May 14, 2008

It's quiet, it's green, it's the rack o' my dreams

When I refer to my lab, I use the term loosely. It's a 10-by-10-foot working space whose smooth walls channel the sound from every device with a fan straight into my ears. I share that room with every server I use and test. Of these, an 8-core Xserve is the only box that stays on 24/7, and I wish I could say I've gotten used to the noise. I haven't. While the Xserve idles at a pleasant noise level, as soon as any computing load kicks in, the fans spin up. When they do, they find a frequency resonant with the part of my brain that tells me that if I value what's left of my hearing, it's time to leave the room. The necessity of working with rack servers that get louder with each generation has made noise the primary governor of my workflow. Of rack servers, Xserve is relatively quiet. Apple's design favors ergonomics, but this Xserve is configured with 8GB of RAM. For contrast, consider the four-socket, 16-core, 32GB 1U Barcelona rack server that AMD recently shipped to me. At idle, that machine is as loud as Xserve is at full tilt. My 16-core Xeon rack... more

TAGS: None

May 07, 2008

The Green Delay: A timely proposal for IT energy conservation

"I hope I'm dead before I'm 50." This was said in an entirely unemotional, matter-of-fact fashion by someone who had gotten a poorly timed, age-appropriate, red state public school treatment of both sides of the global warming debate. Is it, as was presented, more likely that natural cycles and the law of averages are to blame for melting glaciers and freakish weather? Either way, his lesson came one day before the horror in Myanmar. It awakened memories of Thailand and New Orleans. It put a different timbre to the voices decrying $120-per-barrel oil when the solution that seems so obvious to a kid--if you can't afford it, don't buy it--isn't on the table. This young man knows me, and he knows that I take as a point of pride that InfoWorld is uniquely outspoken on matters of green computing, and that my dedication to that cause predates InfoWorld's. When I write about it, I stay away from suggesting that there is any sort of "save the planet" global imperative that should drive IT toward consolidation and the purchase of more energy-efficient equipment. By pursuing energy-conscious policies, what a company conserves is capital. As energy prices inevitably rise, kilowatts, BTUs,... more

TAGS: General, IT

April 30, 2008

The view from Microsoft's Live Mesh and Apple's .Mac: Shared disks and remote desktop access, no VPN required

Apple's .Mac comes close to offering professionals secure shared data and remote desktop access without the hassle of VPN. Microsoft Live Mesh hopes to take it all the way. Old-schoolers will tell you that there are only two places your important data should live: on your meticulously secured network behind a paranoid firewall, or at Iron Mountain. One must heed the old schoolers, for they shall keep the bitemarks off your backside, but their advice must be tempered with modern reality. Having data live exclusively within your domain presents thorny operational problems when two or more people need to get at it. If you want to selectively share files with temporary staff, business partners, external software testers, or employees who are on the road, you've got to find a way to publish it with a combination of easy access and tight security. If you've shared business data that can't easily be placed in a shared Exchange folder by putting it in a password protected zip file and stuffing it in your Yahoo! Briefcase or its like, you'd hardly be the first. Nor would you be the first to stay on the phone with that remote user until they verified... more

TAGS: Microsoft, Microsoft Live Mesh

April 22, 2008

For server power measurement, there's only one shortcut

On this Earth Day, let us examine the criteria that IT brings to its purchases and arrange to make power efficiency a top priority. All it takes is the will, a little homework, and the embrace of the delusion that there's any fit and fair way to compare the power consumption of two similar pieces of equipment. [ Discover the techniques used by InfoWorld's 2008 Green 15 winners to make their IT more energy-efficient. ] Last December 27, SPEC announced the availability of its SPECpower benchmark. One would think that having the heaviest of the benchmarking heavyweights pour concrete on that most slippery of metrics would give us something to go by. InfoWorld has been waiting for its copy of SPECpower, which SPEC acknowledges is a first step, since January, and I have a guess as to the reason we're still waiting. Perhaps some members of SPEC, which is primarily a consortium of vendors, have encountered the same issue that I have: Power measurement is only 5 percent process. It is 110 percent policy. The total exceeding 100 is appropriate, because like the predator/moron mortgages in which all American taxpayers are now unwilling investors, power benchmarking creates a debt that... more

TAGS: Green benchmarks

April 16, 2008

Back to the Mac

Several months ago, I determined that my years-long fondness required reexamination. I quietly took a break from the Mac to get some perspective, to check out Vista, AMD, and Longhorn (Windows Server 2008) untainted by Apple's PR and uninfluenced by other journalists and bloggers. I elected to take a break from reviews of new Mac hardware, the occasion of which always piques my interest in Apple's platform. There were times when I felt I'd chosen the worst possible time for this hiatus. I ended up passing on MacBook Air, Time Capsule, Harpertown Mac Pro, and most painful of all, the new MacBook Pro. It was difficult seeing InfoWorld pick up reviews of these from sister publications, but I take my responsibility to readers very seriously. I can't very well counsel you on technology choices if I consider the field limited to one worthwhile player, especially when that player projects the image that it competes only with the generation of systems that preceded what's presently sold. I found enormous value in my time away from Mac. I made the kind of discoveries I used to make routinely before I took on the Mac as a specialty, and as I take... more

TAGS: AMD, Apple, Microsoft, Mobile apps, Software Development, iPhone

April 16, 2008

Corrections to "Back to the Mac"

I made a couple of statements in my recent "Ahead of the Curve" blog that Apple contacted me to correct. First, contrary to my claim that the iPhone SDK is the first time that Apple has released a public preview editions of Xcode in the past, Apple claims to have done so. Apple tells me that it is not incorporating FORTRAN into beta 3 of its iPhone SDK, a release that includes the newest stable build of the GNU Compiler Collection toolchain. MacOSForge lists FORTRAN as a default language in its distributions of gcc after v4.0, This accounted for my confusion. Note that while gcc 4.x will build for OS X, it is only supported informally by Apple, as are all Apple open source projects. My apologies for any inconvenience brought about by my incorrect information.... more

TAGS: Apple, Unix