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I thought that after the SheevaPlug some time will pass before we see even smaller computers intended for light IT tasks. This time the project is even smaller. It is called the Raspberry Pi. At its current state it looks like this. You might think the product has a long way to go before it hits the market, but you are wrong. One of the ideas of the creator is to bring computing closer to students and inspire them to learn more about the hardware and how it works. That is why it will most likely look like this, when the first units head out to public schools.

<img class="size-medium wp-image-866 aligncenter" title="raspberry pi" src="http://www.website-monitoring.eu/wp-content/plugins/wp-o-matic/cache/21e6a_raspberry-pi-300×225.jpg” alt=”" width=”450″ height=”340″ />

At the moment, it is marketed as the 25 USD PC. It has a 700Mhz ARM CPU, 128MB of RAM, HDMI slot and a USB port. You can attach a keyboard, mouse and any other USB device. You can connect a hub. You can see that there is also an image sensor in the middle. It is a 12mp CMOS sensor. You can also insert a memory card in order to have some place to install the OS.

Despite its size, this little gizmo is fully capable to play HD video. For this feature I love and hate the device at the same time. I love the fact that such a small contraption can become part of my home cinema installation, and that is exactly the reason for me to hate it.

This ultra small PC is intended for educational purpose. It is for hobbyists, tinkering with it to power a weekend project, to run some kind of server. It is mostly for people willing to build up on top of it. I will hate seeing this be treated as a cheap HD player.

I can’t wait to get my hands on it. It is cheap enough for anyone to go ahead and play around with, without thinking too much about not being too great with the soldering iron. The CMOS sensor cam can probably have a wide variety of implementations – light detector, face recognition, webcam. By being that small, the Raspberry Pi enables enthusiasts to try out many new projects.

I will definitely try to run something light, such as a telnet server, or a webcam, with the cam being the server. The latter’s retail price is at about $100+. Here is a thought – if the device keeps the promised price, it will cost less than my personal hosting plan. I can move everything there and just pay for the IP address I’m already using.

How would you use or mod this device?

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press release SAN JOSÉ, CA., June 27, 2011 –  Any system administrator worth his or her salt knows that data is the oxygen of the modern age. To keep the oxygen flowing Monitis Inc., the award-winning provider of the world’s first all-in-one systems monitoring platform, announces that users can now monitor their MySQL-operated database servers [...]
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<img alt="K Computer rack" src="http://www.website-monitoring.eu/wp-content/plugins/wp-o-matic/cache/01d46_110629-k-supercomputer-rack.jpeg” title=”K Computer rack” class=”alignright” width=”150″ height=”183″ />Top500.org recently released updated statistics about the fastest supercomputers in the world. They do this twice per year, and every time the reports make computing enthusiasts drool with mind-boggling performance numbers. You think your souped-up server or gaming rig is fast? Think again.

We cherry-picked some of the more interesting numbers, and made a few additional calculations for your reading pleasure. Enjoy.

• 548,352 – the number of CPU cores in the K Computer in Japan, the world’s currently fastest supercomputer. It’s the result of having 68,544 SPARC64 VIIIfx CPUs with eight cores each.
• 1,820,352 – the combined number of CPU cores in the top 10 supercomputers
• 672 – The number of computer racks that make up the K Computer (one is seen on the image for this post).
• 8.2 petaflops – The computing performance of the K Computer. It’s more powerful than the five next systems (i.e. position 2-6) combined.
• 8,200,000,000,000,000 – 8.2 petaflops written out as floating point operations per second (8.2 quadrillion instructions per second).
• 2.6 petaflops – The computing performance of the second-fastest supercomputer, the Tianhe-1A in China.
• 20.3 petaflops – The combined computing performance of the top 10 supercomputers.
• 1.04 petaflops – The computing performance of the “slowest” of the top 10.
• 9.9 megawatt – The power consumption of the K Computer.
• $10 million – The yearly power costs for the K Computer.
• 42.8 megawatt – The combined power consumption of the top 10 supercomputers.
• 40,000 – The number of homes that amount of electricity could power.
• 5 – Number of US supercomputers in the top 10. Japan has 2, China has 2, and France has 1.

