Microsoft reveals its server designs and releases open source code
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
It's cool how you can save a lot on small things when stuff get so big.
In the same way that openly shared and critiqued communication protocol specs are a boon for incredibly performant, efficient and secure services, so too can cracking the black box on data center hardware be for building even more powerful server farms and the like.
It's cool to see Microsoft join with Facebook in being a disruption to a closely kept branch of system design. The designs are open source -- any of these threatened companies can take, learn from, and extend them.
If opening up designs like this is a threat to wages or jobs (I think the argument might be "why pay a system designer if I can grab these specs") it's the same threat presented by any technology advance. Innovate or die, as they say.
Though, it would be nice that if a company is going to pay a team to design a custom box, then open source that design, the least they could do is prominently credit the team of engineers.
If hardware mffs see this as a challenge, there's an easy solution. Start building it!
The huge gap in this, opencompute, etc is that for most of us, it's nowhere near cost effective to actually have these designs fabricated. That leaves a gaping hole for supermicro, dell, etc to fill.
By comparison, one of Apple's datacenter buildings is over 300k sq-ft, and Apple is at best a minor also-ran in the datacenter business.
The NSA's computing facilities are insignificant compared to commercial facilities.
The current tension between 'colo facilities' and 'EC2/CE/Azure' is almost palpable at times. I look forward to the first "OpenCompute Ready" hosting facility that just needs you to plug in your server or storage boards.
As Facebook and others already joined, i'm curious how much added value a big company like Microsoft brings in.
Saving say 1 watt per hour power blade, scaled across a thousand servers (with 100% up time) is something like 8.76 Gigawatt-Hours of power per year (not counting cooling). At average California power rates (15.2 cents per kilowatt-hour), your saving 1.3 million dollars per year in power costs.
What Microsoft may achieve is to build machines that are better suited to run Windows, as most other large scale operations don't deploy Windows servers to production. Microsoft, being the only company that has 1M Windows servers is uniquely positioned to develop it.
"Smart companies try to commoditize their products' complements."
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/StrategyLetterV.html
[NB Yes it's from 2002 but the basic rules of the game stay pretty constant]
They tried that too with MSX, which made the front-page a couple days back.
Once your path gets longer, aren't your essentially just stuffing your file name with metadata which should belong in the file in the first place?
The issue is that Explorer--and by extension, virtually every Open/Save dialog in every application--cannot handle paths longer than 254 UTF-16 bytes. I'm fairly sure at this point that Microsoft does that purely because they're not sure application programs can handle paths longer than 254 UTF-16 bytes (and they're likely correct), so they're trying to prevent users from making files that they can't open, but I find the entire situation absolutely infuriating. (In fact, as a Windows dev, it's really just that and the inability to delete open files that drive me bonkers on a regular basis at this point. Most of the rest I either like or have good workarounds for.)
Interestingly, while that problem doesn't exist in .NET, and so you'd think that .NET would finally support long file names by default, Microsoft actually goes entirely the opposite direction: the BCL strips out any leading `\\?\` in paths to force you to stay at MAX_PATH or below. The more things change...
Secondly, if you use 20 version control systems, you're doing it horribly, horribly wrong.
If you want to see how open Microsoft likes it, check out M$ Secure Boot.
Not that it makes any difference anymore. I have Ubuntu on my laptop, didn't even have to disable secureboot to do so.