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My company just signed on as a sponsor for the upcoming CloudCamp in Minneapolis on April 18th. I’m going to be speaking at one of the “lightning talks”. I met with George Reese last week — one of the coordinators of the event, O’Reilly author, and a cloud computing evangelist. It should be an interesting collection of technologists. Sign up if you are in the area.
I think I’ve mentioned in previous posts that I’m a strong advocate for the environment. I like to breath clean air. I like to dive on healthy pristine ocean reefs. I like my snow to taste good when I totally bite it while tearing down the ski slopes.
I am increasingly seeing signs of a global man-made energy crisis.
When people ask me if I believe in man-made global warming I say “absolutely”. I also believe in cow-made global warming. Yes, COWS. Actually cows emit more harmful gases into the air than us humans. But of course we grow cows to feed people so I suppose you could still blame us humans.
I believe that humans are impacting the environment — both positively and negatively. I believe that some people are spreading fear, uncertainty, and doubt for political and financial gain. I mean, look who is making millions off of carbon trading or off of government grants. People are going to say almost anything when their livelihood is at stake. Yes. I’m saying that people are probably lying — on both sides of the political isle.
My chief concern is that politicians and carbon traders are going to pick winners and losers amongst all the available energy options. And generally their choices will hurt critical sectors of the American economy. Sure it would be cool to setup a bunch of wind turbine manufacturing plants in the US. But those plants will do nothing to offset the loss in manufacturing to countries with cheaper energy generation. China has to be licking their chops as they add new power plants every month.
Will datacenters that consume 3%+ of all power in the US be viable in a future driven by high energy costs and carbon taxes? Suddenly those off-shore datacenters are starting to look pretty good.
I wrote about Qwest’s new initiative to kill off local ISPs a number of months ago. I’m starting to hear more real world complaints from our DSL customers caught in the crossfire.
Here’s the typical story. Customer signs up for 7Mbps DSL services from ISP. Six months later the customer receives a letter from Qwest saying something-to-the-effect of “we accidently allocated too much bandwidth to your area”. The customer is given the option to either cut back their internet access to a much slower 1.5Mbps connection or sign up for Qwest’s shiny new ADSL2+ service with more bandwidth than they are getting now. Hmmm, gee. Tough decision.
I just happened to stumble upon a technical explanation for some of Qwest’s gerrymandering. Apparently their ADSL2+ technology is causing some crosstalk issues with legacy DSL customers. I’m sure Qwest’s marketing department sees this as a terribly unfortunate situation.
The traditional local ISPs are dying and the quality service they offered is dying along with them.
Cloud hosting infrastructures have a number of unique advantages over traditional dedicated infrastructures. One of those advantages, a key part of any cloud infrastructure model, is the utility pricing model. Here’s a key point to understand: the customer always overpays for infrastructure and never underpays when using traditional hosting. Traditional hosters oversubscribe infrastructure such as bandwidth and storage. Customers pay for bandwidth and storage reservations as part of their selected hosting package. They also pay for any overages beyond their infrastructure reservations. In other words, a customer pays for a reserved amount of bandwidth or storage whether or not they are actually using that infrastructure. In the cloud model the customer only pays for the infrastructure they consume. They can scale the infrastructure up or down as the needs dictate. In many cases the infrastructure unit pricing goes down as the customer’s needs scale up.
I emitted an audible “uh oh” when I read the recent Times Online article regarding the environmental impact of Google searches. Time to make some popcorn and grab a good seat to watch the fight.
I consider myself to be an environmentalist. I participate in activities such as camping, hiking, and scuba diving that are enhanced by a unscathed environment. I want my children, and my children’s children to enjoy clean water, mature trees, and a bountiful ecosystem. At the same time I want my children to be able to enjoy the luxuries and efficiencies that technologies provide.
So here is the question I would ask the proponents of this environmental study: What was the environmental impact of knowledge acquisition before Google? My gut tells me that Google has significantly decreased the environmental impact of knowledge acquisition. In the past people may have traveled to multiple libraries or research institutions to find knowledge. Maybe they had to fly oversees to visit museums. Or they wrote messages to companies on dead wood using something called “a pen”. Okay, you get the point.
Information providers and the datacenters they live in will become big targets for the carbon-credit crowd. Those providers better start preparing for the coming battle.
I was recently interviewed by Finance and Commerce magazine for an article related to enterprise security issues stemming from staff layoffs. I agree with the main point of the article: enterprises are woefully prepared to mitigate data security issues during significant reductions-in-force.
Happy New Year everybody and thanks for tuning in to this great experiment. I’ve really enjoyed contributing to this blog over the past year (has it been a year already?? WOW). Here are my technology predictions for 2009:
– IT spending will focus on value = primarily defined by price.
– Microsoft and Xen virtualization solutions will seriously crack VMWare’s armor.
– The storage industry should be relatively recession-proof this year
– 2009: The Year of the Cloud.
– Premium hosters will lose business to value hosters who will lose business to cheapo hosters who will lose business to free hosters.
