My wish list of what Nest ship after Google acquisition, A Managed Router for the Home

Google acquired Nest and details are in the press release.

Nest, Google and you.

Today is undoubtedly an exciting day for all of us at Nest, but it’s also meaningful for you, our customers. I’m sure you have questions about whattoday’s news means for you, the Nest Thermostat, and Nest Protect. While Tony answered many of the broader questions regarding our new partnership with Google, I thought we’d talk product – my favorite!

When you look at stuff in the home the thermostat and smoke detectors are kind of important, but not as important as internet access in the home.  Without Internet connection the Nest thermostat and smoke detector are kind of dumb.

So how about if Nest ships a Home Router that is managed device that Google’s smart people with Nest can give us a more highly available internet?

This seems so obvious i hope this comes true by the summer.  You’ve got to believe that the Nest team had gone through the use case and numbers to create a Nest Router.

Nest says Safety shouldn’t be annoying.

How about internet connection should not be annoying!!!

A simple thermostat UI.  Green things are working.  Red Internet connection is down.  Google knows your home router has lost connection and is figuring out why?  DNS problems.  Local internet provider issue.  Hard reset required.  “push here to reset”  Or timeout without internet connection, then hard reset yourself. 

Wouldn’t it be great if home routers worked like your smartphones.  Android in Routers.

Valve's Steam exhausts the heat three ways for CPU, Graphics Card, & Power Supply

Here is is a simple solution to the heat problems in a PC.  Exhaust the CPU, Graphics Card, and Power supply separately and isolate their heat. The Verge got a chance to check out the Valve Steam Machine.

The Steam Box

Valve will ship 300 prototype Steam Machines to beta testers this year, and there's nothing particularly special about their specs. That’s kind of the point, though: the first Steam Machine is a computer that can fit bog standard parts just like a full-size gaming rig, and yet fit into your entertainment center. Valve's steel and aluminum chassis measures just over 12 inches on a side and is 2.9 inches tall, making it a little bigger than an Xbox 360 and smaller than any gaming PC of its ilk. And yet the box manages to fit a giant Nvidia GeForce GTX Titan graphics card and a full desktop CPU — and keep those parts quiet and cool — without cramming them in like a jigsaw puzzle.

The secret is actually quite simple, it turns out: Valve designed the case so the parts can breathe individually. The CPU blows air out the top, the power supply out the side, and the graphics card exhaust out back, and none share any airspace within the case.

That might sound like common sense, but it’s remarkably hard to find a case that does so while still making it easy to drop components in. Here, the key component responsible for dividing those three zones is a simple plastic shroud which unscrews in a jiffy. The box we touched was already surprisingly cool and quiet, but Valve's still tweaking the design: we saw Valve printing a couple of the shrouds as we walked through its rapid prototyping lab.

HGST ships Helium filled HD with 49% higher performance per watt per TB

As most of you know storage whether it is RAM, SSD, or good old HD has a cost and power impact in the data center.  HGST announced today a new Helium filled HD.

First Hermetically Sealed, Helium HDD Platform Provides Path for Higher Capacity Storage, While Significantly Lowering Power and Cooling, and Improving Storage Density
SANTA CLARA, Calif., Cloud Expo Silicon Valley (Booth #209), November 4, 2013 – HGST, a Western Digital company (NASDAQ: WDC), today announced that it is shipping the 6TB Ultrastar He6 hard disk drive (HDD). Key OEM, cloud and research leaders working closely with HGST to qualify the drive include HP, Netflix, Huawei Unified Storage, CERN, Green Revolution Cooling and Code42, as well as some of the world’s largest social media and search companies. Revealed in September 2012, HGST’s cutting-edge HelioSeal™ platform provides a path for higher capacity storage for decades to come while significantly lowering customer total cost of ownership (TCO). Leveraging the inherent benefits of helium, which is one-seventh the density of air, the new Ultrastar He6 drive features HGST’s innovative 7Stac™ disk design with 6TB, making it the world’s highest capacity HDD with the best TCO for cloud storage, massive scale-out environments, disk-to-disk backup, and replicated or RAID environments.

