siggraph in 1986.  Ed Catmull's book Creativity Inc gives insight into some things that Steve learned from Ed.  And "Becoming Steve Jobs" tells the story of how Steve went from Apple to Next and Pixar and back to Apple and was transformed.

One of the best descriptions I found of the book is in the Source Notes at the end of the book.  Beyond where most would stop reading.

“providing a deeper understanding of Steve Jobs’s ever-evolving arsenal of entrepreneurial skills and capabilities, and the deepening of his almost messianic drive to have an impact on his world. We want to show how it was fueled to an unusual degree by his unique gift for being an autodidact, and by genuine idealism as well as his occasionally scary obsessions, his rigid and austere yet consistently well-thought-out aesthetic standards, his often pompous sense of mission. All along, he held a genuine compassion for the anxieties and needs of ordinary people who want to find new tools to empower and improve themselves in a world that grows more complex, cacophonous, and confounding every day. So for us, this is an entirely new story.

”

— Schlender, Brent; Tetzeli, Rick (2015-03-24). Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart into a Visionary Leader . The Crown Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

My Last Uptime Symposium visit, 2016 they move to Dallas

I wasn't planning on being at Uptime Symposium this year, but it turned out I had some other business in San Jose this past week and I wanted to catch up with some data center friends.  So we met at the Hyatt Regency hotel bar.  It was well worth my time to be at the bar so I went back the next night.

The bar crowd was a bit light, but I still had good conversations.  Helped out a power company guy who was going to have a media event with an environmental person.  Chatted about design ideas.  Who is where and what they are doing.

One of the little known facts is Uptime Symposium is planning on being in Dallas in 2016.  This could change as any event planning can do, but they usually plan this stuff well over a year out. The staff friend also said this is part of a plan to take Uptime on the road.  People from East Coast will travel to Santa Clara given the density of users.  The West Coast people are there.  Will these two crowds travel to Dallas or other locations?  What other cities have the density of users in the SF Bay Area?

I have gone to Uptime Symposium in Orlando, NYC, and Santa Clara.  Now I just go to the hotel bar where the conference is.  Next year I extremely doubt I will be in the Dallas area to go to the bar.  So this is my last Uptime Symposium.

The data center events aren't what they used to be.  In April 2016 is Data Center World in LV.  In May Uptime will be in Dallas.  In May 7x24 will be in FL.  And in July DatacenterDynamics is in SF.

7x24 Exchange Conferences have turned into my preferred data center conference.  Why?  Because more of my friends are there.  And every event I make a few more.  I learn a lot too.  You can argue what event has better presentations which depends on your experience.  Where I learn the most is chatting with some of the smartest people in the industry.  Which is usually at the hotel bar.  :-)

PS, in the picture above you can see three of smartest DC people in the industry. I left the image a bit dark and low resolution to make it harder to recognize, but if you know them you'll recognize them right away.  And all three will be at 7x24 Exchange Orlando.