Opportunities for insurers to cover risks from cyber attacks, natural disasters: Tharman
Deputy Prime Minister Tharman Shanmugaratnam cites growth areas in the region that insurers can tap, including providing insurance solutions for cyber and natural disaster risks as well as investing in infrastructure.
By Nicole Tan
Posted 13 Jun 2016 21:54 Updated 13 Jun 2016 22:06
SINGAPORE: There are opportunities for insurers in financing infrastructure and providing insurance for cyber attacks and natural disasters, despite the challenge of persistently low interest rates, said Deputy Prime Minister and Coordinating Minister for Economic and Social Policies Tharman Shanmugaratnam.
He was speaking at the International Insurance Society Global Insurance Forum on Monday (Jun 13).
Mr Tharman cited growth areas in the region that insurers can tap, including providing insurance solutions for cyber and natural disaster risks, as well as investing in infrastructure.
To enable long-term investments, such as for infrastructure, Mr Tharman said the Monetary Authority of Singapore is seeking to modify its risk-based capital framework for insurers. He said the next public consultation on this will be held at the end of the month.
Mr Tharman also noted that the economic cost of natural disasters is growing but that the take-up of catastrophe insurance in Asia has been "woefully low". The Deputy Prime Minister pointed to a data gap: "The industry needs good data on the frequency, location and economic impact of natural disasters, so that insurers and reinsurers can price risks adequately. So we have had a limited supply of insurance coverage, that has itself led to higher cost of protection, which in turn discourages demand for insurance against catastrophe risks."
Likewise, Mr Tharman noted that the data needed for the efficient underwriting of cyber risk is "weak". He said: "We need to strengthen collaboration between the industry, government and academia to build reliable databases and analytical tools to enable the efficient underwriting of cyber risk."
ACTIVE INVESTMENT MANAGEMENT 'NOT ALL IT HAS BEEN CRACKED UP TO BE'
As populations age, individuals need to save more for a longer retirement. Meanwhile, slower economic growth is weighing on investment. Mr Tharman said higher savings and lower investment suggest that long-term real interest rates are likely to stay low for quite some time to come. He added that this poses a challenge for insurance and pension funds.
He said: “It hits you on both your assets and your liabilities. It means a lower return on your assets. And it pushes up the value of liabilities because the discount rate has gone down. It is not a temporary challenge but a long-term challenge.
"As life expectancy goes up, liabilities will be pushed out further, and the gap in maturity between your liabilities and your assets is likely to grow. This mismatch in durations, together with low interest rates, means we have a growing problem."
Going forward, Mr Tharman said fundamental reforms are needed to address the challenges, such as making the workplace more attractive to older employees.
As for the finance industry, he said there should be a shift towards passive investment management, away from active management which has proven costly for ordinary savers.
Mr Tharman said: “Active management is not all it has been cracked up to be: it has not proven its worth for most ordinary savers preparing for their retirement. We do have to move towards a system, in a whole range of countries, of helping people save for the long term through passive investment funds, and pool savings to avoid fragmentation and excessive marketing costs.”
- CNA/ms
- wong chee tat :)
Showing posts with label infrastructure. Show all posts
Showing posts with label infrastructure. Show all posts
Monday, June 13, 2016
Monday, November 25, 2013
'Let's try and not have a human do it': How one Facebook techie can run 20,000 servers
'Let's try and not have a human do it': How one Facebook techie can run 20,000 servers
Summary: Facebook on how it has managed to ease the pain of running one of the world's largest fleet of servers.
By Nick Heath | November 25, 2013 -- 12:43 GMT (20:43 SGT)
How many people does it take to run 20,000 servers? In the case of Facebook just the one.
Facebook's low overhead is born of necessity. When you run a computing infrastructure supporting the Likes of more than one billion users worldwide – the less human input needed to keep it ticking over, the better.
The philosophy of the social media giant is if a job doesn't need to be carried out by a person, "let's try and not have a human do it", said Tom Furlong, Facebook's director of site operations.
Facebook cuts manual maintenance of its IT infrastructure wherever possible. Servers and drives can be replaced without tools thanks to their Open Compute Project (OCP) designs, a system called Cyborg fixes tracts of misbehaving servers automatically and tools like Chef help manage thousands of servers at a time.
