Took a look at the published "inventory" of information on Google to give myself some orientation to the development timeline of what folks have been saying about availability (specifically"High Availability") and "Continuous Data Protection" to see when people started turning ideas into products.
The HA issues zipped right along from around 1985 or so (this is a survey, not a census, dear reader) with articulated specifications, formation of managed service offerings, products, etc. zipping right along to our current worlds.Continuous Data Protection, and by that, *that* particular search term shows up circa 1991 as prelim to disk mirroring products appearing later that decade.
The pre Sysplex days (and more people were working on the distributed problem than IBM) rested upon dark fiber, to me, reflecting the some people longing for dial tone at 40 pfennings a minute. SMDS, SONET offerings hadn't yet shown up, but the results were pretty convincing among some (rumored) blue sparks and flame that having trusted data in at least two places at once with a prayer (improvement) in recovering ones systems from the distributed data, well.... very good thing.
I'd argue, however, that the Continuous Data Protection model is the converged solution for how to answer the question of applications availability; the economics of (planned) redundancy favor that information distribution. Kindred concerns of custodial, compliance, and reliable connectivity, while significant, do invite innovations in putting the data objects. Market momentum for how to build higher availability into applications comes from known good libraries of "how to do this".
The DeDupe market space, as well, offers cost relief from the ability to recycle and realize more efficiencies in net storage capacities. The cautionary tale here comes from distributed computing, wherein some applications resemble Yorkie Terriers. Very very good at playing "this, all of this, is mine!" to the tune of "Big Boss Man" resulting with a conundrum of which manager manages the manager managers and a stack of dueling control systems oh heck lets put another piece of monitoring software in there that ought to hold 'em....
Which in turn brings back memories of notoriously brittle High Availability systems from the 90s, wherein the prudent management discipline was to establish that it was at last working and hanging up a sign that said "Was working fine when I left it. You broke it."
Some local use cases (involving moderate storage requirements and a thin network infrastructure) indicate that Continuous is the way to go (assuming that the data "containers or objects" allow for incremental updates). Saves network, and keeps one closer to the point in time when the fan will make a rude noise. Seriously looking at the peer to peer model has some wonderful attributes of survivability, and redundancy (boy, you can say that again) also with the potential for borrowing resources across networks.So in no way is it a motherhood issue as to how.
Barbie: Math is hard. She caught H E Double Hockeysticks for that but that's a fact.
Meanwhile, the what is of the motherhood issue (viz, a requirement to keep things going). But that how (one's chosen implementation). Hoo Wee! That how's a poser. But to me there's something in the thought that "this system swaps things about all of the time and keeps running with a provable audit trail of service levels" as more comforting than "it's in Lou's truck". One can always, as it were, burn a disk. Demonstrating recovery during system operation as a normal course of business.... cool.
Wednesday, March 12, 2008
"Say watt again. SAY WATT AGAIN"
Joules, old boy.
The conversations around the topic of "Green Computing" have focussed very much upon the management of heat loads in the metaphor of power. The technology itself heads toward a lower unit consumption of power production of heat due to smaller geometry as balanced against higher densities.
Once upon a time, R. Buckminster Fuller looked at the Spaceship Earth problems of electrical distribution and posited that the total capacities of power could on a global basis (more or less) be reduced (ceteris paribus) if the power grids of the whole world were deeply interconnected.
Sunny side of the planet, dark side of the planet, lighting from the sun, lighting from electricity, factories on, factories off. With some nit picking regarding transmission losses, etc. the proposition yields an interesting gedanken experiment vis a vis networks of computers and networks of storage. With some form of daily (whatever) variations, moving workloads, comprised of payloads of data and eventually application pieces, could let one reduce a given site's "peak capacity" through clever movement of processing.
Yes, latency. Yes, transmission capacities. Yes, etc.
But forms of this more agile distributive model come to us from, gasp, BitTorrent and other computing structures. For anyone who lives with real technology, the working model is that the solution will not be perfect (obsolete as it gets plugged in, in fact) but that the solution should be measurably "better".
We're living in a material world. You go girl.
Part of the Green computing ecosystem has been and will be the interaction of design for life cycles from a Cradle To Cradle point of view, increasing pressure on key materials in the computing industry (rare earths, gold), and improving recognition of the value of these materials in the cycle of creation, use, deconstruction, and re use. Fuller looked in particular at copper cycling through the system; the recycling of component materials in computing, however, has only recently become a design requirement. (LeRoy Budnik noted the "drive that will not die" in a recent post here.)
But the materials will be better "designed" to enable reuse in part because of "goodness" but principally because it makes sound organizational sense from the view of economics.
That the trend of ephemeralization (the less is more than more koan) cuts into this olio will be saved for another time.
When I have the erg.
With apologies.
The conversations around the topic of "Green Computing" have focussed very much upon the management of heat loads in the metaphor of power. The technology itself heads toward a lower unit consumption of power production of heat due to smaller geometry as balanced against higher densities.
Once upon a time, R. Buckminster Fuller looked at the Spaceship Earth problems of electrical distribution and posited that the total capacities of power could on a global basis (more or less) be reduced (ceteris paribus) if the power grids of the whole world were deeply interconnected.
Sunny side of the planet, dark side of the planet, lighting from the sun, lighting from electricity, factories on, factories off. With some nit picking regarding transmission losses, etc. the proposition yields an interesting gedanken experiment vis a vis networks of computers and networks of storage. With some form of daily (whatever) variations, moving workloads, comprised of payloads of data and eventually application pieces, could let one reduce a given site's "peak capacity" through clever movement of processing.
Yes, latency. Yes, transmission capacities. Yes, etc.
But forms of this more agile distributive model come to us from, gasp, BitTorrent and other computing structures. For anyone who lives with real technology, the working model is that the solution will not be perfect (obsolete as it gets plugged in, in fact) but that the solution should be measurably "better".
We're living in a material world. You go girl.
" Metals recirculate on a sum-total-of-all-metals-average every 22 1/2 years....
I was able to arrive at that figure of a 22 1/2-year metals recirculating cycle in 1936. I was working for Phelps Dodge Co., which had asked me to give them some prognostications about the uses of copper in the future of world industry."R. Buckminster Fuller, Critical Path
Part of the Green computing ecosystem has been and will be the interaction of design for life cycles from a Cradle To Cradle point of view, increasing pressure on key materials in the computing industry (rare earths, gold), and improving recognition of the value of these materials in the cycle of creation, use, deconstruction, and re use. Fuller looked in particular at copper cycling through the system; the recycling of component materials in computing, however, has only recently become a design requirement. (LeRoy Budnik noted the "drive that will not die" in a recent post here.)
But the materials will be better "designed" to enable reuse in part because of "goodness" but principally because it makes sound organizational sense from the view of economics.
That the trend of ephemeralization (the less is more than more koan) cuts into this olio will be saved for another time.
When I have the erg.
With apologies.
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