New Florence. New Renaissance.

Burning Platform Series on hot enterprise topics

Update - after Brian and I did the first 12 episodes, I have been inviting other market observers and practitioners to the series.

Brian Sommer and I go back nearly 30 years. We look at issues from very different perspectives but have a healthy respect for our differences. We have been called the "Penn and Teller" of Enterprise Technology because we tend to be both educational and entertaining about trends in software, outsourcing and many other issues that affect C level execs in enterprises.

We collaborate on a number of advisory projects and talk on a regular basis. During the COVID-19 pandemic, our conversations have moved to Zoom. We thought it would be fun to share some of our on-going conversations about enterprise technology. 

Notice on the cover of each episode how cool the man is, even in the face of the raging fire. That is a good metaphor for how we approach enterprise problems. We will share these on a regular basis, minus much of the snark, family talk and politics that creeps into our conversations. We expect to average 1-2 a week. It is a roughly 10-20 minute format. Below are links to each episode. 

Look forward to your feedback, and the opportunity to help you through complex enterprise issues. And do so with much needed humor in these crazy times!

1. Eulogy for On-Premise Apps 
2. Bumper Quarter 
3. School buses or RVs 
4. The WTF about WFH 
5. Analytics, new management science
6. The Post-Pandemic world of the CFO
7. The Post-Pandemic world of the CHRO
8. The Post-Pandemic world of the CIO
9. Software - Feast or Famine
10. Why does my software not have its own passport?
11. COVID morphing of digital transformations
12. Career advice for new tech world
13. Wall Street and Enterprise Software with guest Rob Kugel
14. Mediocre, Myopic or Merry? with guest Josh Greenbaum
15. Project Management in the age of COVID with guest Bonnie Tinder of Raven Intel
16. A Curmudgeon Christmas Greeting Card with guests Frank Scavo of Avasant and Dennis Howlett of Diginomica
17. Diversity Trends in Tech with guest Cindy Jutras of Mint Jutras
18. Services and other Industry solutions with guest Dave Hofferberth of SPI Research
19. Architectural Trends in Enterprise Software with guest Holger Mueller of Constellation Research 
20. Digital Acceleration with guest Tamas Hevizi of Automation Anywhere
21. Supply chain resilience and renewal with Bob Ferrari of Supply Chain Matters
22. Pandemic and Tech AR/PR with Sabrina Horn of Horn Strategy Consulting
23. A Christmas Carol with Sandy Lo of Zoho
24. Cloud Wars! with Bob Evans of Evans Strategic Communications
25. SAP Projects in Asia Pac with Paul Coetser of Big Blue Ventures
26. Business Continuity with Mark Smith of Ventana Research 
27. A review of RISE with SAP with Dennis Howlett of Diginomica
28. Exciting world of Citizen IT with Amit Zavery of Google Cloud
29. More on RISE with SAP with Geoff Scott of ASUG
30. Evolving expectations of CX with Mark Taylor of Cognizant Digital Experience
31. Developers, developers...with James Governor of Redmonk
32. Modern Decisioning with Bret Greenstein of Cognizant
33. Global Grand Challenges with Jyoti Banerjee of North Star Transition
34. Startup Communities with Brad Feld of Foundry Group and Ian Hathaway of Techstars
35. Entrepreneurial Trends with Brad Feld of Foundry Group and Ian Hathaway of Techstars
36. Relentless Amazon with Simon Gaster, author Behemoth, Amazon Rising
37. Amazon, automation and society with Simon Gaster, author Behemoth, Amazon Rising

GitHub's thousand year archive

GitHub, the software collaboration platform recently acquired by Microsoft, will store 6,000 software repositories in long-term storage.

The open-source software will be stored at Piql's data center in Svalbard, known as the Arctic World Archive. Instead of hard drives or tape, the company uses its own proprietary film which is designed to last for 1,000 years.

The selected collection includes the source code for the Linux and Android operating systems; the programming languages Python, Ruby, and Rust; web platforms Node, V8, React, and Angular; cryptocurrencies Bitcoin and Ethereum; AI tools TensorFlow and FastAI; and more. GitHub will store all active public repositories as of February 2, 2020.

Data Center Dynamics

 

 

 

 

50% of us live near the coast. Why doesn’t our data?

Project Natick seeks to understand the benefits and difficulties in deploying subsea datacenters worldwide. Phase two extends the research we accomplished in phase one by deploying a full-scale datacenter module in the North Sea, powered by renewable energy.

