Inside System Storage -- by Tony Pearson

I found some interesting posts and articles on Second Life that might be of interest.

[Harvard Offers Classes in Second Life]

Benjamin Duranske of Virtually Blind writes:

The Harvard Extension School is running a course focused on virtual law with a Second Life component. Rebecca Nesson (’Rebecca Berkman’ in Second Life) is teaching the class. The lectures, which look fascinating, are available to at-large participants on Berkman Island [SLURL: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Berkman/113/70/24].

You can attend the lectures in Second Life on Monday evenings from 8:00-10:00pm EST (5:00-7:00pm SL time). Videos of past lectures are linked on the course’s web site, where you can also find the syllabus, a wiki, and more.

[Oh, It has losers...]

Roo over at Eightbar writes:

The US version of The Office (which does an excellent job of being almost as funny as the BBC version) is no stranger to life online. It’s fun to spot Kevin, Meredith, Creed, Roy, Pam all on MySpace, and Dwight has a blog. This week they dipped into Second Life. The very same week as CSI:NY; It’s all getting very mainstream.

Of course, the Office’s treatment of SL was as tongue-in-cheek as you’d expect…

Dwight:“Second Life is not a game. It is a Multi User Virtual Environment. It doesn’t have points or scores or winners or losers.”

Jim:“Oh, it has losers.”

Steve Nelson at Clear Ink, the team behind bringing the office into SL for the episode, has [written about the project] and carefully lists the locations and clothing used.

I watched this episode and loved how they were able to blend it in seamlessly without looking out of placeor awkward reference.

[A Press Conference in Second Life]

Matt Hamblen of ComputerWorld writes:

Cisco Systems Inc. has been staging virtual meetings between developers and channel partners in Second Life for more than a year, but this invitation was a first for me. So a presentation announcing the winners of a networking technology innovation contest -- inside a Second Life simulation -- seemed like the place to be.

I'm probably an SL noob (for newbie) by most standards, but I've spent enough time there to know most of the ways to move and how to search out islands and events.

In all, I would say the Cisco event sparked my interest in the SL virtual meeting format, but my attention was focused more on making things in SL work smoothly than on the material presented.

technorati tags: Harvard, Eightbar, The+Office, Cisco, SecondLife, Second Life, SL, ComputerWorld, Matt Hamblen

Take for example this little Shell Oil[RealEnergy "Eureka"] video webisode. It's about eight minutes long, and helps explain a recent innovation Shellmade to help extract oil from awkward locations. Look for how the engineer was inspired by observing something his son did, that he in turn applied to innovatively solve this challenging problem.

Thinking differently has helped IBM innovate as well. Today, IBM announced it has shippped its 10,000th Storage Virtualization Engine, which coincidentally happens to correspond with today's GA date of SVC 4.2.1 release. From the [IBM Press Release]:

"IBM has been delivering virtualization capabilities for more than 40 years and today we unveil a milestone in the area of data storage virtualization with the shipment of 10,000 storage virtualization engines -- a fact no other storage company in the world can claim," said Kelly Beavers, Director, Storage Software, IBM. "By working across multiple platforms, IBM's storage virtualization helps to lower energy costs and unlocks the proprietary hold that other storage vendors have had on customers for years -- which IBM believes makes storage virtualization the killer application in the storage industry over the next decade."

SVC helps improve flexibility and responsiveness of IT infrastructures, such as creating a single virtual pool of information across the enterprise, enabling IT departments to respond more quickly to business needs and manage resources more flexibly. Benefits including increased resiliency, better application availability, simplified data migrations, and improved resource utilization can all be achieved through storage virtualization and these benefits are increased further when SVC is coupled with server virtualization such as through IBM System p LPARs and VMware ESX Server.

IBM's storage virtualization helps to unlock the proprietary hold that vendors such as EMC, HP and Hitachi have had on customers for years. With IBM SVC, customers can choose any combination of supported EMC, IBM, HP, Hitachi or other devices, virtualize them, and manage and deploy them easily and with greater flexibility and independence than ever before.

You can also read this[MarketWire] article.

I've posted before on IBM's [history of storage virtualization], but there are still a few folks not convinced.Dr. Kevin McIsaac has an article on ComputerWorld[Vendor Claims on Storage Virtualization] that warns against vendor hype. Dr. McIsaac feels"network-based storage virtualization results in a lowest common denominator view of the infrastructure, eliminating the value-added features of the array." This is really not a "network" issue, as this applies equally to Hitachi's USP-V directly cabled to external storage, no network required.IBM BarryW gives his take [Lowest Vendor Neutral Denominator] on his blog.

The concern that adding SVC (or USP-V) in front of other disk arrays adds complexity or eliminates the value-added features of older technologies, can be addressed simply by observing how similar problems were solved by the automobile industry.

