This is interesting … for US$100,600 per machine (White Goat), you will be able to take shredded office papers and turn them into a 40-sheet roll of toilet paper in 30 minutes. Here, have a look (and be amused) >
Archive for the ‘Emerging trends’ Category
White Goat?
Sunday, February 7th, 2010High Performance at Massive Scale: Lessons learned at Facebook
Thursday, January 7th, 2010Jeff Rothschild, VP for Technology at Facebook, shared some detailed insights into Facebook architecture. Over the past few years, Facebook has grown into one of the largest sites on the Internet today serving over 200 billion pages per month and with more than 300 million users. The nature of social data makes engineering a site for this level of scale a particularly challenging proposition. In this presentation, Jeff discussed the aspects of social data that present challenges for scalability and the core architectural components and design principles that Facebook has used to address these challenges. He also discussed emerging technologies that offer new opportunities for building cost-effective high performance web architectures.
Understanding Data Deduplication
Thursday, November 12th, 2009As we look at the many ways to improve storage utilization, data deduplication often pops up as a potential technique. Data deduplication, or sometimes referred to as “intelligent compression” or “single-instance storage”, is a method of reducing storage needs by eliminating redundant data. Deduplication is quite similar to data compression, but it looks for repeating sequence of very large chunks of data across very large comparison windows. Long sequences are compared to the history of other such sequences, and where matched, only one unique instance of the data sequence is actually retained on storage media. Redundant data is replaced with a pointer to that first unique data sequence copy. 
For example, a typical email system might contain 300 instances of the same two megabyte (2 MB) file attachment. If the email platform is backed up or archived, all 300 instances are saved, requiring 600 MB storage space. With data deduplication, only one instance of the attachment is actually stored; each subsequent instance is just referenced back to the one saved copy. In this example, a 600 MB storage demand could be reduced to just 2 MB. Imagine the huge economic benefits! Of course, in a storage system, this is all hidden from users and applications, so the whole file is readable after having been written.
Networking for next-generation Data Centers
Thursday, September 17th, 2009When we think about designing and building a new data center in today’s terms, it is not a simple task anymore. Data center facilities are large, capital-intensive fixed assets and requires enormous amount of thought process in it as designing such facility is fraught with risks and cost. Just like building a home, once you get the architecture and foundation completed, whatever shape and form of the house, you will have to live with it for the next 10 to 20 years; For a data center, once you get the architecture right, you create an asset that will facilitate the rapid launch of your new technologies which will give your business that competitive edge.
One of the reasons why it is so difficult to design a data center is the mismatch of the planning horizons. Data center architects are pushed to design and plan for a data center that will last for at least 20 years. However, IT and technology innovation cycle moves at a much faster pace. So, the mismatch here is that we need to design a facility to support future technologies for 20 years, but our insight into the direction of technology is probably only on the horizon of next two or three years. (more…)
The things we put in Containers
Wednesday, September 16th, 2009I chanced upon this scene (below) on the way out for lunch over the weekend. While the bank branch was under renovation, they placed a few containers outside and created a make-shift containerized temporary banking center outside. Innovative use of containers.
Actually, there are many many ways to make use of containers. Currently, approximately 90% of all non-bulk cargo worldwide are moved by containers stacked on transport ships. Although ISO standardized containers into five common standard lengths, 20-ft (6.1 m), 40-ft (12.2 m), 45-ft (13.7 m), 48-ft (14.6 m), and 53-ft (16.2 m), we usually hear of just the 20-ft and 40-ft versions.
One of the many creative way of using a 20-ft standard sized container is to turn it into a compact data center facility. (more…)
Prosumerism
Tuesday, September 8th, 2009
I attended the CIO Forum Asia 2009 at the Grand Hyatt, Singapore, today. The recurring messages from the presenters were about emerging trends such as increasingly high adoption of mobility / mobile computing platform, increasingly high adoption of Internet computing, social networking/community, distributed co-creation, mashups, use of technologies to drive down costs (e.g. unified communications, collaboration, virtualization, optimized IT management, etc.), and use of CRM and Business Intelligence to drive profitability and provide better business insights. Nothing new.
But one interesting concept was of particular interest to me. That is prosumerism. Edward Tan (c/o McKinsey) have explained this as a way or process to empower your customers to get them involved in the innovation and communication around the products and services they used. Hence, the term prosumer = producer + consumer.
