Data centers (DCs) are a major consumer of energy consumed by computers. A large part of that energy is used for cooling down the exhaust heat of the servers contained in the DCs. Ph.D. dissertation titled Data Center Energy Retrofits describes both the aggregate numbers of DCs and key agship installations in detail. It will →
Software defined seems to be the hype buzzword nowadays for many technology areas: We have Software-defined radio, Software-defined networking, Software defined storage and software-defined data center. Some days ago AllThingsD ran a piece endorsing the idea of the software-defined data center titled What Is the Software Defined Data Center and Why Is It Important? Slashdot →
How to Deploy A Server article discusses the current state of the art when it comes to deploying servers. Through the years, the ways that sysadmins have installed and configured servers has changed as they have looked for ways to make their jobs easier. The Beginning: by Hand First Generation: Images Second Generation: the Post-Install →
Any real-world security system is inherently complex. Making them safe and secure is hard. Controlgeek Blog has an interesting pointer and summary on on a very interesting white paper How Complex Systems Fail. I also found his paper, which is only a few pages long, a fascinating read (like John Huntington and Schneier on Security). →
2013 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Network Firewalls give a view to current firewall markets: Gartner states, “Advances in threats have driven mainstream firewall demand for next- generation firewall capabilities. Buyers should focus on the quality, not quantity, of the features and the R&D behind them. This market includes mature vendors and new entrants.” Palo →
Google now allows web developers to share hosted websites via Google Drive. Google Drive now lets developers share hosted websites by storing HTML, JavaScript, and CSS files article gives you nice instructions how to do that. The basic idea is to upload site files to Google Drive folder and share it a as “Public on →
Cells vs. packets: What’s best in the cloud computing data center? article from few years back tells that resource constrained data centers cannot waste anything on their way to efficiency. One important piece on this is right communications technology between different parts of data center. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, proprietary switch fabrics →
A recent white paper from APC-Schneider Electric authored by Neil Rasmussen takes a hard look at grounding practices and the use of the signal reference grid in data centers. The Grounding and the Use of the Signal Reference Grid in Data Centers paper contends that signal reference grids are automatically specified and installed in data →
I posted few years ago How to build cheap cloud storage. That article talks about how Backblaze decided to build their own custom Backblaze (67 terabyte) Storage Pods. Their Petabytes on a budget: How to build cheap cloud storage gives quite good view on the special design they used. At the time I was really →
Seemingly every tech vendor seems to have a cloud strategy, with new products and services dubbed “cloud” coming out every week. But who are the real market leaders in this business? Gartner’s IaaS Magic Quadrant: a who’s who of cloud market article shows Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for IaaS. Research firm Gartner’s answer lies in its →