Al Hoang

Data Center Knowledge links to a story on data center rollouts in Vietnam:

Vietnamese technology company Quang Trung Software City (QTSC) and a U.S. company called DOT Vietnam have announced plans to build a $10 million data center in Ho Chi Minh City.

Some things that I’ve been wondering about with this data center are.

• Cooling and humidity (Vietnam is a tropical country after all)
• What companies will be using that data center once it is built.
• What will the network capacity outbound & inbound from this data center will be
• Price ranges for renting out a rack

I guess I’ll never know since this type of news will probably never get a follow-up article. Perhaps this is a good impetus to have a visit and see for myself what it will be like.

Just for contrast on budgets, M$ is plugging $500M USD to build a data center in Iowa.

Seems that Joyent experienced some downtime (8 days) due to some bugs in OpenSolaris that got triggered during an upgrade. (Read here and here)

One rather well known service was also affected by this outage as they are hosted by Joyent.

I guess this does not reflect very well on running OpenSolaris in a production environment. Especially, if downtime cannot be tolerated. I guess even with competent Solaris folk on board at Joyent this type of stuff can happen.

The stories point out that the bug that affected them was over a year old in the OpenSolaris bug database and seems to point some blame at Joyent for not reacting sooner to fixing the problem. However, the reality is that upgrading systems is never a button click like it is to upgrade some piece of software on most people’s Windows machines. In a non-trivial production system, there are usually multiple intertwining dependencies that make it difficult to change the system on the fly. Usually one tries their best to isolate the interdependencies of different pieces so that it IS possible to swap out pieces without affecting other pieces. But that is the ideal to work towards.

This is one reason why having windows of maintenance as well as trying to practice failure fire drills in some manner can help in trying to catch these issues before they happen. However, the trick is getting time to perform windows of maintenance and being able to duplicate enough of the system in a test environment to be able to run a fire drill. Sounds easy on paper, very difficult in practice.

Hackzine has a blog post on using a SD card as swap space for the OLPC to handle the following situation:

Most of the time, the 256MB in the XO Laptop is sufficient. But I use yum to install software, and it can be very memory hungry. I often run out of RAM when installing more than a few packages at once

While the hack is definitely a good one to get around a system limitation in the OLPC, it is yet another reason I’m glad that the OLPC is not on my desk being fiddled with. For the others who are having fun with it, that’s great however I have gotten a little tired of dealing with trying to get Linux to behave like a system that I want it to be on resource-constrained systems.

I’ve had enough experience dealing with it on the Zaurus. In general you end up having to have a specialized toolchain / user environment in order to deal with things and this can be a fun challenge when you want to use ’standard’ system components to upgrade or install something since you’ll get into dependency hell.

Another issue with running outside the rails is the community can sometimes fall out from under you and you’re left with the choice of keeping your system at its current state with tweaking or rebuilding your system again.

Kristian Köhntopp shares his views on growing an email system from a small number of users to millions of users and the changes in the system architecture as it continues to evolve to match user growth. Some of the more interesting notes are not at the ‘what type of machines will solve 2 million users’ but some of the organizational changes that have to be made in order to accommodate such growth.

Read it yourself

I’ve been playing with KDE4 on my desktop at home. One of the things I have always liked about KDE is the myriad of options you can drown in while trying to configure something.

However, it seems that KDE4 at present is still not up to that task… ah well.

Live and learn, I guess.