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Linux makes a lot of inroads against MS in the enterprise market..

I know this is the conventional wisdom around those parts, but it doesn't seem to be the case: here is an article that indicates the share of both Windows and Linux servers growing in businesses, while Unix usage dropped dramatically. And in related news, another recent article here shows IIS 6 making inroads against Apache. So Sun's decision does make economic sense.

It's been a long time since I went on a tour of several data centers to locate a new facility for our dot-com. I believe that 365 Main was a facility that does not use a battery UPS. Instead, they have engine-backed flywheel UPS system (see http://www.enterprisenetworksandservers.com/monthl y/art.php?2813 for a description). At the time, they have 10 2-megawatt generators on the roof in a N+2 configuration. The engines are kept heated and are spec'd to go from stop to engage-clutch/deliver-power in 3 seconds. The flywheel can deliver 11 seconds of power so they can fail through a couple of bad engines before running out of flywheel power. They periodidally do a 20-hour load test into a pair of 500,000 watt heat-sinks. Time will tell if this outage was a failure of design, failure of maintenance, or outright malfeasance. But it wasn't supposed to happen. They've got some 'splainin' to do.

As to diesel storage, use of diesel is widespread for emergency use everywhere from hospitals to emergency-services to hospitals. Those systems are run regularly - typically weekly. The use of biocides, stabilizers, and mobile fuel-scrubbing services, and extra filtration systems can maintain the fuel quality. Our colo currently maintains a 1-week fuel-supply and has multiple quick-refuel contracts in place. I can't imagine any colo having less than 24-48 hours in-the-tank with quick-refill on-call.

But one thing that is missing is cooling. Our colo has a typical contract that says something like blah-blah won't exceed 80F for more than 4 hours blah blah. OK, but a rack full of blade servers can crank out 15-20kW of heat load and a data center can heat up real quick without AC. By contract, 150F for 3.5 hours would be in-spec.

Why is this "10G" even news? 10 Gigabit (OC192) Has been around since at least 1999. In fact, engineers & scientists already have functioning proto-types of 100 Gigabit over fiber (basically DWDM - multiple colours of 10 Gigabit streams multiplexed).

The IEEE expects the standard to be ratified in mid 2008 for the fiber version & copper (CAT8?) to come out within a couple of years after that (late 2009 or 2010).

Siemens achieves 111 Gigabits over 2,400 kilometers
http://presszoom.com/story_127837.html

Bell & Lucent labs acheive 107 Gigabits over 2,000 kilometers
http://www.enterprisenetworksandservers.com/monthl y/art.php?2642

Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/100_gigabit_Ethernet

Those Internet2 people are just a tad behind... like 10 fold! If Internet2 = 10G, and Internet3 =100G, then really those Internet2 people should be working on Internet4 (Terabit baby!)!

Adeptus

...steadily dwindling market share...

http://enterprisenetworksandservers.com/monthly/ar t.php?3027

SGI still delivers high speed NUMA. The difference is the CPUs and the OS. Few other operating systems than Linux supports 1024 CPUs out of the package. Novell SLES 10 does support it on SGI altix.

http://www.enterprisenetworksandservers.com/monthl y/art.php?2495
"Leveraging its coveted high-performance computing (HPC) architecture to claim yet another world record, a Silicon Graphics Altix 4700 system has achieved a sustained memory bandwidth of 4.35 Terabytes (TB) per second in STREAM Triad benchmark tests.

The feat was achieved on an SGI Altix 4700 system powered by 1,024 Intel Itanium 2 processors running under a single copy of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 from Novell with SGI ProPack 5 for Linux. The configuration, which includes 4TB of system memory, is the largest single system image (SSI) attainable on a Linux OS system.

The world record was posted in late July on the STREAM Triad Top 20 page at www.cs.virginia.edu/ stream/ top20/ Bandwidth.html, after the results were achieved and validated June 1 on an SGI Altix 4700 system now installed at the Leibniz Computing Centre Munich (LRZ)."

According to About.com, it affects only a small % of discs. Of course, like all digital data, replication is essential to keeping eternal life (despite the best efforts of the MPAA to stop you ;) ). More about the overalarming cries of DVD rot from PC Magazine, Manifest Technologies, and Enterprise Networks and Servers.

Your 20 year old VHS tapes should have suffered significant quality loss by now. It doesn't have to be defective to go bad; VHS slowly goes bad on its own.

Ahem....Eolas?

What are you trying to say? Microsoft's lawyers demolished Eolas. Patents hardly ever get overturned (no matter how stupid they are), but Microsoft did it.

(Winning the lawsuit was possibly a tactical error by Microsoft. It might've been better for them to buy Eolas's patent for $5 billion, and then use it to cripple all non-InternetExplorer web browsers for 1-3 years)

When you take the fact that IBM has been obtained more patents than any other company for 11 years running and the fact they doubled earnings during their last quarter, they must be doing something right. Since they don't have to pay the Microsoft tax when selling Open Source, they get to keep even more of the pie (I would guess they are not passing _all_ of the Open Source savings on to customers). This "System, method and program product for software development" patent is hilarious, though. It sounds more like an attempt to patent a business relationship between IBM and the coders the wish to exploit.