A cool aside regarding the K Computer is that it isn’t even fully constructed yet, and it’s already outperforming everything out there by a huge margin. Its computing power is roughly the equivalent of a million linked desktop computers. Quite a comeback for Japan. This is the first time they’ve held the number one spot since 2004, when the Earth Simulator ruled the pack.

This was a post from the guys at Pingdom, a site monitoring service that makes sure you’re the first to know when your site is down. Check it out for free.

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Some time needed to pass before we can publish this post. With an event so devastating, it didn’t feel right blogging about technical difficulties in Japan. With some delay, I would like to summarize what’s been happening with key communication across Japan.

It is of the utmost importance for people and the government that the data centers remain operational at all times. In any society, such disasters cause panic. In times of need, people reach out to relatives and friends. Communications play essential role in keeping society’s integrity and morale as high as possible. With data centers being at the heart of keeping the country connected, it is vital that they remain fully operational at all times.

It seems people from all over the world relying on Japanese Data Centers have also grown worried about server status and performance. You can see a sudden spike in search volume in March.

According to early reports, data centers continued to run. There was no structural damage to major data centers in Tokyo. Some had to switch to backup power, but they continued to operate. Following blackouts forced data centers to run on backup generators, cutting fuel reserves short. The biggest problem at this point is supplying fuel for the backup generators. Data Centers are designed to run at least 72 hours on backup generators. Most of the centers exceed the requirements; however 10 days of continuous outages can drain the reserves.

Equinix and KHV remained fully operational. Equinix’s two data centers in Japan had no fuel shortages and KHV’s center remained operational thanks to its larger storage facilities and independent water supply. KHV’s center, proved to be one of the safest building during the earthquake. Inside the building, the earthquake felt like 4.0 instead of 8.9. KVH’s newest center was built to withstand the worst possible earthquakes. This allowed it to remain fully operational the whole time.

Unfortunately, 5 out of 20 submarine cable lines suffered damage. Underwater systems were able to reroute around affected segments onto redundant links and avoid major outages. At that point, Japanese Wi-Fi providers reached out, sharing Internet connectivity for free. A major ISP rerouted and is still sharing the network load in order to prevent major network outage.

Our <a title="monitoring center in Tokyo” href=”http://www.websitepulse.com/services/network.php” target=”_blank”>monitoring center in Tokyo remains intact and fully functional. Everyone can continue to perform network availability reports from and to Japan.

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We are glad to announce that we have updated our Site24x7 service. This update includes following new features and enhancements such as:

• Analyze Web Page is now rechristened as Web Page Analyzer.  The Web Page Analyzer now supports monitoring from multiple geographical locations. We will slowly roll this out across all our monitoring locations.
• Screenshots to confirm downtime or problem in website.
• Run traceroute analysis from the actual location from which the error was reported, hence facilitating more meaningful error analysis.
• Get in-depth details such as DNS, Connection time, First and Last Byte and Throughput of your website.
• <a target="_blank" href="http://www.site24x7.com/website-monitoring-reports.html”>Site24x7 Reports have been revamped. The Summary Report, Response Time Report, Downtime Report, Outage Report and Busy Hour Report have been improved by introducing line graphs and area charts.
• Multi-user login option has been included for Professional account users
• The tools section of the website now sports more social features by providing easy to use, share on <a href="http://www.website-monitoring.com/blog/2010/05/04/twitter-facts-and-figures-history-statistics/”>twitter and <a href="http://www.website-monitoring.com/blog/2010/03/17/facebook-facts-and-figures-history-statistics/”>facebook buttons. The results from these tools are saved on our servers so the reports are accessible at any time.
• Webmasters and even consumers can check the validity of a website’s Security Certificate (SSL).
• Two <a target="_blank" href="http://www.site24x7.com/multi-location-web-site-monitoring.html”>new monitoring locations added – Phoenix (USA) and Montréal (Canada).

