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Amazon Web Services has quietly passed an interesting benchmark: the company’s S3 storage service now hosts more than 100 billion objects. This factoid was noted this morning at Data Center World, when keynote speaker Brian Lillie of Equinix said that Amazon now is hosting 102 billion objects in S3 (Simple Storage Service).

Over the past year, the number of objects stored on S3 has grown from 54 billion to 100 billion, according to Amazon CTO Werner Vogels, who mentioned this startling growth curve in his recent presentation at the Cebit computer trade show in Germany.

It’s a fuzzy milestone, to be sure, as we don’t know how much infrastructure is required to store those 100 billion objects, or how much revenue Amazon is generating from them. But in an industry where we’re used to big numbers, 100 billion is an eye-popping total. By any measure, that’s a huge storage cloud, and likely a sign of things to come.

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Amazon S3 Now Hosts 100 Billion Objects

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Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer today emphasized that “when it comes to the cloud, we are all in.” He shared that message first in a speech at the University of Washington, later in an all-staff email, and also in a major ad campaign the company is launching today.

Most of Ballmer’s talk focused on the end-user experience of cloud computing services. But he brought a data center with him: one of the next-generation containers that Microsoft data center GM Kevin Timmons described yesterday in a presentation in New York. The prototype (seen above) is the latest in a series of evolving designs for Microsoft’s containers, also known as an IT-PAC (pre-assembled component). The design is likely to undergo additional refinements as Microsoft continues scouting locations for its next major data center.

“It includes the equivalent of about 10,000 servers,” said Ballmer .”It’s a cool, next-generation concept. We used to have to stick fire hoses into these things to cool them down. (With this) next generation technology, you can put a garden hose in to one of these things to cool down.”

From a data center perspective, one of Ballmer’s most interesting comments came during the question-and-answer session with students, in which he hinted that Microsoft may offer a container packed with Azure technology as a product for on-site installation.

“When you walk outside and see one of those containers, it would be OK with me if we have to dump one into every country or sell some to some people who want to implement them,” said Ballmer.

Sell a container? These kind of statements are sometimes parsed out of context by media. So here’s the full transcript of the exchange:

QUESTION: “So, I’m curious that we shouldn’t care where information is because it should be completely abstracted away, but it seems the laws and regulations do care where information is. I’m just curious how we should manage and take care of that.”

STEVE BALLMER: “That’s why we talk about a partner cloud, a customer cloud and a public cloud. I mean, I think for a lot of reasons it will be many years before many government organizations will grow comfortable with the notion of their data or citizen data living outside of the jurisdiction.

As technology people we can talk about whether that makes sense or doesn’t make sense, and why the protections can be the same, but it turns out the regulatory environment, as you highlight, is imperfect. I mean, the truth of the matter is – our guys were trying to explain this to me a week or two ago – the same data held in the same place but under different operating circumstances has different regulatory blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And we can’t assume all of the world’s important countries are going to even standardize the regulatory framework. That’s why when you walk outside and see one of those containers, it would be OK with me if we have to dump one into every country or sell some to some people who want to implement them.

I love Slovenia, it’s a great country, but there’s only a million and a half Slovenes. This company is not likely to build part of our public cloud in Slovenian anytime soon. So, somebody should be able to implement a Windows Azure cloud in that country. They should be able to buy a device that looks like that or a set of devices and go do that and have that be affiliated for the rapid advance of technology with other things going on in the world.

So, I hear you and I agree that there’s a set of issues, but they don’t have to be constraints.

Here’s just one simple way to think about it. Will all of the world’s centralized compute, storage and networking infrastructure all be built out by four or five companies, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, the cloud guys? Will we buy every server computer and every piece of storage in the world? No, that isn’t going to happen. I don’t think that – if you just think about the level of capital investment that involves.

We need to permit the private cloud, and the kind of thing we’re showing, the kinds of things we’re doing with Windows Azure is about making sure there’s a public version and there’s a customer version, and there can be a government version, all based on the same core technology, and there’s some innovation to go make that happen.”

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Microsoft ‘All In’ on Container-Powered Cloud

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We often think of computers as a very modern phenomenon, but there were actually plenty of computers around 50 years ago. They just weren’t an everyman commodity, instead limited to goverment and corporate use. And they certainly weren’t small. Some of them had imaginative names like Whirlwind, Colossus and Pegasus, while others were slightly less poetic with names like Z4, AN/FSQ-7 and ENIAC.

Below we have listed as many as 19 examples of computers from the early days, pioneering efforts that although cutting edge in their day now look lovingly retro.

