Data Center Industry Links for October 20

Netflix Migration to the Cloud - From James Hamilton: This morning I came across an article written by Sid Anand, an architect at Netflix that is super interesting. I liked it for two reasons: 1) it talks about the move of substantial portions of a high-scale web site to the cloud, some of how it was done, and why it was done, and 2) its gives best practices on AWS SimpleDB usage.

Why The HPC Growth Equation Hasn’t Added Up - Why doesn’t the HPC industry grow more? While HPC has certainly had its booms and busts, hardly a conference, panel or roundtable goes by without the issue of frustrated industry growth rolling down the aisle. Some estimates put the industry’s growth at a paltry 5% annual average between 1999 – 2009. From InsideHPC.

Troubles with Sharding - What can we learn from the Foursquare Incident? - Sharding is a great scalability solution, but as Foursquare recently revealed in a post-mortem about their 17 hours of downtime, sharding also has problems. MongoDB, the database Foursquare uses, also contributed their post-mortem of what went wrong too. Now that everyone has shared and resharded, what can we learn to help us skip these mistakes and quickly move on to a different set of mistakes? From High Scalability.

US DHS data center consolidation plan needs a facelift - Data center consolidation initiative of the US Department of Homeland Security can benefit from a more granular inventory of its existing data center and IT assets and from an update to its consolidation plan, according to a recent audit of the program. A new report by the DHS Office of Inspector General pointed out several shortcomings of the consolidation project, including a lack of complete inventory of existing data centers, as well as of existing hardware and software. The Inspector General also recommended that the DHS create consolidated data center floor plan to guide the process. From DatacenterDynamics.