Sun, 30 Aug 2009
Project California: a Data Center Virtualization Server - Short Review
When it comes to sysadmin buzzwords Project California: a Data
Center Virtualization Server ticks a lot of the boxes, which is a
little misleading as half the book is about solid hardware level details
that are actually rarely covered.
While this makes the first half more than a little dry it does introduce concepts that many of us take for granted, such as why DDR3 is faster than DDR2. The second half takes you through the Cisco UCS stack and where the benefits are. It's a good starting point but I'd hoped for some more meat, maybe even a case-study or two. The book answered some of my questions but it's not amazingly comprehensive so expect to do a lot more digging after you've finished reading it.
The book is self-published (Via Lulu) so it's probably worth mentioning the quality - it's the same as any other book I've bought recently. No better and no worse, which is actually pretty impressive.
6/10 - dry, fills a niche but covers a lot of general material not specific to UCS.
Like this post? - Digg Me! | Add to del.icio.us! | reddit this!
Posted: 2009/08/30 11:05 | /books | Permanent link to this entry | This entry and same date
FrOSCon 2009
Last weekend I joined the hordes and worked my way from London to Seigburg
for FrOSCon 2009. Along the way I
experienced an airport evacuation due to fire alarm, a delayed flight,
four trains (one in the wrong direction) and numerous kindly old
German ladies that took pity on me and gradually got me in the right
direction. And it was worth every second.
I'd never really considered going to FrOSCon before, the percentage of talks given in German is quite high and I don't speak a word of the language but this year there was an excellent line up of speakers (all presenting in English) in the OpenSQLCamp room. As I'm getting more and more MySQL requests at work I thought it'd be a handy thing to go along and learn from.
In general it reminded me of the earlier FOSDEMs in tone, especially with the selection of project based developer rooms. The only annoyance was that so many sysadmin related talks, with excellent attention grabbing titles, were in German only. I plan on working my way through the slides in the hope that I can get at least a basic idea of their subject matter.
A large percentage of the sessions were recorded and I'm looking forward to catching up on the sessions where I was already booked or engaging in the hallway track. The only annoyance was that so many sysadmin related talks, with excellent titles, were in German only. I plan on working my way through the slides in the hope that I can get at least a basic idea of their subject matter.
Speaker highlights for me were Dag Wieers and Simon Wardley, both are very entertaining, highly practised speakers that grab the audience and don't let go. I especially like watching the audience in swardleys cloud computing talks as they gradually come to see how it's going to impact all of us eventually. If he was paired with someone in the mobile space with the same kind of eloquence we'd have a nice road map of the tech future.
Although the English language talks were a little thin on the ground during the second day the organisers did an excellent job (although the newbies like me could have done a few pointers about things like the BBQ, do we buy tickets? Pay at the counter?) and with a little luck I'll have the money to go back again next year.
Like this post? - Digg Me! | Add to del.icio.us! | reddit this!
Posted: 2009/08/30 11:00 | /events | Permanent link to this entry | This entry and same date
Copyright © 2000-2010 Dean Wilson
