November, 2008

Overheard - Frank Gillett’s cloud computing reality check

Forrester’s Frank Gillett talks with Beet.tv about “cloudwashing.”  He does a nice job breaking down where the future might lie for cloud computing and unlike a lot of other pundits, Frank seems to have his feet on the ground (and not in the clouds).  Don’t miss this one.

Thanks go to Dennis Shiao for recommending this video clip. My takeaway?  I need to keep an eye on three things: software as a service (SaaS), platform as a service (PaaS) and virtual infrastructure as a service (usually shortened to just IaaS).

Overheard - Disruption Tolerant Networking Protocol

By the time astronauts make humanity’s next giant leap, they may well be getting their e-mail via a dot-space address. Alan Boyle, Interplanetary Internet Passes Test

Today, NASA’s information superhighway to outer space flows through one major gateway - the Deep Space Network - to a host of space probes, scattered all the way out from Earth orbit to the edge of the solar system. As those probes proliferate, the Deep Space Network has to keep up with an increasingly complex communications schedule.

The new protocol developed by NASA to deal with complex communication scheduling is called Disruption-Tolerant Networking (DTN). It’s sort of works like TCP/IP, but it doesn’t assume there will be a continuous end-to-end connection. If a destination path can’t be found, the data packets aren’t discarded. Instead, each network node keeps the information until it can communicate safely with another node. It’s called a store-and-forward system.

Overheard: Future of clouds remain hazy without standards

It is clear that without standards of one kind or another (de-facto or from a recognised body), there won’t be a market, and without a market, the cloud is unlikely to thrive. The competition isn’t as much between cloud providers, as it is between cloud providers and internal IT organizations. Cloud providers need to keep that firmly in mind. Benjamin Ellis, CloudCamp London 2: On Standards. Special Guest Post

A standard image format might provide a base level of standardization, but there is a risk that the industry then gets caught up in a ‘lowest common denominator’ model that throttles much of the unique innovation that the scale and speed of cloud computing allows. There was a consensus for a pragmatic approach: a layering of APIs, standardizing a layer at a time.

(My apologies to Benjamin Ellis! I had originally credited this quote to James Govenor.)

Overheard: Beyond the petaflop

Breaking the petaflop barrier, a feat that seemed astronomical just two years ago, won’t just allow faster computations. These computers will enable entirely new types of science that couldn’t have been done before. Betsy Mason, Supercomputers Break Petaflop Barrier, Transforming Science

The U.S. Department of Energy announced that the XT Jaguar, housed at its Oak Ridge National Laboratory, has hit a peak performance of 1.64 petaflops. That’s more than a quadrillion mathematical calculations per second.

Officially, the computing power will be used for simulation. Simulating climate conditions, for example. Or maybe nuclear explosion modeling.

Overheard: Cloud chargeback

Knowing which applications and departments are driving IT expenses is critical now, and will continue to be critical as cloud computing goes mainstream in the enterprise. Therefore, any cloud chargeback solution should integrate with the chargeback framework that the company uses to manage their physical assets. John Gannon, Enterprise Cloud Computing: Understanding the Costs

James Govenor’s blog post wrapping up the speakers at Cloud Camp London is a must-read for anyone interested in the future of cloud computing. Before we even have the luxury of talking about cloud chargeback, there’s some serious work to do re: standards.

Overheard: What’s another name for white space device? Brick

Unfortunately for the companies developing these devices, they’ve yet to demonstrate a device that accurately and consistently senses broadcast and wireless microphone signals. The development of these devices is absolutely crucial to the white space debate. If they can’t sense signals, they are essentially useless bricks. Shelly Palmer, White Space - A Big White Lie

Thanks to Alex Howard for finding today’s “Overheard” quote!

Overheard: 62% of rural America is still dialing up

According to a study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, released in July, only 38% of rural American households have access to high-speed Internet connections. Arik Hesseldahl, Bringing Broadband to Rural America

Comcast  is constantly looking for where to expand, and looks for areas that have at least 25 homes per one-mile stretch while meeting other criteria, says company spokeswoman Terri Weldon. “We are in business to make a profit,” she says.

Today’s WhatIs.com Word of the Day is white space device.

Overheard: Chris Morell explains phase change cooling

For those people that aren’t HVAC engineers, Phase Cooling involves using a refrigeration compressor to compress a gas till it changes phases to a liquid. This liquefied gas is then pumped into an evaporator which is place on your processor/GPU. While inside the evaporator, the liquefied gas changes phases back to a gas, and while doing this it sucks up heat and gets pulled back into the compressor, completing the cycle. Chris Morrell, Vapor Phase Change Cooling

Overheard: Azure grew out of Red Dog - gotta love those code names

The goal of Azure is to provide developers who want to write applications that run partially and/or entirely in a remote datacenter with a platform and set of tools. Mary Jo Foley,  Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform: A guide for the perplexed

Ok. So Azure isn’t all that new. It’s just Red Dog with a new name?

Overheard: USB 3.0 is on its way

According to official specifications, USB 3.0 will officially be known as SuperSpeed USB and carry with it a whopping bandwidth of 5 Gbps, which is roughly 1 CD’s worth of data (650 MB) per second. Tuan Nguyen, SuperSpeed USB More Like HalfSpeed

Ok now it makes sense that Apple ditched FireWire.