Watch this space Monday for an in-depth entry on Knowledge Base Pilot available from our Fresh Tools tab of My Sun Connection portal.
If any of you have ever used SunSolve and felt a little frustrated about finding real-time, relevant content. Sun Knowledge Connection will help ease your pain. In trial mode at the moment, Solaris 10 content is the current content base.
More to follow Monday…..
Those of you who know me at all, know I’m something of a tinkerer. I like to dream things up and make them, for example, all terrain rollerblades in 1994. I’ve picked up a few wood and metal working skills through the years, but I’m by no means a professional.
So what do you do when you find you’d like to create a 1mm diameter stainless steel fan for a micro-turbine you’ve been dreaming up? I could try to fabricate a component like this forever and never quite get it right.
Tada! eMachineShop.com comes to the rescue. The first network enabled fabrication shop. Simply download their software. From there, you design your widget and submit it to them over the net for pricing. If you accept their bid, they’ll fabricate the widget and ship it to you. Way cool. And a very clever business model using the power of the network and sharing software to bring in customers world-wide.
Widget from eMachineShop.com
If there’s one thing I’d change about this service, I’d make the software run on any platfom, perhaps we can convince them to release the next version in Java. Right now it’s limited to various Windows versions. Other than that, it’s a simple and nifty little CAD program.
Agriculture is one thing this country has done well historically. It turns out, without a huge amount of hassle, we can use that agricultural prowess to “grow” our own fuel. Sound crazy? Perhaps, but something that’s happening today. In 1999, 500,000 gallons of biodiesel was produced in the US. In 2005, the volume was around 75 million gallons.
So what is biodiesel (mono alkyl esters) anyway? It’s a product of vegetable oil, methanol, and lye put through a process called transesterification. This yields usable fuel and a glycerin by-product. Turns out, it’s pretty trivial to produce on your own, there are many step by step guides, but this one is the clearest and most complete in my opinion.
Biodiesel works in any standard diesel engine and can be (and is) mixed with petrodiesel to get different properites. For instance, biodiesel is more viscous than standard petrodiesel and is more temperature sensitive (if you’re in the cold, you want a bio-petro mix most likely.) This fuel is for sale in retail locations with ratings like B20 (20% bio) to B100 (100% bio.)
With the crunch on fossil fuels, wouldn’t it be great if we could simply grow our way out of this mess? Here’s a great FAQ on the fuel.
A recent Washington Post-ABC poll indicated that 63% of Americans found the NSA telephone monitoring program to be an acceptable way to investigate terror. I fear we may be forgetting about the Constitution and the Bill of Rights in our rush to feel “safe.”
OK, here are some facts about safety:
Note: The Centers for Disease Control maintain a comprehensive mortality database.
Are we really safer? Or are we simply buying into a corrupt and erosive process that damages our democracy? In my opinion, it’s time to dust off this quote and put it to use:
They who would give up an essential liberty for safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety – Benjamin Franklin
It’s really exciting to be able to share a new network service capability, this one is distinct and complementary to our existing Update Connection. I’d like to introduce the Eco Connection – power management for your data center assets. (Go direct using the link above, or navigate by going to My Sun Connection, click the “Fresh Tools” tab, then click the Eco Connection link.)
Here’s a snapshot of the capability at work.
Power Consumption for a server
Temperature of the CPU for the same server
This capability capitalizes on work done in Sun Labs around the continuous system telemetry harness conceived by Kenny Gross and team. What we do is collect telemetry from sensors resident in computers, establish baselines, then compare the telemetry patterns to patterns we’ve collected that are known good and bad.
For instance, if CPU temperature is climbing but power consumption and workload stay constant (as in the above images,) we have a nascent failure mode to identify. We can model this situation by covering an air intake with something as small as an index card. It turns out that MTBF is highly influenced by factors like elevated temperature over time – even slight elevation of temperature.
Another great advantage to this capability is being able to aggregate and trend power consumption at an application service level and data center level.
This isn’t finished, we’ll continue to enhance it over the coming days, weeks, and months adding data for our new T2000 and x2100/4100/4200 servers, power conditioning equipment, and non-Sun equipment in the data center. I invite you to visit often to see how we’re progressing.
One thing we’re hoping you notice is that we’re rolling these things out and letting you get a feel for them early in the development lifecycle. Expect to see more and different capabilities show up in the very near future. Tell us what you think, good or bad, and we’ll factor it into our plans.