I first saw this news in ComputerWorld’s post, then found the press release.  Here are some of the stats.

TCOptimized™ - Driving Down Data Center TCO with HeliumThe amount of data that companies need to store is growing exponentially, but IT budgets remain flat. With 6TB, a low 5.3 idle watts, a reduced weight of 640g, and running at 4-5°C cooler, the new Ultrastar He6 lowers data center TCO on virtually every level. Key TCO benefits when compared to a 3.5-inch, five-platter, air-filled 4TB drive include:
Highest Capacity HDD on the Market; 6TB, Seven-disk Design, Providing the Best TCOLowest Power Consumption with Best Watts-per-TB
-23 percent lower idle power per drive -49 percent better watts-per-TBBest Density Footprint in a Standard 3.5-inch Form Factor -50 percent higher capacity
Lighter Weight than a Standard Five-disk 3.5-inch Drive–50g lighter even with two more disks, offering 50 percent more capacity–38 percent lower weight-per-TB- 

One of the companies referenced is Netflix.  Isn’t Netflix all in AWS. NO.

“The Netflix Open Connect delivery platform is a highly optimized video content delivery network. We serve billions of hours of streaming video per quarter to over 40 million subscribers,” said David Fullagar, director of Content Delivery Architecture, Netflix. “As part of our efforts to optimize the delivery ecosystem for Netflix and our Internet Service Provider partners, we strive to build better and better streaming appliances. The high storage density and lower power usage of the Ultrastar He6 hard drives allow us to continue with that goal, and create a great customer experience.” 

SSD bubble bursting? Fusion-IO posts lost and executives leaving

NBCNews covers Fusion-IO troubles

The management changes came as Fusion-io reported a loss of $27.9 million, or 28 cents per share, for the quarter that ended Sept. 30. That is compared with earnings of $3.9 million, or 4 cents per share, in the same months last year. After adjusting for acquisition expenses and other special items, it had a loss of 7 cents per share versus earnings of 14 cents per share last year.

Fusion-io's revenue fell to $86.3 million from $118.1 million.

Intel defends its data center territory vs. ARM with C2000 Atom

Intel announced last week the Intel ARM C2000 at 6W

The ARM processor was claimed to be more efficient.  And now the C2000 is 6x performance per watt

Barrons blog has a post on the business impact of the Intel Atom.  Here are the two analyst views.

Doug Freedman of RBC Capital Markets reiterated an Outperform rating and a $29 price target on the shares, writing, “INTC’s new Atom low-power C2000, successor to S1200, is a very compelling offering in that it not only offers up to 6x performance/ watt (vs. S1200), but will enable newer markets leveraging prior SoC efforts in mobile (smartphone/tablet).

Thus INTC stands to pick-up ground in new markets with attractive ROI on more customized solutions [...] Performance vs. select S1200 parts are expected to be up to 7x faster, offering up to 6x higher performance per watt. The product is expected to be a best-in-class solution vs. competitive ARM solutions in the marketplace [...] We were encouraged to hear that the gross margin impact is expected to be “a wash”. To us, this implies that the margins are at least comparable to performance-based parts, and potentially better due to 22nm and cost efficiencies realized as a result of leveraging mobile resources.”

From the bear camp, Hans Mosesmann of Raymond James, reiterating an Underperform rating, wrote that “Intel introduced today an impressive number of Atom-based processor, switch, memory, and optical connectivity products/technologies for the datacenter in a move that highlights, in our view, Intel’s sense of urgency to defend its server processor supremacy.”

It is hard to fathom Intel making this big of a splash had ARM not released its 64-bit v8 architecture (for licensing) nearly two years ago with the subsequent strong design interest. Intel was at pains to explain that microservers, as a category, are small but the opportunity for adjacent markets is big. Translation: we are worried about the ARM threat and are willing to cannibalize existing low-end, highly profitable XEONs to make sure this does not happen.”