These computers didn’t use the same kind of components as we do today. The computers in the 1940s and 1950s were mostly based on vacuum tubes. Transistors showed up late in the game, and integrated circuits were just a distant dream and didn’t start showing up in computers until the 1960s, and then in very limited capacity. How tempting it would be to travel back in time and show the engineers of these computers a normal modern-day PC, just to see their reaction.

We have listed the completion year for each computer, although often work on them had begun several years earlier (they were huge projects). We’ve arranged them in chronological order, oldest first. Please note that these are just a sample, there are plenty we didn’t include (in order to make this a blog post and not a book ).

Z4

Year: 1944

Designed by the legendary German engineer Konrad Zuse, the Z4 was a follow-up to its pioneering predecessor, the Z3 computer he built in 1941 (the world’s first programmable, automatic computing machine). The Z4 used about 4,000 watts of power and ran at approximately 40 Hz. It had 64 32-bit registers, the equivalent of 512 byte of memory. One addition took 0.4 seconds.

Above: The Z4 computer, as seen in a German museum (in Munich).

Colossus

Year: 1944

Two generations of Colossus, the Mark 1 and Mark 2, were used by British codebreakers to decrypt coded German messages at the end of WW2. It processed 5,000 characters per second (it could process faster, but then the paper tapes holding the data would break). The existence of Colossus and other British codebreaking machines remained secret until the 1970s out of fear that widespread knowledge would encourage more efficient encryption algorithms.

Above, top: The Colossus in its heyday. Note the punched paper tape running on the right side. Above, bottom: A reconstructed Colossus.

ENIAC

Year: 1946

When the ENIAC was announced in 1946 the press immediately started calling it a “Giant Brain”. ENIAC was the world’s first general-purpose electronic, digital computer and is probably the most famous of the ones included in this article. It weighed 27 tons. Among other things, ENIAC was used for calculations for the creation the hydrogen bomb. Programming the machine could take weeks, since after the program had been figured out on paper you first had to manipulate the various switches and cables that controlled the programming and then follow that with verification and debugging.

Above, top: The ENIAC in all its glory. Above, bottom: Old-school programming?

Whirlwind

Year: 1951

The Whirlwind was the first computer to use video displays for output. The first version had 512 byte of main memory and could do 20,000 instructions per second, although a switch to a different kind of memory later doubled its performance and made it the fastest computer of its time.

Above, top left: The Whirlwind. Above, top right: Closeup of the circuitry. Above, bottom: The control room.

UNIVAC I

Year: 1951

An acronym for UNIVersal Automatic Computer, the UNIVAC I was the first US-produced commercial computer. It was designed by the inventors of the ENIAC. A total of 46 systems were built and delivered. It weighed 13 tons (29,000 pounds), ran at 2.25 MHz and could perform 1,905 instructions per second. The UNIVAC I cost up to $1.5 million per system.

Above: The UNIVAC I, built by Remington Rand (see their nifty logo top left in the image).

WITCH

Year: 1951

Short for the Wolverhampton Instrument for Teaching Computing from Harwell, the WITCH was also known as The Harwell Dekatron Computer. It was slow (a multiplication took 5-10 seconds), but this was justified by its ability to run long periods of time unattended. It could therefore be left on its own with a large amount of input data. At one point it was left running over the Christmas and New Year holiday and was still working when the staff came back 10 days later.

Above: The WITCH in use. Is it just us, or do they look a bit confused?

BESK

Year: 1953

Pingdom being Swedish, we had to include this Swedish computer from 1953. BESK stands for Binär Elektronisk SekvensKalkylator, which is Swedish for Binary Electronic Sequence Calculator. The main memory was 512 40-bit words, the equivalent of 2,560 byte. An addition could be performed in 56 microseconds, and a multiplication in 350 microseconds. For a short time it was the world’s fastest computer. Small aside, “besk” means “bitter” (as in taste) in Swedish, but besk is also an alcoholic beverage from the south of Sweden. The name was a pun sneaked in by the computer’s creator, who had previously had the computer name COGNAC rejected by officials.

Above: The control panel for the Swedish BESK computer.

IBM 702

Year: 1955

The IBM 702 had been announced as early as 1953, but the first production model wasn’t installed until 1955. It was a commercial computer that could be leased from IBM. The system could have a maximum of 11,000 7-bit characters of main memory, i.e. roughly 10 kilobytes. It could do 3,950 additions or subtractions per second, but multiplication and division was significantly slower.

Above: An IBM 702 installation.

IBM NORC

Year: 1954

The IBM Naval Ordnance Research Calculator was arguably the first supercomputer and was the most powerful computer of its time. It could perform 15,000 operations per second, and the first version had 2,000 64-bit words of main memory, roughly the equivalent of 16 kilobytes.

Above: Various angles of the IBM NORC.

