Powering a warehouse-sized computer – part 1
Power is probably the least understood/most widely used technology in computing. We don't understand it, - what is a ground loop?- we rarely measure it, and its behavior is a mystery. Labels are no help either. My computer spec is "100-240 V alternating current, 12 A...
Long-haul InfiniBand
I've liked InfiniBand ever since I learned about it at YottaYotta in 2000. The switches are fast and cheap, the latency very low and the bandwidth - 6 GB/sec full-duplex at 12x - stunning. (Cisco has an excellent technical overview introduction here.) One thing it...
Two summer scalability conferences
Still wishing you'd made the Seattle Conference on Scalability last month? There's a couple of upcoming East Coast meetings that look worthwhile. These are focused on compute intensive cluster computing, not Internet Data Center workloads, but many of the issues...
When *haven’t* we had home storage?
In a recent post, A Terabyte in the home? Hitachi's CTO, the redoubtable Hu Yoshida writes I don’t believe there will be a market for home storage units. I believe internet service providers will provide the storage and data management for our personal data. They...
Has Crosswalk closed its doors?
I received a tip from a reader yesterday that Crosswalk, a company I wrote about last year, has closed its doors. I've called Crosswalk to confirm. I hope the tip is wrong, but many of the early players in the company have moved on already, which is rarely a good...
Why aren’t disk reads more reliable?
Over on Storage Bits I've ignited quite a bit of controversy with the post Why RAID 5 stops working in 2009. My point in that post is that as SATA disk drive capacity continues to increase, and the unrecoverable read error (URE) rate remains constant, the time will...
Who makes the best consumer disk drives?
I just did a post over at the more consumer-oriented StorageMojo doppelgänger Storage Bits titled "Who makes the best hard drives?" In it I attempted to determine, based on simple search requests, if any drive vendor had a real advantage or disadvantage. Maxtor *had*...
All (almost) Seattle Conference on Scalability videos now online
An alert reader sent this in as a comment this morning. Thank you! As of Jul 10, 1:00am PDT, 10 of the talks have been published (including the Lustre and Verisign ones). Searching for "seattle conference on scalability" on google video seems to return most, but not...
Seattle Conference on Scalability videos
The wily Googlers fooled me I thought the videos were supposed to be on YouTube - the video service they bought for $1.6 billion a few months ago. But NO! They're on Google Video. I just figured that out. The good news: better quality on Google Video. The bad news: I...
How Yahoo can beat Google
Google has pummeled Yahoo into near-obscurity: the early search leader - the Google of the 1990's - Yahoo's market cap is a fraction of GOOG's while their search share is a distant second. It is easy to forget that Yahoo is actually a large and highly profitable...
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