Upgrading Your Home Wireless Network to Work Better

I have gone through a wide range of wireless network gear. I had Linksys gear that I ran DD-WRT. http://www.dd-wrt.com/site/index.  I went for ease of use of using Cisco routers then Apple routers.  The Apple stuff worked well, but the ease of use came with a lack of data.  My biggest nightmare was being on the road and getting a call from the family, usually my daughter saying the wireless doesn't work.  Then I would take her through the steps to power reset the modem and then router.

Looking for something better I found the ubiquiti AP gear.  If you want an in depth review read this arstechnica article.  http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/10/review-ubiquiti-unifi-made-me-realize-how-terrible-consumer-wi-fi-gear-is/

I bought my ubiquiti gear in July 2015 and it is so much better.  I have four access points.  Two in the house.  One in my office and another in the beach house.  Gigabit ethernet is connected to all the switches.  At first I used the Mac OS X software to manage the access points, but later I eventually ran the Ubiquiti controller software on by Drobo NAS.  Then I could log into the IP address:8043 and check the AP operations from a iPhone, iPad, or Mac.

So how is it using Ubiquiti gear?  So much better.  I can get information on the signal strength of devices connected and so much more. 

You need to be a bit of gear head to use Ubiquiti, but it is well worth it.

Attending 7x24 Exchange Spring 2016 Conference, Are you?

In 58 days 7x24 Exchange Spring Conference will start.  Why do I go?  Because I have more friends there than anywhere else.

Merriam-Webster definition of friend: a person who you like and enjoy being with

I can go to any data center conference and I'll run into friends and make new ones.  But when it comes to where do I have the most amount of friends and make the most new ones 7x24 Exchange Conferences is at the top of the list.

http://conferences.7x24exchange.org/spring2016/

And in this large group of people are even the organizations who run other DC competing conferences so I can see those friends too.

Lee Kirby is new President of Uptime Institute, why no press release?

News was spreading yesterday that Lee is the new president of Uptime Institute.  If you go to the web site you will see the following description.  https://uptimeinstitute.com/about-ui/our-team

Lee Kirby - President

Mr. Kirby is President, providing thought leadership, new product development, and strategic marketing. He facilitates prospective engagements and delivers consistent quality services to contracted clients on a global basis. Additionally, Mr. Kirby serves as a spokesperson and evangelist for various initiatives that are focused on solving systemic issues in the industry. He is based in Seattle, Washington, USA.

For a promotion to president I and many others expected a press release from Uptime Institute, but none so far.  Oh well.  LinkedIn will suffice for now.

Steve Manos
Chief Business Officer at Server Farm Realty, LLC
Wanted to take time out to congratulate a wonderful friend, mentor and one of the most exceptional people I have ever met, Lee Kirby on his elevation to President of the Uptime Institute. An exceptional leader of an exceptional organization. Congratulations Lee.

Lee Kirby has been around in the data center industry for a while and is a great friend to many of us providing helpful suggestions.  One of the memories that sticks in my mind is Lee telling me years ago about 7x24 Exchange conference and his recommendation was key to get me to attend.

Google Tours Its Data Centers as part of the Cloud Battle

Google's Joe Kava presented at its Cloud Event.  Go to the 5 min mark in the below video.

Open a Chrome or Firefox browser and you can take this DC 360 degree tour.

Wouldn't it be great if Amazon and Microsoft responded in a similar way?

If you don't like watching videos there are a few news articles that report on the above.

Google finally told its most important cloud customers what they wanted to hear
Business Insider - ‎Mar 24, 2016‎
In fact, Kava claims that Google is the "world's largest private investor in renewable energy," with $2 billion given to wind and solar companies, as it tries to reduce its power consumption as much as it can. That's a cost savings that gets passed on ...

Google Cloud Platform's 3 keys to the roadmap: Data center, security, containers
TechRepublic - ‎22 hours ago‎
Joe Kava, one of the heads of Google's data center efforts, was the speaker who explained the company's strategy in the data center. Early on, there was a big push in the concept of "your data centers are Google's data centers," likely to position the ...
Google Cloud Platform touts investments in security, data centers, and containers

ZDNet - ‎Mar 24, 2016‎
DeMichillie then introduced data center head Joe Kava, who walked through Google's data center strategy. According to Kava, the core principles of Google's approach to data centers are availability, security, and performance. Kava explained the company ...

So is 48V DC a big deal for the Data Center? Google's OCP contribution

Google's Urs Hoelzle announcing the contribution of 48V and rack design at OCP summit was the news of the Summit.

Google's contribution is posted here.

Why is 48V a big deal? if you are pushing higher performing chips as Google's Urs Hoelzle has discussed in his paper on the need for brawny cores vs. wimpy cores.  There is a need for GPUs as mentioned in the post.

As the industry's working to solve these same problems and dealing with higher-power workloads, such as GPUs for machine learning, it makes sense to standardize this new design by working with OCP. We believe this will help everyone adopt this next generation power architecture, and realize the same power efficiency and cost benefits as Google.

Why would Google contribute the 48V DC design?  As one ex-Googler said at OCP Google wants to reduce the cost of the 48V DC converters and to do that they need more volume.  And Google has a history of sharing its innovations.  See the below timeline on Google's contributions