[LINK] Blade servers solve space dilemma

[Tom Worthington]

At 10:29 AM 11/02/2009, Bernard Robertson-Dunn wrote:
><brd>
>10-12% improvement in space utilisation with blades I can believe.
>
>Tom's factor of 100 I find difficult to take seriously, even with 
>virtualisation and application optimisation.</brd> ...

An example I have mentioned on Link previously is the use of the 
Australian Arms (aka Commonwealth Crest) 
<http://www.tomw.net.au/2003/epolicy.html#edocs>. Most Australian 
Government agencies now use the same logo. But due to poorly thought 
out guidelines, each agency is required to use a slightly different 
version of the logo, stopping agencies from sharing the one 
electronic copy online. Due to poor implementation each agency seems 
to use many copies of inefficiently encoded versions of the logo. In 
one case I was e-mailed a government document where the logo took up 
90% of the document size and was encoded at one hundred times the 
size needed. If this and similar images were optimized, this should 
reduce computer requirements significantly.

Similarly the PDF files used for many government reports are several 
times the size they need be. This is in part because of poorly 
thought out decisions which require them to use non-standard fonts. 
Inefficient encoding of images also contributes.

Another example is poor coding of web pages. As an example the 
department of finance web pages about the Gershon report have an 
excessively large side menu. The executive summary of the Gershon 
report is 95 Kbytes of HTML 
<http://www.finance.gov.au/publications/ICT-Review/summary.html>. Of 
this only 22 Kbytes is the text of the report, with 78% of the file 
taken up by the Finance menu. The images in the document have also 
been incorrectly coded in JPEG.

An additional example is poorly though out information strategies. As 
an example, the Finance Department went to the trouble of providing 
reasonably formatted web versions of individual chapters of the 
Gershon report. However, the first option they offer the reader is a 
2.6 Mb PDF version of the entire report. Many people will click on 
this link, when the 95 kbyte executive summary would do.

There are many examples of inefficient use of e-documents outside 
government. One is on Kirk W. Cameron's web page at Virginia Tech 
<http://people.cs.vt.edu/~cameron/>. 99.9% of the  total page size of 
3.6 Mbytes comes from two small images. The photos on this page are 
stored and transmitted at about 100 times the size they are 
displayed. Essentially what happens is the server sends a large 
document across the world and then the receiving computer has to do 
extra work to throw away 99.9% of what was sent. If you are wondering 
why I picked on Dr. Cameron, he writes a column on Green IT for IEEE 
Computer magazine and so should know better.



Tom Worthington FACS HLM tom.worthington at tomw.net.au Ph: 0419 496150
Director, Tomw Communications Pty Ltd            ABN: 17 088 714 309
PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617                      http://www.tomw.net.au/
Adjunct Senior Lecturer, Australian National University