Can you see the choices made in the Media? Gives you insight into how useful their information is

DatacenterDynamics Seattle just on Sept 4, 2014 in Bellevue at the Hyatt.  It was good to catch up with Stephen Worn and one of the conversations I had is does he think people understand how the media companies that cover the data center industry work?  He and I know, but do others?  He agreed that OMG, yes.

Here is a study on traditional media companies.

Rowse found the charges of news bias to be valid--in selection, in display and in tone--on both political sides, but preponderantly in the pro-Republican direction. He concluded that, "with the possible exception of the New York Times, all papers--both Republican and Democratic--showed evidence of favoritism in their news columns in violation of their own accepted rules of conduct," and that "almost every example of favoritism in the news columns coincided with the paper's editorial feelings." This "would indicate that over 80 percent of the nation's newspaper readers may be getting their editorials with some Republican flavoring."

The conclusion of this study is to have media judge other media.

Rowse concludes his book with remarks on the problems of measuring bias. "The persons best qualified to evaluate newspaper fairness," he says, "are newspapermen themselves; yet they are unwilling to do this." He thinks that the next step is to set up regional panels of newspapermen who would meet periodically and rate each paper's performance.

This isn’t going to happen and last to change how we perceive media.  The above study was printed in 1957.

What is useful if you are going to read the media looking for data centers news is to understand how they work.

Too many people read the media and take what is written as gospel.  Many of us laugh when their coworkers quote a media publications article as if it is a fact.

Part of what I have enjoyed is being in the role of blogger and media is learning how media organizations work, and in the process making good friends.  These friends are people who because I know them and how they think and work allow me to refine my perspective on how to read their work.  It is kind of funny to think when I am in a media briefing with other media that I gain more insight on the writers, than the briefing.  Watching the flow of questions from media, what they ask, how they dress, what equipment they have, who they talk to before and after the meeting.  

Wow, just figured out that media briefings are a chance to evaluate the fairness of media.  Watch what is presented.  What is asked.  Then analyze what is written and where the bias is.  All the writers were in the same meeting, yet look at the range of coverage.

Pizza Dough Recipe, Best Taste - Clean and Supportive

For years I have held off on making my own pizza dough.  I tried a couple of times, but I didn’t like the taste and time it took to make the dough.  So I would use pre made dough from Whole Food or Trader Joe’s.

Over the past few months I have gone back to trying to make my own pizza dough, using Woodstone’s pizza dough recipe which is the same company that makes my pizza oven.  I like this recipe because of the taste, clean and supportive for toppings.

Wood Stone Dough

Yield: Makes 6 ea. 7-oz. dough balls
 

Ingredients

1/2 tsp. dry instant yeast
1 tsp. sugar
2 tsp. salt
2 cup water, 65 degrees
1 cup semolina flour, Bob’s Red Mill is great
 4 1/2  -5 cups all-purpose flour, we prefer King Arthur for this dough
Olive oil

Writing this post I discovered this dough tip page that gives you great information to modify the recipe.

Three Styles of Crust

  1. Crispy Crust (thin or thicker crust): Lower gluten (as low as 7.5% is available), a wetter dough (without being sticky), protein content can be the same or lower (for less chewy dough), and oven temperatures between 550-600 degrees.
    • Lower temperature for thicker crust (needs to cook longer, 5-7 minutes)
    • Higher temperature for thin crust (quicker bake, 3-4 minutes)
    • Minimal toppings and sauce: the more “stuff” you have on the pizza the longer it will take to cook and the less crispy it will be.
  2. Cracker Crisp Crust: low protein (10.5-11.5) low gluten flour, longer mixing time (12 minutes) better developed dough.
  3. Thick and Chewy Crust: Gluten in the range of 12-13% and a bit dryer dough, higher protein as well as a lower oven temperature (525-550 degrees) and longer cooking times (6-9 minutes). Use a larger dough ball if using our dough. This is a good style if you like more toppings and sauce on your pizza.

Is your Data Center Team Arrogant? Do you see the impact?

A data center team has a hard job and almost everyone tries to recruit what they think are the best.  What my friends and I have been noticing is how some of the data center teams have been tipping towards an arrogance of thinking they know more than others.  Curious I ran a Google search on “technical arrogance technology” and the following are 5 articles, all about silicon valley’s arrogance pop up.

Why is arrogance bad?  Check out this article.

“Arrogant people are more
than willing to take credit for
their successes, but not their failures,”

Silverman notes. “They 

get angry when their ideas are
criticized, and they tend to put
their personal agendas ahead of
organizational objectives.”

Being more efficient in the data center by changing how you organize the hardware

So much of IT is governed by self optimizing behavior by different fiefdoms.  Security, Web, Data, Apps, Mobile, Marketing, Finance, Manufacturing most of the time own their own gear.  I had a chance to talk to Gigaom’s Jonathan Vanian to discuss how data center clusters (sometimes called cores or pods) are used to organize IT resources to be efficient vs. a departmental approach.  This has been done for so long it’s been well proven.

Here is Jonathan’s post.

Want a more efficient data center? Maybe it’s time you tried a core and pod setup

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AUG. 27, 2014 - 5:00 AM PDT

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Data Center - generic
photo: watcharakun/Shutterstock
SUMMARY:

In order for companies to improve their internal data centers’ efficiency and improve their applications’ performance, many are turning to using a “core and pod” setup. In this type of arrangement, data center operators figure out the best configuration of common data center gear and software to suit their applications’ needs.

The fundamental idea is to let system architects define systems as resources for departments.

“You need to have some group that is looking at the bigger picture,” Ohara said. “A group that looks at what is acquired and makes it work all together.”

If more companies were using this approach making them more efficient many times they can get better price performance making them competitive with public clouds.

Jonathan wrote about my perspective.

How pod and core configurations boost performance

Google, Facebook and eBay are all examples of major tech companies that have been using the pod and core setup, said Dave Ohara, a Gigaom Research analyst and founder of GreenM3. With massive data centers that need to serve millions of users on a daily basis, it’s important for these companies to have the ability to easily scale their data centers with user demand.

Using software connected to the customized hardware, companies can now program their gear to take on specific tasks that the gear was not originally manufactured for, like analyzing data with Hadoop, ensuring that resources are optimized for the job at hand and not wasted, Ohara said.

It used to be that the different departments within a company — such as the business unit or the web services unit — directed the purchases of rack gear as opposed to a centralized data center team that can manage the entirety of a company’s infrastructure.

Because each department may have had different requirements from each other, the data center ended up being much more bloated than it should have been and resulted in what Ohara referred to as “stranded compute and storage all over the place.”

And Jonathan was able to discuss with Redapt a systems integrator who has build many clusters/pods/cores.

Working with companies to build their data centers

At Redapt, a company that helps organizations configure and build out their data centers, the emergence of the pod and core setup has come out of the technical challenges companies like those in the telecommunications industry face when having to expand their data centers, said Senior Vice President of Cloud Solutions Jeff Dickey.

By having the basic ingredients of a pod figured out per your organization’s needs, it’s just a matter of hooking together more pods in case you need to scale out, and now you aren’t stuck with an excess amount of equipment you don’t need, explained Dickey.

Redapt consults with customers on what they are trying to achieve in their data center and handles the legwork involved, such as ordering equipment from hardware vendors and setting up the gear into customized racks. Dickey said that Redapt typically uses an eight-rack-pod configuration to power up application workloads of a similar nature (like multiple data-processing tasks).