http://bit.ly/nttEyi DEMO Fall 2011 Consumer Technologies

OLogic, Inc. @ologicinc
MashON, Inc. @mashon
Get.com, Inc. @getdotcom
Gimme!
I-POSTMORTEM @thewvc
JobOn @jodypresti
MyFinance, LLC @mikekozlak
Neighbor Marketing, Inc. @neighboroil
Medication Intelligence @onne72
Tradepal, Inc. @tradepal
Pinevio @pinevio
Schedulicity @schedulicity
SenseAide, LLC
Creaza, Inc. @josteinsvedsen
Newman Infinite, Inc. @newmaninfinite
trueRSVP @truersvp

The Launchpad for Emerging Technology.

DEMO Fall 2011 is taking place at the Hyatt in Silicon Valley, CA. Companies both large and small come to DEMO to launch their products to the Technology world. DEMO offers the access, interaction, and validation of the new emerging technologies.

For more information:
DEMO Fall 2010 Website

Follow DEMO on twitter @demo

Social Media presented by New Media Synergy

Photos by Stephen Brashear

When you’re running a large web infrastructure, automation is critical to ensure that administrators aren’t spending their every waking seconds putting dealing with downed servers. Google, Yahoo and other pioneers had to figure out how to automate operations in their data centers, and now it’s Facebook’s turn. On the Facebook Engineering blog today, the aptly named Pat Power describes how his team of two keeps about half of Facebook’s infrastructure up and running by fixing server problems automatically.
Named the Facebook Auto-Remediation system, or FBAR, Power’s creation is a system of scripts, APIs and plugins that work together get failed servers back online. At a high level, FBAR works by constantly scanning Facebook’s monitoring system for new outages, then undertaking a workflow to fix the problem. Because FBAR has access to hardware and configuration data, as well as the ability to execute commands on host servers, it’s able to to solve some issues by itself. Others — such as a failed hard drive — are marked for human resolution.

The idea of self-healing systems is nothing new, of course — Google and other web properties do it to some degree, and IBM has been pushing Autonomic Computing for years — but it’s interesting to see new approaches to the problem. Additionally, it’s fascinating to see how a well-designed system can eliminate the need for huge IT departments. As Power notes:

Today, the FBAR service is developed and maintained by two full time engineers, but according to the most recent metrics, it’s doing the work of approximately 200 full time system administrators. FBAR now manages more than 50% of the Facebook infrastructure and we’ve found that services have dramatic increases in reliability when they go under FBAR control.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.
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