• In 1911, the automobile industry introduced the "electric starter", eliminating the value-added features of the "hand crank".Instead of standing in front of the vehicle turning a hand crank over and over until the engine started, the driversat inside the vehicle and turned a small key or pressed a button, and let the "electric starter" do it. Yes, this meant thatcars were more complicated by adding a battery and electric system, but it also made cars easier to start and drive. Despite manufacturers arguing why their hand cranks were better than the hand cranks of other manufacturers, automobile models with hand cranks disappeared by 1920.

• In 1934, the automobile industry introduced the "automatic transmission" eliminating the value-added featuresof the "stick shift" and "clutch pedal". Before, people had to know when to shift gears manually, depending ontheir speed, engine RPM, and steepness of the hill they are driving on, pressing the clutch pedal at the same time, requiring skilled hand-foot coordination. Yes, cars weremore complicated with more equipment under the hood, but it made them easier and safer to drive, with one less thing to distract the driver. Surprisingly cars with automatic transmissions can be more energy-efficient, employing best practices when to automatically shift gears to optimize fuel economy.

  While you can still purchase automobiles with manual transmission, the newer hybrids and electric vehiclesnearly universally all have automatic transmission. Not everyone is skilled enough to drive a car with manual transmission, something to consider when you decide which car to take on a cross-country road trip if you want to share the driving responsibilities with the rest of your group.Not surprisingly, rental car companies like Hertz offer primarily cars with automatic transmission, both forincreased safety, and to broaden the reach to all driving skill levels.

• In 1946, the automobile industry introduced "power windows", eliminating the value-added features of the window-crankon each door to roll the window up or down. Now you just press or pull a lever or button, until the window reaches the desired position. Yes, this means that cars are yet again more complicated,with little motors inside each door panel, but it made them easier to use, with the added safety option to lock out children from rolling down the back windows.

  Some people actually choose manual windowsout of fear of driving their car into a lake or river, assuming a window-crank may make the difference in escaping the vehicle. It is these kinds of highly-unlikely scenarios that cause people to make bad purchase decisions. A betterapproach is to learn how to [escape from a sinking vehicle] properly, and keep the right "window-breaking" tools on hand. I keep a hammer for this purpose, and while you might think that Tucson has norivers or lakes to worry about, we do have flash floods, and I'll take knowledge-plus-hammer over window-crank any day.

So, when a company or industry innovates a new way of doing something, changing the way people think about the problem, it might take a while to take effect. SVC has been well-received in the marketplace, with thousands of delighted clients in production.

technorati tags: Shell, Oil, Eureka, video, webisode, IBM, storage, virtualization, engine, SVC, Kelly Beavers, EMC, HP, Hitachi, HDS, Kevin McIsaac, ComputerWorld, network-based, USP, USP-V, Hu Yoshida, BarryW, automobile, industry, electric starter, automatic transmission, power windows, escape, sinking, car, Tucson

With the [end of the PC era] upon us,IBM researchers John J. Barton, Shumin Zhai, and Steve B. Cousins from the Almaden Research Center wrote aresearch paper [Mobile Phones Will Become The Primary Personal Computing Devices], and USA Today reports that [Social networkers reach out more with cellphones]. Of course, telephones, including those attached to land lines, have always been used for social networking since the late 1800s, to arrange parties, reunions, and other get-togethers, but this article is referring to the new "Web 2.0" meaning of social networking, with services like Facebook, Flickr, MySpace and Twitter.

This is a major game-changer, forcing companies to rethink many of their strategies. For example,John Windsor, on The YouBlog asks the CBS Interactive division[What Business Are You In?]The answer is that CBS is shifting from a content focus, to an audience focus, looking to provide CBS television contentto an audience of cell phone users.ThinkBeta [Me, My Cell Phone and I] presents some interesting statistics. Google CEO Eric Schmidt estimates there are over 2.5 billion cell phones in use today, with 288 million units shipped alone in 3Q07.

That's quite a trend. As a leader in IT innovation, IBM tries to stay one step ahead of the industry, selling off mature technologies to other manufacturers, like typewriters, printers, and most recently laptops and desktop PCs, so that it can focus on newer technologies and market trends. For example, while many people might be aware that IBM designs and fabricates processor chips for all of the major game consoles (Microsoft's Xbox 360, Nitentendo's Wii, and Sony'sPlay Station 3), they might not know that IBM also makes chips for many cell phone manufacturers. IBM[POWER Architecture] blog writes about the IBM CMOS 7RF SOI semiconductor:

IBM has managed to integrate seven Radio Frequency (RF) front-end functions onto this single CMOS chip using silicon-on-insulator (SOI) technology. And this means? For cell phones, according to IBM foundry product director Ken Torino, "Our solution minimizes insertion loss and maximizes isolation which will prevent dropped calls even on the most inexpensive handsets." Currently, cell phone RF front-end functions are handled by five to seven chips and at least two of those are using expensive gallium arsenide (GaA) technologies. The CMOS 7RF SOI should not only reduce costs by eliminating the need for so many chips, but also trim the fat from materials expenditures since GaA tech is somewhat expensive. IBM predicts that manufacturers will first use the chip to reduce on-phone processors to two or three before making the leap to a single chip.

