Servers

Overheard: The secret to Wikipedia is Squid?

“Down time used to be our most profitable product.” Domas Mituzas, as quoted in A Look Inside Wikipedia’s Infrastructure

Domas Mituzas works as a MySQL support engineer for Sun Microsystems in his “day job.” He says that Wikipedia has 200 application servers, 20 database servers and 70 servers dedicated Squid cache servers.

Guess we  need to define Squid!

Overheard: Top 10 ways to kill your server

Scalent Systems builds software that can take 1 or 1000 machines “From Dead Bare Metal to Live, Connected Servers in 5 Minutes or Less”. But we were sitting around on April Fools’ day thinking about how many ways we’ve heard of hardware dying… and we came up with our own interpretation.

Overheard: Mommy, why does Microsoft want us to buy a server?

This children’s book parody is a viral promotion for the Windows Home Server campaign. The author, Tom O’Connor, and his PhD are bogus. The small print on the title page explains that he’s made up. Whoever did write this deserves credit, IMHO. Very clever. Yes, that’s me reading the book.

The campaign is indicative of unusual creative approaches by big advertisers as they seek to break through in cluttered categories like technology. Among the most popular are so-called viral campaigns, so named because they are intended to be passed from one computer user to another with an endorsement implied by such personal sharing.

Stuart Elliot, What Next, Having the Office Christmas Party at Home?

Overheard: Open source inspires strange bedfellows

“If you want proof that open source is turning the world on its head, look no further than this announcement that Dell will be distributing Solaris on select Dell PowerEdge servers.” Matt Asay, The gods must be crazy: Dell and Sun link up

Overheard: Google’s first production server

‘…with the hair pulled back, revealing a rack of cheap networked PCs, circa 1999.’ jurvetson’s photos, flickr

Jurvetson writes: Each level has a couple of PC boards slammed in there, partially overlapping. This approach reflects a presumption of rapid obsolescence of cheap hardware, which would not need to be repaired. Several of the PCs never worked, and the system design optimized around multiple computer failures.

Here’s another photo from the Computer History Museum.

Overheard: Your first Web server

It was nearly 10 years ago (mid 1996) that I first put my own web server on the Internet. Back in college, I managed to convince one of the staff to give my personal computer a static IP address so that I could run a web server. Jeremy Zawodny, You Never Forget Your First Web Server

Overheard: Blade servers, those hot little power suckers, not a GMOOT item

Blade server adoption has been discussed for a number of years now, but the form factor hasn’t been embraced in the way it was initially expected. One of the main reasons is that they are often referred to as “hot little power-suckers.” Thoughtput, Bring Blades Back From The Future

GMOOT = get me one of those 

For most, the tried and trusted 1U and 2U rack mounted servers have been reliable and familiar workhorses, dramatically reducing the urgency of blade adoption.