One of the latest of these manual labour-saving tools is Cluster Planner. Facebook regularly deploys servers in their thousands to meet the constantly changing demands of its business. Cluster Planner helps the company find the best home for these clusters within its global datacentre estate.
"Cluster Planner helps us calculate where we're going to put machines, so we can best utilise the infrastructure that we have," said Furlong.
"It basically replaces an incredibly manual process," he said, adding it had reduced cluster deployment time from days to hours.
Cluster Planner takes a snapshot of what sits where in Facebook's estate. It aggregates data about Facebook's computer systems – such as server components, average CPU utilisation and number of IOPs – and details about the datacentres, including electrical capacity and available floor space.
"It's normally a very cumbersome process for engineers to do the math calculations. With Cluster Planner you can do that very quickly, so what took us days before now takes us hours."
A core challenge for Facebook when cataloguing infrastructure spread across its global datacentres is ensuring consistency in how the data is collected and labelled, so Facebook can properly aggregate data. For example ensuring that data derived from generators at its datacentre in Prineville, Oregon is labelled in the same way as that collected from generators at its Forest City installation, more than 2,500 miles away.
Cluster Planner is in beta, its tools are being worked on and Facebook is in the process of hooking it into all of its datacentres.
Keeping track of Swiss cheese clusters
The make-up of Facebook's datacentres is moulded by the ebb and flow of business demands, with its computing estate changing shape to support alterations to systems and the roll out of new software. Furlong believes Facebook's IT operations could become more efficient by using systems like Cluster Planner to capture information about the composition of server clusters as they change during their lifetime.
"You don't put a server in production and then have [it handling] exactly the same workload during its three year lifespan. It's a moving landscape," said Furlong.
"Over the lifespan of the cluster you start to see things disappearing from it. You get people saying 'Oh there are underutilised resources in that cluster, let's put them in that new cluster that we're bringing up'.
"After a while there's like this 'Swiss cheese' [cluster], which I know by looking at it doesn't have enough machines in it to be used efficiently.
"If we had something that allowed us to better calculate what that 'Swiss cheese' is, we could go back to capacity planning and say 'Hey send us some more stuff' or 'How about we compact this and use some free rows for other things'. Those are the types of things I want us to be able to do over the lifetime of the equipment, so we don't have this static view of the world."
Automating away the pain
Maintaining one of the world's largest fleet of servers could be a massive hassle.
Facebook eases that pain in several ways, such as by using OCP-designed servers, storage and datacentre equipments that have been stripped down to the core components needed to carry out specific computing workloads, an approach that the OCP refers to as 'vanity-free design'.
These designs not only remove unnecessary screws from servers and drives so they can be installed without tools, but also reduce the number of components that can go wrong. The company estimates that using OCP hardware has cut the time its staff spend on maintenance jobs by more than 50 percent.
Also cutting the number of manual repairs are automated software tools like the aforementioned Cyborg, which monitor Facebook's infrastructure and try to correct problems without manual intervention.
"We've said that one datacentre technician can basically handle about 20,000 machines," Furlong said.
"One of the reasons why we can operate as efficiently as we do in terms of server repairs is we have huge numbers of automated systems that collect and analyse data.
"Cyborg goes out and tries to do its own server repairs, like a soft reboot or something that is an easy way to fix a system that's hung up. Cyborg keeps literally thousands of potential tickets from ever hitting a human hand.
"The more stuff we can have a system do, the better. I don't want to employ armies of people to do the things I can automate out. I want the people who are there to do high value work, the more complex repairs, the installs and de-installs, and all the kind of things that you need people to do."
Furlong is also examining ways to cut the manual work needed to add new hardware to Facebook's inventory system, and is considering automated alternatives to its current system of adding items by manually scanning barcodes.
"Say we have a setup where you just snap the new thing in and the system recognises it then updates all of your inventory systems," he said.
While the scale of Facebook's IT operations can be difficult to manage, its size can be an asset when it comes to weeding out problems in the infrastructure. Furlong recalls the company spotting a recurring fault with a small number of motherboards in its OCP servers when they were installed in its Prineville datacentre.