So let me now get into the details of these features.

Analyze Web Pages from Multiple Locations Using a Real Browser

We have improved our Web Page Analyzer (previously known as Analyze Web Page) such that it not just downloads the entire components of your website, but also renders them using a real browser. This response time is then displayed along with individual component details, file sizes, status and loading time of individual components. This gives you a clear picture of how well your website renders enabling you to identify and troubleshoot components which cause response time to increase. Another best thing is that you can now analyze your web pages from multiple locations.

Screenshots to confirm downtime or problem in website

With the website monitoring component, we have gone one step ahead by improving reporting when there is a downtime or trouble. We will now show you a screenshot from a real web browser to confirm the downtime or error.

Granular Data for your Website Monitor

Now for every website you monitor, you can find key component data such as DNS Time, Connection Time, First Byte Time, Last Byte Time and Average Value under response time.

• DNS Time – Time taken by our monitoring server to resolve DNS server
• Connection Time – Time taken by our monitoring server to connect to your server
• First Byte Time – Time taken by our monitoring server to receive the first Byte from your server
• Last Byte Time – Time taken by our monitoring server to receive the last Byte from your server

Run Traceroute Analysis from your selected primary Location itself

Whenever a downtime is detected from a monitoring location, Site24x7 will perform a traceroute analysis of your website from that particular monitoring location. This would enable you to quickly identify if there is any performance issue within your ISP network and take corrective steps.

Tools section just got social by introducing <a href="http://www.website-monitoring.com/blog/2010/05/04/twitter-facts-and-figures-history-statistics/”>twitter and <a href="http://www.website-monitoring.com/blog/2010/03/17/facebook-facts-and-figures-history-statistics/”>facebook buttons

Gain credibility for your website by <a target="_blank" href="https://www.site24x7.com/check-website-availability.html”>sharing website’s uptime and availability via social media such as <a href="http://www.website-monitoring.com/blog/2010/05/04/twitter-facts-and-figures-history-statistics/”>twitter and <a href="http://www.website-monitoring.com/blog/2010/03/17/facebook-facts-and-figures-history-statistics/”>facebook. We also provide you with a permalink with which you can share the results of your test. You can also email it to your customers.

Ensure Safe Environment for Your Customers

One of the common phishing attacks happen with expired or fake SSL Certificates. As it has become easier for hackers easily obtain fake SSL Certificates, it becomes your responsibility to ensure that you check the whether the website you are about to conduct business is safe and secure. Our tool will help you to check for the validity of the website SSL certificate and inform you if there is any problem with the certificate.

Interested to try out these features? Sign up for a 15-day free trial now.

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Update 1: We have temporarily resolved the web client and alerting issue for nearly 80% of customers.

Hi all,

We wanted to let you know that you might be experiencing some web
client issues. This is because we are in the middle of a major upgrade.
However, our team is working hard to fix this issue as soon as
possible.

We would like to assure all that your websites and web
applications are still being monitored from the configured locations.
You will still receive downtime alerts when your website goes down. Once
this issue is fixed, you will be able to see your configured monitors
after you login.

As soon as this fixed, we will post an update.

Do contact us at support@site24x7.com in case you have other technical issues.
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New Easy-to-Remember domain Name     Press release SAN JOSÉ, CA., June 22, 2011 – Shakespeare wrote it: “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” Now, Monitis Inc., the award-winning provider of the world’s first all-in-one systems monitoring cloudware, is picking a new name [...]
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8. VMware ESX Server and VMWare Server (www.vmware.com) VMWare allows the ability for organizations to improve the efficiency and availability of their IT resources and applications through virtualization. The application helps to eliminate a “one server, one application” model and provides the ability to run multiple virtual machines on each physical machine. Pros Application has [...]
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