Microsoft

Facebook’s Open Compute tackles telecom infrastructure

I profiled Facebook’s Open Compute initiative as it launched its Prineville data center in the New Technology Elite. Now it is tackling the telecom infrastructure side

“To that end, we recently started working with a few partners on Open Packet DWDM — a packet transponder and open line transport system with open optical specifications that enable any interested party to contribute systems, components, or software. Today we’re excited to announce Voyager, a networking solution for Open Packet DWDM networks — and what we believe is the industry’s first “white box” transponder and routing solution. Our partners have helped us successfully test Voyager and begin to build an ecosystem around it. We plan to contribute the design to TIP via the Backhaul: Open Optical Packet Transport (OOPT) project group, with the aim of encouraging more open and programmable network architectures.”

Facebook

 

 

The Queen of Chaos

Sometimes this team makes Martians invade the earth. Sometimes they feign an earthquake or ecological disaster.

They strike their internal Google targets without warning.

This is Google’s renowned DiRT team, (Disaster Recovery Testing), led by director Kripa Krishnan, who has perfected the art of breaking Google over the past nine years.

Business Insider

The New Trading Floor

The security at NY4 bears this out. To get from the parking lot to a spot where you could touch one of the servers you’d have to go through five checkpoints. One of them is a so-called man trap with two automatic steel doors that never open at the same time. Your palm print is required twice in addition to your PIN code. A wall of video monitors captures every nook and cranny of the 338,000-square-foot building.

Once you’re in, the space is enveloped by a rush of white noise from the thousands of computer fans whirring away to keep the servers cool. To help maintain the temperature, the ceiling is 45 feet high, roughly four stories up. It’s barely visible—not just because of its height, but also thanks to all of the suspended trays of cables and cooling ducts running overhead. All this goes toward one statistic: Equinix says in its annual filing that it kept its facilities up and running 99.9999 percent of the time in 2015.

Bloomberg Markets

Submarine data center?

Microsoft says underwater data centers would be ideal in many ways. First, they can help reduce cooling costs and emissions from a regular data center by taking advantage of the lower surrounding temperatures for cooling, though the capsule doesn’t actually consume water for cooling.

An underwater capsule can also be built and deployed within 90 days. That’s a great turnaround time if your cloud service needs extra help during a major event like the Super Bowl, when tons of users want to access their data in a specific location. A Project Natick vessel could also be dropped off the coast of a disaster zone to enable faster access to data when it counts.

Finally, about half the world’s population lives within 124 miles (200 kilometers) of the ocean. Placing datacenters offshore brings them closer to more users, which in turn would make latency (the time it takes data to transfer from a server to your PC or smartphone) goes down dramatically.

PC World

CERN Science Heaven

Hundreds of millions of particle collisions take place every second, at the heart of LHC's detectors. The sensors generate about one petabyte of data every second, an amount no computing system in the world could be able to store if it was generated for any prolonged period.

Most of the data is discarded quickly, as sophisticated systems select what could be of interest for the scientists and filter out the clutter. Then, tens of thousands of processor cores go even further and choose just one percent of the remaining events - information which then gets stored and is later analyzed by physicists.

The datacenter can save 6GB of data per second at the peak rate of the LHC. However, this gigantic machine doesn't run 24/7. "We're expecting about 30 petabytes per year of LHC run two - that would represent something like 250 years of high-definition video," Frédéric Hemmer, IT department head, told ZDNet.

More sustainable data centers

Apple® today announced a €1.7 billion plan to build and operate two data centres in Europe, each powered by 100 percent renewable energy. The facilities, located in County Galway, Ireland (see artist impression below) and Denmark’s central Jutland, will power Apple’s online services including the iTunes Store®, App Store℠, iMessage®, Maps and Siri® for customers across Europe.

The two data centres, each measuring 166,000 square metres, are expected to begin operations in 2017 and include designs with additional benefits for their communities. For the project in Athenry, Ireland, Apple will recover land previously used for growing and harvesting non-native trees and restore native trees to Derrydonnell Forest. The project will also provide an outdoor education space for local schools, as well as a walking trail for the community.
In Viborg, Denmark, Apple will eliminate the need for additional generators by locating the data centre adjacent to one of Denmark’s largest electrical substations. The facility is also designed to capture excess heat from equipment inside the facility and conduct it into the district heating system to help warm homes in the neighboring community.

Apple PR

Photo Credit

More Facebook Data Center innovations

The Altoona (Iowa) facility is the first in Facebook’s fleet to feature a building-wide network fabric – an entirely new way to do intra-data center networking the company’s infrastructure engineers have devised.

The social network is moving away from the approach of arranging servers into multiple massive compute clusters within a building and interconnecting them with each other. Altoona has a single network fabric whose scalability is limited only by the building’s physical size and power capacity.

Data Center Knowledge