SteveJ-restore-test

Summary : For the delivery of general purpose and wide-scale Compute/Internet Services there now seems to be a definitive hardware organisation for servers, typified by the E-bay "pod" contract . For decades there have been well documented "Design Rules" for producing Silicon devices using specific technologies/fabrication techniques. This is an attempt to capture some rules for current server farms. [ Update 06-Nov-11 : "Design Rules" are important: Patterson in a Sept. 1995 Scientific American article notes that the adoption of a quantitative design approach in the 1980's led to an improvement in microprocessor speedup from 35%pa to 55%pa. After a decade, processors were 3 times faster than forecast.] Commodity Servers have exactly three possible CPU configurations, based on "scale-up" factors: single CPU, with no coupling/coherency between App instances. e.g. pure static web-server. dual CPU, with moderate coupling/coherency. e.g. web-s...

Related posts: Everything Old is New Again: Cray's CPU design A Good Question: When will Computer Design 'stabilise'? Senior Google staffers wrote The Datacenter as a Computer: An Introduction to the Design of Warehouse-Scale Machines, which I thought showed break-through thinking. The importance of this piece is it wasn't theoretical, but a report of What Works in practice, particularly at 'scale'. Anything that Google, one of the star performers of the Internet Revolution, does differently is worthy of close examination.  What do they know that the rest of us don't get? While the book is an extra-ordinary blueprint, I couldn't but help asking a few questions: Why do they stick with generic-design 1RU servers when they buy enough for custom designs? How could 19-inch racks, designed for mechanical telephone exchanges a century ago, still be a good, let alone best, packaging choice when you build Wharehouse sized datacentres? Telecommunications sites use...