transcyberia.info

Green IT is all the rage.

60 percent of global executives view climate change as important to consider within their companies' overall strategy McKinsey report on ITstrategyblog.com

A sudden outbreak of tree-hugging planet-conciousness? Nah.

I think the real reason that most IT shops should be looking at going green is the sheer cost savings component of it SUN CIO Bob Worrell on Biz-tech 3.0

First and foremost, this new trend is powered by record oil prices. Second: green has become a magical marketing word. A green spin covers any sin.

Hot air has become big business.

At the NFG mail servers, we block about 10 spam messages for every valid email our customers receive. Even so, customers keep asking for more agressive spam filters.

Spam filtering requires a lot of system resources. Content filtering involves opening each message and matching its full contents against a database of spam patterns. This involves a lot of disk read/write actions and heavy number crunching.

In the graph above, our mail server was flooded with more spam than it could adequately handle. Of course, we could allocate more system resources or try and tune the server some more. However, the solution turned out to be much simpler: greylisting.

Paul and myself have started a new DBMail blog.

Read the full blog entry @blog.dbmail.eu about direct database access versus protocol-mediated data retrieval.

Virtualization is cool. Literally. Consolidating servers is a great way to reduce carbon emissions.

Running a multi-core Xen server nowadays is like having a mini-datacenter-in-a-box. Cramming a dozen logical servers into the rackspace and energy footprint of a single physical server, it's a geek paradise. And a boon for the bottom line.

So naturally, when Amazon keeps upping the ante in it's Xen-based EC2 (Elastic Cloud Computing) offering, that's a cool thing.

Which begs the question: make or buy? How does running your own server rack (make) compare to renting EC2 capacity (buy)?

In Why most things fail, Paul Ormerod gleefully attacks economic orthodoxy. Traditional economic theory fails to explain the complexity and dynamics of the real world. Much more promising is an artificial life approach. Here, unpredictable interactions between simple agents give rise to complex behavior of the system as a whole.

Creating a simple computer model of a software market in which some firms pursue an open source strategy turns out to be very instructive, and funny.

See the group of ooo.......> agents up top? That's the open sourcers, competing with the closed source xxxxx.........> firms. You can click on the image to see an animation, or download the model and run your own simulations.