Setting up our own (small size) personal cloud infrastructure. Part #3, reverse engineer the “black box”

By Tuesday, December 2, 2014 Projects, Resources, Sciences & Technology, X-Posts Tags: 0079, A, Cabinets, Data, Datacenter, Documentation, Domestic, Hardware, Personal, Software, Standards, Tools Permalink 0
SONY DSC SONY DSC SONY DSC SONY DSC DSC03052_m SONY DSC SONY DSC owncloud_desktop SONY DSC SONY DSC SONY DSC SONY DSC SONY DSC SONY DSC SONY DSC SONY DSC SONY DSC SONY DSC SONY DSC SONY DSC SONY DSC SONY DSC SONY DSC SONY DSC

 

At a very small scale and all things considered, a computer “cabinet” that hosts cloud servers and services is a very small data center and is in fact quite similar to large ones for its key components… (to anticipate the comments: we understand that these large ones are of course much more complex, more edgy and hard to “control”, more technical, etc., but again, not so fundamentally different from a conceptual point of view).

 

SONY DSC

Documenting the black box… (or un-blackboxing it?)

 

You can definitely find similar concepts that are “scalable” between the very small – personal – and the extra large. Therefore the aim of this post, following two previous ones about software (part #1) –with a technical comment here– and hardware (part #2), is to continue document and “reverse engineer” the set up of our own (small size) cloud computing infrastructure and of what we consider as basic key “conceptual” elements of this infrastructure. The ones that we’ll possibly want to reassess and reassemble in a different way or question later during the I&IC research.

However, note that a meaningful difference between the big and the small data center would be that a small one could sit in your own house or small office, or physically find its place within an everyday situation (becoming some piece of mobile furniture? else?) and be administrated by yourself (becoming personal). Besides the fact that our infrastructure offers server-side computing capacities (therefore different than a Networked Attached Storage), this is also a reason why we’ve picked up this type of infrastructure and configuration to work with, instead of a third party API (i.e. Dropbox, Google Drive, etc.) with which we wouldn’t have access to the hardware parts. This system architecture could then possibly be “indefinitely” scaled up by getting connected to  similar distant personal clouds in a highly decentralized architecture –like i.e. ownCloud seems now to allow, with its “server to server” sharing capabilities–.

See also the two mentioned related posts:

Setting up our own (small size) personal cloud infrastructure. Part #1, components

Setting up our own (small size) personal cloud infrastructure. Part #2, components

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EIC / ECIA standards (for racks, cabinets, panels and associated equipment)

By Monday, December 1, 2014 Resources, Sciences & Technology Tags: 0078, Cabinets, Furnitures, Hardware, Infrastructure, Links, Standards Permalink 0

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EIA_standards

…

And now that the Electronic Industries Alliance (EIA) has become the Electronic Components Alliance (ECA) and has then merged with the National Electronic Distributors Association (NEDA), its new name is ECIA, standing for Electronic Components Industry Association. That’s where you can buy (for $88.00 usd) the norm EIA/ECA-310E that regulates the 19″ cabinets standard.

Acting like a building block, this modular standard ultimately gives shape to bigger size data centers that hold many of these racks and cabinets.

Virtualization

By Thursday, November 27, 2014 Resources, Sciences & Technology Tags: 0077, Hardware, Ideas, Infrastructure, Software Permalink 0

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtualization

Virtualization, in computing, refers to the act of creating a virtual (rather than actual) version of something, including but not limited to a virtual computer hardware platform, operating system (OS), storage device, or computer network resources.

Virtualization began in 1960s mainframe computers as a method of logically dividing the mainframes’ resources for different applications. Since then, the meaning of the term has broadened.[1] 

… it continued and now this concept and technology is widely used to set up system architecture within data centers. Virtualized (data) servers populate physical servers. A well known company that is specialized around these questions is VMware.

Thingful, search engine for data

By Thursday, November 13, 2014 Resources, Sciences & Technology Tags: 0067, Data, Mapping, Mining, Tools Permalink 0

Note: Thingful is a “search engine” (beta version) for data and artifacts/sensors that produce data (the coming “Internet of Things” so to say, but also and mainly weather stations, aircrafts and Rastracks at this day). Already quite loaded, the content of the search engine and its map will with no doubt explode in the close future. It is a project by former creators of Pachube (in particular Usman Haque), which was an open webservice to “store, share and discover” data from realtime sensors, now sold and therefore private… It was sold to LogMeIn in 2011 (which is somehow a sad destiny for an open data project, but this is a different story) and became then Xively.

 

thingful

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Amazon presents Echo, new cloud-enabled AI for home

By Thursday, November 13, 2014 Design, Resources Tags: 0066, Corporate, Object, Product, Smart Permalink 0
Echo

Echo is a connected object for your home which is activated by voice recognition. It’s a loud-speaker connected to the “cloud” via Wifi, so it’s main use seems to be streaming music. It’s apparently able to understand and answer queries said in “natural language”, like “Play some Henry Mancini” (activates your Amazon Music Library, Prime Music, TuneIn or IHeartRadio account). Of course, it’s main features are shopping-oriented but a few aren’t: you can ask for information about say, Ronald Reagan and it taps into Wikipedia and reads the page, it’s linked to weather prediction pools so you can ask about tomorrow and you can manage personal to-do lists. Unsurprisingly, “Echo’s brain is in the cloud, running on Amazon Web Services so it continually learns and adds more functionality over time”. The object’s also got a dedicated control app, which runs on Fire OS, Amazon’s new smartphone Operating System.

SQM: The Quantified Home, (2014). Edited by Space Caviar

By Wednesday, November 12, 2014 Architecture, Resources, Thinking, X-Posts Tags: 0064, Books, D, Data, Domestic, Housing, Monitoring Permalink 0

Note: an interesting project /book by Space Caviar about the “house” under the pressure of “multiple of forces - financial, environmental, technological, geopolitical -”, to read in the frame of I&IC. Through its title, the book obviously address the question of domesticity immersed into technologies and the monitoring of its data.

While our project is gravitating around “networked objects/spaces”, the question of their monitoring, so as the production or use of data (“pushed” into to the cloud?) immediately comes into question, of course.

In this context, we must also point out Google and Apple efforts to tap into the “quantified house” with Nest and Homekit.

 

Via Space Caviar

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