Though this is the second day of SAF, it is really the first official day.  Yesterday was actually a pre-conference day.

Today, we had three keynote speakers.  Neil Leslie and Tim O’Brien from Microsoft, and Bob Pearson from Dell.  One interesting thing about the keynote speakers at this event is the that they were all limited to 30 minutes.  When hearing this, I initially felt that they would be too time constrained to be able to deliver a complete message, but all three were successful.

After the keynotes, the follow-on break out sessions, and lunch, we all gathered together for an Open Space session led by my friend, Steven “Doc” List.  This was my favorite part of the day (excluding some one-off conversations that recurred throughout).

Open Space, in a nutshell, has gets everyone together to nominate topics for discussion.  Once the topics are decided and organized (I am REALLY skimming over this part), everyone attends the topic discussions that they desire to hear or participate in.  I don’t know how many formats Open Space “supports” during topic deliberations, but I experienced two.  One topic I attended, the use of social networking in the enterprise and the challenges it presents such as privacy and security, was setup as chairs in a circle for discussion.  This was a good and productive session, but it was nothing compared to the first one I attended.

The first session I attended, “I don’t get Twitter”, had too many people to put all the chairs into one big circle.  So it was arranged with a “fishbowl” in the center.  The fishbowl consists of four chairs are placed in the center of the room in a circle facing inward.  There are some very basic rules here.  No one is allowed to participate in the discussion unless they are sitting in the fishbowl.  Only three people are allowed to sit in the fishbowl, meaning that there must always be one empty chair.  As someone wants to enter the discussion, they enter from the audience and sit in the empty chair.  One of the original three, usually the one that has been there the longest, must exit the fishbowl.  Once out of the fishbowl, you return to being part of the audience and can no longer participate in the discussion without reentering the fishbowl.

The “I don’t get Twitter” session was packed!  There were 10 topics run in parallel for a conference of about 300 attendees and there were over 50 people in this session alone.  There were many interesting questions posed during the session.  “What about security/safety of our children as they expose personal and geographic information about themselves?”, “How is Twitter monetized?”, “Does Twitter detract or enhance the work environment and should employers care?”, “What happens when a company is built on Twitter and Twitter ‘goes away’?”. 

They were all very good topics of discussion and there were many participants.  I personally, was addicted to the fishbowl and found myself reentering it several times during the session.  As you may have expected, the Tweeps in the audience were tweeting about being in an Open Space discussion about Twitter during the discussion.

The session lasted 50 minutes and was exhilarating.  I have asked Doc to facilitate our Open Space at the Atlanta ITARC in February and now that I have participated in Open Space, I am extremely excited.

I was the last person in the fishbowl (go figure) and I announced, as everyone left, that Doc had just tweeted to me “have you explained Twitter yet?”

To follow me or Doc on Twitter our aliases are jdecarlo and athought respectively.

And there you have it.

Joe.

The trip to San Francisco was uneventful, but the arrival was beautiful.  I was tipped off that I should get a window seat to witness the landing of the plane into the San Francisco International Airport.  It was quite beautiful.

My first day was very fun.  In addition to the planned festivities, I got to spend time with quite a few people that I normally don’t get to see face-to-face.

Of all the first day “Pre-conference” presentations, my favorite was by Ulrich “Uli” Homann.  Uli is a Principle/Partner Architect at Microsoft and is a Infrastructure/Solution Architect combination which is a rare breed.

Uli spoke to us about the energy crisis in data centers and how application design and virtualization can work together to address the issue. 

When analyzing how the industry addresses Green computing, the trend is for more efficient CPUs and lower power rack densities.  While cooling is a big energy consumer in today’s data centers, disk utilization of mass storage does not get the attention it deserves and consumes more energy than CPU, memory, and fans combined.

To win in this space, there are two basic approaches that can be taken.  Stabilizing resource utilization, while increasing service throughput, where services represent any server output.  And stabilizing that service throughput, while decreasing resource utilization.  While both these can address the problem, Uli presented solutions leveraging the first approach.  