IBM 305 RAMAC

Year: 1956

This computer is most famous for being the first commercial computer delivered with a hard disk drive. The hard disk drive could store a total of just under 5 MB and consisted of 50 24-inch diameter disks. The 305 RAMAC was one of the largest computers IBM ever built. (If you find ancient hard drives fascinating, check out our post about the history of computer data storage.)

Above: Yes, those huge units in the foreground are hard disk drives. Each storing a massive 5 MB…

Bendix G-15

Year: 1956

The Bendix G-15 weighed 450 kg (950 lb) and cost around $60,000. It had 2,160 29-bit words of memory, the equivalent of about 7.6 kilobyte. The G-15 has sometimes been called the first personal computer, although there are disagreements about this. More than 400 were made.

Above: The Bendix G-15. It looks like a very big tower desktop computer. Kind of.

Pegasus

Year: 1956

The British computer Ferranti Pegasus was designed and built to be cheap and reliable. It had 5,120 40-bit words of memory, the equivalent of 25 kilobyte, plus 56 words (280 byte) of fast memory. A Pegasus 2 from 1959 is still operational at the Science Museum in London. It is the world’s oldest working digital computer.

Above: A Pegasus 2 at the Science Museum in London. The cabinet was built by Rolls Royce, hence the use of car door handles for the doors. Note also the inserted clock at the short end.

AN/FSQ-7

Year: 1958

A successor to the Whirlwind, based largely on the design of the never-realized the AN/FSQ-7 was developed by IBM in collaboration with the US Air Force to be used with the SAGE air defense system. It is sometimes incorrectly referred to as the Whirlwind II. One computer took up 2,000 sqm of floor space (roughly half an acre) and weighed 275 tons. They are the largest computers ever built (52 of them were made). The AN/FSQ-7 could perform about 75,000 instructions per second.

Above, top: An installation of the AN/FSQ-7. Each cabinet a built-in phone to save time when calling in problems (seen here at the short end of the nearest cabinet). Above, bottom: SAGE control consoles. A sign of different times: each console had a built-in cigarette lighter and ashtray.

IBM 7090

Year: 1959

A typical IBM 7090 system cost $2.9 million and was designed for large-scale scientific and technological applications. Among other things, it was used by NASA to control space flights. A 7090 system is featured in the movie Dr. Strangelove. In 1961, a later version, the 7094, became the first computer ever to sing (the song Daisy Bell). This was the inspiration for a scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Above:The IBM 7090. Trivia: The second man on the left is Smith DeFrance, founding director of the NASA Ames Research Center.

AKAT-1

Year: 1959

The Polish AKAT-1 was the world’s first transistor-based differential analyzer, designed specifically to solve systems of differential equations. It was never mass produced due to the country’s policies at that time.

Above: The AKAT-1.

Datasaab D2

Year: 1960

Never massproduced, the Datasaab D2 was a concept computer build in Sweden. It weighed “only” 200 kg and could be placed on a desktop. It held the equivalent of 15 kilobyte of memory and could perform 100,000 additions per second. It was a prototype designed to test the feasibility of computerized navigation aid in aircraft. Datasaab was the computer division of the aircraft manufacturer Saab, which made fighter jets for Sweden.

Above left: The Datasaab D2 in its entirety. Above right: Closeup of its control panel.

BRLESC I

Year: 1962

The name is an acronym for Ballistic Research Laboratories Electronic Scientific Computer. It was, as its name suggest, designed primarily for scientific and military tasks. It could do five million operations per second and had 4096 72-bit words of memory, the equivalent of 36 kilobyte.

Above: The awesome-looking console for the BRLESC I computer.

Honeywell 200

Year: 1963

The Honeywell 200 and its successors were introduced to compete with affordable commercial computers from IBM (specifically the IBM 1401). The native assembly language used to program the Honeywell computer was named Easycoder. Yes, at that time, assembly language was considered easy to code in. Honeywell ran an ad campaign over several years that they called the Liberator, using various very creative sculptures made from computer parts (one example available here).

Above: The H200 at work.

UNIVAC 1108

Year: 1964

The transistor-based UNIVAC 1108 supported up to three CPUs and up to 262,144 36-bit words of memory (more than 1 MB). The memory used integrated circuits (quite rare at the time) instead of the thin film core memory used in its predecessor, the 1107.

Above: A later model of the 1108 from 1969.

Final words, acronyms and the MANIAC

As you can see from some of the examples above, acronyms were highly popular. Some scientists were so fed up with this acronym mania that they started mocking it. There was for example a computer called MANIAC (I and II), which stood for Mathematical Analyzer, Numerical Integrator, and Computer.

We always think it’s fascinating to look back and see how things were in the early days of computing. It truly illuminates how far we have come. Today we have more computing power in our pocket than what would fit in entire buildings in the past. Our most modest smartphones widely exceed the performance and storage capacity of these early behemoths.

