Archive for September, 2009
New school year brings ‘Green IT’ college degree
September 2nd, 2009 | 
Author: Making data centers more energy efficient has been elevated to a college degree.
IBM on Wednesday said it has developed a two-year associates degree in “green data center management” in collaboration with the Metropolitan Community College in Omaha, Neb.
Existing technologies like virtualization can improve data center efficiently significantly. Emerging technologies such as this wireless sensor promise better control over equipment and facilities.
(Credit: Arch Rock)
Starting in December, students will learn how to design and manage data centers to run efficiently in what IBM says is the first college degree in the subject. Classes will be offered online to remote students as well.
The Environmental Protection Agency in 2007 estimated that data centers alone use about 1.5 percent of all electricity in the U.S. and are on a pace to double consumption in the coming years. With existing technologies, energy use could be cut by 25 percent, representing up to $4 billion in savings, the EPA found.
Because of financial and environmental concerns, more data center operators are taking steps to cut energy use, such as consolidating server workloads and upgrading cooling systems. Companies such as IBM, HP, and IT consulting companies have practices in designing facilities to be more efficient.
The green IT degree from IBM and Metropolitan Community College covers technologies for consolidating computing work loads, including virtualization, as well as security and disaster recovery. The course work also addresses the nuts and bolts of building and managing a facility, such as cabling and monitoring.
The data center where the class will be taught, which will be stocked with IBM servers, was funded by a $1.8 million Department of Labor grant.
Source :
http://news.cnet.com/8301-11128_3-10331256-54.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20
Posted in education, evironment, Green, IBM | 
Tags: college degree, education, Green IT, IBM, Metropolitan Community College | 
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Major earthquake strikes Indonesia, kills 6
JAKARTA, Indonesia — Six people were killed in Indonesia after a 7.0-magnitude earthquake struck Wednesday, officials said.
The quake was initially categorized as magnitude 7.4 before being downgraded to 7.0 by geological officials.
No details were immediately available about the deaths. At least 18 other people were injured around the capital, Jakarta, said Rustam Pakaya, a health ministry spokesman.
A tsunami watch went into effect and quickly expired, according to the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center.
It struck about 2:55 p.m. (3:55 a.m. ET) and was centered 242 km (150 miles) from Jakarta, according the U.S. Geological Survey. The quake was about 60 km (37.3 miles) deep.
In Tasikmalaya, a city in the Indonesian island of Java, some older buildings were damaged and people panicked in the streets because there was no electricity, according to a witness named Maya.
Tasikmalaya is about 142 km (88 miles) from the epicenter. Several homes in that city were destroyed and a building collapsed, the health ministry spokesman said.
John Aglionby, a journalist with the Financial Times, was in Jakarta during the quake.
“The whole building started to sway. People got very serious,” Aglionby told CNN. “People left the building. But there was no sign of damage here.”
About three weeks ago, a series of earthquakes — ranging in magnitude from 4.7 to 6.7 — struck off the western coast of Indonesia’s Sumatra Island.
At least seven people were injured and one building collapsed in Padang City in West Sumatra, officials said.
– CNN’s Andy Saputra contributed to this report.
Source :
http://cnnwire.blogs.cnn.com/2009/09/02/major-earthquake-strikes-indonesia/
Posted in diaster, earthquake, evironment, News, World News |
Tags: deaths, earthquake, Indonesia, Jakarta, tradegy, West Sumatra |
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More on today’s Gmail issue
Gmail’s web interface had a widespread outage earlier today, lasting about 100 minutes. We know how many people rely on Gmail for personal and professional communications, and we take it very seriously when there’s a problem with the service. Thus, right up front, I’d like to apologize to all of you — today’s outage was a Big Deal, and we’re treating it as such. We’ve already thoroughly investigated what happened, and we’re currently compiling a list of things we intend to fix or improve as a result of the investigation.
Here’s what happened: This morning (Pacific Time) we took a small fraction of Gmail’s servers offline to perform routine upgrades. This isn’t in itself a problem — we do this all the time, and Gmail’s web interface runs in many locations and just sends traffic to other locations when one is offline.
However, as we now know, we had slightly underestimated the load which some recent changes (ironically, some designed to improve service availability) placed on the request routers — servers which direct web queries to the appropriate Gmail server for response. At about 12:30 pm Pacific a few of the request routers became overloaded and in effect told the rest of the system “stop sending us traffic, we’re too slow!”. This transferred the load onto the remaining request routers, causing a few more of them to also become overloaded, and within minutes nearly all of the request routers were overloaded. As a result, people couldn’t access Gmail via the web interface because their requests couldn’t be routed to a Gmail server. IMAP/POP access and mail processing continued to work normally because these requests don’t use the same routers.