An example of this would be planning around a stable storage constraint.  Let’s take a mass storage solution that houses 100 terabytes and takes 25 servers to support servicing that storage to consumers.  Stabilizing service throughput while reducing resource utilization would be accomplished by increasing each server’s efficiency so that the same 100 terabytes can be serviced by 10 servers with the same throughput.

Uli warned against over execution of cautious planning.  That is to say, plan for High Availability (HA) or Disaster Recovery (DR), but don’t implement it if you don’t need it.  Having huge amounts of unneeded replication in our data centers is contributing to the energy crisis.  Since the government is putting restrictions around the amount of power all data centers can consume (a percentage of the country’s overall power consumption), the days of paying for servers or storage that we don’t need in the name of “just-in-case” need to come to an end.  As architects, we need to be more responsible in identifying what deployment configurations we actually need before requesting them.

Uli introduced us to a concept called “Constraint Based Planning” which he picked up from a book by Eliyahu Goldratt called The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement.  I am not going to try to define it here, but he illustrates it using the data center and the comparison of energy spent versus the service units as you can see from the diagram on the right.

He suggests, from a infrastructure and solutions perspective, that services and applications should be segmented so that administrators can segment the work loads of servers.  All that is to say that if a service isn’t needed, don’t deploy it.  If it has to be deployed but is rarely used, don’t waste energy making it immediately available, but create a topology that will allow it to be serviced up from a hibernated or serialized and stored state.

This idea can be translated to application development, which is depends on, to allow application features to be turned “off”.  This is to say that not all features are immediately available.  Today, applications typically expect service calls to immediately respond.  To help solve this problem, applications should have resilience to failed service calls and allow for retry logic when it is not available.  So if the data center has “turned off” a particular service by some sort of hibernation, but can bring it back online when a request for it occurs, the application can support this kind of delay.

Though this session was mostly attended by infrastructure architects, there was a lesson for solution architects as well.

This does very little justice to Uli’s presentation, but, hopefully, there is something for you to digest here.

Comments welcome and encouraged.

Joe.

As a member of the Board of Directors of the Atlanta IASA Chapter, I am in charge of the 2009 Atlanta IT Architect Regional Conference (ITARC).  We have been busy securing sponsors, keynote speakers, and a facility to hold the thing.

Now the hunt is on for Atlanta-based speakers.  Architects who like to present to their peers about subjects that interest us all.  If you are an architect or know one, consider this blog entry a call for papers.  Interested parties should email their profile and abstract to atlantaitarc@iasahome.org. 

And there you have it.

Joe.

The Strategic Architect Forum (SAF08) is in San Francisco this year and I’ll be there.

SAF is an annual forum where Microsoft gathers 400 senior architects from around the world to contemplate architecture and architecture trends.  The meeting lasts several days and, like many Microsoft events, has three tracks.

• Enterprise Architecture 2.0
• Next Generation Social and Consumer Productivity
• Embracing the Cloud

 

I am really excited to have been invited and will definitely blog about my experience once I return.  The event is not until late November, so don’t hold your breath on those posts.

Recorded Sessions from SAF07

And there you have it.

Joe.

 I arrived with the presidents of the Nashville IASA Chapter to B. B. Kings in downtown Nashville.  At first, my observations made me doubt that this was a good venue for an IT meeting, but as I found the reserved spacious room in the rear of the building with tables, chairs, and a buffet, my opinion quickly switched from doubt to excitement.  I knew the event was going to be

spectacular.  Although the food was good, I didn’t get much of it because I tried to talk to everyone as they arrived.

The Nashville chapter has had two previous meetings, but this was to be their “kick-off” event and I was honored to be a part of it.

My presentation seemed to be well received by the audience and that was confirmed by some of the feedback directed my way.  It was a very enjoyable experience and I will remember it for a long time.