Data sources: Almost needless to say, Wikipedia was an invaluable starting point when researching this post, which in turn uses a ton of other places as data sources. Too many to mention here.

Image sources: Z4 by Clemens Pfeiffer; Colossus old image by UK government, rebuild image by MaltaGC; ENIAC images are from the US Army; Whirlwind top left from Computerhistory.org, circuitry by Dpbsmith, control room from MIT; UNIVAC I from US Army; WITCH from the Computer Conservation Society; BESK by Liftarn, IBM 702 from the US Federal Government;IBM NORC images from Columbia University; IBM 305 RAMAC from the US Federal Government; Bendix G-15 by unknown author (stored by Wikipedia); Pegasus; AN/FSQ-7 from US Air Force, SAGE consoles by Steve Jurvetson; IBM 7090 by NASA; AKAT-1 by Topory; Datasaab D2 images by Lars Aronsson; BRLESC I from US Army; Honeywell 200 image from unknown source; UNIVAC 1108 by the manufacturer.

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Retro delight: Gallery of early computers (1940s – 1960s)

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What would it mean if Apple wanted to take all the songs in all the iTunes libraries sitting on all the hard drives of its users and host them in the cloud? It would probably require Apple to build an enormous data center to house the operation. There are widespread reports that Apple is contemplating such a shift.

As it happens, Apple is also building a major new data center in Maiden, North Carolina that will span 500,000 square feet. The enormity of the new facility - which will be nearly five times the size of the company’s 109,000 square foot Newark, Calif. data center – has raised questions about Apple’s ambitions. Why would it need all that data center space?

A Shift to the Cloud?
I discussed this question in an August interview with Leander Kahney at the Cult of Mac blog. A recap: The most interesting question is whether Apple needs a much larger facility to support growth in its existing services, or is scaling up capacity for future offerings.  One of the leading theories about the size of the NC project is that Apple is planning future cloud computing services that will require lots of data center storage.

This fits neatly with Apple’s purchase last week of the streaming music service LaLa. The Wall Street Journal reports that Apple is planning to “reboot” its iTunes service as a browser-based service that would allow users to stream their music from anywhere.

“The shift to cloud-based music won’t be instant, and may never be total,” notes an analysis at GigaOm. “But a smartly integrated way of giving consumers access to their existing MP3 libraries side-by-side with a new streaming option is very attractive. Lala knew this, and Apple can deliver it.”

Is Video Part of the Story? 
Wired believes video looms large in Apple’s ambitions. “All these recent developments point to a significant new strategic market for Apple: personal broadcasting, or sharing personal experiences,” writes Brian Chen. “YouTube and Flip are already big players in this young space, and the logical competitive move for Apple is to make personal media deliverable and accessible anytime, anywhere.”

This shift in the iTunes model would mean a change in Apple’s data storage requirements – hence the huge scaling up of its data center platform. A de-duplicated iTunes storage hub serving music from a central repository might not require much additional space.

Apple Set to Scale Up
But video is a different matter. Users of YouTube upload 20 hours of video content every minute. That may be why Apple hired Olivier Sanche to run its data center operations. Olivier previously ran the data center infrastructure at eBay, one of the leading examples of massive scalability.

If Apple is really planning a push into online video, we’ll hear about more huge data center projects soon. Here’s why: A centrally hosted iTunes would create the potential for the Mother of All Downtime Events - a data center outage that leaves the world’s iTunes users unable to access their music.

In terms of actual impact, an online music outage would rank low on most industry lists of worst-case data center failure scenarios. But an iTunes data center crash would be a huge public relations nightmare, generating a tidal wave of digital complaining via blogs and tweets.

A single point of failure will not suffice. If the speculation about Apple’s cloud ambitions are correct, there are more huge data centers to come.

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Is iTunes ‘Reboot’ Driving iDataCenter Project?

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At the Data Center Jobs Board, we have a new job listing from SteelVault Data Centers, which is seeking a Hosting/Colocation Sales Executive with industry experience and a technical understanding of colo, web hosting, cloud computing and disaster recovery. Click  here for more information or to apply.

Are you hiring for your data center? You can list your company’s job openings on the Data Center Jobs Board, and also track new openings via our RSS feed.

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Data Center Jobs: SteelVault Data Centers

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Here’s one of the most unusual data center designs we’ve seen. The CLUMEQ supercomputing center in Quebec has worked with Sun Microsystems to transform a huge silo into a data center. The cylindrical silo, which is 65 feet high and 36 feet wide with two-foot thick concrete walls, previously housed a Van de Graaf particle accelerator. When the accelerator was decommissioned, CLUMEQ decided to convert the facility into a high-performance computing (HPC) cluster known as Colossus.

