Virtualization, Cloud, Infrastructure and all that stuff in-between

Interesting ideal posted here about a company build floating datacentres on old container ships. plenty of water for cooling and bio Diesel for power and land docked for power/connectivity.

Combined with a fluid infrastructure (no pun intended!) based virtualized systems  as proposed on blade watch, and you have a portable datacentre. in the event of disaster VMotion all your VMs to another ship and move, when you get there bring them back.

Also a further advantage would be with a global energy market in flux, it does give you the option to move your Data centre to an entirely different country which may have cheaper power rather than an investment in bricks and mortar which is hard-tied to the local power grid.

if you could get good ship to shore comms with high bandwidth you could maybe do away with the land tether for reasonable periods of time to keep running whilst you relocate, or even keep it outside a nations waters for legal reasons – like they tried at Sealand (and) in the English Channel, wow a real container load of pr0n 🙂

Not without practical problems, but Interesting

Speculation here.

This would be a great feature – I’ve been playing with Fusion on a Mac Book Pro recently – I would love this, it’s a great feature!

Proper support for ESX under VMWare would be great for those of us that have to do demo/dev work – even if it’s not supported for production along the same lines as the way MS provided initial support for SQL 2005 DB mirroring when it first came out.

Sorry for lack of posts – technically on Christmas holiday until the new year – but plenty on!

Very handy – quick visual reference to the various Exchange 2007 roles downloadable here

As the Exchange team blog mentions a printed copy is coming in TechNet magazine if you subscribe – as it’s got a lot of detail on it and needs to be printed big to be readable.

Interesting short article here on future interfaces using Infiniband to provide a flexible interface for hypervisor various services that require high-bandwidth (network, SAN, etc.).

very cool – you can buy Infiniband modules for HP c-class kit now, and this kind of interface standardisation can only be a good thing for flexibility, just cable and forget, any change becomes just a software re-configuration which in turn means less late nights in the datacentre which can only be a good thing!

credit for original link from Bladewatch

Robert Scoble gives the new Amazon Kindle a lashing.. here

My take; for me I can’t see the point of it.. wouldn’t Amazon be better investing in electronic books that can be read on PC’s or phones, PDA’s etc. – rather than building a limited device locked to one web service an iPhone/iPod touch or Asus Eee would have a good screen for this kind of use.

I’d rather spend a bit more on a decent multi-functional device rather than another bit of gadgetry to lug about with its related chargers etc., would guess most people that would use one of these are also likely to have at least a mobile phone or a laptop – Joe consumer is probably more likely to buy a paper book surely?

Scoble is normally pretty positive about most stuff (even if the rest of us think it’s a bit pointless), guess he really doesn’t like the Kindle!

Will be interesting to see when the hardware hackers manage to use it’s in-built cellular data services – which seem to be a flat rate as Jerry Pournelle points out

Interesting post over on Dugie’s blog about how much energy Microsoft have saved by switching to virtualization.

As they say would be good to see that in Watts, but I’ve been having the same discussion internally, data centre power is very limited here in the UK now and this is the only real solution in my book

Details here..

http://blog.windowsvirtualization.com/wss/microsoft-it-going-green-with-virtualization-today

Mark Wilson has a good post that translates the Microsoft-ese into English for the rest of us! here

Cool idea, using ground water to cool a bunch of Sun Blackbox datacentres inside an old coal mine.

But $400m USD to setup and it’s going to take 2 years – wasn’t the whole point of Blackbox to make this kind of thing quick to deploy?

article here

Good whitepaper from VMWare here explaining full & paravirtualization and hardware assist.

I have to say I like VMWare whitepapers, they always seem to be very well written, especially when compared to Microsoft’s white papers!

Obviously its a bit slanted towards VMWare with a bit of marketing in there too but gives a good expanation of the underlying concepts that tend to make peoples heads hurt

I’m a big believer in this, and yes it does depend on who you work for.. some employers expect the earth, and the skin off your back – however you always maintain the overall control… after all you’re not held there at gunpoint are you?*

If you don’t like it, walk… I do get bored of listening to the “grass is always greener on the other side” brigade – if there really was this nirvana where everything is perfect don’t you think everyone would be working over there instead of plugging away with you?

Anyways – Steve Richards posted a great article about how he manages his working day. Whilst he has some specific health issues that mean he has to strictly control his stress/work loads I think there’s a lot in there that everyone can apply to their working day.

Blog post here

*well ok, maybe some people are..