The Shape of Things

There was a time when I thought the Huffington Post was a interesting website, primarily because it wasn’t the typical news site (existing newspaper/channel) and I like all things new. Since the beginning of year I have noticed that the journalism on this site has been on a gradual slide towards uselessness… which to me equates to less frequent visits to the site. Today I came home and was surfing the web to catch up on the latest news and found this article:

Is Sarah Palin’s Lipliner A Tatoo?

It’s sad to say, but that will be the last article I read on that site.

My wife is an architect and is into “green” design which I whole-heartedly support. Today she sent me a blog post titled: Server Rooms and the Future of Humanism. It piqued my interested quite a bit mainly due to the fact that one, I am a human… and two that I implement and maintain servers for a living.

The purpose of the article is to raise awareness that servers are bad for the environment due to their stringent cooling requirements. The author (Geoff Manaugh) went so far as to say that a single server can do as much damage to the environment as an SUV. However, of the many remedies that Manaugh purposed, he (hopefully not knowingly) didn’t talk about “server virtualization” at all.

Since Manaugh didn’t raise the awareness of server virtualization, please allow me.

Wikipedia defines server virtualization as: “a method of partitioning a physical server computer into multiple servers that each has the appearance and capabilities of running on its own dedicated machine”.

So think of it like this: typically we think of SUVs as a bad thing for the environment. However SUVs would be at least somewhat better if they were always used to their maximum potential. In that I mean, whenever they are driven there are 8-9 people seated in them. Server virtualization is the same thing. Typically a physical server only uses 10%- 20% of its resources, so you could use a product like VMWare to setup 5-10 “virtual” servers to run on one “physical” server.

I know that I am a total computer geek, but I am really excited by VMWare and I want people to understand that computer software can be “green” too!!

Not sure how accurate this is, but its pretty darn cool!!

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I am no where near smart enough to come up with the insights Bob Harris came up with… so I won’t even try to steal.

Read his post and then re-watch the episode… some things are far fetched, but I do like the funeral theory.

Tony Soprano didn’t just get whacked; he practically got a funeral

Ok, I am a total computer geek that needs to be on bleeding edge of everything tech-wise. After work I upgraded my blog from wordpress 2.13 to 2.2

Alright… I really can’t tell a difference, but it is supposed to be a little faster. We’ll see…

I guess the more important thing is that my first upgrade to my website on a linux server went smoothly. John Savel would be proud!! I signed the deployment tech section of the project docs…

Get it while its hot!!

http://wordpress.org/development/2007/05/wordpress-22/

After years of being in the tech industry and not having my own domain (how absurd) I am pleased to launch shaneschnell.com

I plan to keep the content fresh, thought provoking, and consistent.

I combined my old blog into my current blog. Some oldies but goodies in there:

http://seattleshane.blogspot.com/2005/03/j-st.html

http://seattleshane.blogspot.com/2005/04/should-i-get-one.html

http://seattleshane.blogspot.com/2005/04/cant-sleep.html

http://seattleshane.blogspot.com/2005_08_01_archive.html

hahahaha… nice to be able to look back at yourself.

Enjoy!