We first noted the development of the CLUMEQ site earlier this year when Marc Hamilton of Sun discussed its unique design, but offered scant details. Additional information about the design of the facility and its cooling system were discussed at the Sun HPC Consortium last month in Portland, Oregon.

The CLUMEQ Colossus cylinder features an interior “hot core” (as opposed to a hot aisle) in the center of the building and uses the outside ring of the facility as the cold air plenum. The cabinets are arranged in a ring on each floor, facing the outside of the silo. The floors supporting each ring of cabinets are comprised of grates rather than solid flooring to facilitate airflow through the facility.

The cooling coils and air handlers are located in the basement. Chilled air flows upward through the outside cold aisle and through the racks of servers. The waste heat exits the rear of the racks into the hot core, and is returned to the basement via the cold aisle.

The air flow pattern is maintained through differential air pressure – maintaining a higher air pressure in the cold aisle than the hot aisle. This keeps the air moving through the facility, which has a blowing capacity of 180,000 CFM and can cool up to 1.5 megawatts of electrical load. Up to 300 kilowatts of cooling capacity can be supplied by free cooling using fresh air from outside the facility.

“CLUMEQ silo totally blows up the paradigm of data center design,” says Nicolas Dube of Sun, who began work on the project as a graduate student at Universite Laval in Quebec. “The silo, by itself, is the CRAC (computer room air conditioner). The whole facility cools itself.”

As for computing horsepower, Colossus will have a peak of 86 teraflops of compute power. It’s equipped with a Sun Constellation HPC systems featuring 10 fully loaded Sun Blade 6048 chassis, 1 petabyte of Lustre storage and Sun J4400 storage arrays.

The data center racks are spread over three floors, with the switches on the second floor to keep the cable runs as short as possible.

For a full description of the CLUMEQ design, check out this video from Sun, which runs about 6 minutes.

Additional details are available in PDFs of presentations by Marc Parizeau of CLUMEQ and Nicolas Dube of Sun.

OTHER STORIES YOU MAY LIKE:

• Who Has The Most Web Servers?
• The Gallery of Exploding Servers
• Inside the ‘James Bond Villain’ Data Center
• Google’s Chiller-Less Data Center
• Inside a Cloud Computing Data Center

Original post:
Wild New Design: Data Center in A Silo

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Anthony Wanger is the President and Founder of i/o Data Centers. He directs the company’s strategic affairs, handles acquisition activities, and oversees the company’s marketing, HR and legal functions.

The transition from physical, “offline” processes to digital, online processes is referred to as digitization or dematerialization. Processes that are digitized produce less carbon emissions than their analog counterparts. Data centers provide the infrastructure that enables this digitization to occur, serving as the foundation for the energy efficient enterprise.

Over the past 20 years there have been hundreds, if not thousands, of offline processes that have been digitized – everything from software distribution to financial transactions to medical record keeping. The combined effect of all of these digital processes is a macro-scale reduction in the overall use of materials and a more efficient distribution of the materials.

With the advent of the commercial Internet in the 1990s, companies have improved how they interact with their customers, partners and employees. Prior to the World Wide Web and email, businesses and government transacted in mostly inefficient and unconnected ways. For example, in order to pay a bill, a buyer would send a paper-based check by mail, which would be delivered to the recipient by way of a network of carbon-emitting postal vehicles.

Today, bills can be paid online in a matter of minutes. By digitizing this offline process, the need for material (i.e. paper) to be created and transported has been eliminated. This in turn has resulted in a significant reduction in CO2 emissions.

The impact of dematerialization has been quantified by a number of prominent corporations and research institutions including Microsoft, Intel, Lawrence Berkley Labs and Stanford University.

• A recent paper by Dr. Jonathan Koomey, senior researcher for Lawrence Berkley Labs, studied the impact on CO2 emissions resulting from the purchase of music online as compared to the purchase of a compact disc at a music store. Their research shows that the process of purchasing music online can reduce CO2 emissions, on a conservative basis, between 40%-80%.
• A comparative carbon footprint study of Microsoft’s Office 2007 product suite found that the digital delivery of their product to customers reduced carbon emissions by 88%.
• According to NPG Group, Apple leads the U.S. with 25% of all music sold, surpassing both Wal-Mart and Amazon.com. Apple’s iTunes music service has materially changed the way music is purchased and in so doing has eliminated a substantial portion of the carbon footprint related to the offline distribution of music.

iTunes, software distribution, online bill payment and many other digital services are delivered by a complex array of IT systems including servers and telecommunications networks. These servers and networks are located in data centers. Data centers provide the infrastructure (i.e. power, cooling, network access) required by these digital services to function.

