Google just announced in their Official Enterprise Blog today that they are releasing Google Drive to consumer and Rapid Release Google Apps domains. Berkeley Lab is on Rapid Release.
What is Google Drive?
With Google Drive, your users can securely upload any file or folder to the web and access the most up-to-date versions of those files from anywhere. Users can access Google Drive in their web browser and can also download the Drive application to their Mac, PC, Android or iOS devices to seamlessly access files across any of these devices. Each user will have 5GB of included storage space for their Google Drive.
The Product Information Page is here.
To see what the install process looks like, we captured a few of the steps in screen shots and added them to our Google Help Center Google Drive Page.
A quick survey of Google sites users turned up some interesting results. (survey done with Google Docs>Forms tool)
Collaborative Team sites was the category chosen most often. We are speculating that conferences and workshops will be a use case that will increase in the future.
We think it is interesting that over a third of the responses indicated they would not have used another tool if Google Sites was not available. Collaboration via email and attached office docs would probably have been the alternative. All these alternative methods for web site creation either require effort to configure a server or cost something for the tool itself (Dreamweaver). Google Sites came with our move to Gmail and calendar at no extra cost. (Examples of tools mentioned in the "Other" Category: PBworks, other open source wikis running on Linux, shared network drive, raw HTML)
A large percentage took the Intro to Google sites class - but we assume the 72% response for "Learned it on my own" also indicates that other features were explored after class, for those that attended. (We have seen a drop off in registrations for the Introductory class - so we are speculating that only advanced topics are now of interest and that introductory material will be self taught or learned via a coworker).
We asked for ideas on what the product was missing in functionality. Here are some of the responses.
- The ability to handle larger size document is most needed.
- Better table formatting support.
- I don't like the size and placement constraints on images that I upload to the site
- The same type of "plug-in" document upload process that eRoom had
- Need more template options
- Allow for some way to format attached files display (default order is alphabetical).
- Database (PostgreSQL/MySQL) support
What was installed:
Cluster Support:
- Approximately 18.2kW
Business Systems:
- No new systems
What was removed:
Cluster Support:
- Approximately 2kW
Business Systems:
- None
March average Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE): 1.46
- Average Power Consumption:
- 410kW IT
- 1kw Lighting
- 23.0kW Building and IT Losses
- 165kW Cooling Power - unknown due to sensor error
- Average Cooling Load: 116.5 tons
Data Center Efficiency Progress:
The DOE national average PUE for data centers is 1.75. 50B-1275 data center has evolved from an average PUE of 1.65 (calculated in 2009) to today’s 1.47. Getting there, staying there, and further improving the PUE is an ongoing effort.
Key highlights for this month include:
- Updates were suspended the last two months due to sensor read out failures. A water temperature sensor was replaced and a IT load electrical meter failed. The meter is expected to be replaced within the next week. Manual readings from the meter were taken and entered into the calculations to establish proper PUE.
- The new VFD software to automatically control air handler air flow is in final testing and expected to be installed soon. The current software is disabled.
- Testing using the current software revealed problems with two of the 15 ton air handlers. Bot have hot gas expansion valves fluctuate which make it difficult to control the air handlers. Two valves in one of the units are currently being replaced.
- In November we reported raising the room temperature slightly. The resulting affect has been continued failure of floor tiles, which become delaminated.
HPC Services senior engineer Michael Jennings will be talking about the new features of the Warewulf 3 cluster toolkit and about a new cluster Node Health Check program that he developed at this week's Moabcon 2012 conference in Promo, Utah this week.
