Resource Round-up: The Best of September 2012

Data Center News

• The Dynamic Data Center: Cloud’s Overlooked Little Brother – There are two models competing for data center attention today: dynamic data center and cloud computing. They are closely related, and both promise similar benefits with cloud computing offering “above and beyond” benefits that may or may not be needed or desired by organizations in search of efficiency.
• The Importance of Disaster Recovery – There are numerous factors that can lead to data center failure, especially in the IT sector or other companies where most of the data exists in an electronic format.
• Protecting Public Data –  Public data, the data that government makes available to the public, is at risk. Wait a minute, what about all those great Open Data initiatives you’ve heard about? Isn’t government sharing more data than ever? Well, no.
• The Innovator Dilema in the Data Center – The rapid development of new technology impacts virtually all the biggest firms, virtually all the largest, most successful organizations. Many of them still use old hardware, old ideas and old business models.
• The Software-Defined Data Center and Software-Defined Networking: What Does It All Mean? – Software-Defined Networking (SDN) has become the center of heated discussions in the IT community, just like Big Data and The Cloud. This year, another term is being added to the list, the Software-Defined Data Center (SDD).
• Security is the main cause of complexity in the data center – This is the subject, and the fifth year, of Symantec’s annual ‘State of the Data Center’ survey.
• State of IPV6 in the Data Center Gear– have some great news for you: most vendors started supporting IPv6 in their data center switches.

Data and The Environment

• Intel Stores Servers in Oil to Reduce Energy – Intel says oil-cooled systems only use another 2 or 3 percent of their power for cooling, compared with a typical air-cooled server, which uses 50 or 60 percent.
• As Data Centers Grow, Innovators Search for Green Cooling Methods – As a company that runs a data center can commonly shell out nearly half of its budget for energy, green data centers are designed to run at maximum efficiency and use the least amount of power.
• Green Data Center Market to Surpass $45 Billion by 2016: Pike Report – Research analyst group Pike Research, a part of Navigant’s Energy Practice, announced on Friday that it has released a new report that shows that the worldwide market for green data centers will grow at a compound annual growth rate of nearly 28 percent from $17.1 billion in 2012 to $45.4 billion by 2016.
• Cool Ideas for Cutting Down on Data Server Cooling Costs – One of the biggest – yet least talked about – challenges facing data centers today is the amount of energy they consume in order to process and store the masses of big data generated by big businesses around the world.

FreeBSD News

• PC-BSD 9.1-RC1 Now Available – This release candidate provides both users and developers a means to test out new features in the upcoming PC-BSD 9.1 release.
• Announcing the end of port CVS – By February 28th 2013 the FreeBSD ports tree will
  no longer be exported to CVS. Therefore ports tree updates via CVS
  or CVSup will no longer available after that date.
• Clang’ed FreeBSD: Builds quicker, uses way less RAM – Dimitry Andric, a FreeBSD developer, has carried out some performance tests to explore the impact that LLVM/Clang as the default FreeBSD compiler has on FreeBSD 10, compared to GCC 4.2.1 and GCC 4.7.1.
• FreeBSD-XEN support: a quick status update – Seemingly, a renewed interest into improving the FreeBSD support for XEN may drastically change the landscape by adding a further options for hosts.
• FreeBSD Struggles To Gain UEFI Boot Support – While the Haiku OS had some successful GSoC projects this summer, not all of the FreeBSD summer projects sponsored by Google were a success.

Big Data News

• One Does Not Simply Scale into Real-Time – Real-time seems to be the next big thing in big data. Map-Reduced has shown how to perform big analyses on huge data sets in parallel, and the next challenge seems to be to find a similar kind of approach to real-time.
• Big data to redefine value – Leveraging Big Data innovatively could redefine manufacturing profit centres explains Professor Andy Neely of the Cambridge Service Alliance.
• 5 Ways That Data Analysts Add Business Value – Companies are awash in data but corporate leaders don’t always know the most effective ways to extract business value from customer and market information.
• Big Data Quotes of the Week: September 14, 2012 – “The most significant idea for big data is that it allows you to see around corners and react”—Michael Cavaretta, Ford.
• Big Data and Data Science Events September-December 2012 – This is where influencers the in Big Data will be over the next few months.
  At NYI, we like to stay on top of what’s happening in the world of data centers, Big Data, and enterprise tech, and this week we’re going to share the best content that we’ve come across with you. We hope you find it as informative and useful as we did.
• The value is in the reader’s Big Data – Digital publishing is vastly undervalued. Advertising has yet to fulfill its promises — it is nosediving on the web and it failed on mobile. Readers come, and often go, as many digital publications are unable to retain them beyond a few dozen articles and about thirty minutes per month.
• Analysts Require Three Major Skills Plus Technological Solutions to Derive Information from Big Data – In addition to possessing mathematical reasoning skills and the ability to see the bird’s eye view of big data, analysts must be willing to experiment.

Enterprise IT

• The Enterprise Risk Pendulum – If your organization is not ready to take on some level of risk, then don’t start a major systems or IT initiative. Ever. All projects come with some degree of risk. It’s that simple.
• The Stages of Identity –  It seems that we all have our own set of assumptions about what is supposed to happen to information based on our roles and responsibilities.
• Pervasive Gesture Recognition: Relevance to Enterprises – Gesture recognition is a pervasive concept that is gaining momentum in enterprise applications. Imagine navigating through business presentation slides with a simple hand swipe, or drilling through data charts with simple finger flicks.
• Intel Outlines Coming Computer Trends – In his keynote on September 13th at the Intel Developer Forum, Intel Chief Technology Officer Justin Rattner said, “In the future, if it computes, it connects. From the simplest embedded sensors to the most advanced cloud datacenters, we’re looking at techniques to allow all of them to connect without wires.”

From Big Data to Infinite Space

We’re going to round off our round-up with a fascinating infographic from Information Is Beautiful that very neatly shows the incredible scale of the solar system in one very long image.