Igniting Social Change

Did you imagine how much electricity we could save if we could stop the harddisk from spinning when not in use. Oh you might say, what big deal, how can one hard disk make a difference. For people who dont know much about data and storage, let me tell you that a even a small bank in India would be utilizing the services of 4000 disks for its banking data.

Bigger banks need more disks and more and more for backups, replication (disaster recovery) etc. Its very common for banks and telcos to have atleast 5 PB (petabyte) of data. I’m considering the least, the maximum I have heard is 20 PB.

Quick Info : 1 PB = 1000 Terabyte = 1000000 GB

Lets assume the average disk size to be 300 GB, then 1 PB/ 300 = 16000 disks approx.

These 16,000 disks keep spinning idly, consuming a lot of power. So why dont we buy as we grow, does any body need 1 PB or more. Yes and No..! Storage cannot be bought in the last minute, it has to be brought well in advance and allocated to each server specifically. The data is critical so the storage has to be mirrored, replicated etc. Basically a lot of preparation.

So companies normally buy storage and pre-allocate it to the servers, as per the application growth rates.

Say if the application is currenlty occupying a 50 GB of space, and is expected to grow to 300 GB by next year, then the IT manager buys disks for 500 GB just to be on the safer side. So when just one HDD is utilized, others keep spinning and contributing to power consumption. Thin provisioning helps you allocate the storage space prior to the adding disks. For example you can allocate 500 GB of space, and still have only 1 OR 2 disks. And when the requirement arises, you simply add disks to the pool.

This saves a lot of energy, as few disks are required in the storage system.

Another technology is the ability to selective hard disks or RAID groups in a a system, when not in use.

A few companies I know who have implemented thin provisioning are HITACHI, 3PAR, COMPELLENT etc.

So people, go thin to save energy, I hope you know that we only have a few watts left..

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E-mail retrieval is becoming increasingly expensive in today’s world. The expense is incurred by the receipient rather than the sender. The expense is more in terms of loss of time, bandwidth & productivity.

Spam filters are merely a workaround to solve this problem. Research projects such as Penny Black project are aimed at resolving the spam problem by attacking the root cause.

In a nutshell, the idea is this: “If I don’t know you, and you want to send me mail, then you must prove to me that you have expended a certain amount of effort, just for me and just for this message.”  The approach is fundamentally an economic one.  Suppose we measure effort in CPU cycles.  Since there are about 80,000 seconds in a day, a computational “price” of just ten seconds per message would limit a spamming computer to at most 8,000 messages daily. So spammers would have to invest heavily in hardware in order to send high volumes of spam.

Four Stanford undergraduates, under the supervision of Dan Boneh, implemented the computational approach using a very simple proxy architecture. The research component of this project is largely complete & the researchers continue to investigate how these ideas might be realized in practice.

Reference
http://research.microsoft.com/research/sv/PennyBlack/demo/index.html
http://research.microsoft.com/research/sv/PennyBlack/
 

 

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Well in what people call “news”, IBM has agreed to support Solaris on its x86 platform. But for me this is’nt a great deal.Why would somebody run solaris on IBM x86, IBM must have asked SUN to port solaris on to IBM mainframes. IBM is for sure a better deal maker than Sun.

Windows running on Sun boxes, V40Z, V20Z e.t.c. Sun’s x86 series…was also a shock. The first time I heard somebody was installing windows on a Sun box, I ran into the data center to find this thin 1 U (v20z) server, and later saw Windows 2003 on the T6400 e.t.c. So is hotmail still on solaris?? or is it on windows installed on sun.

Sun is upbeat this week, google has started packaging its StarOffice into google pack. I dont know how this helps SUN, unless google has paid Sun a royalty.

Also big news for open source followers, xensource is in the process of being aquired by Citrix. However Xensource CEO has said that his company will abide by the commitment to all vendors.

The market these days seems to love to shock people..!

Information Technology Open Source

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The blogging phenomenon seems to be spreading like wildfire across the world. Around 10.4 blogs are created every second (on an average) according to findings from Technorati.

• Technorati is tracking about 900,000 blog posts created every day.
• That’s about 10.4 blog posts per second, on average.
• Median time from posting to inclusion in the Technorati index is under 5 minutes.
• Significant increases in posting volume are due to increased mainstream use of easy hosted tools as well as simple posting interfaces like post-from-IM and moblogging tools.
• Weekends tend to be slower posting days by about 5-10% of the weekly averages.
• During the day, posting tends to peak between the hours of 7 a.m. and noon Pacific time (10 a.m. - 3 p.m. Eastern time).
• Worldwide news events cause ripples through the blogosphere - not only in search volume, but also in posting volume. (more…)
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Call it the Cause & Effect story or the Chicken & Hen syndrome, we have a competing product for the Magic Quadrant and it’s called………hold your breath …..the Forrester Wave (did I hear clapping sound   ).

 Ahem….I would not be the right person to comment on who copied who. According to Forrester Website,  http://www.forrester.com/wave

” One of your biggest challenges is evaluating and selecting vendor products and services. That’s why we created the Forrester Wave — our call on a particular market or technology. Whether you’re investing in application server platforms or content management providers, the Forrester Wave makes it easy for you to make well-informed decisions. (more…)

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During one of the conference in Mumbai, I was surprised to see every major vendor using the Gartner’s Magic Quadrant in their presentation. I was both embarassed and annoyed at my lack of information about this important concept released by Gartner.

In order to enligten our readers, I have compiled a brief article

The “Magic Quadrant by Gartner” evaluates each vendor according to its strategic direction, completeness of vision and ability to execute. The vendors are placed in one of the four quadrants consisting of Challengers, Leaders, Niche players and Visionaries depending on their strength. (more…)

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It was an interesting article authored by the SUN CEO Jonathan Schwartz in the Sun Boardroom newsletter that I receive every month.

http://www.sun.com/emrkt/boardroom/newsletter/0407feature.html?cid=917071

Although its quite a simple math that he’s illustrated, its a good thought. Also to note is the marketing strategy he’s used this for, to sell tapes. He also projects tapes as environmental friendly storage devices, since unlike hard-disks they do not consume power when unused. HDD needs to be spinning all the time.

Well a few things to learn from Jonathon, on starting new debates which can create fresh demands for you old products.

Information Technology Internet Security

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While most of India is facing an acute shortage of power, while we suffer from frequent power loss at home, office seems to be better with no power outages et all.

But now since our enterprises are aware that they are also at the edge of the power crisis, there is a desperate effort to save energy.

Consider ICICI where I work and spend most of my day, there is increased awareness to save power. Its mandatory to switch of monitors when not at desk and also power off PC’s at EOD. This has led to 15% savings in power. Switching off lights and restricting internet access post 6pm has helped dissuade employees from idling away at office after work hours unless required.

Considering the huge IT infrastructure we posses, our CIO has initiated a drive to buy energy saving computers. (more…)

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