Sunday 14 March 2010
Yahoo! like most companies operating mainly in the online space; has a big dependence on data centers which are far from cheap to run. With that in mind the company has announced a new data center project that it claims is, “one of the greenest, most energy-efficient data centers in the world”. If you listen to the details you can see why that may actually be true. The new data center will be located in Lockport, New York with the bulk of the energy it requires to run coming from the huge renewable energy source that is the Niagara Falls. The hydroelectric power is put to good use too as the construction will not require the use of air conditioning meaning 90% of the power goes to the servers. More typical data centers only use around 50% of the power for the servers.
Being able to run a data center without air conditioning meant thinking about the design of the building a bit differently. The structure will be called the Yahoo! Computing Coup because it looks like a building chickens would live in. The roof will go to a high point and the walls are louvered allowing the cooling to occur 100% through outside air. As well as the announcement of a new data center Yahoo! also outlined plans to reduce the overall carbon footprint of the company by 40% by 2014. Yahoo! aims to achieve such a significant drop mainly through improvements to its existing data centers, but also by rethinking how to utilize servers more efficiently, seeking out clean energy to use, and taking advantage of cloud computing where possible.
The confidential information of the Internet goliaths has been exposed once again. This time, Twitter.com has fallen victim. Hundreds of corporate e-mails, financial projections, private meeting notes and other sensitive data became available to a hacker, who then sent his ill-gotten gains to TechCrunch.com which published most of the information. Web sites that handle millions of users daily should learn from this privacy snafu. In reality, there is no such thing as Internet security. Other big names such as Yahoo and Google have fallen victim to the false word “security.” These companies have become incapable of securing sensitive data. Web security is a two-way street. Hackers have begun to target Web sites with weak security, find passwords, and then use them on the more secure sites. While education to the average end-user is important, companies have equal responsibility in today’s new cloud-computing environment.
But is it the technology industry’s fault? Or should we fault the broken model of security in the concept of password protection? In the Twitter case, the hacker gained access simply by cracking an employee’s password stored offsite on a GoogleDocs document. GoogleDocs is part of a new revolution in the computing world, dubbed cloud computing. Cloud computing programs are like traditional applications but they store data on an outside server, making it available anytime. Strong passwords are a necessity with cloud computing applications such as GoogleDocs and Gmail because they are all linked to a central account. If that account has a weak password, the information within it is highly vulnerable.
What we need is a nuts and bolts, sound-proofed room, gathering of the minds and Linux thought leaders to discuss Linux, its current state, its legal standing and its future as an operating system. I’m not talking about a nice little get together with keynote speakers with high-powered, 10,000 foot views of where Linux is and where it’s going. And I’m not talking about vendor booths touting the latest and greatest Linux toys or big blowout parties from a spectacle-making platinum sponsor.
What we need is a nuts and bolts, sound-proofed room, gathering of the minds and Linux thought leaders to discuss Linux, its current state, its legal standing and its future as an operating system. It’s time to get serious. It’s time to put aside our petty differences with the likes of Microsoft and Apple and just take care of business–the business of producing an operating system. It’s time to focus on the future.
We need key players and contributors from Google, Yahoo, Red Hat, Novell, Debian, Ubuntu, The Linux Foundation, Slackware, CentOS, Oracle, IBM, HP, Intel, AMD, VMware and Citrix to come together and hash out a grand plan for this once niche operating system that’s grown up into the enterprise-level beast that has changed the world.
Now held three times a year - in New York, Prague, and Santa Clara - the Cloud Computing Conference & Expo series is the fastest-growing Enterprise IT event, devoted to every aspect of delivering massively scalable enterprise IT as a service. The event is co-located with our 7th International Virtualization Conference & Expo. Yahoo! is running the largest Hadoop clusters in the world - 25K+ servers, analyzing billions of Web pages, multiple petabytes of storage and billions of records per day. The Yahoo! Distribution of Hadoop is a publicly available source release of Hadoop as it’s tested and deployed at Yahoo!’s massive clusters.
This session will explain what the distribution is, why Yahoo! is sharing its investment in testing Hadoop, and how it benefits the larger cloud ecosystem. It will cover major use-cases for Hadoop @ Yahoo! and provide a glance into the exciting plans moving forward around Hadoop and related open source technologies. YS-CON Events announced today that Eric Baldeschwieler, VP Hadoop Software Development at Yahoo!, will be presenting at SYS-CON’s 4th International Cloud Computing Conference & Expo (http://cloudcomputingexpo.com) in Santa Clara, CA
Yahoo! is bringing large-scale supercomputing to the academic research community through its newly launched M45 project. Named after a well-known open star cluster, M45 is a 4,000-processor supercomputer that’s one of the fifty most powerful systems in the world. The goal of the project: help academic researchers tackle some of the most complicated computing tasks known to humanity. The media has showered attention on the M45 project. It has been featured in Scientific American, Business Week, and ZDNet, among other outlets.
Carnegie Mellon University will be the first academic institution to benefit from the computing cluster, which boasts 3 terabytes of memory, 1.5 petabytes of storage, and a peak performance of more than 27 trillion calculations per second. To bring this massive raw computing power to users’ fingertips, the system runs a suite of open-source distributed computing software. The software features a fault-tolerant, distributed storage and computing platform called Hadoop, coupled with a user-friendly parallel programming environment called Pig.
