Recently, we had a photographer come out to create an inside Google Street View of our HQ so our customers, friends and family – anyone, really – can get a virtual feel for what it is like to work at Rackspace. There’s a ton to see.
via Get An Inside Look At The Rackspace ‘Castle’ Via Google Street View – The Official Rackspace Blog.
The star of HP’s show, or at least the product with the biggest number, is the FlexFabric 12900 core switch, which can fit 768 10Gbit/s ports or 256 40Gbit/s ports. Cisco’s 18-slot Nexus 7018 claims to have the same 10Gbit/s density but only has cards to support 96 40Gbit/s ports.
via Light Reading – HP Calls Out Cisco With Data-Center Switches.
At first sight, the relatively low performance per core of ARM CPUs seems like a bad match for servers. The dominant CPU in the server market is without doubt Intel’s Xeon. The success of the Xeon family is largely rooted in its excellent single-threaded (or per core) performance at moderate power levels (70-95W). Combine this exceptional single-threaded performance with a decent core count and you get good performance in almost any kind of application. Economies of scale and the resulting price levels are also very important, but the server market has been more than willing to pay a little extra if the response times are lower and the energy bills moderate.
via AnandTech | Calxeda’s ARM server tested.
As usual another thorough review from Anandtech. Below is another interesting architectural tidbit.
Let’s start with a familiar block on the SoC (black): the external I/O controller. The chip has a SATA 2.0 controller capable of 3Gb/s, a General Purpose Media Controller (GPMC) providing SD and eMMC access, a PCIe controller, and an Ethernet controller providing up to 10Gbit speeds. PCIe connectivity cannot be used in this system, but Calxeda can make custom designs of the “motherboard” to let customers attach PCIe cards if requested.
The public cloud confirmed today by VMware marks the first time the company will become an IaaS provider itself, analysts said. Unlike platform-as-a-service, which puts the focus on providing simplified tools to application developers, IaaS clouds let customers (or require them to) manage the underlying infrastructure such as the operating system and virtualization tools.
via VMware targets rival “bookseller” Amazon with its own public cloud | Ars Technica.
Puppet Labs’ IT automation software enables system administrators to deliver the operational agility and efficiency of cloud computing at enterprise-class service levels, scaling from handfuls of nodes on-premise to tens of thousands in the cloud. Puppet powers thousands of companies, including Twitter, Yelp, eBay, Zynga, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, Google, Disney, Citrix, Oracle, and Viacom.
Janitor Monkey detects AWS instances, EBS volumes, EBS volume snapshots, and auto-scaling groups. Each of these resource types has distinctive rules for marking unused resources. For example, an EBS volume is marked as a cleanup candidate if it has not been attached to any instance for 30 days. Janitor Monkey determines whether a resource should be a cleanup candidate by applying a set of rules on it. If any of the rules determines that the resource is a cleanup candidate, Janitor Monkey marks the resource and schedules a time to clean it up.
Despite being in “the cloud,” Amazon Web Services has always required developers to know what they’re doing. Customers still have to manage a lot of the infrastructure even though they’re not monitoring physical servers and storage. But that doesn’t mean everything has to be a hassle, so Amazon simplifying something as important as disaster recovery is a big step in the right direction.
via Building Amazon cloud apps that span the world is now much easier | Ars Technica.
Overlay networks as proposed by companies such as Nicira Networks Inc. , now owned by VMware Inc. (NYSE: VMW), are “an important step, but what if you had a data center that had to serve 10,000 customers, and every customer had a complex topology? That’s the real world, and that’s not easy,” Alwan says.
It’s all run by a controller that’s centralized but also includes a federated piece distributed to each switch. The setup is similar to the way OpenFlow gets deployed, but the inner workings are very different (and no, OpenFlow itself isn’t supported yet). Plexxi uses algorithms and a global view of the network to decide how to configure the network.
In other words, rather than programming route tables, the controller looks at the needs of the workloads and calculates how the network ought to be getting used. Some of this can even happen automatically.