DataCenter

Overheard - Hot aisle / cold aisle containment

In any push air-conditioning arrangement, two components need the most amount of power: the compressor and the fan. In a hot aisle - cold aisle arrangement, the need for cold air is reduced drastically because it’s needed only for the servers and not the entire room. Smrutiranjan Das, Hot aisle - cold aisle design best practices for data centers

Today’s WhatIs.com Word of the Day is hot aisle - cold aisle contaiment.

Overheard - Master data management

“Master data management? We didn’t even know the words existed three months ago.” Jonathan G.R. Spaetzel, as quoted in Master data management adoption ‘broad but shallow’ across industries

Today’s WhatIs.com Word of the Day is master data management.

Overheard - Degaussing

“Outside of physical destruction, degaussing is a very reliable means for erasing backup tapes. The problem with basic degaussing is that there’s not a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ confirmation that the destruction has indeed taken place. So, ideally, both degaussing combined with physical destruction would be best to ensure nothing’s going to be recovered.” Kevin Beaver, Secure data destruction options for old backup tapes and disk

Today’s WhatIs.com Word of the Day is degaussing.

Overheard - Unified computing system

“A unified computing system brings certain service benefits.  What it really comes down to is one throat to choke.” Marc Staimer, Defining ‘unified computing systems’

Today’s WhatIs.com Word of the Day is unified computing system.

Overheard - DNA origami

“At IBM, scientists are investigating the possibility of using structures made of DNA strings as buildings blocks for future microchip designs. The structures, dubbed ‘DNA origami,’ self assemble onto lithographic templates which can lead to manufacturing of circuit features down to 22 nanometers.” MedGadget, IBM’s DNA Origami May Lead to New Computer Chip Design

Overheard - D2D2T (disk-to-disk-to-tape)

With D2D2T, you can transfer your data to disk at night at a much faster rate than to tape, and then migrate that data to tape, as you need to. Phil Pascarelli, D2D2T: is it quite right for you?

Unlike tape emulation, which replaces a tape drive with a virtual hard disk equivalent, D2D2T allows users to manage the storage of data closer to an Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) model. Users can specify the destination and duration of stored data as well as its replication and archive life. In addition, D2D2T offers an excellent data recovery option, allowing instant retrieval of lost or corrupted data. D2D2T is also able to address compliance legislation-based storage requirements.

Overheard - Energy Star 5.0

Only 25 percent of PCs could qualify for Energy Star 5.0 compliance. Andy Patrizio,  Dell Goes Green With Energy Star 5.0 Push

The changes from Energy Star 4.0 to 5.0 are in three main areas:

- minimum power supply efficiency was raised from 80 percent to 85 percent.

- the formulation of criteria changed to get a measure of annualized kilowatt hour power usage based on typical energy consumption metrics.

- the AC power conversion rises to 87 percent efficiency.

Overheard - Origins of Amazon Mechanical Turk

“Mechanical Turk began life as a service that Amazon itself needed…Amazon had millions of Web pages that described individual products, but it wanted to weed out the duplicate pages.” Jason Pontin, Artificial Intelligence, With Help From the Humans

Amazon makes money from Mechanical Turk by charging companies 10 percent of the price of a successfully completed HIT. For simple HITs that cost less than 1 cent, Amazon charges half a cent. ChaCha intends to make money the way most other search companies do: by charging advertisers for contextually relevant links and advertisements.

If you haven’t heard about ChaCha yet, it’s a free voice search service for mobile phones. It’s interesting that one of ChaCha’s investors is Bezos Expeditions, the personal investment firm of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.  According to marketing literature:

ChaCha, a free mobile answers service, allows users to call 1-800-2ChaCha™ or text questions to ChaCha (242242™) on mobile phones and receive answers within minutes. Its unique advertising solutions provide pay-for-performance opportunities for advertisers to precisely target and embed their messages within millions of text conversations.

Aha! So maybe Mechanical Turk isn’t so much about enterprise search — it’s really about mobile voice search!  Makes sense. Amazon would have a revenue stream by serving highly targeted ads along with the search results.

Overheard - Computer hardware visual reference

“This idea grew out of the need of a visual aid for customers while I worked at CompUSA.” Sonic84, Artist’s comments

Today we’re featuring Sonic84’s excellent fast reference chart for hardware.  He’s created an illustrated cheatsheet for RAM, hard drives, ports, slots and connectors.  Sonic told me he took most of the photos with a Canon Powershot A630. Sonic says “the thing has a great macro.”   When asked where he found all the hardware, he said:

“I collect old computers and for a while my local Goodwill had a lot of vintage stuff going through it. Combined with the techshop I worked in, I had a lot of diverse hardware at my disposal.  Sometimes I’d find hardware eBay.  I had to do that when I was searching for rare stuff like a PAC418 socket and 32Bit RAMBUS chip.”

Overheard - BIOS attack

“Until now, common wisdom has been that the large variety of BIOS implementations means it is unfeasible for attackers to create portable, widespread BIOS malware. Core’s researchers proved this wrong.” Sherri Davidoff, BIOS can become a source of malware

According to Core’s CTO, Ivan Arce, the researchers identified a specific section of BIOS code — a decompression routine — used in the majority of motherboards. BIOS code is stored compressed so that it takes up less space, and code must be decompressed before it runs. The decompression routine is exactly the same in many different motherboards. This gives attackers a single snippet of code that they can target in order to compromise many different BIOSes. The result? For the first time, researchers showed that BIOS-level malware can practically infect a wide variety of hardware.