The Word, Farm

With all due respect to developers, it bugs me when they subdivide farms and then include the word “farm” in the name of the new development. You know, like “Farm Hill Estates” or “The Orchards at Rustic Knoll Farm.”Call me a young urbanite, but there’s also something unsettling about the term “server farm.” Things, mainly plants and animals, grow on farms. They even breed and reproduce. If servers start growing, breeding and reproducing, we’re doomed.All this talk about farms and servers reminded me of Sun Microsystems. Not because plants on farms need the Sun to grow, but because Sun’s server virtualization and consolidation efforts are helping companies reduce the size of their data centers.Every acre not needed for a sprawling data center is one more acre for a farm. Or a housing tract named after one. For more information, please visit www.electronicdatagirl.com

What Would Rod Serling Think about a Modern Data Center?

Gotta wonder what good old Rod Serling would think if we resurrected him inside a modern data center. Surrounded by humming racks of Sun servers, he just might start narrating. I can hear him now, intoning ominously as the LEDs blinked all around, “I’m traveling through another dimension — a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind. A journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of my imagination. That’s a signpost up ahead …”Rod was great. He (of all people) came to mind when I was reading about Sun Solaris 10 virtualization. The people at Sun kinda asked for it when they decided a virtual environment created under Solaris 10 is a “Solaris Zone.” That’s a name right out of 50s-era, drive-in movie science fiction. Rod would love it!FWIW, a “Solaris Zone,” as defined by the dudes at Sun, is “A virtual environment that has security and application fault containment, and its own name space that can be tailored to the application that will run in it.” Put that on your signpost.  It’s right up ahead.  For more information, please visit www.electronicdatagirl.com

WSJ has really cool Google article

I was reading the Wall Street Journal today and came across an interesting articleabout Douglas Merrill, CIO of Google.  He’s got some cool stuff on security and scalability in the data center.  Take a look

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120578961450043169.html?mod=technology_featured_stories_hs