7x24 Exchange Spring 2015 Keynote Astronaut Mark Kelly - "Endeavour to Succeed"

Astronaut Mark Kelly gave the opening keynote at the Spring 2015 7x24 Exchange Conference in Orlando on June 8, 2015 - "Endeavour to Succeed"

The keynote was well received and a memorable one. The opening video was an excerpt from this U2 video to a concert in Seattle at Qwest Field.

U2 delivered a surprise to the crowds at Quest Field, Seattle last night with a video message from Commander Mark E. Kelly. Bono dedicated 'Beautiful Day' to Gabby Giffords, before asking, "Imagine a man looking down on us from 200 miles up. Looking down at our beautiful crowded planet...

One of the main themes that Mark Kelly covered is having a Goal, a Plan, and Working hard.  One of my data center friends had just seen Mark Kelly at another executive event and he noticed there were parts of the presentation that are his theme, and how he customized the presentation to the data center audience.

To give you an idea of what Mark spoke about here is a Ted video.

On January 8th, 2011, Congresswoman Gabby Giffords was shot in the head while meeting constituents in her home town of Tucson, Arizona. Her husband, the astronaut Mark Kelly, immediately flew to be by her side. In this emotional conversation with the Paley Center's Pat Mitchell, the pair describe their lives both before and after the accident -- and describe their political campaign against gun violence.

7x24 Exchange spends a lot of effort to get inspirational keynotes and this keynote by Mark Kelly is amongst the top ones.

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

A vintage Steinway with rusty strings, wood-boring insects, and cat hair clogging the action, is dragged into a workshop and restored over the course of a year by a colorful team of technicians led by Richard Davenport, a renowned Los Angeles piano doctor. American Grand captures the transformation of the 1913 Steinway from wreck to shining beauty.

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.