CIDR Notes 2: power

On Wednesday morning there was very interesting discussion of power management in datacenters and data management software

James Hamilton — formerly of Microsoft and now at Amazon — gave a killer keynote talk on power in datacenters.  He traces the power from the provider through all the steps involved in powering machines and cooling.  He compares all the power-related costs to the costs of the machines, networking and other costs of running a datacenter, and points out the places where efficiency can be found.  A few things amazed me:

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CIDR Conference Notes 1

CIDR 2009 is shaping up to be as interesting as I had hoped.  

If you don’t know about CIDR, it’s a conference founded by David DeWitt, Jim Gray and Mike Stonebraker 8 years back, for data systems work and other data-centric topics that would have a tough time getting accepted to the more hidebound conferences like SIGMOD and VLDB.  It’s usually a good conference — everybody stays in one room and pays attention, and it tends to attract a smart mix of old hands and young upstarts who really dig in and engage.  I ran the program this year, and was really happy with the papers and speakers we got.  Only have time to comment on a few things here.