You are currently browsing the monthly archive for March 2009.
According to this article change management is a pretty interesting ride at Google.
Making changes to Google’s search infrastructure is akin to “changing the tires on a car while you’re going at 60 down the freeway.” –Urs Holzle, Google
It’s a very cloudy and rainy day here in Minneapolis. This is a strange time of year when it can be 60 degrees F one day and 30 degrees and snowing the next.
I ran across a Wall Street Journal article today that discussed some of the confusion surrounding the definition of cloud computing.
I think this article would have been more relevant one year ago. The fact is that specifications have been coalescing around cloud computing for the past two years. Analyst firms like Tier1Research have done a decent job of tracking the evolution of cloud computing. It is not purely marketechture anymore. Sure there are a few firms out there that have been piling on the cloud bandwagon to sell services or move product. But the main cloud players exhibit a number of common features such as utility billing, virtualization, automation, APIs, high availability, and web dashboards. The article missed a great opportunity to talk about what clouds have in common versus the lack of a common standard.
I was a little late in commenting on the announcement last week from Sun Microsystems detailing their plan to build the Sun Cloud.
Sun’s CEO, Jonathan Schwartz, seems pretty excited about the open source nature of the Sun Cloud. They plan to release the technology and the all-important cloud API under open sources licenses. The idea is that businesses can leverage this technology to create their own private clouds behind the security of corporate firewalls. And maybe some of those companies will want to use Sun servers, and maybe MySQL, and just possibly ZFS.
A new open source cloud architecture can’t be a bad thing no matter how widely it is deployed. Sun is pushing open standards in the cloud. That is a critical element that will separate clouds from smoke coming out of stovepipes.
Here’s a youtube video explaining Cisco’s new Unified Computing vision. Beware of the marketing-speak.
Rackable Systems is riding the cloud computing bandwagon with their new CloudRack enclosure system. The enclosure features a power distribution system that is more effecient and at least as reliable as existing embedded power supply units. Additionally the enclosure is designed to run at higher datacenter ambient temperatures — up to 104F degrees. This dovetails nicely with the recommendation from Google to raise your datacenter temperature.
Here’s an interesting article regarding the role of CTO’s in consulting organizations. I have to agree with many of the author’s points. Oftentimes consulting or service organizations use the role of CTO purely for sales and marketing purposes. Their clients expect them to have a chief expert on staff. In those cases the CTO role doesn’t add much strategic value.
Mosso, a division of Rackspace, launched their new Cloud Server hosting service today. I’ve been following the chatter on this service development over the past 6 months.
When I read Tier1Research’s report on the launch last Friday I had to do a double-take. They reported that Cloud Server pricing started at $0.015/hour — or $10.95/mo. I thought that was clearly a mistake until I checked out the pricing list on the Mosso website. I don’t know how the heck they can price a virtual server that low — even though it is basically unmanaged. My guess is that they are expecting most customers to quickly ramp up into higher pricing tiers.
I tried to compare Mosso’s Cloud Server pricing to Amazon’s EC2 service. It’s not an apples-to-apples comparison because of the subtle differences in pricing models.
Many businesses are paying more for shared hosting than they would pay for a Mosso Cloud Server. If I was a website developer hosting sites for clients I would be ecstatic right now. The plethora of cheap hosting infrastructure offerings on the market is amazing. I’ll take it one step further. If I was starting a traditional mass-market hosting company today I wouldn’t buy a datacenter or servers. I would totally leverage existing infrastructure in the cloud. What a great time to invent new business models!
Disclosure: I am a Rackspace (RAX) shareholder.
The Minnesota Independent website is running a series of articles detailing the recent data breach in Senator Norm Coleman’s campaign website. Apparently a misconfiguration in the website provided the public with direct access to the campaign donor database — including unencrypted credit card information.
Some of the political fall out is due to the slow response of Coleman’s campaign notifying donors. But much of the fervor surrounding this story is due to political astroturfing.
The coleman website was developed and hosted by a 3rd party. The site structure, database, server and security configuration was handled by a website developer. I’m not going to name the company because it’s not hard to find out.
This type of problem could have happened to the Franken campaign, the Obama campaign, or any other businesses. In fact, I’ve seen this type of problem with vendors many times over my career. Rarely do the public (or customers) hear about these issues. Choose your vendors carefully.
Laying blame on the Coleman campaign for this data breach is misdirected. You can argue all you want about their public relations but the lack of data security isn’t their fault. I’m sure they signed a contract with a vendor and believed they were getting quality services. If their credit card vendor’s servers were hacked would you blame the campaign? Of course not. It’s not like Coleman’s staff bought a server, threw linux on it, and tried to play hoster. They wouldn’t know the difference between Apache and an American Indian.
BTW I didn’t vote for Coleman so I don’t have any skin in this game. I’m just annoyed by the fake moral outrage surrounding this story.
Here’s an interesting Mercury News interview with Cisco’s CTO Padmasree Warrier.
Most of us have heard that Cisco is getting into the server business. But what I find interesting about this interview is Padmasree’s comments on a “unified computing” architecture — one that combines elements of computing, network, and storage. This is starting to sound vaguely familiar… sort of like VMWare’s Datacenter OS concept.
I will be speaking at the upcoming Secure360 conference held at the St. Paul RiverCentre on May 12th and 13th. My educational session is currently titled “Cost-effective Disaster Recovery Strategies“. I will be leading a discussion of disaster recovery technologies and architectures that organizations can deploy with limited budgets.