Most corporate data centers are built to accommodate the IT needs of a single business unit or department. Large, commercial-grade data centers leverage the economies of scale to reduce energy consumption. Instead of operating ten smaller data centers, an organization could consolidate their IT infrastructure into one or two large data centers and reduce the costs and energy associated with operating separate cooling, UPS, backup power and network access systems.

Modern data centers use the latest technologies and engineering best practices including variable frequency drives, light-emitting diodes (LED) fixtures, thermal energy storage, photovoltaic (PV) solar arrays, ultrasonic humidification and sealed cabinets. Collectively, these systems contribute to a significant reduction in energy consumption – especially during peak load periods.

Conclusion
By combining digitized processes with the economies of scale recognized at large, modern, commercial-grade data centers, today’s enterprise can materially reduce the energy it consumes and greatly improve its efficiency. As consumers, businesses and government look for more efficient ways to communicate and transact, dematerialization and the data center will provide the foundation for a more energy efficient enterprise.

Industry Perspectives is a new content channel at Data Center Knowledge highlighting thought leadership in the data center arena. See our guidelines and submission process for information on participating in Industry Perspectives.

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How Digitization Drives Energy Efficiency

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With the release of Google Public DNS, it appears that Google is making good on their earlier call to action for making the Web faster. In conjunction with that announcement several months ago, they launched the “Speed” site at Google Code with the headline “Let’s make the Web faster.” After setting up their DNS servers, which replaces the DNS servers from my ISP, I can confirm that my web browsing is indeed much zippier than before. So much so that it’s sort of shocking that ISP’s don’t seem to do much DNS optimization on their own – then again, why would they?

At first, this got me thinking about the self-serving aspects of Google Public DNS, in addition to Google’s other speed initiatives – which include Chrome, Chrome OS, and the announcement of the SPDY protocol. After all, these initiatives are aimed at more than just purely altruistic ends, they’re helping to make the Web a better platform for Google products. I quickly learned that we had already covered that material here on Pingdom’s blog, but the thought kept gnawing at me.

I decided at that point to take things a bit further. Of course Google wants to make the Web faster and more stable, but what will it all mean for the technology giant down the line? And how will their current projects evolve to take advantage of a better performing Web?

Looking ahead five years from now may not allow us to see the full extent of Google’s ambition, so I’ve decided to make a bit of a gamble. Based on the many chess pieces they’ve laid down since the launch of Gmail in 2004, along with a general sense of where today’s technology is headed, let’s jump forward ten years and imagine how things could end up for Google*.

*Assuming that we’re all still around after the Mayan calendar ends in 2012, Skynet remains fiction, and somehow the Large Hadron Collider doesn’t doom us all.

Google’s focus on speed will help bring us to a faster, lag-free Internet sooner

It probably won’t blow any minds to say that the Web will be significantly faster ten years from now. I’m not going to try and argue that Google Public DNS and the SPDY protocol will directly lead to a faster Internet, but Google’s increased focus on speed surely won’t be entirely in vain. Internet access speeds and infrastructure will naturally improve over time, but Google’s DNS service and Chrome browser are also making significantly faster speeds a reality today, and bringing to light the many inefficiencies we currently face on the Internet.

Chrome’s release made browser developers focus more heavily on Javascript performance, and also turned it into a hot topic among power users. Basically, it forced the competition to actually compete, and now improved Javascript performance figures are almost a requirement for developers to tout with every new browser version.

This is a pattern we’ll see repeated several times throughout this piece. It honestly doesn’t matter if Chrome becomes the top browser on the Web, or if its growth remains stagnant. Google made everyone step up their Javascript crunching game – and since that will make their apps faster across all browsers, Google wins no matter what.

Similarly, Google DNS has made more people aware of the issues with DNS resolution when left to ISPs, who haven’t really made DNS optimization a priority. Google DNS makes web browsing faster and safer, the only problem is that the process of changing DNS servers can be a little troublesome for general users (and of course, it introduces some new privacy concerns). The mere existence of Google Public DNS will make people aware of other DNS alternatives, like Open DNS, and ISPs may eventually be able to offer Google’s DNS optimizations on their own servers as an option to customers.

The Internet will be powerful enough to handle today’s offline applications

Many Internet users are already moving away from desktop applications and over to web applications, often without even realizing it. Few webmail users go through the trouble of configuring desktop client access anymore (unless they’re business users that really need Outlook), and I’ve seen many users make far more use of Google Docs than Microsoft Office in the past few years. You can even do some rudimentary audio and video editing using Aviary’s apps.

Ten years from now, we’ll be seeing even more powerful applications residing on the Web, and desktop apps will most likely be relegated to high-end media production and PC gaming. In addition to increased Internet speeds, we can attribute the future rise of better web apps to more robust web standards and plugins.

