Two weeks ago, I wrote about The Data Center in the Age of Abundance and claimed that IOPS are - among other things - a solved problem.

What does a solved problem look like?

Here is a benchmark running 100k random writes of 4K per second, with zero Jitter, at 350µs end-to-end write latency across six switches. Databases really like reliably timed writes like these. Maximum queue depth would be 48, the system is not touching that.

The German Language podcast Lage der Nation has published an interview with Axel Friedrich on Dieselgate. Axel Friedrich has been a department lead in the German Umweltbundesamt until 2008, now working with BUND and other environmental NGOs in Germany and instrumental in uncovering Dieselgate on the German side.

The interview contains some very interesting remarks on rental car companies and car maker owned car leasing companies, and how the shape the car market. A deprecation of Diesel cars by those leasing companies is instrumental to transforming the car maret and in promoting the shift to BEVs.

Digging through my bookmarks and open tabs was interesting. The picture of the future that emerges: With costs for energy approaching the 1 cent range per kWh, electrical energy is going to be close to free. Money can and will be charged for guarantees, because batteries or other forms of storage still cost money.

• Guardian: ‘Spectacular’ drop in renewable energy costs leads to record global boost »The new renewable energy capacity installed worldwide in 2016 was 161GW, a 10% rise on 2015 […] The new record capacity cost $242bn, a 23% reduction in investment compared to 2015, and renewables investment remained larger than for all fossil fuels. Subsidies for green energy, however, are still much lower than those for coal, oil and gas.«
• SolAmerica: SolAmerica Energy Launches 1.3 MW Solar Project on President Carter’s Farm in Plains, Georgia »Former President Jimmy Carter leased a 10-acre (40.000 sqm) site in his hometown to SolAmerica for development of the 1.3 MW solar project, which will provide over 50% of the power needs of the City of Plains.«
• Bloomberg: German Tenants Win Right to Generate Solar Power on Rented Roofs »Lawmakers are set to pass legislation dubbed “Tenant Power” on Thursday in Berlin. The bill promises owners of tenant blocks a subsidy of as much as 3.8 cents (4.3 U.S. cents) a kilowatt-hour for generating solar power on rooftops or from basement combined heat and power units.«
• Bloomberg: Solar Power Will Kill Coal Faster Than You Think The tipping point will be 2021 for China, Germany is already past it.

  

So I have been testing, again. My hapless test subject this time is a Dell Box, an R630. It has a comfortable 384GB of memory, one of two 25 GBit/s ports active, and it comes with two E5-2690v4 CPUs. That gives it 14 cores per die, 28 cores in total, or with hyperthreading, 56 threads.

$ cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep 'model name' | uniq -c 
56 model name : Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2690 v4 @ 2.60GHz 
$ ./mprime -v 
Mersenne Prime Test Program: Linux64,Prime95,v28.10,build 1 

I have not been nice, because I have been abusing the box with mprime95 in Torture Test Mode, trying to make it consume as much power as possible.

Short link to NBC Miami :

South Miami Set to Become First City in Florida to Require Solar Panels on New Homes The new law would require owners of new homes – including single-family homes, townhouses and multi-story residential buildings – to install solar panels. It also applies to owners who expand their homes by 75% or greater. Once the measure is passed, South Miami would become the fourth U.S. city that requires new homes to be installed with solar panels. San Francisco and two small cities in California have similar renewable energy building laws.

Today somebody had a problem with expiring a large table (a Serendipity Blog table).

In MySQL InnoDB, tables are physically ordered by primary key (InnoDB data is a B+ tree, a balanced tree where the data pages are the leaves of the tree). If you are expiring old data from such a log table, you are deleting from the left hand side of the tree, and since it is a balanced tree, that triggers a lot of rebalancing - hence it is very slow.

based on an old Google plus article from 2015: What you observe as Planned Obsolescence is often the natural outcome of fast product cycles that are necessary for any new technology. When a new thing arrives in the market, it is often barely viable, a minimum viable product .

We are remembering the iPhone 1 as revolutionary, but we chose to forget about is slowness, its clunkyness and the very limited feature set it had. And those of us having purchased a car with built-in satnav now have to deal with a car radio where you have to choose between listening to a CD or putting in the outdated CD-ROM with navigation data - and then wait for a minute until you get the route.

We are currently experiencing a fundamental transition in the data center. In recent discussions, it occured to me how little this is understood by people in the upper layers of the stack, and how the implications are not clear to them.

In the past, three fundamentally scarce resources limited the size of the systems we could build:

• IOPS,
• bandwidth and
• latency.

All three of them are gone to a large extent, and the systems we are discussing now are fundamentally different from what we had in “The Past™”, with “The Past” being a thing five to ten years ago.

Glorifying toil, glorifying organisational ossification

So somebody posted this on G+, and it’s a classic example for a thing that I classify as BOFH memes. That’s a group of memes and stories from operations people from a time past glorifying the toil and nastiness of operations.

This is going away now, for some time, and people identifying with BOFH thinking or finding it funny need to change, or go out of job. That’s also happening, rather quickly, and I have a talk about this (Slideshare , Youtube ).

Fortune has a kind of home story on Project Zero , explaining what it is, how it came to be and who the people in there are.

If you do not know what Project Zero is and why it is important, it’s a good starting point. If you know about Project Zero, it’s still a fun read because of all the parentheses that read »x declined to be interviewed for this story.«