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Comcast announced bandwidth caps for broadband Internet customers today. After October 1 customers will be capped at 250 GB of traffic per month.
What does 250 GB of traffic mean to the typical Comcast customer? I’m sure that most of them have no idea what it means. Let’s try to put it into perspective.
250 GB of traffic means about 125 standard-definition movies per month (but who is watching SD on their pretty HD plasma screens these days?)
250 GB of traffic means about 25 HD movies per month or around 50 hours of HDTV per month (1.6 hours of HDTV per day).
250 GB of traffic means running a T1 connection (1.5Mbps) around full throttle for an entire month.
I’ve often told people that I’d love to be able to scale storage the way Google does.
Data storage architectures don’t get the kind of recognition they should by information architects. Storage really serves as the foundation for every application service — email, video streaming, data warehousing, or twittering. The challenge with building a storage architecture is that at some point you know you are going to outgrow it. Most storage vendors ask you to perform a forklift upgrade of your storage devices in order to scale your growth.
I’ve been alpha testing a promising storage technology by a company called Parascale. Their technology lets you take commodity servers connected to storage and form them into a cloud architecture. I like what I see so far and I have been impressed by my interactions with their development team. This technology is not designed to replace high-performance SANs. But it is perfectly suitable for tier-2 data storage applications. Stay tuned…
I stumbled across an interesting article describing the changing CTO role in enterprises. The article is a couple years old and written from more of a European perspective but I think it is still relevant today. I especially like this paragraph:
The CTO role as it exists in some organisations today can be a strange one. It is a term that has come from technology-centric companies such as Telcos, IT vendors etc who clearly need a technology visionary at the top of the organisation. But it has then been transposed into non-tech organisations, becoming a badge assumed by the people with the best technology expertise. But that doesn’t seem appropriate for many. It can be difficult to justify the value of having a chief technical individual without accountabilities for realisation in non-tech-centric industries. Without accountabilities, CTOs’ offices can become a strange kind of retained in-house IT analyst organisation, which isn’t linked to value as the business would define it, and doesn’t exactly help with business-IT alignment.
That last sentence really hits home. All to often the CTO office becomes the domain of the wise technology sage. As a CTO it is challenging at times to see how your input and work is translated into business value.
A recent federal GAO report states the obvious: many small businesses don’t pay federal income taxes.
Some people are in a tizzy over this so called finding. Let’s be clear. Businesses pay taxes. Businesses pay payroll taxes. Businesses pay sales taxes and property taxes. The amount of taxes a small business pays would make most people cringe. Income taxes are just one type of tax. Most small businesses will try to offset their losses (expenses) with income so that they don’t have to pay this particular tax. This is Business 101. You would rather invest money back into your business to encourage growth rather than pay it to the government. Generally everybody wins.
According to this interesting article if U.S. broadband Internet speeds continue to change at the same rate as this past year we won’t catch up to Japan’s broadband speeds for another 100 years. It kind of puts our plight into perspective.
After being exposed to the powerful rays of cloud computing marketecture for three days at HostingCon in Chicago I thought I would be granted a reprieve back home in Minnesota. But people are still asking me about this cloud computing phenomena. How will it change our hosting industry? Are SMB’s gravitating towards this service model? Can these cloud computing grids really scale?
I love the thought of true utility-based, grid-architected, infinitely distributable computing services. But what you are seeing marketed today ain’t all that. It’s not even close.
An experienced industry expert told me that cloud computing encompasses any web-based service that can be hosted on the Internet. Well if that’s the case then it’s been cloudy around here since at least 1994.
All of the current cloud computing hosting services are based around the same theme. Take a computer server and virtualize it. Now add another box, some network storage, a pretty web control panel, tie resource metrics to a billing system and voila… cloud computing. Okay, maybe it’s a little harder than that. But I don’t think this is much of an oversimplification.
I recognize that all of this is simply the first step towards the ultimate goal: an architecture that is truly unrelated to the services it provides. I’m willing to wait for that. But in the meantime I’ll keep my head in the clouds.
