Intel’s Experiment on Free Cooling to 90 degrees

December 23, 2008 Leave a Comment

Intel has announced the results of experiment that challenged myths about server room cooling:

  • The chipmaker’s air-economizer experiment reveals that servers can weather relatively harsh conditions while delivering huge savings on cooling
  • For 10 months, the chipmaker had 500 production servers, working at 90 percent utilization, cooled almost exclusively by outside air at a facility in New Mexic
  • Only when the temperature exceeded 90 degrees Fahrenheit did they crank on some artificial air conditioning. Intel did very little to address air-born contaminants and dust, and nothing at all to deal with fluctuating humidity
  • The result: a slightly higher failure rate – around 0.6 percent more – among the air-cooled servers compared to those in the company’s main datacenter – and a potential savings of $2.87 million per year in a 10MW datacenter using free cooling over traditional cooling.

The computer industry has a practice of keeping data centres under 70F/21C. The University of Winnipeg Library server room runs around 90F/30C on an average day. Our mean time to failure (MTTF) on drives and blistering capacitors on motherboards has been no where near industry standard reports.  Perhaps it is a myth and the hotter, the better…or perhaps we’re just too lucky. We’ve been running about 10 servers in the server room for about four years now, so we’ll have to see if they start to get a bit more cranky as they get a bit older.

Filed under Green, Library Systems, News

Geek Metaphors and Finding Religion this Holiday Season

December 20, 2008 Leave a Comment

Thanks to Darlene Fichter for re-posting the very viral posting If Programming Languages Were Religion (which is based on If Programming Languages Were Cars).  Dabbling in several languages, I know several very serious programmers that are completely monotheistic with this language or that.

This also reminds me of Neal Stephenson’s In the Beginning was the Command Line, where he likens various operating systems to cars (or, more aptly, various forms of land transportation): BeOS = Batmobiles, Linux = Tanks, Windows = Stations Wagons, amd Mac = MGBs (…though, he says, Batman fans might challenge me on classifying the Batmobile as a land vehicle).  In his book, Stephenson sets these four operating systems in dealerships in an automall and hits on the underlying ideologies in the following dialogue:

HACKER WITH BULLHORN: “Save your money! Accept one of our free tanks! It is invulnerable, and can drive across rocks and swamps at ninety miles an hour while getting a hundred miles to the gallon!”

PROSPECTIVE STATION WAGON BUYER: “I know what you say is true…but…er…I don’t know how to maintain a tank!”

BULLHORN: “You don’t know how to maintain a station wagon either!”

BUYER: “But this dealership has mechanics on staff. If something goes wrong with my station wagon, I can take a day off work, bring it here, and pay them to work on it while I sit in the waiting room for hours, listening to elevator music.”

BULLHORN: “But if you accept one of our free tanks, we will send volunteers to your house to fix it for free while you sleep!”

BUYER: “Stay away from my house, you freak!”

BULLHORN: “But…”

BUYER: “Can’t you see that everyone is buying station wagons?”

This also reminds me of a popular College Humor video “If People Were Fonts“…which also reminds me of the fact that only geeks get this style of humour and that we love to pimp our products. Of course, resistance is futile, and, if you can’t keep up with technology and improve your skills, here’s where you may find yourself …Autoexec.bat editing or worse.

Filed under Trends, Open Source, User Experience, Humour, Geek Humour

Who’s Laughing Now: Libraries Offer Free Relief from Tough Times

December 12, 2008 Leave a Comment

The recession is not supposed to hit Manitoba as hard as rest of Canada, and, in comparison to the United States, the recession in Canada (for those who may have actually heard journalists or politicians use the ‘R’ word or even the word ‘downturn’ or perhaps the phrase ‘lower growth’) is supposed to be nowhere near as dramatic.   But speaking of something that is dramatic, I enjoyed this NBC news clip of Libraries Offer Free Relief from Tough Times that my American colleague, Michael Sauers, posted to his blog.  As as Librarian I spend a good deal of time promoting my Library and the need for Libraries in general, but I’m glad big news media is finally helping to promote the virtues of Libraries.  Looking back on my previous post Historic ‘Blockbuster’ Store Offers Glimpse Of How Movies Were Rented In The Past, it does seem like there’s less opportunity to aim such satire at Libraries.  However, as big news media gets a hold of this and mixes the merits of Libraries in to a two and a half minute soundbite, there’s something that makes a much bigger and better blockbuster.

Filed under News, Trends Tagged with , , , ,

IT Trend Predictions for 2009

December 8, 2008 Leave a Comment

CIO Insight has announced their top 10 disruptive IT trends for the coming year.

New Media
Augmented Reality
Social Networks
Information Transparency
Web Waves
3D Printing
Molecular Computing
Cloud Computing
Semantics
Web as Reasoning Engine

Gartner has also announced their top 10 strategic technologies for 2009:

Virtualization
Cloud Computing
Servers — Beyond Blades
Web-Oriented Architectures
Enterprise Mashups
Specialized Systems
Social Software and Social Networking
Unified Communications
Business Intelligence
Green IT

There’s some overlap between the Gartner and CIO Insight lists (when you figure “Web Waves” on the CIO Insight list equates with “Business Intelligence” on the Gartner list).  We can bet that no list of predictions will be dead on.  The Gartner technologies have better explanations and straightforward categories …let’s hope clarity provides more direction (better understanding and informed leadership) and becomes a better predictor than something that’s much more ambiguous and uses some odd rather odd labels for these trends.

Filed under News, Trends Tagged with , , ,

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