January 2011
168 posts
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The Web is Not a Gadget →
Seed magazine review Jaron Lanier’s You are not a Gadget. Interesting thoughts on self-organization, complexity, and design.
Contrary to the prevailing idea that consumers on the Web should not be obligated to pay individual human content-creators for their work, Lanier is adamant that music and human-created information should not be free. Creativity that goes unpaid leads to a novelty-...
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Data providers rise on Verizon-Terremark purchase →
Verizon’s Terremark purchase is driving investment in other cloud providers, as investors bank on another big telecom acquisition. Very interesting.
A number of companies that specialize in Internet infrastructure saw shares jump Friday after Verizon said it would by Terremark Worldwide Inc. for $1.4 billion in cash.
Investors are laying bets on which company will become the next...
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Verizon steps into IaaS cloud leadership ranks →
Forrester argues that Verizon - with its recent acquisition of Terremark - is a major cloud player.
Forrester surveys of enterprise infrastructure & operations (I&O) professionals show that 29% are prioritizing investments in private cloud solutions in 2011 and that 40% see hosted private clouds as the most attractive option as they place the least amount of operational disruption on...
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Skeptical About Amazon’s Bulk E-Mail Service... →
I could care less about Amazon’s bulk e-mail service, but the bit about the neighbors is interesting…
See that part in my title, “Beware the Cloud Neighbors?” I’ve been noodling on this issue ever since having heard those warnings about Amazon. It’s really the fundamental concern most people have about the Cloud: is there something my neighbors will do in the Cloud that will ...
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13 Reasons Not to Go to the Cloud →
13. You Need Special Hardware: Much as I love the whole scale out on commodity hardware approach, maybe your application needs special hardware that isn’t available in the Cloud. Maybe your advantage is precisely that you didn’t use the commodity approach. Some fancy VOIP network box. Some crazy Cloud-in-a-Box vertical scaling up the wazzo box. Who knows? And scratch need it, let’s...
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Robin Hoods of Cyberspace →
The New York Times reviews a new book that contrasts the hacker ethic to the protestant work ethic - The Hacker Ethic and the Spirit of the Information Age by Pekka Himanen.
Up to now, most ruminations on the impact of open-source software have limited their view to the computer desktop itself: does the stability of the Linux platform prove that open software development models are ...
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Public vs Private Cloud Adoption: The Economics of... →
A discussion about the various benefits of private and public clouds that’s actually interesting, largely because Stephen O’Grady (the author) maps these perceived benefits against the expectations of developers vs. large enterprises.
It is less apparent, however, to larger entities that the public cloud economics compare favorably to their internal operational costs. Setting aside...
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EMC Summit: On Cloud, Storage, Big Data and... →
James Governor of RedMonk discusses the big EMC launch from last week. Nothing particularly new… but his discussion of EMC’s push into big data is worth noting.
EMC is looking at workloads such as gene sequencing, geophysical exploration, media editing. It recently acquired GreenPlum, a massively parallel processing engine, built on commodity hardware – to accelerate its go to...
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Guru: Oracle's storage strategy is 'screwy' →
Oracle’s lack of a cohesive storage strategy undermines their claims for delivering the whole, integrated stack.
El Reg: What has been happening in the high-end storage array space at Oracle since the HDS relationship was dissolved and the 9990 and 9980 arrays went away from Oracle’s product range? How is the Oracle storage sales force coping with this?
ES: “Sun sales...
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The Private Cloud: Who Will Stop the Rain? →
More on the difficulties inherent in virtualization - and how these make private cloud roll-outs difficult.
As some companies move towards a virtualized, private cloud infrastructure, they get caught in a downpour of problems. The additional layer of virtualization requires significant expertise to manage and support, can substantially decrease overall stability and makes diagnosing and...
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HP blackens the skies with Cloud offerings →
Much of this has already been posted - but the final exhortation to vendors to rationalize their naming and bundling is worth noting…
If you can keep track of all this bundling, naming, and renaming, then you probably have a promising career as an HP sales rep. HP might have simplified the IT infrastructure with each successive BladeSystem Matrix refinement, but the company has made...
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RT @lmacvittie: @mccrory You are spot on, IMO. PaaS is just SOA without the baggage after all, and it’s the SO in SOA that lives on strong.
