The Anti-Blog Blog: Everyday Engineering and Architecture

A good article over at Slashdot points out "Why IT Won't [or Can't] Power Down PCs"...

It's amazing that all this comes down to governance really... then again I am not really surprise because those organizations that's one of the large differences between organizations that exist at the lower end of the Maturity Model spectrum versus those that manage to break through the ceiling of the 2nd quartile... simply put, governance... the ability to see the larger picture and make effective decisions...

Sun has relesed the Sun Storage 7000 series of unified storage systems. The systems use a "hybrid storage pool" consisting of solid state disks, hard disk drives, and RAM to improve performance -- and it's super easy to administer, sexy even. This is quite frankly what should be used as the yardstick by which all other Sun admin interfaces and appliances are judged. Oh and if you're wondering why I have this tagged as "Eco Computing" well these little appliances use less electricity (smaller carbon foot print) than other options. (AWESOME!)

The Sun Storage 7110 has 8GB of RAM and provides 2TB of storage in a 2U form factor.

The Sun Storage 7210 provides up to 44TB of storage in a 4U form factor.

The Sun Storage 7410 scales up to 576TB with multiple expansion arrays.

In addition, Sun has released a simulator for the units as a VMWare virtual machine image. My only wish was that they had release the simulator using VirtualBox.

Interesting article in the NY Times...

John Doerr's Advice for Barack Obama: Hire Bill Joy

If you think OpenSource Software is interesting and good... check out the OpenSource Hardware!

There's a whole 'nother community out there called the OpenSPARC community and Sun just published our T2 core documentation out there. How neat is that? You can actually run a T2 core on an FGPA!

Along with the documentation for the T2 core and the T2 core on FGPA, a new book titled, OpenSPARC Internals, is now available for FREE. You can download the PDF yourself.

There's a lot of things happening in the world of SunRay's this past week or so.

There's a new version of the SunRay software with some interesting enhancements that was just released... http://blogs.sun.com/ontherecord/entry/new_version_of_sun_ray

And I found a good blog entry on SunRay bandwidth monitoring, something I think will be very useful to any SunRay admin...

http://blogs.sun.com/ThinkThin/entry/sun_ray_bandwidth_monitoring_scripts

Some pretty cool stuff in my opinion

Clay Baenziger's blog recently had an interesting post on whether you could actually save money using SunRay's in a lab environment vs. standalone PCs. He did an admirable job on working through the problem.

Here's one environment where every desktop is typically standardized, you want to treat them as appliances, you want some additional security and abstraction that the SunRay's provide... and so forth. Now add in additional power savings and you've got some added incentives.

It's amazing in this day and age that Universities still provide public compute labs using real PCs -- eg. they don't take advantage of the newer SunRay and Virtual Desktop (VDI) technology.

I have to commend the University of Maryland for being a leader in this arena. More info is on the VDI page, but they also presented at the regional EDUCAUSE meeting in January 2008.