Getting into it…

Former IBM Colleagues, especially those who’ve been working in the X86 server business, which is being sold to Lenovo, might enjoy listening to the latest This American Life, #516, Act 1 of Stuck in the Middle. It starts out with this introduction, “he spent his entire career working for IBM, going back to the 50’s and 60’s, when working at IBM was like working at NASA”.

Obsessive, compulsive types rejoice, you are not alone. You can click on the sound bar, the act starts at 11:50’ish, or go here on the This American Life website. Hear it out.

Oh yes, Opus No.1 is here. Tim never made any money, he didn’t get a drink for it, he never used it to pick-up women. This American Life is offering Opus No. 1 as a download, here.

Now here’s an interesting uptime challenge

I was reading through some Cisco blogs to catch-up on what’s going on in their world for a current project of mine, when I saw this blog entry for today called “Beat this uptime” from Omar Sultan at Cisco.

They have some servers with five, seven and even nine years uptime. Great, except the utilization is so low as to not warrant the electricity they’ve used. Rather than an uptime boast, these systems seem like a great opportunity for a green datacenter consolidation and save the electricity!

Hmm, I love the smell of virtualization in the morning. I emailed Tim Sipples, it will be interesting what the mainframe blog makes of this, I know that when I was new technology architect for System z they had some customers with uptime in the 3-4 year space, running millions of transactions per day and at 85%+ utilization. I never checked for Power Systems but I suspect there are many similar out there.

[Update:] Actually if you post with stats on your system uptime directly to the Cisco blog, you can win a fleece. I missed that when I first read it!