John Wilkes

John (who is my Facebook friend!) visited MPI-SWS and gave a talk about data center storage design. His theme was the design of "light out data center": can we design a data center that will continue to work when all the light goes out (without human intervention?) This means automated control.

He also shared one very interesting thought. SLAs are ad-hoc and random (e.g., service outage should be within three-nines, or 0.999 availability). Sometimes meeting this arbitrary number means investing arbitrary money and effort. So why not have flexible SLA and see what are the losses as we fail to meet the needs?---what a refreshing idea. John further said cost of not meeting the needs at Google may mean loosing customers. He said "users are one click away from leaving to other services" and the cause of leaving may depend on many axes including a particular shade of blue they use in the logo.