"What we realised was we actually had the same failures in all of our legacy equipment, we just couldn't see it before because the sample sizes were small," he said.
"That's the beauty of having a large sample size to look at, you can knock things out that keep you from having to do a whole bunch of work [in the future]."
If Facebook is to continue to grow its 1.1 billion-strong user base it will need to continue work at sweating its datacentres, but Furlong believes there are plenty more efficiencies to wring out.
"To me that is the Holy Grail of this, to look at that server to datacentre ratio and be able to say 'I can get more servers into my datacentre'," he said.
"I think we do a good job of that today but I absolutely believe there is room for improvement."
- wong chee tat :)
Summary: Facebook on how it has managed to ease the pain of running one of the world's largest fleet of servers.
By Nick Heath | November 25, 2013 -- 12:43 GMT (20:43 SGT)
How many people does it take to run 20,000 servers? In the case of Facebook just the one.
Facebook's low overhead is born of necessity. When you run a computing infrastructure supporting the Likes of more than one billion users worldwide – the less human input needed to keep it ticking over, the better.
The philosophy of the social media giant is if a job doesn't need to be carried out by a person, "let's try and not have a human do it", said Tom Furlong, Facebook's director of site operations.
Facebook cuts manual maintenance of its IT infrastructure wherever possible. Servers and drives can be replaced without tools thanks to their Open Compute Project (OCP) designs, a system called Cyborg fixes tracts of misbehaving servers automatically and tools like Chef help manage thousands of servers at a time.
One of the latest of these manual labour-saving tools is Cluster Planner. Facebook regularly deploys servers in their thousands to meet the constantly changing demands of its business. Cluster Planner helps the company find the best home for these clusters within its global datacentre estate.
"Cluster Planner helps us calculate where we're going to put machines, so we can best utilise the infrastructure that we have," said Furlong.
"It basically replaces an incredibly manual process," he said, adding it had reduced cluster deployment time from days to hours.
Cluster Planner takes a snapshot of what sits where in Facebook's estate. It aggregates data about Facebook's computer systems – such as server components, average CPU utilisation and number of IOPs – and details about the datacentres, including electrical capacity and available floor space.
"It's normally a very cumbersome process for engineers to do the math calculations. With Cluster Planner you can do that very quickly, so what took us days before now takes us hours."
A core challenge for Facebook when cataloguing infrastructure spread across its global datacentres is ensuring consistency in how the data is collected and labelled, so Facebook can properly aggregate data. For example ensuring that data derived from generators at its datacentre in Prineville, Oregon is labelled in the same way as that collected from generators at its Forest City installation, more than 2,500 miles away.
Cluster Planner is in beta, its tools are being worked on and Facebook is in the process of hooking it into all of its datacentres.
Keeping track of Swiss cheese clusters
The make-up of Facebook's datacentres is moulded by the ebb and flow of business demands, with its computing estate changing shape to support alterations to systems and the roll out of new software. Furlong believes Facebook's IT operations could become more efficient by using systems like Cluster Planner to capture information about the composition of server clusters as they change during their lifetime.
"You don't put a server in production and then have [it handling] exactly the same workload during its three year lifespan. It's a moving landscape," said Furlong.
"Over the lifespan of the cluster you start to see things disappearing from it. You get people saying 'Oh there are underutilised resources in that cluster, let's put them in that new cluster that we're bringing up'.
"After a while there's like this 'Swiss cheese' [cluster], which I know by looking at it doesn't have enough machines in it to be used efficiently.
"If we had something that allowed us to better calculate what that 'Swiss cheese' is, we could go back to capacity planning and say 'Hey send us some more stuff' or 'How about we compact this and use some free rows for other things'. Those are the types of things I want us to be able to do over the lifetime of the equipment, so we don't have this static view of the world."
Automating away the pain
Maintaining one of the world's largest fleet of servers could be a massive hassle.
Facebook eases that pain in several ways, such as by using OCP-designed servers, storage and datacentre equipments that have been stripped down to the core components needed to carry out specific computing workloads, an approach that the OCP refers to as 'vanity-free design'.
