Backbone Magazine - Backblog

"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."

"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"

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

No high sticking on the hockey rink

If we had to hazard a guess, we’d estimate that a very small portion of the planet knows the word “Zamboni.” For those of you who don’t hail from geographically cold climates, a Zamboni – note it is a proper name with a capital “Z” – is the tractor-like machine that floods the ice.

Still not sure what we are talking about? Take a look here: http://www.zamboni.com/

The Zamboni plays a big role in the sport of hockey and it has a catchy-sounding name, but it has absolutely nothing to do with the IT we’ve installed at Canada Hockey Place. However, just as the Zamboni keeps the ice clean and fast, our IT systems ensure a flawless transmission of the hockey games; penalty times, power plays and shoot outs included.

To ensure Canada’s favourite and oldest sport – yes, it dates back to the 1800s – is unaffected by technology, we work with our technology partners to transmit scores and stats in real-time. For the past four years, we have worked with the Olympic Games technology consortium to perfect the technology in Canada Hockey Place. We have pulled plugs and have pushed our systems to the breaking point.

Hockey will also prove to be quite the test for our CIS, the Commentator Information System, since no one knows this sport better than Canadians. Information errors in our CIS, leading to broadcasted errors by commentators would cause an entire nation of people to shout at their televisions.

Canada Hockey Place is now ready, thanks to our IT systems, to protect the integrity of this nation’s beloved sport.

This year’s hockey medal games are going to draw the largest crowds. After all, the sport is taking place on home ice.

FACT:
Hockey at the 2010 Winter Games will take place the Canada Hockey Place and has seats for nearly 20,000 people.

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."

"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

Unfortunately, it's coming to be called the Spring Olympics .. but seriously, there's lots of snow at Whistler.

Also ... the 2101 Winter Olympics will be the first in history to have an independent media centre. The rise of social media over the last five years means that the accreditation of various people-and-purpose users of social media has been a hotly-debated issue in the months coming up to the opening of the Games.

Vancouver's new inner-city arts and media delopment W2 Community Media Arts Centre opened yesterday. One of its opening projects is the W2 Culture + Media House offered to social media users from around the world:

a 24/7 25 work-station centre for bloggers and twits and vloggers to get together, hang out, work, use high-speed broadband, co-mingle amongst people from all over the world, etc.

I'm glad to have been able to play a role in the development and evolution of this iinitiative, and these pictures tell a thousand stories.

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