Measurement + Monitoring of Data Centre Energy Use Immature Through 2011: Gartner

As previously posted, "cheap" servers really aren't cheap at all (Infoworld 5/2008), since recurring server operational costs are often as large or larger than the initial hardware capital investment. Below is a related update from Gartner, reminding us that "you can't manage what you can't measure". Here is Gartner's explanation of the importance of metrics for reducing data-center energy consumption [emphasis mine]:

Gartner Says Measurement and Monitoring of Data Centre Energy Use Will Remain Immature Through 2011:
“...when asked which energy management metrics they will use in the next 18 months, 48 per cent of respondents have not even considered the issue of metrics. However, without metrics it is impossible to get accurate data, which is essential to evaluating basic costs, proportioning these costs to different users and setting policies for improvement.

'These metrics form the bedrock for internal cost and efficiency programmes and will become increasingly important for external use', said Mr Kumar. 'Organisations that want to publicise their carbon usage through green accounting principles will need to have their basic energy use continuously monitored.'

Mr Kumar also urged organisations not to rely on internal metrics saying that evaluating server energy needs to be done in an open and transparent manner...”

hat tip / source: http://twitter.com/Gartner_inc/statuses/4339604501

Mashable: Carrier Pigeons beat ADSL, but Memory Card capacity growing even faster

'Winston' the racing pigeon after flying with a 4GB SD card in Durban, South Africa.(EPA/STR/Corbis, as per THE WEEK)

Mashable: "...Internet lines getting faster, but memory card capacity is getting bigger even faster. If you need your data to travel fast, use a carrier pigeon."

Of course, this is not the only situation where "low tech" wins over conventional methods... e.g. in some situations and for some audiences, email reliability (or lack thereof) cannot match the simplicity and immediate hardcopy accessibility of conventional fax transmissions. In any case, IMHO this is at least worth a smile :)

Full article from Mashable:
CARRIER PIGEONS: Still Faster Than ADSL

Hat tip: http://www.theweek.com/article/index/100380/Highspeed_Internet_vs_carrier_pigeon

Gmail outage resolved thanks to flexible technical architecture [Official Gmail Blog]

Google's Site Reliability Czar: A clear explanation of today's gmail outage, as quoted below.

IMHO, as painful and widespread as the outage was (a side-effect of "routine upgrades"), urgent and ultimately successful action was taken towards resolution. And of course, the true "secret sauce" that enabled this resolution, is the underlying foundation of the "flexible capacity" which "is one of the advantages of Google's architecture".

Here is the full Official Gmail Blog post:

Official Gmail Blog: More on today's Gmail issue: Tuesday, September 01, 2009 6:59 PM
Posted by Ben Treynor, VP Engineering and Site Reliability Czar

"Gmail's web interface had a widespread outage earlier today, lasting about 100 minutes. We know how many people rely on Gmail for personal and professional communications, and we take it very seriously when there's a problem with the service. Thus, right up front, I'd like to apologize to all of you — today's outage was a Big Deal, and we're treating it as such. We've already thoroughly investigated what happened, and we're currently compiling a list of things we intend to fix or improve as a result of the investigation.

Here's what happened: This morning (Pacific Time) we took a small fraction of Gmail's servers offline to perform routine upgrades. This isn't in itself a problem — we do this all the time, and Gmail's web interface runs in many locations and just sends traffic to other locations when one is offline.

However, as we now know, we had slightly underestimated the load which some recent changes (ironically, some designed to improve service availability) placed on the request routers — servers which direct web queries to the appropriate Gmail server for response. At about 12:30 pm Pacific a few of the request routers became overloaded and in effect told the rest of the system 'stop sending us traffic, we're too slow!'. This transferred the load onto the remaining request routers, causing a few more of them to also become overloaded, and within minutes nearly all of the request routers were overloaded. As a result, people couldn't access Gmail via the web interface because their requests couldn't be routed to a Gmail server. IMAP/POP access and mail processing continued to work normally because these requests don't use the same routers.

The Gmail engineering team was alerted to the failures within seconds (we take monitoring very seriously). After establishing that the core problem was insufficient available capacity, the team brought a LOT of additional request routers online (flexible capacity is one of the advantages of Google's architecture), distributed the traffic across the request routers, and the Gmail web interface came back online.

What's next: We've turned our full attention to helping ensure this kind of event doesn't happen again. Some of the actions are straightforward and are already done — for example, increasing request router capacity well beyond peak demand to provide headroom. Some of the actions are more subtle — for example, we have concluded that request routers don't have sufficient failure isolation (i.e. if there's a problem in one datacenter, it shouldn't affect servers in another datacenter) and do not degrade gracefully (e.g. if many request routers are overloaded simultaneously, they all should just get slower instead of refusing to accept traffic and shifting their load). We'll be hard at work over the next few weeks implementing these and other Gmail reliability improvements — Gmail remains more than 99.9% available to all users, and we're committed to keeping events like today's notable for their rarity."

HighlightCam Cuts Long Security Camera Videos Down to the Action

Mashable has a nice writeup today regarding HighlightCam.com :
HOW TO: Quickly Cut Long Videos Down to the Juicy Parts:
"...finding the important parts of these [security camera] videos is painful. That’s because there are hours of footage to sift through. Really, do you want to fastforward through a 12 hour video just to find out what your dog was doing? Yet if you don’t, then you’ve lost the point of having the camera in the first place.

Now a new YCombinator-funded company, HighlightCam, has built the software to take hours of video and compress it into just the minutes with the important stuff – you know, when the dog starts barking, the baby falls out of the crib, or the crook turns on the lights.

