Since I started on the topic of consolidation and virtualization, here’s my take on server virtualization and the 8 things you should be aware of: (more…)
Posts Tagged ‘Architecture’
8 things you should know about Server Virtualization
Wednesday, February 10th, 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.
Cityscape and Data Center floor
Friday, October 16th, 2009It has been almost four days since I last blogged. Have been busy with a client in Tokyo.
This photo is a view from my hotel room at Shibuya. On the top left, you can see Tokyo tower at a distant away.
Look carefully at the picture and you’ll see that in general, there are buildings which are 10 stories high, in the middle of smaller buildings and there are occasionally a few which are 20 or more stories high. And here I am, looking out of my hotel room window, on the 29th storey. This is exactly the same state that we most likely will observe in a typical data center floor. There will be racks with highly densed equipment, consuming upwards of 15kW or more power, and right next to it, might be a patch panel rack with a few layer 2 switches, which is lower density. Each row of equipment racks and each individual rack will have varying composition of density.
An Elephant called Hadoop
Thursday, October 1st, 2009
One of the technology that is often being evaluated for HPC (High Performance Computing) or Cloud infrastructure is named after a stuffed elephant toy called Hadoop.
Hadoop is actually a framework for distributing data and running applications across a large cluster of servers built on commodity hardware. Today, I’m going to put away my service management, operations, facility hats and put on my old software hat to tell you a little story about this elephant and explain what Hadoop framework is composed of (in a layman’s terms).
Monitoring Operational health in a Virtualized Environment
Thursday, September 24th, 2009Virtualization technologies are becoming more advanced today and their adoption are growing. Increasingly, IT services are being delivered using virtualization technologies to derive higher cost efficiency and optimization. In the past, x86 compute hardware were designed to run a single operating system and a single application workload. As IT begins to realize that their compute assets are under-utilized and there are beginning to have so many of these under-utilized compute assets in their data center, they begin to explore using virtualization technologies to run multiple independent operating systems images (or virtual machines or VM) on each physical compute hardware. This allows sharing of resources on a single physical compute hardware with multiple environment. Not only that, you could have different virtual machines running different operating systems and multiple applications on the same physical compute hardware.
What is “Architecture”?
Sunday, September 6th, 2009The definition of an architecture used in ANSI/IEEE Std 1471-2000 is:
“The fundamental organization of a system, embodied in its components, their relationships to each other and the environment, and the principles governing its design and evolution.”
At present, TOGAF, which stands for The Open Group Architecture Framework, embraces but does not strictly adhere to ANSI/IEEE Std 1471-2000 terminology. By TOGAF’s definition, the term “architecture” has two meanings depending upon its contextual usage:
- A formal description of a system, or a detailed plan of the system at component level to guide its implementation
- The structure of components, their inter-relationships, and the principles and guidelines governing their design and evolution over time.
