Category: Technology

Slashdot has a new article which says:

Google’s wasn’t the best storage paper at FAST ’07.
Another, more provocative paper looking at real-world results from
100,000 disk drives got the ‘Best Paper’ award. Bianca Schroeder, of
CMU’s Parallel Data Lab, submitted Disk failures in the real world: What does an MTTF of 1,000,000 hours mean to you? The paper crushes a number of (what we now know to be) myths about
disks such as vendor MTBF validity, ‘consumer’ vs. ‘enterprise’ drive
reliability (spoiler: no difference), and RAID 5 assumptions.
StorageMojo has a good summary of the paper’s key points.

See full article and interesting comments.

Slashdot is reporting on a just published a paper out of Google on Failure Trends in a Large Disk Drive Population.

Excerpts:
Based on a study of 100,000 disk drives over 5 years they find some interesting stuff. To quote from the abstract: ‘Our analysis identifies several parameters from the drive’s self monitoring facility (SMART) that correlate highly with failures. Despite this high correlation, we conclude that models based on SMART parameters alone are unlikely to be useful for predicting individual drive failures. Surprisingly, we found that temperature and activity levels were much less correlated with drive failures than previously reported.’

See full article.

LiveOps is a very interesting start-up which is essentially virtualizing call centers. This is the description of LiveOps from Techcrunch:

Palo Alto based LiveOps offers web based management of more than 10,000 home based telephone workers. Here’s what makes them interesting: their service operates as a performance based auction, routing incoming calls to the best performing worker available. Top workers participate in IM communities to discuss methods of increasing productivity and solving problems. I like seeing the web make work more interesting and perhaps services like this will help decrease the drudgery of call-center work. At the very least, it will likely make the business more efficient.