This was originally written on March 6, 2006.
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A colleague sent this article on virtualization to me today. This is not the first virtualization-related piece of information to come across my desk today either. There are also calls to customers, calls from vendors, and other pleasantries. The main point of the article talks about different strategies for increasing “yield” from a cubic foot of data center space.
The comparison to agriculture is apt, I believe, since for our society information generation, storage, and retrieval mirrors the concerns of agricultural societies in years and millennia past. Data Centers are our fields and granaries, and the network is the road between our towns, those fields, granaries, mills, and bakeries - replaced by online communities, data centers, SANs, database and application servers, and web servers respectively. What data center managers are going through now is similar to the “closing of the frontier” thesis by Turner.
As a result of the closing of the frontier, several significant changes occurred. As the availability of free land was basically exhausted … At the closing of the frontier, we entered a period of concentration — of capital, as with monopolies and trusts — and of labor, responding with unions and cooperation.
We can theorize, that as opportunity to add thousands of square feet of space for data center use becomes exhausted, people actually have to turn to concentrating - or consolidating - their resources for more productivity. Similarly, we power expenditures for running the CPUs and the disks, and power to cool them as well rising proportional to the density and amount of used space, and rising again as the cost per unit of power has increased by 50 or more percent over the last 2 years, managers better be getting something worthwhile from all those boxes. Suddenly, it is not longer possible to just “add a box” to a rack. Like modern agriculture, the “yield” from all these machines must be watered with power, and fertilized with efficient allocations and management.
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There are a lot of rules in photography, and one of the biggest temptations for people is to “break” them. Pretty much always, for pretty much anyone that is a bad idea. Much like driving @ 200 Mph is a bad idea for most people most of the time… Sometimes one does come across compositions and executions that break rules on purpose to good effect. That is rare, but here is one photograph that does this well:
I am never quite sure whether it is alright to repost someone else’s images. In this case, it was posted to a website with no subscription, and I am providing the link to the original post and serve the image directly from the server… To be absolutely clear - I did not take this image. As if this was not obvious already
Meng writes:
“I don’t think I’m going to need iPhoto any more. I have fallen in love with Adobe LightRoom.
Joining the ranks of other DSLR snobs, I will henceforth shoot in RAW, not JPG. “
I have also been on a Lightroom tear for the last month or so. Few weeks ago I had a chance to really try it out during a trip, with a hundreds of [poor] pictures shot over a couple of days - and I have not been so impressed with photo software … ever.
Photoshop is awesome, of course, but it really does not do much for management of the photos. Adobe Bridge has been horrible for years, but I think its recent improvements (with Photoshop CS2) are negligible compared to Lightroom.
Adobe finally got the separation between shoots and collections which are obvious to photographers, but for some reason not to those who create photo management applications for them. Cannot wait until it is fully integrated into Adobe RAW/Photoshop and has more full-featured version control. Ever since I started shooting RAW a year ago, I had problems with my old workflow and could not find a new one that worked. Lighroom finally lets me easily keep my initial files where they are, and create collections from each shoot that can be sent to family and friends, or merged into more specific “portfolio” collections. Now I just need to figure out what to do with the 90GB or existing photos which are already stored according to my old system…
Some of the nicer things about Lightroom compared to other systems:
- implicit understanding RAW and non-destructive editing workflows
- clean separation between shoots and post-shoot categorization
- transparent file structure — no proprietary databases I can not synch between my many backup hard drives and machines, at least as far as files themselves are concerned (not sure about keyword and other info)
- smart control for gauges, and still ability to just type in values everywhere
- fast - even for RAW (especially for RAW!)
- small touches that show understanding of the paranoid photographer’s mind. Such as the ability to immediately copy imported photos to another location as the import goes on. This creates a backup right away, even as files are been copied off the camera or memory card. Easy to do, but so many tools do not seem to get it…
A previous post on this site had a few comments about the different pieces of software I use. All of them have now been replaced with Lightroom.
