The Remarketer

Spaghetti Cabling that would make a fully-grown sys admin cry.
or… Cable management is for wimps.

Most network and system administrators like a nice tidy cabled cabinet of servers and network equipment. Sometimes it just doesn’t work out that way. The following are some of my favorite images of nasty cable messes.

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A Cable Mess of Beauty
photo by: Cormac Phelan
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The Playstation Blog has drawn the curtain strings a salivating tad to show off their very impressive server cluster of rackmounted PS3s that run it’s multi-player game Warhawk.

The Data Center Knowledge blog keanly observes:

The powerful processor is no stranger to the data center, as it is also being used in IBM System X blade servers and System Z mainframes.

Players of Warhawk on Playstation 3s take advantage of a server method they call IGS or “Integrated Game Server”, which is essentially distributed computing. This allows players to take advantage of PS3s nearby to reduce latency, but Sony also wanted to have dedicated racks of PS3s available to gamers as well.

OK, maybe not quite yet… but Pandia Search Engine News is reporting that Google runs more than 1 million servers.

Pandia cites a Gartner analyst from the fair elven lands of Norway (the article is in Norwegian, so we’ll have to take their word for it).

Google reports that it spends some 200 to 250 million US dollars a year on IT equipment. We know that Google make use of a large number of cheap off the shelf servers using open source (and free) LINUX.

There are endless numbers of tech bloggers online, but finding those that cover enterprise IT is a bit more challenging. For the past several months, I’ve been compiling a list of the best that I could find.

Quick observations: Sun is the runaway blogging leader. HP has a ways to go, as does Cisco, but they’re finally getting there. Storage Execs are your buddies in the blogosphere, as they go by their first names (i.e. Chuck’s Blog, Dave’s Blog, Hu’s Blog, etc…)

General IT Bloggers
- Some great writers and thinkers covering Enterprise IT of all flavors:

Last week, Sun Microsystem’s Project Blackbox (aka The DatacenterMobile) finally made a stop in Minneapolis, but alas, daycare couldn’t be lined up and I didn’t make it over to the St. Thomas campus to get a tour. I don’t feel like I completely missed out though, because TechnologyEvangelist.com offered a great video of Sun’s Twin Cities visit.

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Find out where Project Blackbox is now.

At lunch yesterday, I was amazed to find out that the two co-workers joining me hadn’t yet realized that daylight savings time goes into effect this coming weekend. Of course, they aren’t responsible for any of our company’s or clients’ IT hardware or computer systems. Otherwise they most certainly would have been aware that Daylight Savings Time is starting a month earlier this year due to new US regulations.

Just in case any IT admins out there have gotten (way) behind on their DST07 updates, here is a summary of where you can find help for various manufacturers:

This month Google released their compiled data on hard drive performance from their datacenters around the world. When you’re Google, this type of study is far beyond the anecdotal reports that can be found on gear forums like “I picked up these piece of $&@# Drives from (xyz low-end drive manufacturer) and one already crapped out!”

Instead, Google basically posted “We’ve got these datacenters all over the world with over 100,000 cheap SATA and PATA drives between them and a bunch crapped out!”, oh yeah and here is some great insight into the circumstances under which this occurred. Over 5 years, they recorded every failure and many variables and then repurposed it into an independent report unprecedented in size.

When I first heard that Sun’s Datacenter in a Box was slated to go on a tour of the USA, the first thing that came to mind was naturally the Oscar Meyer Wienermobile. Sun shouldn’t take this as a slight though, I think it’s a brilliant move, and I tip my hat to them as a competitor (we sell used Sun servers). Anyhow, in looking into this, I discovered there is a whole world of these product themed cars.

Here is our List of 11 Traveling Product-mobiles, starting with the legend.

1) Oscar Meyer’s Wienermobile
(The Grand-Daddy of product-mobiles)

A few weeks ago, Corey wrote about the top “Ten Servers that Changed the World.” In reaction, I decided to make my own list… The Ten Servers that Changed the Fictional World.

There are two guidelines for this list. One, they must exist only in the world of movies or TV. Second, they need to fit the following definition: A server is a computer system that provides services or data to other computing systems—called clients—over a network or other communication device.

With that said, here they are. In no particular order…

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Smaller chips, smaller servers, smaller datacenters, smaller world…

IBM wants you to forget about all that. If you’ve had your ear to IBM’s train tracks, you’ve heard the message too… Big is the New Small.

So, when the world is all about blade servers and you want to shift a little love to your system z9 and zSeries mainframe servers, what do you do?

1. Make Big = Easy. Mainframes have always been considered cumbersome, complex and difficult to use. IBM is investing $100 million over five years to make the systems and the z/OS easier to work with. Implementation and administration is expected to become much less complex.