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Mac daddy predicts all-knowing, all-seeing UI →
Major Watson love from a founding Macintosh designer…
“More and more people have smartphones in their pockets … and the best way to interact with them is going to be a conversational user interface – as long as we can get natural language understanding to work,” said Bill Atkinson, a member of the original Macintosh team, the principal designer of the Mac’s...
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I, for one, welcome our new Android forking... →
What particularly struck me in this article isn’t so much the main point - i.e., the value of forking in the development process - but the little throw-away dig at Oracle. It’s interesting to see RedMonk portray Oracle as an anti-innovative, business-as-usual solution. This implicitly puts paid to the idea that deep design matters.
At RedMonk we don’t think forking is a bad thing. On...
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The Future of PaaS in the Enterprise – The Service... →
A little dense, but the basic idea that PaaS clouds will develop as an extension of SOA is kind interesting…
PaaS in an Enterprise will operate as a Service Oriented Platform. That sounds like a silky smooth sentence doesn’t it? But there is substance behind the statement. Today the most advanced Public PaaS platforms are focusing on generic, on-demand, multi-tenant, infrastructure ...
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Quoted often, followed rarely →
In 1975, Frederick Brooks published The Mythical Man-Month. It had no right to succeed. The book detailed Brooks’ experience managing IBM’s bet-the-company System/360 computers and OS/360 software, and featured odd illustrations, an awkward title, and loads of jargon. Yet Brooks’ deconstruction of what went right and wrong became a must-read among tech and nontech execs;...
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How Do We Achieve Peace In A Digitally-Driven,... →
Positioning recent events in Tunisia within a smarter planet context -
Sovereign Individual versus Sovereign Nation State
We forecasted in late December last month, that 2011 will be about self-assembling dynamic networks. Little did we realise that our forecast would come true in less than three weeks in the context of Tunisia. [ATCA: 2011: Self-Assembling Dynamic Networks and...
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IBM and ARM Continue their Collaboration – Major... →
Last week IBM and ARM Holdings Plc quietly announced a continuation of their collaboration on advanced process technology, this time with a stated goal of developing ARM IP optimized for IBM physical processes down to a future 14 nm size. The two companies have been collaborating on semiconductors and SOC design since 2007, and this extension has several important ramifications for both...
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Press Release: Organizations Speed Business... →
HP’s announcement concerning their Microsoft-partnered appliance offerings. Very interesting…
HP and Microsoft Corp. today announced a portfolio of four new converged application appliances that fuse applications, infrastructure and productivity tools into a single system. These solutions help organizations optimize employee productivity and decision-making, while simplifying...
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Building Super Scalable Systems: Blade Runner... →
I need to delve deeper into this article - but so far it appears to be a truly forward-looking point-of-view on where IT infrastructure is going. Smarter computing anyone?
We have not yet begun to scale. The world is still fundamentally disconnected and for all our wisdom we are still in the earliest days of learning how to build truly large planet-scaling applications.
Today 350 million...
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HP offers enterprise cloud service. Plus... →
Unsurprisingly, HP is getting into the enterprise cloud game (public/private/hybrid), as part of their “Instant-On” vision.
HP is offering its own Enterprise Cloud Services directly to enterprises, and announcing a cloud infrastructure building service based on a hybrid delivery model.
HP says its hybrid delivery is an integration of traditional IT with private and public...
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Why The Future of Java is with Large Customers,... →
More on the slow death of Java as a key component of the innovator’s toolkit. Thanks, Oracle.
Oracle is taking such lengths to control Java’s future that companies need to start looking at alternatives such as .NET, Platform-as-a-Service and the Open Web.
In a report issued today, John R. Rymer and Jeffrey S. Hammond of Forrester Research write that Oracle is controlling Java to...
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HP euthanizes Neoview data warehouse iron. Itanium... →
Maybe Neoview wasn’t the answer… in fact, it probably wasn’t. But HP seems to be giving up on a pretty lucrative market. Although - as the article suggests at the very bottom - perhaps this is moot w/ HP and Microsoft announcing an x86-based data warehouse appliance, Frontline, last week. Regardless, the opening to this article is precious.
With IBM’s Watson...
