Project Blackbox

17.October.2006 - After today, you'll never look at an ordinary shipping container quite the same way again. Project Blackbox is a prototype of the world's first virtualized datacenter--built into a shipping container and optimized to deliver extreme energy, space, and performance efficiencies.Designed to address the needs of customers who are running out of space, power and cooling, Project Blackbox gives customers a glimpse into the fast, cost-effective datacenter deployments coming in the near future--where thinking out of the box means putting an IT infrastructure in a box.

Project Blackbox - Sun

This is MEGA!!! Cringley has been touting that Google were working on this concept but it looks like Sun have beat them to the punch! Check out the video on the site. The brilliance of the concept is that it's all built into a standard shipping container and hooks up easily virtually anywhere. They've also built in a water based cooling systems to keep the supported servers and storage running at the correct temp. Imagine building a datacenter with these beauties, I wonder how high you can stack them! Welcome to the age of utility computing.

Technorati Tags: Enterprise, Sun, Blackbox

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An Unexpected Bonus

Following on from my trip to the Podcast and Portable Media Expo a few weeks ago, I stumbled upon an unexpected bonus. As the flight from Manchester to LA was approximately 10 hours, I thought I'd treat my self to a pair of Shure E2C-N In-Ear Headphones (affiliate link!). These are noise cancelling headphones, just the job for cutting out extraneous noise on the flight. They worked extremely well but I must admit, I don't make that many transatlantic flights so they could be considered a bit of an extravagance! But! It was time to cut the lawn yesterday and I've got a fairly large garden and an old very noisy petrol lawnmower. I've tried to listen to my iPod in the past but even with the volume turned up full, it was still difficult to hear and it can't really be that good for my hearing. Ding! Why not try the Shures? Popped them in and with my iPod only on half volume I was able to listen to and fully understand a rather badly recorded podcast. Result! I feel a lot better now knowing I'll get regular use out the EC2's rather than just waiting until the next Podcast Expo :-)

Technorati Tags: gadgets

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New Membership System Live

Went live with the new system yesterday and let the forum users try it out first! No major problems although it's difficult releasing control to an automated system. You still want to see every email that gets sent out! Just about to do a mini screencast letting people now about the new facilities. Talking about letting people know, I also decided at the last minute to use a proper mailing list system to forward instructions and also to use as my delivery mechanism for newsletters etc. My current one is phplist which is a free application which works well but I'm limited to only sending 350 emails per hour. I decided to go with aWeber (affiliate link). This is a hosted service that came highly recommended from the guys at the Podcast and Portable Media Expo. It's a chargeable service ($19.99) per month but looks to have more whistles and bells than I'll ever need to use. Couple of problems though in that aWeber is an opt-in mailing list to prevent spammers from using it. By that, I mean you have to get subscribers to opt-in to joining the mailing list by clicking a link when they get added to the system. This is a great mechanism to help cut down spam but it does mean that if you're adding users in bulk, they all have to opt-in before you can send a message to them. Actually, you can send a message immediately but only those that have opted in will be sent it! The care that the system takes to prevent abuse looks pretty impressive, even to the extent of the bulk upload of users being manually inspected by support staff. Anyway, after 12 hours, I'm over 50% opted in so it shouldn't take too long to get everyone onboard. Another nice thing is you can create registration forms to host on your website so people can sign up for lists so I may create a few lists for none Extra! members later. Ah well, better get these screencasts done!

Technorati Tags: Premium Podcasting, Subscription Membership, Subscription Tools, aweber

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Google Watch : Google to Merge Writely and Spreadsheets to Form Google Docs

Google Watch : Google to Merge Writely and Spreadsheets to Form Google Docs: "Google to Merge Writely and Spreadsheets to Form Google Docs Breaking news: Google will announce tomorrow at the Office 2.0 conference a new product called Google Docs, which will merge Writely and Google Spreadsheets into a collaboration and document management solution, according to sources.The new offering will be available at docs.google.com, although that address produces a 404 error right now. "

(Via eWeek.com Weblog.)

OMG! I've been a long time fan of Writely and recently started to get into Google Spreadsheets. Have to say the Google SS still has a way to go to get close to Excel but for 60% of traditional spreadsheet work it's OK. This is exciting news and chairs will be flying in Redmond today. Is it me or are Google slowly but surely taking over the web? Is that a good or a bad thing? Looking forward to the next Gilmor Gang! UPDATE: 30 seconds after posting this I tried http://docs.google.com/ and wouldn't you kmow it, they've launched it already - the major bummer is it doesn't support Safari. This may be a major issue for Mac users and I know that with Writely that there were some serious issues in Safari that made it impossible to use with Writely. Camino and Flock and Firefox should be OK though.

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Quote of the day from Susan Mernit

(From the post, 'What Google didn't buy') '(For $1.65 billion) Google could have bought the New York Times...(That Google) bought YouTube, not a media company, and the fact that doesn't even surprise anyone one anymore and that it makes perfect sense, that, dudes, is a paradigm shift.'

Technorati Tags: google, youtube

(Via rexblog: Rex Hammock's Weblog.)

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