The Gmail engineering team was alerted to the failures within seconds (we take monitoring very seriously). After establishing that the core problem was insufficient available capacity, the team brought a LOT of additional request routers online (flexible capacity is one of the advantages of Google’s architecture), distributed the traffic across the request routers, and the Gmail web interface came back online.
What’s next: We’ve turned our full attention to helping ensure this kind of event doesn’t happen again. Some of the actions are straightforward and are already done — for example, increasing request router capacity well beyond peak demand to provide headroom. Some of the actions are more subtle — for example, we have concluded that request routers don’t have sufficient failure isolation (i.e. if there’s a problem in one datacenter, it shouldn’t affect servers in another datacenter) and do not degrade gracefully (e.g. if many request routers are overloaded simultaneously, they all should just get slower instead of refusing to accept traffic and shifting their load). We’ll be hard at work over the next few weeks implementing these and other Gmail reliability improvements — Gmail remains more than 99.9% available to all users, and we’re committed to keeping events like today’s notable for their rarity.
http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2009/09/more-on-todays-gmail-issue.html
Gmail users suffer through outage
Gmail went offline Tuesday for some users.
(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)
Gmail users were unable to get to their accounts on Monday as an outage struck the Google e-mail service.
“We’re aware of a problem with Google Mail affecting a small subset of users. The affected users are unable to access Google Mail,” Google said at 11:12 a.m. PDT on its Google Apps status dashboard after it discovered the error.
At 11:28 a.m., some good news arrived: “Google Mail service has already been restored for some users, and we expect a resolution for all users in the near future.”
However, two hours later, the problems persisted for some, and the Twittersphere was abuzz with griping.
The problems appeared to affect the Web-based version of the service, but accounts could be reached using third-party e-mail software that used the IMAP, or Internet Message Access Protocol, interface.
Gmail is used by tens of millions of people, and its fast growth carried it past AOL’s e-mail service into third place, according to ComScore.
Google didn’t immediately comment on the scope and cause of the outage. It’s not the first Gmail outage this year.
Google Apps customers, who pay $50 per user per year, get extensions of their service contracts, if their services are down for longer than a certain duration. The dashboard showed only mail to have troubles, not other Google Apps services, such as Google Calendar, Google Talk, and Google Docs.
Outages pose problems for Google, as it tries to persuade companies to buy into its cloud-computing vision, in which applications are hosted on the Internet rather than on corporate computers. But Google argues that its service availability is competitive with most organizations’ abilities to run their own e-mail servers.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-10323306-264.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20
LA fire likely to pass across Mount Wilson
The wildfire ravaging Northern Los Angeles County is expected to pass across Mount Wilson, home to TV and radio towers and the famed Wilson Observatory.
Mount Wilson Observatory Director Hal McAlister said Monday in an ongoing blog that the U.S. Forest Service informed him that passage of the fire across Mount Wilson was imminent. The USFS also said firefighters would battle the blaze from the air rather than on the ground.
Firefighers have already been pulled from Red Box, a major staging area about five miles from the observatory.
In his blog late Monday, McAlister reported:
Monday, 31 Aug 09, 2:46 pm PDT – I just spoke with Sherry Roman, Public Affairs Officer of the Angeles National Forest. She could give no updates as to the status of the fire in the Mount Wilson vicinity except that the USFS still considers that passage of fire across Mount Wilson is imminent and will be fought aerially rather than with ground personnel. Once the fire is through the area, they can assess the damage by air after the event before they can send in ground personnel. She also confirmed that firefighters have been removed from Red Box.This roller coaster has taken a dip downward.
McAlister’s latest blog (which mistakenly lists the day as Monday rather than Tuesday):
Monday, 1 Sep 09, 7:15 am PDT – …I do not at this point have any news – only what we can all deduce from Towercam and other sources. Towercam scenes continue to show thick smoke on the mountain with a concentration on the right side of the image implying activity on the mountain’s north side. It clearly has not reached the mountain and, if advancing towards us, it is only doing so slowly.
McAlister also reported that one of the two power lines to the mountain was knocked out by the fire. But the towercam showing the latest images is still online for now, allowing the Mount Wilson staff to monitor the flames.
The latest news from CBS in Los Angeles reports that the Station fire is still only 5 percent contained, and officials don’t expect full containment for another two weeks. At this point, the fire has destroyed 121,000 acres and 53 homes.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-10323008-94.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20
Posted in diaster, evironment, Health, weather |
Tags: diaster, environment, Health, L.A. Wildfire, Mount Wilson |
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