We’re already taking steps toward that today. Google recently announced that they’ll be moving away from Gears – their technology which allows for offline support, geolocation, and other robust desktop-like features for web applications – and will instead look toward the HTML 5 specification in the future since it supports many similar features.

It should be no surprise that HTML 5 mimics Gears so closely. In 2004, the specification was proposed by the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group, and one of the founding members, Ian Hickson, is also a web standards proponent who has been working for Google since 2005. The group also includes individuals from Mozilla and Apple. Before it was called HTML 5, they referred to their specification proposal as “Web Applications 1.0″. With features like built-in media playback, drag and drop support, and offline storage, it’s clear that HTML 5 is still being built with web applications in mind.

Gears was another example of Google pushing the Web in a direction that they wanted. Now, along with Mozilla and Apple, they’ll be helping to shape the very standards the Web is based on with HTML 5.

In ten years, we’ll likely be looking at HTML 6 or 7, and even more powerful plugins from the likes of Adobe and Microsoft. HTML 5 is making strides towards reducing our dependence on third-party plugins, but I don’t think their respective companies will allow Flash or Silverlight to die off too easily.

Internet access will be ubiquitous, free to many, and Google will help make it happen

Now here’s where things become a little more speculative. We’ve already established that a faster and more powerful Web will ultimately be good for Google, and that they’re trying to jump-start innovation when it comes to making that a reality. But what of actual access to the Web? I predict that over the next decade, Google will see a great deal of value in helping to make Internet access more widespread, dirt cheap, and possibly even free. Decently fast web access could very well be ubiquitous in first-world countries.

If a faster and more powerful Web is good for Google, then surely getting more eyes on the Web is in their best interest as well. Broadband adoption will undoubtedly increase on its own over the next decade, but Google could help by figuring out ways to bring Internet access for free to emerging markets like Africa and South America, and low-income users in cities. They could also help to push legislation that would make cheap nationwide broadband a reality in America.

Wave will be an integral part of collaborative communication on the Web

Currently, Google Wave is suffering from confusion and dismissal by many users, which is very similar to what Twitter faced a few years ago (and is still facing today). It’s something that occurs every time a new technology appears and the public doesn’t quite know what to make of it. Sometimes the technology just disappears into oblivion, but once in a while it ends up changing the way we live.

Having used Google Wave in several capacities, from planning podcast episodes, to brain storming this very article, I can understand the confusion. On the face of it, the service is just a glorified chat client with an email interface. Dig a little deeper though, and the true face of Wave quickly makes itself clear.

Real-time updating, threaded conversations, and the ability to play back updates all end up making Google Wave the best collaborative resource on the Web. It’s better than Google Docs for simultaneous collaboration because of the real-time updates (instead of the “whenever it feels like it” updating of Docs), and the threaded conversation allow for some order amidst the collaborative chaos. And to make even further sense of how the conversation evolved, the ability to play back edits is immensely useful.

Many have seemed to forget this, but when it was first announced, Google intended for anyone to be able to deploy their own Wave server. It’s a protocol, like any other, and individually deployed Wave servers will be able to interact with the greater community.

What does this mean in ten years? For one, we’ll quickly see Wave implemented across the board on Google’s services. Businesses and other organizations will adopt it for in-group collaboration. I’d even wager as far to say that anyone who has an email account will have access to Wave. Wave’s real-time updating features will also see widespread use among mobile devices.

Android will have won the mobile platform wars

Yeah, I said it. Apple’s current lead in the smartphone space won’t last for long once Android finally gathers some steam. Android’s victory will be in sheer number of devices, as well as the ability to hit price points that Apple would never dare. Top-end Android phones will continue to compete with Apple’s iPhone successors, but Android will take Nokia’s place in ruling the dirt-cheap and free phone segment.

Not everyone needs a fancy smartphone with a huge screen and a fast processor, and the low-end Android phones will cater to that market. Of course, in a decade even the low-end phones will probably blow us away, but I think we’ll begin seeing cheap Android phones within the next few years. Then there’s also the speculation about the data-only VOIP Google phone, which could radically change the landscape for phone service.

In the end, having the fastest hardware, and the most apps in their online store (although that won’t last for long either), won’t be enough to keep Apple on top. That is, unless they come up with a radically cheap phone of their own. The fact that Android is free, customizable for handset makers, and deployable on a wide variety of mobile hardware, makes its mobile takeover more than just speculation. It’s inevitable.

Google Search will be able to find anything instantly – a harbinger of the Technological Singularity?

Short of reading minds, there will be nothing that touches the Web left that Google’s search engine can’t tackle. Just today they announced how they’re integrating real-time search results, using their secret sauce relevancy engine. Google Fellow Amit Singhal’s also mentioned the following, which seems especially prescient for this article, “Light can travel around the world in 1/10th of a second, and we won’t rest until the speed of light is the only barrier to getting good search results to you.”

