Picture from the Honolulu Advertiser...the full article is at the link below...many thanks to the dedicated journalists at the Honolulu Advertiser. Hawai'i rattles, then loses power statewide Source: Hawai'i rattles, then loses power statewide - The Honolulu Advertiser By Dan NakasoAdvertiser Staff Writer <Views from Brian Chee, Director of the Advanced Network Computing Laboratory> So one of the pri Hawai’i rattles, then loses power statewide Source: Hawai’i rattles, then loses power statewide – The Honolulu Advertiser By Dan Nakaso Advertiser Staff Writer So one of the prices of paradise is that I live in an active volcanic region and we get some tremblers once in a while. However not since the 60’s have we had one quite this big. The wife and I were shaken out of bed around 7am HST with a 6.7 shake, then minutes later a 5 aftershock that had a longer duration tossing some books off a shelf and knocking a few pictures off the wall. The overall status is that no one was badly hurt in the quake and since Hawaii is an active volcanic region our buildings are designed to handle tremblers like this. So what does this have to do with technology, well I’m glad you asked. KSSKRadio.com is our biggest prime time radio station (2nd only to a station in Los Angeles) and they were setup to stream to a maximum of 60,000 internet listeners. When news of the quake hit, their internet service provider found themselves in a rare situation where all 60,000 licenses were gobbled up within a couple hours of the initial CNN story. Even this Honolulu Advertiser article about the quake took me almost 5 minutes to load due to the huge demand around the world.My favorite example is the Victoria Secret Lingerie show made infamous on the internet a few years ago. Load balancing is now a way of life, but just how much can you anticipate? The reality is that you can only load balance what you already have setup. What we’re going to be examining in the Honolulu lab in the coming weeks is how data center virtualization could have solved this massive unexpected load. The scenario is to have the vendor migrate a monolithic server (ie. one that takes up ALL of a standard server) and migrate it to a virtual environment. Then based upon demand, move the virtual image to a dedicated blade, and as an optional feature, then add more virtual images on dedicated blades as demand grows. Maybe I should pay a visit to the folks at the Honolulu Advertiser to talk about just how this can work for them?/brian chee Technology Industry