These designs not only remove unnecessary screws from servers and drives so they can be installed without tools, but also reduce the number of components that can go wrong. The company estimates that using OCP hardware has cut the time its staff spend on maintenance jobs by more than 50 percent.
Also cutting the number of manual repairs are automated software tools like the aforementioned Cyborg, which monitor Facebook's infrastructure and try to correct problems without manual intervention.
"We've said that one datacentre technician can basically handle about 20,000 machines," Furlong said.
"One of the reasons why we can operate as efficiently as we do in terms of server repairs is we have huge numbers of automated systems that collect and analyse data.
"Cyborg goes out and tries to do its own server repairs, like a soft reboot or something that is an easy way to fix a system that's hung up. Cyborg keeps literally thousands of potential tickets from ever hitting a human hand.
"The more stuff we can have a system do, the better. I don't want to employ armies of people to do the things I can automate out. I want the people who are there to do high value work, the more complex repairs, the installs and de-installs, and all the kind of things that you need people to do."
Furlong is also examining ways to cut the manual work needed to add new hardware to Facebook's inventory system, and is considering automated alternatives to its current system of adding items by manually scanning barcodes.
"Say we have a setup where you just snap the new thing in and the system recognises it then updates all of your inventory systems," he said.
While the scale of Facebook's IT operations can be difficult to manage, its size can be an asset when it comes to weeding out problems in the infrastructure. Furlong recalls the company spotting a recurring fault with a small number of motherboards in its OCP servers when they were installed in its Prineville datacentre.
"What we realised was we actually had the same failures in all of our legacy equipment, we just couldn't see it before because the sample sizes were small," he said.
"That's the beauty of having a large sample size to look at, you can knock things out that keep you from having to do a whole bunch of work [in the future]."
If Facebook is to continue to grow its 1.1 billion-strong user base it will need to continue work at sweating its datacentres, but Furlong believes there are plenty more efficiencies to wring out.
"To me that is the Holy Grail of this, to look at that server to datacentre ratio and be able to say 'I can get more servers into my datacentre'," he said.
"I think we do a good job of that today but I absolutely believe there is room for improvement."
- wong chee tat :)
Monday, June 24, 2013
Tenders called for government ICT infrastructure services
Tenders called for government ICT infrastructure services
POSTED: 24 Jun 2013 3:50 PM
The government is calling a series of tenders for the provision of government infrastructure services.
SINGAPORE: The government is calling a series of tenders for the provision of government infrastructure services.
This is to provide for a smooth transition before the end of the current Standard ICT Operating Environment (SOE) contract.
The objective of the SOE, launched in 2008, was to consolidate the government's infocomm services into a single environment.
A joint statement by the Ministry of Finance, Ministry of Communications and Information, and Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore, said the current SOE contract will expire in February 2016 and there is a need to put new contracts in place to ensure service continuity.
The government will continue to operate in a single environment to enhance Whole-of-Government security, inter-operability and resiliency.
The new tenders are structured to allow greater flexibility so that government agencies have more options to manage their IT infrastructure for optimal efficiency.
The first set of tenders will cover central core infrastructure services, messaging and collaboration services, desktops, notebooks and printers, and agency facilities management.
The remaining tenders will be issued in the months ahead.
- CNA/fa
- wong chee tat :)
POSTED: 24 Jun 2013 3:50 PM
The government is calling a series of tenders for the provision of government infrastructure services.
SINGAPORE: The government is calling a series of tenders for the provision of government infrastructure services.
This is to provide for a smooth transition before the end of the current Standard ICT Operating Environment (SOE) contract.
The objective of the SOE, launched in 2008, was to consolidate the government's infocomm services into a single environment.
A joint statement by the Ministry of Finance, Ministry of Communications and Information, and Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore, said the current SOE contract will expire in February 2016 and there is a need to put new contracts in place to ensure service continuity.
The government will continue to operate in a single environment to enhance Whole-of-Government security, inter-operability and resiliency.
The new tenders are structured to allow greater flexibility so that government agencies have more options to manage their IT infrastructure for optimal efficiency.
The first set of tenders will cover central core infrastructure services, messaging and collaboration services, desktops, notebooks and printers, and agency facilities management.
The remaining tenders will be issued in the months ahead.
- CNA/fa
- wong chee tat :)
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