Posts Tagged subject=open_source
Internet Archive and Sun Modular Datacenter
Posted by admin in Infrastructure on March 31st, 2009
Part on an email message from Art.Pasquinelli@sun.com
The Internet Archive and the Sun Modular Datacenter Announcement – March 25
Sun and the Internet Archive rolled out a joint project at a March 25 event in Santa Clara. Sun has approximately 60 Sun Fire x4500s managing the Internet Archive’ content in a Sun Modular Datacenter. Dozens of articles were generated globally (see below). We will have a presentation and consulting on the architecture at the June 24-26 Sun PASIG in Malta (Early Bird registration will be open in the next 1-2 days at www.sun-pasig.org).
The video tour and Sun case study can be seen at; http://www.sun.com/featured-articles/2009-0325/feature/index.jsp
KEY QUOTES
“’Archive.org also houses the Wayback Machine, 1 million books, 100,000 movies and about 200,000 audio recordings,’ Kahle said. ‘It is a full-on library. This technology we see as another step toward a manageable system for dealing with enormous amounts of information safely.’” – eWEEK
“Each container packs in 60 of the company’s Sun Fire X4500 Open Storage Systems and is constantly monitored for potential threats. It’s actually a pretty elegant, modular solution to an archive that grows by nearly 100TBs every month.” –Gizmodo
“’For years, the folks at the archive got by building their own open-source computer systems,’ said Brewster Kahle, its founder — at one point the archive spun off a company to build systems — but they couldn’t move fast enough to keep up with advances in technology or the growth of the Web. So today Sun Microsystems will announce that the archive has migrated its digital library to a single Sun data center housed in a shipping container on Sun’s campus in Santa Clara.” – San Francisco Chronicle
“’It may be the single largest database in the world, and it’s all in a shipping container. I think of the shipping container as a single machine or expression made up of many smaller machines,’ said Brewster Kahle, digital librarian and co-founder of the Internet Archive, the nonprofit organization that runs the Wayback Machine site.” – Computerworld
“The Internet Archive is moving its data to one of Sun’s datacenter-in-a-box units, and not a minute too soon. At the rate that print is dying, we’ll need to step up the archival pace if we’re going to retain our cultural artifacts in the digital age.” – Ars Technica
Talis Connected Commons
“The terms of the offer are as follows: if you own, or are creating, a public domain dataset then you can store that data in the Platform as RDF, for free. We’re setting an initial cap of 50 million triples on each dataset, but thats should be plenty of space in which to collect some really interesting data. To qualify for the scheme, you need to be using either the Open Data Commons Public Domain Dedication and License or the recently launched Creative Commons CC0 license to publish your data. Anyone will then be able to freely access the stored data using the Platform services, without API keys and without usage limits. This means that your data will be wrapped in a ready made API right from the start.
The Platform API covers basic data management facilities, through to a configurable search engine and a fully compliant SPARQL endpoint. And with data being delivered in a range of formats including RDF/XML and JSON, there should be something there for everyone to get their teeth into no matter what kind of application you’re building or environment you’re working in.”
MIT Adopts Open-Access Policy
Posted by admin in Library World, Standard on March 25th, 2009
On March 19, the MIT faculty unanimously adopted a resolution that makes scholarly articles freely and openly available to the entire world.
Hal Abelson (MIT professor of computer science and engineering, who chaired the committee) writes:
Our resolution was closely modeled on similar ones passed last February by Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences and by the Harvard Law School, also passed by unanimous vote. Stanford’s School of Education did the same, as did Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government just last Monday.”
MIT Adopts an Open-Access Policy
also reported in:
Jonathan Schwartz – Understanding Sun in Three Easy Steps
Understanding Sun in Three Easy Steps (1 of 4)
“… I’m neither worried about the role information technology will play in the economy, nor am I worried about the relevance of Sun’s offerings. I’m not worried about the future, I’m focused on its arrival date.”
1. Technology Adoption
2. Commercial Innovation
3. Efficiently Connecting 1. and 2.
“…general purpose microprocessors and operating systems are now fast enough to eliminate the need for special purpose devices. That means you can build a router out of a server – notice you cannot build a server out of a router, try as hard as you like. The same applies to storage devices.
“At Sun, open source isn’t for servers. Open source is for datacenters.”
“The second, and arguably more important headwind was a decision made back in the 1990’s to cancel Solaris on Intel, in the belief it would protect Sun’s SPARC hardware business. Conversely, that mistake destroyed a generation of Solaris developers, and accelerated the rise of alternatives to traditional SPARC hardware. And now you understand why we prioritize developers – they are the seeds from which great forests grow. If you don’t water the roots, the trees wither.
But how do you make money giving software away to developers? Well, let’s switch gears, and talk about Software and Services.”
“When Free is Too Expensive
Numerically, most developers and technology users have more time than money. Most readers of this blog are happy to run unsupported software, and we are very happy to supply it. For a far smaller population, the price of downtime radically exceeds the price of a license or support – for some, the cost of downtime is measured in millions per minute. If you’re tracking packages or fleets of aircraft, running an emergency response network or a trading floor, you almost always have more money than time. And that’s our business model, we offer utterly exceptional service, support and enterprise technologies to those that have more money than time. It’s a good business.”
“…open source platforms generate, alongside the services attached to them, over a billion dollars a year, making Sun by far and away the world’s largest open source software company.”
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