An old English proverb observes that “Even a broken clock is right twice a day.” A more modern idiom involves a blind squirrel and an acorn, and I’m certain there are many other culturally specific nuggets of wisdom that succinctly describe what is essentially blind luck.
The proverb and modern idioms fit well the case of modern acceleration techniques as applied to content delivered to mobile devices. A given configuration of options and solutions may inadvertently be “right” twice a day purely by happenstance, but the rest of the time they may not be doing all that much good.
Monthly Archives: August 2012
Thoughts for the Week-End
1. NBC’s Olympics coverage proves the point that all the great technology in the world is wasted if the human element is forgotten. This has been a stunning technological display, accompanied by some of the most ignorant commentary and craven corporatism imaginable.
2. The sudden pivot to SDN in particular and networks in general scares me. Too soon, guys, you’re getting ahead of your customers.
3. I agree with @krishnan that it’s asinine to talk about how open source has “won.” This has never been a zero-sum discussion.
4. Our summer in Northern Illinois has been statistically equal to the norm for Tulsa, Oklahoma. I’ve always wondered what it would be like to live in Oklahoma; now I don’t have to.
5. Related to Thought #2, this talk of public-cloud consolidation makes me nervous. How can something be consolidated before it’s been allowed to mature?
6. Read my article about Citic and its new Singapore datacenter. Gaze in wonder at all the US vendors mentioned. Agree with me that cloud computing creates great jobs and that IT jobs are only going to be more sophisticated in the future, not wiped out.
7. Write a letter to your Congressperson and Senator and implore them to focus on how to rebuild our economy on technology in general and cloud computing in particular. Yes, write a letter. Don’t send an email, as most of them don’t yet know how to use it. And by all means, don’t tweet it. They’ll think you’re some sort of subversive.
Have a great week-end!
Are the Costs of Cloud Security Too Good to Be True?
The costs of holistic security are very different from company to company when considering direct costs, soft costs, hidden requirements, scope of services, and migration issues.
What is it they say…you get what you pay for, right? In most cases, that is a spot on assessment but in terms of the cloud-based security, the numbers tend to add up towards the benefit of the user. But let’s get the whole idea of numbers down straight. It’s all relative. What is pricy for one organization is downright affordable to another, so in terms of costs let’s look squarely at the moving target of return on investment. What makes cloud security compelling is how the costs break down in terms of hard and soft cost savings
Cloud’s Cohesion: When Virtual Worlds (Must) Collide
The software application developer is about to become the cloud software-as-a-service application developer. At least this is the truism that we must accept if we give full credence to the ‘trending’ topics coming out of IT vendors’ newswires just now.
Logically, as an industry, we appear to have spent most of our time up until now concentrating on the construction of cloud computing architectures, development frameworks, usage models (i.e., public, private and/or hybrid) and the multifarious issues pertaining to the migration of both data and applications.
Zetta.net Achieves Distinct Cloud Storage Advantages Through Use of WebDAV
Zetta.net, a provider of 3-in-1 online server backup solutions, has announced that storage analyst firm Storage Strategies NOW reports that the company’s use of the WebDAV (Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning) protocol is a distinct advantage for its Zetta.net DataProtect cloud infrastructure. The recent Delta Report authored by Storage Strategies NOW outlines how WebDAV delivers both the security and speed required by today’s customers of cloud-based data protection, making Zetta.net unique in terms of throughput and recovery availability.
“WebDAV is latency independent and efficient over wide area networks, particularly when compared to file protocols like CIFS and NFS,” said James E. Bagley, senior analyst, and Deni Connor, founding analyst of Storage Strategies NOW in the report. “By using WebDAV, the data is encrypted during transmission and stored quickly and efficiently. Connections are kept open continuously which reduces the amount of stress on the customer network and the internet in general. This is coupled with the speed and efficiency of Zetta.net’s compression and incremental-forever update technology, making it unique in terms of throughput and recovery availability.”
Cloud Computing: AWS Launches Provisioned IOPS for Its Elastic Block Store
Amazon Web Services is now offering new features for customers looking to run high-performance databases in the cloud by launching Elastic Block Store (EBS) Provisioned IOPS.
Provisioned IOPS (input/output operations per second) are a new EBS volume type designed to deliver predictable high performance for I/O-intensive workloads, such as database applications, that rely on consistent and fast response times.
With Provisioned IOPS, customers can specify both volume size and volume performance, and EBS will consistently deliver the desired performance over the lifetime of the volume.
Provisioned IOPS volumes are engineered so customers can develop, test and deploy production applications and get their desired performance.
Check on In and Eat This Dog Food
Jim Barksdale is a pretty quotable guy, work for him for a few years like I did at Netscape and you leave with a small library of “Barksdalisms” that just stick with you. One of Jim’s sayings was, “It ain’t dogfood unless the dog comes off the porch to eat it…”.
While Jim was making the point that you can love your product, but if the customers doesn’t buy it it ain’t worth much. Let’s take a look at a few cool examples of this…
Ever feel like escaping the doldrums of your computer, sitting down by a mountain lake and skipping stones? Sounds like fun. That’s exactly the experience that the SkipTown promo for Sun Valley created by San Francisco design firm 11 did. And while Skippy has since retired, check out the video of the world’s first (and maybe only?) web controlled stone skipping robot from Sun Valley Idaho.
Cloud Computing: Savvis Buying Part of Ciber
Savvis is buying parts of Ciber’s global IT Outsourcing (ITO) business for $7 million in cash plus a cash earn-out payment based on performance through December 2013.
It’s supposed to expand Savvis’ application management services and help desk support.
The acquisition includes client and vendor relationships, infrastructure, technology and facilities in several countries.
Savvis expects to hire the approximately 750 people who currently support Ciber’s global ITO business. Savvis plans to provide ITO clients with continued IT outsourcing support besides offering its enhanced capabilities, including cloud services.
Gazzang and DataStax Partner to Deliver Robust Data Security for Big Data
Gazzang and DataStax, the commercial leader in Apache Cassandra, have announced a partnership that will help customers meet data security compliance regulations and guard against unauthorized data access or malicious attack, while comprehensively managing their Big Data. As part of the partnership, Gazzang zNcrypt is now available as an integrated data security solution for DataStax Enterprise customers, allowing data to be secured when at rest.
“As we see increased enterprise adoption of NoSQL databases, issues such as data security are going to become increasingly important,” commented Matt Aslett, research management, data management and analytics, 451 Research. “Partnerships such as the one struck by DataStax and Gazzang will ensure users are able to combine the flexibility of distributed unstructured data management with the encryption and access control capabilities of zNcrypt.”
“Gazzang gives DataStax customers peace of mind, knowing the sensitive information they use to run massive-scale queries and analytics is secure,” said Larry Warnock, president and CEO of Gazzang. “Because zNcrypt is optimized for cloud and big data environments, there is no tradeoff between security and performance. This means DataStax Enterprise customers can have the best of both worlds: fast data and maximum protection.”
A Sixth Thing CIOs Should Know About Big Data
Recently, IDG’s Joab Jackson of IDG wrote a piece titled, Five Things CIO’s Should Know About Big Data. Amid the slew of articles offering advice on Big Data, this particular one stood out because of how absolutely spot on it was. Of course we couldn’t stop at just five.
You will need to think about big data. What we’re seeing now is that the price of entry to big data, at least from a CapEx standpoint, is pretty low. Open source tools like Hadoop, Cassandra, MongoDB, MapReduce and others, combined with the relatively low price of cloud computing, means organizations that may not have been inclined to collect, store and analyze their data volumes are now more willing and able to do so.