Backblog—Charlie Bess |
Charles Bess has worked in the Information Technology industry for more than 27 years supporting a variety of large clients and industries. Starting as a semiconductor yield analysis engineer for General Motors, Charlie has performed a variety of formal and technical leadership roles throughout EDS. He is a licensed professional engineer and in 2002 was recognized as a Fellow within EDS for his focus on value delivery and innovation. In addition to these activities, Charlie has also worked as a public speaker, advisor to SMUs MBA program and supported engineering and computer science activities at Purdue University and University of North Texas. He’s been blogging on technology related topics since early 2003.First Wind-cooled Data Center
HP just opened the large 360,000 sq. ft. Wynyard data center. This Green Data Center project was underway at EDS before the HP purchase. It uses the continuously blowing cool North Sea air and a unique multilevel low pressure airflow design to minimize the cost of cooling.
"The air runs through a massive bank of modular filters to remove dust and other contaminants before it circulates in a massive cavity, called a plenum, below its data center halls.
The air is forced up though the floor and runs over the front of server racks before being exhausted. The system keeps the hall at a constant 24C (75.2F). When it is cold outside, some of the exhausted heat is recirculated with the outside air to maintain the right temperature."
The PUE for the data halls themselves is around 1.16. Some of the Green features of the data center can be seen in this video.
"Running at a full load, HP has calculated that the Wynyard facility has a 1.2 PUE, meaning that for every 1.2 watt of electricity used to power IT equipment, 1 watt is used for cooling and other facility needs. That makes it HP's most efficient data center"
PUE is being used by the EPA in the US to determine Energy Star ratings for data centers. Various cloud vendors are using PUE for comparison as well and HP's appears to shape up pretty well in that comparison.
Energy efficiency is not everything when it comes to data centers though like all modern data centers security is critical:
"Security is tight. Access cards and biometric details are needed to access halls. Server cabinets are locked, and the keys are only released if the particular engineer has permission encoded on an access card. The entry system to the data halls prevents two people from entering at the same time. The data center also has a high perimeter fence, reinforced walls and constant security."
Charlie Bess
The Next Big Thing blog
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Posted February 17, 2010 Category: General Green Tech 0 Comment(s) · del.icio.us · Digg it · Furl · reddit · Email |
A more organic approach to computer security
I was catching up on my reading the other day and I came across an article on using Swarm Intelligence techniques to identify computer malware, describing research from Wake Forest University and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL). In my predictions for 2010 I listed security as one of the areas where significantly different techniques are going to be required. This article reinforced that perspective.
The article talks about using a detection approach that had different kinds of assessments moving around the corporate network looking for anomalies. Once an unusual situation is found they leave a trail (like an ant) back from the central security site. Other assessment techniques can follow the trail and look at the issue from other perspectives and develop a better understanding of the issue. This new approach to security minimizes false positives, since the report of unusual events are more thoroughly analyzed before a treat signal is raised.
"The system comprises a hierarchy of agents that run in specially designed swarm software deployed on all the hosts in a protected network. At the bottom of the hierarchy, the ants are simple programs that look for a particular statistic as they travel from host to host. Each ant has a memory of what it finds to be normal across the previous five hosts it visits.
One level up, a sentinel agent runs on each host. On the basis of information it collects from the ants, the sentinel forms an idea of the host's normal state. When an ant finds something unusual, it reports this to the host sentinel. For example, if the ant reported 8,000 connections per minute, the sentinel might see this as an anomaly. In that case, it would reward the ant by raising its pheromone value. The ant stores this information. As it moves on to other hosts, its high pheromone value attracts other ants and communicates the information about the host that raised its pheromone value. This encourages the other ants to investigate that host as well.
If these additional ants find other anomalies, they would also be rewarded, which would attract ants from other hosts. A certain threshold of messages triggers a threat signal.
Sergeant ants haven't yet been implemented in the prototype system, but they will sit between the computing ecosystem and human analysts. When a threat signal is triggered, the sergeants will report it to a human for further action. The sergeants also let humans specify what types of behavior the system allows. For example, a system administrator could tell the sergeant not to allow peer-to-peer file sharing, and the sergeant would create agents to disable this on all the hosts."
Although it is still a prototype:
"The researchers created four digital ants of the 64 types then eventually want. To test their effectiveness, they set up a bank of computers and released three worms into the ant-infested Linux-based computers. The four digital ants in the computers had never seen the viruses before, yet identified the virus by only monitoring."
Charlie Bess
The Next Big Thing blog
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Posted February 15, 2010 Category: General Security 0 Comment(s) · del.icio.us · Digg it · Furl · reddit · Email |
A UK-based February 26 Future Internet meeting
HP Labs' Nick Wainwright has been appointed Chair of the UK Future Internet Strategy Group, which will consider next-generation technologies, applications and services. They are going to hold a meeting on February 26th in London - and it's free when you register.
There are many groups who are looking at ways to capitalize on the Internet or even look at mechanisms to steer organizational or governmental approaches based new capabilities. I mentioned a presentation I made to the mayor and city council of Toronto, where they had an initiative to make most of the city's information available on-line. It looks like the UK is doing a similar activity on a national scale. They are essentially trying to enter into the age of abundance for government data, trying to get value out of what already exists as well as new approaches.
Now the question for me is: "How are they going to address the attention issues for the constituants who use the data?" or are they going to provide the flexibility for the end user community to tailor notification to meet their needs. Naturally security and deriving individual's behavior will also be a concern.
Charlie Bess
The Next Big Thing blog
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Posted February 8, 2010 Category: General 0 Comment(s) · del.icio.us · Digg it · Furl · reddit · Email |
Cloud vs. international law
I came across this blog entry: Can the Cloud Catalyze Change in International Data Laws? It discussed how International laws can severely limit the flow of data across borders -- based on the type of data. Although this doesn't prevent the use of cloud computing techniques on a local level, it does limit global resource utilization and competition. Some cloud providers like Amazon and Microsoft do have European branches (where the laws seem to be the strictest). To date, large IaaS cloud offerings have mainly been a Northern American phenomenon, although the EU believes there are a few countries that can handle their data.
The article states:
"Microsoft, for example, has been actively lobbying the United States to pass laws protecting sensitive data in the cloud, and lobbying the EU to relax its data transportation laws."
Here is a bit more about what Microsoft has been proposing.
This is definitely an area where we'll see activity in 2010.
Charlie Bess
The Next Big Thing blog
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Posted February 5, 2010 Category: General 0 Comment(s) · del.icio.us · Digg it · Furl · reddit · Email |
