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Seamus K - Irish tech industry expat living in Sweden.

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Data Centres – the factories of the 21st century

29th January 2016 / / 0 Comments
One of Ericsson's global data centres outside Stockholm.

One of Ericsson’s global Data Centres outside Stockholm (it was snowing).

Yesterday I was at the opening of Ericsson’s new global data centre outside Stockholm. We were given a virtual tour of some of the building via an Oculus, and a real one through two of computer spaces. It was pretty impressive. Each of the computer spaces has a 4.5MW power capacity. And they can accommodate power densities of 10s of KW per rack (many legacy DCs struggle to go beyond 6-8 kW). The overall site is 20,000sqm and is one of three new global ICT centres Ericsson is bringing online at the moment.

Servers in ericsson data centre the 21st century factory

Foto: Ericsson/Lasse Hejdenberg

Back when I started my career, my first job out of college was in a factory working as a process engineer and production manager for the production lines there. A decade or two later my work is all focused around Data Centres and what goes on (and into) them. In a lot of the ways I am back where I started.

The industrial revolution gave us factories that built widgets that everyone bought. Even just twenty years ago your money would buy you real goods. Physical things you could touch and bring home. But now the greatest growth is in digital goods. Gamers pay for ad-ons like levels, maps, avatars, virtual weapons, clothing and vehicles. Children look for new apps for the family tablet. Music, podcasts, films, and books are streamed to billions of devices, and users never even hold a local copy. These are things exist only as 1s and 0s. And for the most part their existence is within a data centre somewhere.

In the enterprise the office server room is dead and gone. IT infrastructure and workloads are all moving to clouds – private ones in for large enterprises, and the vast hyperscale public clouds for companies large and small. Data is the key asset class today.

And the place where it is stored, manipulated, and value is generated from that data is the Data Centre. Which is why Data Centres are the factories of the 21st century.

I am not making moisturizer cream any more, but I like to think I am not too far from where I was 20 years ago.

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Conspiracies – it’s hard to keep them secret

27th January 2016 / / 0 Comments

I see my one time drinking buddy David Grimes made the front page of the BBC (and a lot of other places) with his paper on the how possible is it to keep a conspiracy theory secret for any length of time.

He cleverly user data from some real conspiracies (NSA Prism, the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) forensic scandal) to model the likelihood that a secret held by many will eventually come out.

And then he applied that to some of the big “popular” conspiracies – that the moon landings were faked, global warming is a conspiracy amongst scientists, and that pharmaceutical companies are concealing a cure for cancer.

The model shows that it would be impossible to keep such large conspiracies under wraps for any length of time. But then what would you expect. Think of all the trivial persona; secrets you are aware of that have gotten out. And then think could thousands of people keep massive things quiet in defiance of their conscience like – We have a cure for cancer. We lied to the world about the moon landings. We are causing deceiving the world about climate change, just so we can get some research funding. The moon landing one always struck me as particularly daft, as you would need the Russians (ostensible “losers” in the race to the moon) to keep quiet as well.

And like all good scientists Dr Grimes used his work to make some predictions. To keep something like the moon landings secret for nearly 50 years the would need a group of conspirators of about 250 people. Considering how many were involved just in running each of the Apollo missions it’s farcical to maintain there is a great secret here.

There is great scope for future work here. Looking at some other real failed conspiracies would refine the model and allow for better estimates. And then I want it applied to some other great conspiracies. Not we can at last figure out how big and how extensive is the reach of the Illuminati, and the Elders of Zion! My bet is the size will come out to be around 0-1 with the greater probability of the lower estimate 🙂

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Excuse the mess

26th January 2016 / / 0 Comments

I am playing around with some structure stuff. This will be cleared up later today.

The plan is to have a full menu with:

  • Blog – with everything, including my tech posts
  • Tech Blog – a category with just the tech stuff
  • Pictures – specific photo stuff
  • Travels – stuff from my world travels.
  • About page

I am debating a static home page. But I think the blog one will be fine. If you want to know what this is all about then you can click on “About”. Simples.

 

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Driving home for (after) Christmas

22nd January 2016 / / 0 Comments

The route is set. My 0600 Sunday departure time is planned. The Rostock hotel room secured for Sunday night. The ferry to Gedser in Denmark at 0600 on Monday is booked, and I am banking sleep. I just need to load the car, hit the road and head 1800km north to get back to my place in Sweden.

driving Vienna to Stockholm

On the way down before Christmas I took the long road with my father – we didn’t take the ferry. But that adds 350km to the trip. We took two and a half days (including time lost for fog from Dresden to Prague and on to Vienna. I should do the return in two.

On Sunday I will do 871km from Vienna to Rostock. My splits should be:

  • Vienna – Brno: 2 hours
  • Brno – Prague: 2 hours
  • Prague – Dresden: 1.75 hours
  • Dresden – Berlin: 2:25 hours
  • Berlin – Rostock: 2:25

The following day

  • Rostock – Gedser (by ferry): 2 hours
  • Gedser – Copenhagen: 2 hours
  • Copenhagen – Malmo (by The Bridge) : 0.5 hours
  • Malmo – Jönköping: 2 hours
  • Jönköping – Stockholm: 2.5 hours

All that assumes no problems with the weather, breakdowns and so on. But the real risk to my times is refugees. The Swedish and German governments have effectively suspended Schengen. They have re-instigated border checkpoints to look for refugees. Over Christmas we saw the big tailbacks that result when we crossed from Austria to Germany on the way to our ski resort.

Still a 15-20 minute tail back I can deal with. 18 hours of boredom on my own might be a different case!

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Blogging for work

22nd January 2016 / / 0 Comments
A blog post I did for work.

A blog post I did for work.

I have been blogging and producing content for work in the past few years.

Some of the highlights are the posts on Ericsson’s Industrial Cloud group over at LinkedIn. There is a blog post I wrote on the massive growth in data being stored in the Cloud and what Ericsson can do to help.

And there are a few videos floating around of me talking at conferences like this one on the economics of NFV at the OpenStack summit in Paris.

Blogging for work is a bit different, and not just because of the longer review process, and the nit picking over your grammar, spelling and punctuation. You need to have a much clearer idea of why you are writing, what it is for, how it will help people, and what you want them to get from the post. There isn’t time for random nonsense (like I can put here). And you need to make sure that the material should tie into everything else that is being published on the topic.

It ads a considerable amount of effort to the process. And certainly robs it of the spontaneity that personal blogging has!

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