VMWorld 2009 recap: Cisco UCS, WAAS.. and more

With over 12,000 attendees, VMWorld 2009 was definitely impressive. It was great to be there as part of the Cisco data center team and see Cisco continue to make progress into the server & virtualization space. A few exciting technology showcases & announcements that were exciting to me:

VMWorld Data Center chose Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) to virtualize and reduced an environment of 37,728 physical servers using 2,483 racks and 25,329 KW of power to 776 physical servers in 28 racks using 528 KW of power.

The Cisco UCS infrastructure supported all the instructor-led labs with an aggregate of 4096 Intel Nehalem Cores and 24 TB of memory using:

16 racks
64 chassis
512 blades
32 6120 XP Fabric interconnects (2 per rack)

Here’s a cool time-lapsed video on the entire build out of the Data Center at VMworld:

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idea blog, 24 august 2009

Earlier this week I read on NY Times about the GPS run craze sweeping through the running community and wondered if there’s an iPhone app that tracked your GPS coordinates and “drew” them for you to upload to sites like gpsdrawing.com. I found the following apps that sort of accomplishes that.

Trails – Primarily designed to record maps while hiking, on bike trips or while jogging directly on your iPhone.

InstaMapper’s GPS Tracker – Periodically uploads iPhone’s GPS coordinate to a website to be shared w/ other people.

Neither application does exactly what I’m envisioning. So here goes idea #1 for today’s blog… and that is an iPhone application that basically tracks your GPS coordinates and plots its movements over a period of time, producing a “drawing”. Sort of a fun / waste-your-time application that can be applied to running, hiking, roadtripping. (more…)

web-based screen capture/recording tool

As simple as it is to create a video and share it with the world (aka screencasting), I feel that technology for creating a recording of one’s desktop interactions (combined with audio) is still somewhat limited. Camtasia is probably the better known desktop/screen recording application. However it only works on Windows. Same goes for the open-source Camstudio. I did find a couple screen recording tools for the Mac. (more…)