The Switch SuperNAP data centre – one of the most impressive I’ve been in
If you were going to build one of the world’s largest data centre’s you wouldn’t intuitively site it in the middle of the Nevada desert but that’s where Switch sited their SuperNAPs campus. I went on a tour of the data centre recently when in Las Vegas for IBM’s Pulse 2012 event. The data centre […]
Planetary-scale computing
If you really want to know how to build a cloud, look at how Google architects its data center infrastructure to produce economies of scale at a global level.
NoSQL is a Premature Optimization
There’s been a lot of back and forth lately from the NoSQL crowd around Michael Stonebreaker’s contention that reliance on relational technology and MySQL has trapped Facebook in a ‘fate worse than death.’ This was reported in a GigaOm post by Derrick Harris. Harris reports in a later post that most of the reaction […]
Carbon Disclosure Project’s emissions reduction claims for cloud computing are flawed
The Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) is a not-for-profit organisation which takes in greenhouse gas emissions, water use and climate change strategy data from thousands of organisations globally. This data is voluntarily disclosed by these organisations and is CDP’s lifeblood. Yesterday the CDP launched a new study Cloud Computing – The IT Solution for the 21st […]
What to Do When Your Cloud is Down
As I write this, Amazon is having a major East Coast outage that has affected Heroku, Foursquare, Quora, Reddit and others. Heroku’s status page is just the sound of a lost sheep bleating repeatedly for its mother in heavy fog. What’s a poor sheep to do about this problem anyway? After all, isn’t a Cloud-based […]
Give Me a Layer to Stand On, And I’ll Move You to the Cloud
Apologies to Archimedes, who is supposed to have said:
“Give me a place to stand and I’ll move the Earth.”
He was speaking of leverage and the idea that a great weight can be moved with very little force given the right amount of leverage. Leverage is what IT needs to make an orderly progression to the Cloud without having to expend too much force.
FaceBook open sources building an energy efficient data center
Back in 2006 I was the co-founder of a Data Centre in Cork called Cork Internet eXchange. We decided, when building it out, that we would design and build it as a hyper energy-efficient data centre. At the time, I was also heavily involved in social media, so I had the crazy idea, well, […]
Any Hardware Company Not Investing Big in Cloud is Nuts
If the Cloud is here to stay, and the trend to move apps into the Cloud is only going to get stronger, then any hardware or infrastructure company that doesn’t invest big in the Cloud is nuts. The problem these vendors face is “Cloud as disintermediator”. Companies that buy into the Cloud are letting the […]
Sentilla thinks of data centers, as data factories!
If you have been following this blog, you’ll know I have been profiling Data Center efficiency companies over the last few weeks. This week I take a look at Sentilla. I talked to Sentilla’s CTO and co-founder, Joe Polastre, the other day and Joe told me that Sentilla came out of Berkeley where they had […]
Power Assure automates the reduction of data center power consumption
If you’ve been following this blog in the last couple of weeks you’ll have noticed that I have profiled a couple of data centre energy management companies – well, today it is the turn of Power Assure. The last time I talked to Power Assure was two years ago and they were still very early […]