So how does HighlightCam pick out the juciest bits of long videos? The web-based software, which has both a free version and an $8.99 per month version, is able to detect movement, light changes, and any variations from the norm. You can pick out how far down the video should be cut – one minute, five minutes, ten minutes, whatever you’d like. You can even get the best parts of YouTube (YouTube) videos with the software, as was demonstrated to us today....

One hour of video, cut down to under a minute, with only the important stuff shown. It’s already caught employees stealing from cash registers, something you’d probably miss if you sifted through the full video. It’s cheap, accessible, usable, and from what we’ve seen, really accurate at pinpointing key events. And with a free version, you can start using it without spending a dime."

Also worth noting as per http://blog.highlightcam.com/ , in fact not only motion but audio is also used as a cue to detect the highlights:

"HighlightCam records your footage all the time, whether there’s motion or not. We then find the highlights using a bunch of different cues, including motion and audio.

A tiny mouse running across the floor, or a loud conversation held off-camera—if that’s the most interesting thing that happened in an hour, that’s what we’ll show you!"

3 Reasons a CIO Should Care About Twitter — CIOUpdate.com

Senior IT executives / CIO's can also benefit from Twitter, according to CIOUpdate.com . The relevant observations excerpted below are a nice complement to my recent post Re: Should Project Managers Twitter? . So here are some of the potential business benefits of Twitter which (when balanced against the known Twitter security/privacy issues) can make sense for many organizations:

3 Reasons a CIO Should Care About Twitter — CIOUpdate.com: "...If all the buzz in the mass media isn’t enough to get you interested in Twitter, here are three solid business reasons why CIOs should devote some time to learning more:

1. Get Targeted Insights Faster - ... Some of the smartest people I meet haven’t devoted themselves to publishing or publicity that gets them a high Google ranking. But they are willing to share their experience and make themselves available for legitimate conversations.
Enter Twitter. Anyone can post their 140-character question, idea or comment on any topic. While the stream is uncensored and unfiltered, it is highly searchable. And because responses come in real time, it’s a channel that is particularly suited for time-sensitive information.

2. Participate in Social Media Innovation - ... the availability of Twitter’s API may present a direct opportunity for you and your company’s brand and products. Is there a way to utilize Twitter to support customer service (see @ComcastCares), promotions, order tracking, etc?

3. Expand Your Professional Network: ... as Twitter participation stabilizes will a valuable professional community emerge? There are some early signs that a viable CIO community exists on Twitter. At this point, I’ve identified over 70 CIOs across 20 industries. You can keep tabs on the growing community at http://www.ciodashboard.com/cio-twitter-dashboard . ..."

MS Exchange2007/WinServer2008 compatibility issues

Seems that waiting for Exchange Server 2010 - rather than upgrading now to Exchange Server 2007 - may make sense for many organizations currently running Exchange Server 2003 [or earlier]. Although this seems somewhat inconvenient, I expect many organizations can deal with this successfully in several ways, given sufficient planning. This sort of constraint reminds me of the situation approximately 4 years ago, when some Microsoft shops wanted to wait until MS SQL Server 2005 became available for purchase, rather than immediately purchasing a SQL Server 2000 license. In fact, the Software Assurance up-front purchase (to purchase SQL Server 2000 with SA that would include upgrade to SQL Server 2005) might have seemed logical at the time for many organizations.... But of course, evaluating the full TCO of a subsequent upgrade to SQL Server 2005 would have involved more than the initial hard cost of purchasing Software Assurance. So perhaps the best decision (then and now) as to whether to invest in Software Assurance depends on the particular upgrade and change management capabilities for the specific organization.

The recent Exchange2007/WinServer2008 issue was explained in the recent Microsoft Exchange Team blog posting explaining that Exchange Server 2007 won't run on upcoming Windows Server 2008 R2. Further insights available from SearchITChannel.com: Dilemma: Exchange Server 2007 won't run on next Windows Server:

"...Customers upgrading to Windows Server 2008 R2, due later this year, will have to upgrade to Exchange Server 2010, which is also due this year. This news, disclosed in the fourth bullet point in a July 17 Microsoft Exchange Team Blog post, means Microsoft partners have to sell Exchange Server 2007 without the promise of support on future OSes and without Windows Server 2008 R2 interoperability with Exchange Server 2007... said Planet Technologies lead infrastructure engineer Mike Crowley: "If people stick with Exchange 2007 on Windows 2008 because 'it works,' I wouldn't expect them to want to upgrade the underlying OS just because a new one is available."

Latest Google Maps for Mobile v3.2 Rocks on WinMo6.1

On my Samsung Jack running Windows Mobile 6.1 [smartphone, not touchscreen edition], I found the My Maps new features of Google Maps Mobile 3.2 to be excellent. The upgrade from Google Maps Mobile v3.0 (Over-The-Air download, clocking in at 1.0 MB) went through perfectly on the first try, as did the new My Maps feature. Quick and simple access to one's "My Maps" info is a real enhancement to the user experience for busy smartphone users trying to get somewhere quickly. IMHO this - together with Google Maps Mobile ability to either read my GPS (when it finds satellites) or locate me via cell towers when the GPS chip cannot - makes Google Maps for Mobile version 3.2 a true killer app.

Official Google Mobile Blog: Layers of fun in Google Maps for mobile 3.2: "...the latest version of Google Maps for mobile allows you to view many layers of information on your map at the same time. Layers make it easier and more useful to find and interact with geographic content, like public transit, traffic (with incidents!), local search results, Latitude friend locations, Wikipedia and more. You can also see your own My Maps content as a layer on Google Maps for mobile. And finally, multiple layers can be combined at the same time to give you a content-rich view of what's around you..."

Hat Tip: http://lifehacker.com/5320514/google-maps-adds-multiple-search-function