With all this demand, the world will need engineers to develop softwareapplications that work in this new environment. This plays into IBM's strength in the area of grid and supercomputing.IBM and Google announced they have jointly established an Internet-scale computing initiative to promote new software development methods that can help students and researchers address the challenges of Internet-scale applications. From[IBM Internet-scale computing] webpage:

Internet use and content has grown dramatically, fueled by global reach, mobile device access, and user-generated Web content, including large audio and video files. More of the world population is looking to the mobile Web to fulfill basic economic needs. To meet this challenge, Web developers need to adopt new methods to address significant applications such as search, social networking, collaborative innovation, virtual worlds and mobile commerce.

The University of Washington is the first to join the initiative. A small number of universities will also pilot the program, including Carnegie-Mellon University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University, the University of California at Berkeley, and the University of Maryland. In the future, the program will be expanded to include additional researchers, educators and scientists.

The heart of the project is a large cluster of several hundred computers (a combination of Google and IBM systems) that is planned to grow to more than 1,600 processors. Students will access the cluster through the Internet to test their parallel programming projects. The cluster is powered with open source software, including:

• Linux [Fedora]
• XEN systems virtualization (see [XenSource])
• [Hadoop] workload scheduling

The project includes a Web site to encourage collaboration among universities in the program, built with Web 2.0 technologies from the [IBM Innovation Factory].

For more viewpoints on this, read the [Google Press Release],or the reviews at [PC World,Cnet,GridsWatch,BBC News, eWeek,IT Jungle].

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USA Today had an article [America crazy about breadbox on wheels called Smart car]. This car weighs only 2400 pounds, gets a respectable 33 MPG City,and 40 MPG Highway, with a list price of $11,590 US dollars. These have been in Europe for some time now.The "Smart" name comes from combining the S from Swatch, the M from Mercedes and ART. The car was designed byNicholas Hayek, founder of the SWATCH wristwatch line, and manufactured by Daimler, who also makes Mercedes cars.

We have many communities here in Tucson that people drive street-legal golf carts. People don't realize but bothelectric and electric/gas hybrid golf carts have been around for a long time. Some of the nicer golf carts run forabout $7,000 US dollars, with a shelf on the back that can hold two sets of golf clubs, or groceries.Of course, you would never take a golf cart on the highway, so that is where the Smart car comes in, with a 10gallon tank, could easily get you from one major city to another.

Like golf carts, the Smart-for-Two model being sold in the US will hold only two people, which is perfect for manyAmerican families. The standard 4-person or 5-person sedan is too big for most DINKS (Dual Income, No Kids), and other families with kids often opt for the 7-person SUV instead.

It is good to see that energy consumption is finally getting the attention it deserves. IBM recently announced some exciting offerings to help data centers manage their energy consumption:

IBM Systems Director Active Energy Manager V3.1 [AEM]:

A new, key component of IBM's [Cool Blue portfolio] offering, AEM helps clients manage and even potentially lower energy costs. According to Gartner, insufficient power and excessive heat remain the greatest challenges in the data center. With AEM, IT managers can understand exact power/cooling costs, manage the efficiency of the current environment and reduce energy costs. AEM is the only energy management software tool that can provide clients with a single view of the actual power usage across multiple IBM platforms, including x86, blades, Power and storage systems, with plans to extend support to the mainframe.

IBM Usage and Accounting Manager Virtualization Edition V7.1 [UAV]for System p and System x:

UAV gives IT managers more information to manage data center costs. These powerful usage management tools are designed to accurately measure, analyze, and report resource utilization of virtualized/consolidated/shared resources. With UAV, IT managers can better manage costs and justify new systems by determining who is using how much of which resource; assessing the cost of an IT service or application; and accurately charging each user or department. Working with AEM capabilities, it will also allow tracking of energy consumption costs by server and by user. This level of reporting eliminates a key inhibitor to the adoption of virtualization and consolidation and further differentiates IBM systems.

IBM Tivoli Usage and Accounting Manager[UAM]:

This solution -- ideal for heterogenous IT shops -- serves as an accurate measurement tool underlying billing processes and SLA compliance. UAM provides usage-based accounting and charging for virtually any IT resources across the enterprise -- ranging from mainframes to virtualized servers to storage networks and more. The Usage and Accounting Manager Virtualization offerings seamlessly integrate into it.

Whether you are trying to reduce energy consumption in your data center, or in your transportation around town, these innovations can help you stay "green".

technorati tags: Smart Car, USAToday, golf cart, street legal, hybrid, MPG, green, energy, IBM Systems, Director, AEM, UAV, UAM, TUAM, SLA, management, virtualization, DINKS, SUV