HP, Intel Corporation and Yahoo! Inc. announced today the creation of a global, multi-data center, open source test bed for the advancement of cloud computing research and education. The goal of the initiative is to promote open collaboration among industry, academia and governments by removing the financial and logistical barriers to research in data-intensive, Internet-scale computing. The HP, Intel and Yahoo! Cloud Computing Test Bed will provide a globally distributed, Internet-scale testing environment designed to encourage research on the software, data center management and hardware issues associated with cloud computing at a larger scale than ever before. The initiative will also support research of cloud applications and services.
HP, Intel and Yahoo! have partnered with the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA), the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) in Germany to form the research initiative. The partnership with Illinois also includes the National Science Foundation. Intel is a leading provider of platform technologies, including processors, chipsets, networking and SSD (solid state drives), for cloud computing data centers. Current platform features such as Data Center Management Interface (DCMI), Node Manager (NM) and virtualization have been designed to improve the manageability and energy efficiency of data centers. IDA will also leverage the test bed and its industry partnerships to train local students and professionals on the technologies and programs associated with cloud computing.
Yahoo!’s cloud confronts technical challenges at an almost unprecedented scale - requiring tens of petabytes of storage, tens of thousands of machines, and synchronization across multiple data centers around the globe. Shelton Shugar will describe how Yahoo! leverages Cloud Computing to improve agility and drive
innovation in his keynote at SYS-CON’s upcoming 4th International Cloud Computing Conference & Expo being held November 2-4 at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA. Yahoo! is developing and utilizing Internet-scale cloud computing services to improve Yahoo! consumer experience for half a million people around the world, speed the innovation of its developers, simplify operating environments and reduce costs.
Cloud Services store and deliver web content, personalize content for consumers, optimize Ad selection and placement, improve search results, provide scalable virtual computing environments, and process and store enormous amounts of data to improve consumer experiences and drive innovation. Shugar’s keynote will elaborate on how consumers benefit from Yahoo! Cloud Services and he will provide a technical overview. The keynote will set the tone for Day Two of the conference, which is the biggest Cloud-focused event of the year.
Speaking on Thursday (9 July), the Luxembourg commissioner also called for European companies to put an end to US dominance of clouds, which are now run by firms such as Google, IBM or Microsoft. Web-based services called ‘cloud computing’ are the medicine needed for our credit-squeezed economy,” Reding said at a conference organised by the Lisbon Council, a Brussels-based think tank. “They can make businesses more productive by shifting from fixed costs (i.e. hiring staff or buying PCs) to variable costs (i.e. you only pay for what you use),” she added.
According to the commissioner, European SMEs are still lagging behind in the use of “productivity-boosting ICT tools”. Electronic invoices, for instance, are used only by 9% of SMEs, according to Commission data. Reding estimated that migrating activities from offices to the online world could “create a million new jobs” in Europe and add 0.2% to annual GDP growth over the next five years.
However, in her view, this massive transition should be supported by EU services to provide an alternative to the control over clouds currently exercised by US companies. “Once again, the US has started to exploit a business model before Europe has managed to do so,” she lamented. US companies including Amazon, IBM, Yahoo!, Microsoft, Sun Microsystems and Google all provide cloud computing services. Google in particular is leading this innovation by providing its email users with a set of remote software and massive electronic storage space, which are expected to slow down demand for new computers and hard disks. Her strategy, despite fitting in nicely with the EU’s energy-saving drive (see EurActiv Links Dossier), might have unwanted negative side-effects on the security and privacy of cloud users if technology is not updated to address growing risks in the digital world.
The hiring is part of Microsoft’s plan to construct a cloud computing network complete with efficient data centers. Microsoft has acquired another all-star executive from one of its rivals. This time it’s former Yahoo vice president of operations Kevin Timmons, who will now take control of Microsoft’s Data Service organization within the company’s wider Global Foundation Services (GFS) division. Given that efficiency usually means wider profit margins, it’s understandable that Microsoft would want to lower its own PUE by hiring Timmons, who Microsoft general manager of infrastructure services Arne Josefsberg credited for placing great importance on the metric. Some say that the PUE could represent the next great battle front between Microsoft and search engine powerhouse Google.
Microsoft is in the middle of constructing data centers across the globe. It’s trying to increase its online service delivery capability, and increasing the efficiency of its data centers in San Antonio, Chicago, and even Dublin is considered critical towards this end. The PUE metric is used to measure energy efficiency it divides the total power used by a data center by the power consumed by its IT infrastructure. The lower the number, the better.
In a letter to Google, a group of 37 leading academics highlight the dangers linked to the growing use of so-called ‘cloud computing’ applications, which Google has championed via its Gmail service. n recent years, Google has broadened Gmail to include calendars, documents, photos and other software, which are stored on external servers rather than personal computers. Anyone who uses these services from a public connection - such as open wireless networks in coffee shops, libraries, and schools - faces a very real risk of data theft and snooping, even by unsophisticated attackers,” warns the letter, saying “tools to steal information are widely available on the Internet.
The letter was signed by academics in the fields of computer science, information security and privacy law from top EU and US universities, including Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The protocol encrypts the data transmitted, thus complicating their exploitation by hackers. Most email services such as Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo! mail use the unsecured protocol HTTP by default in order to speed up their service and improve users’ experience.
Academics acknowledge that Google does better than Yahoo!, which supports the most widely-used email service in the world - and Hotmail, Microsoft’s e-mail service, as neither of them offer users the possiblilty to switch to HTTPS. Online privacy ranks among the main concerns of EU Information Society Commissioner Viviane Reding, who is heading for a second five-year mandate in charge of the information society portfolio. The topic is likely to feature high on the agenda of today’s meeting with Larry Page.