While I’m not sure the laws of physics will ever allow that to be possible (unless everything between you and Google was pure fiber optic cabling), it’s nice to see that they’re always looking for that next milestone.

Relevancy will become increasingly important to Google as they have more and more information to deal with. Their problem won’t be gathering all the data, it’ll be making sense of it. It looks like they’ve already gotten a handle on how to implement Twitter, Facebook, and the like – it’ll be interesting to see how they tackle the rest of the upcoming deluge.

The increasing powers of Google Search will also be of great interest to Sci-Fi fans like myself a decade from now. Futurist types like Bill Joy and Ray Kurzweil have long predicted a point where artificial intelligence becomes self-improving, at which point they will quickly surpass human intelligence. Who knows what sort of tricks Google will employ down the line to stay ahead in the search engine game, but be wary if your search queries ever start seeming too smart.

But of course, the moment you realize that Google Search has become sentient, it’s already too late.

Wrapping up

While the past decade has in many ways been ruled by Apple and their many instances of redefining the technological landscape, I predict that the next ten years will be Google’s reign. They’re now more than a young search engine startup. Google is a technological powerhouse that’s reshaping the Internet, the way we use it, and our overall relationship with technology.

Special thanks to my friends Carl Angiolillo and Dwayne De Freitas for their help with brainstorming this article.

Photo credit: Cheetah by Jason Bechtel.

About the author:
Devindra Hardawar is a tech/film blogger and podcast host. You can find him writing at the Far Side of Tech and Slashfilm.

Original post:
What the Google Web will look like in 10 years

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Here’s a roundup of some of some of this week’s headlines from the data center and hosting industry:

• Private clouds from Cisco and Savvis.  Savvis (SVVS) and Cisco (CSCO) announced an expanded relationship Monday that will focus on the development of private clouds for the enterprise. Formerly dubbed Project Spirit, the Savvis Symphony private cloud platform will integrate the Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS). This new platform will power the industry’s first enterprise-class Virtual Private Data Center (VPDC) with multi-tiered security and quality of service capabilities.  Savvis learned the benefits of the Cisco UCS solution early as they worked with Cisco to develop a reference architecture that will enable enterprise customers to take advantage of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) benefits available in Savvis Symphony.
• Axxana Enterprise Data Recorder to be available through EMC Select. Data protection startup Axxana announced that its Phoenix System RP Enterprise Data Recorder will be available in January 2010 through EMC Select. The Phoenix System RP is a black box solution that was developed in cooperation with EMC’s RecoverPoint and delivers asynchronous data protection over any distance. ”Axxana’s Phoenix System will allow customers using RecoverPoint and CLARiiON networked storage to utilize replication over any distance, while maintaining the ability to recover data without data loss,” said Matt Mainstruck, manager of EMC SelectLast month Axxana secured $9 million in series B funding, led by Israel based Carmel Ventures.
• Enomaly launches cloud service provider edition. Cloud computing provider Enomaly announced the launch of 10 new global cloud computing service providers who have standardized and are powered by Enomaly’s Elastic Computing Platform (ECP), Service Provider Edition.  Called a “cloud in a box” solution for service providers, the ECP service provider edition is designed for carriers and hosting providers looking to build a line of business offering Infrastructure-on-Demand or Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) to customers.  The platform delivers a self-service dashboard and web-based API to manage virtual servers in whatever quantity needed.  Platform features include a multi-tenant, carrier class cloud platform with support for KVM, Xen and VMware hypervisors, detailed resource metering and accounting, tiered classes of service, a hard quota system and easy integration with back-office provisioning and billing systems.
• ColoHouse completes SAS70 audit. Miami data center and colocation provider announced completion of a SAS70 audit.  The audit focused on control environment, risk assessment, monitoring, control activities and information and communication systems. ”Obtaining our SAS 70 certification allows ColoHouse customers to rest easy knowing that we are following through on our commitment to provide the very best in Miami Data Center and Miami Colocation services, with a 3rd party validation to ensure our customers ultra secure access with a 100% uptime guarantee,” said Chief Operating Officer Alan P. Sabourin.

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Roundup: Savvis, Axxana, Enomaly, ColoHouse

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At the Data Center Jobs Board, we have a new job listing from Speakeasy, which is seeking a Data Center Engineer. This position will have responsibility for daily ticket and support requests, server, network, storage, and backup systems troubleshooting, and managing customer requests for the company’s Managed Services division. Click here for more information or to apply.

Are you hiring for your data center? You can list your company’s job openings on the Data Center Jobs Board, and also track new openings via our RSS feed.

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Data Center Jobs: Speakeasy

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