Jeff Dean from Google recently held a lecture at the University of Washington which is highly interesting to anyone curious about the current and future challenges that face companies that operate computing on such a large scale as Google. And of course, it will give you some nice insights into how Google does things.

Since this is from Google’s perspective there are also several aspects specific to search companies, SaaS and distributed computing. It’s a very interesting lecture, easy to follow and well worth the time (it runs almost exactly an hour). You can download it or stream it from here.

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We may be screwing up Mother Nature, but she is getting back at us in her own way. And she knows we love electricity and the Internet.

Though a lot of outages are man-made, there are a huge amount of power outages directly caused by nature every year. Causes include storms and hurricanes, earthquakes, flooding, and more often than not, animals too curious for their own best.

We had a look at some of the nature-made power outages so far in 2008, focusing mostly on the United States and North America, and how power outages have affected data centers and ISPs.

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ZDNet has posted a short walkthrough of HP’s portable data center, POD, which we assume is set to compete with other container data centers from for example Sun and Rackable.

Want one? It’ll only cost you just over $1 million. Without servers.

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Early on Friday (Oct 10) a power outage hit the Novell office and data center in Nürnberg, Germany, effectively taking down several services used by the popular Linux distribution OpenSUSE, including the download redirector (used for downloads and software updates if we understand it correctly) and the mailing lists.

Though the building had two power lines, both failed, and the power company had to dig up the cables to repair them.

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InformationWeek has managed to get an inside look at 1&1’s Lenexa, Kansas data center, built inside a former storage facility. 1&1 is one of the largest hosting companies in the world (arguably the largest), and this data center certainly isn’t small.

The data center has five server rooms with a total of 860 racks and can handle at least 40,000 servers.

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CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will be producing roughly 15 petabytes of data each year (15,000,000,000,000,000 bytes). In other words, the LHC is not only huge in physical size (filling a 17-mile long underground path), but it will produce enormous amounts of data for researchers to bite into.

CERN seems to be well-equipped to handle the data from the gigantic particle accelerator when you take a look at their data center.

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Every day brings a new set of outages on the Internet. Websites go down, online services run into trouble, networks have glitches, and so on. When a lot of users are affected, these outages make the news and set the blogosphere abuzz. We here at Pingdom work with downtime-related issues every day and probably spend more time reading about these things than most, so we decided to sum up the year so far for your convenience, and add some analysis of our own in the process.

These are 14 (not 13, that would be bad luck! ) of the more notable Web- and Internet-related outages and incidents so far in 2008. We chose outages that have either affected a lot of people, or have other implications that we deemed important to highlight.

One thing that the following examples clearly show is that no one is immune to downtime. Not Google, not Microsoft, and not Apple. In addition to this, sometimes whole parts of the Internet itself simply break.

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There have been a lot of numbers thrown around in the last year about the power consumption of servers and data centers. For example, servers and their cooling are now said to consume more power than color TVs in the US. To try and make a bit more sense out of the general information overflow, [...]

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Most people who have worked with IT have at one time or another in their work life come across some amazingly strange practices or major oversights that in retrospect seem more or less insane. Here is a collection of crazy stories specifically about data centers and server rooms that we have filtered out from the [...]

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When it comes to security, there is often a focus on the software side, thwarting hackers and other virtual threats such as viruses and worms. When it comes to uptime and availability, focus often rests on redundant power, clustering, and other similar strategies. We often forget about something that can put a stop to any [...]

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