RT @ShlomoSwidler: .@giberti Larger deployments typically leave EC2 not for CPU but to get better control over and performance from netw …
RT @ShlomoSwidler: .@niklas_a We won’t see that. At the scale of Twitter, Facebook, and Google, it makes financial and technical sense t …
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Is ‘VM Stall’ the Next Big Virtualization... →
There appears to be a challenger to ‘VM sprawl’ as the scourge of virtualization success – a problem I call ‘VM stall’.
We know about ‘VM sprawl’ – because new virtual machines are so easy to deploy, organizations can end up with more VMs that they can handle, or even use. This has the potential to cause severe problems to availability, performance, compliance, costs, security, and more.
...
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Gartner: Clouds, Virtualization Help Pay for IT... →
A new survey of some 2,000 CIOs by analysis giant Gartner found that, although budgets are not growing yet as the recession recedes, they are looking hard at technologies such as cloud computing and virtualization to reduce IT costs and help to drive revenue growth.
Titled “Reimagining IT: The 2011 CIO Agenda,” Gartner’s survey sampled 2,014 CIOs who are in sum responsible...
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Global CIO: FedEx CIO Explains The Real Power Of... →
A couple of interesting things to note in this article. Carter’s description of cloud computing as workload-agnostic is antithetical to IBM’s approach to infrastructure. It promotes a view of computing that essentially says the underlying infrastructure is unimportant provided it can flexibly support any workload. Carter also argues that cloud - or highly virtualized infrastructure -...
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The Future Of Java →
Oracle’s strategy for Java will change the Java ecosystem that has existed for 11 years…
Oracle will direct Java innovation. Oracle has made it clear that from this point forward, it will direct all innovation in core Java (Java SE). Oracle will happily accept the contributions of others through OpenJDK as long as those contributions align with Oracle’s priorities.
Competition...
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WebSphere 7 Reaffirms IBM's Java Platform Lead →
Kind of boring — but you don’t see a lot on WebSphere on the interwebs —
IBM, Oracle, and Red Hat JBoss will play leapfrog in Java platforms for the foreseeable future. But clients should evaluate the three leading vendors of Java platforms based on their primary goals for their software, not just by comparing features (and certainly not by comparing public benchmarks)....
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What's Oracle got up its sleeve? Looks like it... →
More speculation on this upcoming Oracle storage announcement —
Several industry sources say tape is going to feature in, or be the main focus of, Oracle’s announcement.
One industry insider said: “I think Oracle’s announcement timing is very likely aligned with the large growth the tape industry is seeing in the unstructured data being archived off to tape. This is a huge...
RT @nubeblog: @jamesurquhart @swardley I think the ‘IT is complex’ mantra only helps to cover the real problem: how inefficient computin …
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Creating A 2048-Core HPC Cluster in Minutes on AWS... →
This is pretty insane… here’s how a company called CycleCloud provisioned a 2,048-core supercomputer on the Amazon cloud in less than half an hour for less than $600. (As a point of comparison, Watson operates on about 3,000 cores.)
We do a lot of work, at very large scales, on HPC work in the cloud, and today we’d like to introduce you to a decent sized HPC Cluster we recently...
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Virtualization: Blessing or Curse? →
Fantastic article - if a little technical - on the trials and tribulations of virtualization. It’s not all good! Well worth reading as we attempt to figure out the overarching messaging for smarter computing.
Virtualization is often touted as the solution to many challenging problems, from resource underutilization to data-center optimization and carbon emission...
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WatchBenoit Mandebrot discusses fractals, architecture and the death of Euclid with Paola Antonelli, a curator at MoMA. Very interesting.
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The cultural genome: Google Books reveals traces... →
More on how scientists are using Google Books to track the development of culture and language - “culturomics.”
Fortunately, that’s exactly what Google have been doing since 2004. Together with over 40 university libraries, the internet titan has thus far scanned over 15 million books, creating a massive electronic library that represents 12% of all the books ever published. All...
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400 year trends from Google books search →
Pretty great post from Virtual Economics —
Google’s new book search tool comes with the ability to make charts out of searches through the 500 billion words that make up 5.2 million catalogued books. Here’s what ReadWriteWeb used it to find. Here’s what I looked at - changing religious values (especially the decline of God and the fall of heaven vs hell); cars...
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