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Understanding NPIV and NPV - blog.scottlowe.org - The weblog of an IT pro specializing in virtualization, storage, and servers

Mon, 30 Nov 2009 14:13:59 -0500

Understanding NPIV and NPV - blog.scottlowe.org - The weblog of an IT pro specializing in virtualization, storage, and servers

"the process of institutionalizing a new technology will change the institution"

Mon, 30 Nov 2009 13:47:59 -0500

“the process of institutionalizing a new technology will change the institution”

- ViewYonder » Poor IT hygiene is a barrier to technology adoption

"Recently Mike Stonebraker wrote an influential paper titled One Size Fits All: An Idea Whose Time..."

Mon, 30 Nov 2009 12:10:10 -0500

“Recently Mike Stonebraker wrote an influential paper titled One Size Fits All: An Idea Whose Time Has Come and Gone. In this paper, Mike argued that the existing commercial RDBMS offerings do not meet the needs of many important market segments. In a presentation with the same title, Stonebraker argues that StreamBase special purpose stream processing system beat the RDBMS solutions in benchmarks by 27x, that Vertica, a special purpose data warehousing product beat the RDBMS incumbents by never less than 30x, and H-Store (now VoltDB), a special purpose transaction processing system, beat the standard RDBMS offerings by a full 82x.”

- Perspectives - One Size Does Not Fit All

"This conclusion may be surprising — people notice a half second delay? — but we had a..."

Mon, 30 Nov 2009 10:06:09 -0500

“This conclusion may be surprising — people notice a half second delay? — but we had a similar experience at Amazon.com. In A/B tests, we tried delaying the page in increments of 100 milliseconds and found that even very small delays would result in substantial and costly drops in revenue.”

- Perspectives - The Cost of Latency

"Excellent set of distributed systems rules of thumb: o L1 cache reference 0.5 ns o Branch..."

Sun, 29 Nov 2009 21:50:17 -0500

“Excellent set of distributed systems rules of thumb:
o L1 cache reference 0.5 ns
o Branch mispredict 5 ns
o L2 cache reference 7 ns
o Mutex lock/unlock 25 ns
o Main memory reference 100 ns
o Compress 1K bytes with Zippy 3,000 ns
o Send 2K bytes over 1 Gbps network 20,000 ns
o Read 1 MB sequentially from memory 250,000 ns
o Round trip within same datacenter 500,000 ns
o Disk seek 10,000,000 ns
o Read 1 MB sequentially from disk 20,000,000 ns
o Send packet CA->Netherlands->CA 150,000,000 ns”

- Jeff Dean: Design Lessons and Advice from Building Large Scale Distributed Systems

"A few NSPs quietly mentioned that Google has already been offering to sell bandwidth on their part..."

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 15:55:16 -0500

“

A few NSPs quietly mentioned that Google has already been offering to sell bandwidth on their part of the cable in the wholesale market. This puts some NSPs between a rock and a hard competitive place — with one of their biggest customers!

This creates an intriguing dilemma for Google, according to a financial markets expert I chatted with at the Capacity show. Google’s P/E valuation has been driven by its reputation for disruptive technologies since the beginning of Google-time. Although it’s unlikely, if they also start operating as a telecom utility (offering bandwidth and all sorts of cellular technology/services), that could change. P/E values for NSPs, wireless equipment manufacturers and wireless operators are rather modest to say the least. So even if Google has spectacular success selling bandwidth, I can’t imagine it would contribute to even a modest change in their P/E expectations.

”

- IP Backbone: Hard sell, not so much - Renesys Blog

"The reason I assert you will end up with break-even or a loss is because if you start to accurately..."

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 13:42:00 -0500

“

The reason I assert you will end up with break-even or a loss is because if you start to accurately identify the additional expenditures necessary to maintain and operate that investment, then costs start to dramatically increase relative to this single expenditure. To offset these costs, a business would need on the order of a 25% costs reduction or increase in profits to have a “return”. As I noted above, TCO and ROI are notional concepts designed to be manipulated by those with budgets to justify expenditures. I have yet to see one CIO actually go back and reconcile the initial ROI estimates against the original assertion past year one.

[…]

The metric I recommend is total service cost (TSC). Basically stated as a formula, TSC is:

(Cost of Infrastructure + Cost of Operations + Cost of Software + Cost of Risk) – Billed Usage = TSC

[…]

At this point, you’ve laid out very little capital to get started, your development costs were kept relatively low and you’re service is being managed by your Cloud provider. This sounds resoundingly like the story many startups delivering Cloud-based services are prescribing as success. However, because you highly leveraged with a significant number of dependencies on external agencies, your cost of risk is significantly higher than if you has hosted it in a co-located facility with less compute capacity and used your own employees, which maintains knowledge internally to your company, which causes you to set a higher price point for your unit of billing, which results in slower uptake in sales.

”

- A Better Metric for Analyzing the Value of the Cloud — CIOUpdate.com

Blades Made Simple · Making blade servers simple

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 16:15:15 -0500

Blades Made Simple · Making blade servers simple:

A blog about blades, heavy on networking info, fairly technical, across most major vendors (incl. cisco ucs).

"It depends. I love the concept of the Cisco UCS platform. Servers are seen as processors and..."

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 16:13:20 -0500

“It depends. I love the concept of the Cisco UCS platform. Servers are seen as processors and memory – building blocks that are centrally managed. Easy to scale, easy to size. However, is it for the average datacenter who only needs 5 servers with high I/O? Probably not. I see the Cisco UCS as a great platform for datacenters with more than 14 servers needing high I/O bandwidth (like a virtualization server or database server.) If your datacenter doesn’t need that type of scalability, then perhaps going with IBM’s BladeCenter solution is the choice for you. Going the IBM route gives you flexibility to choose from multiple processor types and gives you the ability to scale into a unified solution in the future. While ideal for scalability, the IBM solution is currently more complex and potentially more expensive than the Cisco UCS solution. ”

- Blades Made Simple · Cisco UCS vs IBM BladeCenter H

Dilbert comic strip for 11/18/2009 from the official Dilbert...

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 08:45:46 -0500

Dilbert comic strip for 11/18/2009 from the official Dilbert comic strips archive.

“In this episode, Dean Nelson and Phil Hughes show the...

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 14:15:59 -0500

“In this episode, Dean Nelson and Phil Hughes show the prototype of the fanless server solution from clustered systems using cold plate technology to remove the heat. This is the first proof of concept with the equipment that will be used in the overall SVLG chill off over the next 6 months.” (via datacenterpulse)

Cloud Computing Ecosystem Map - Appirio

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 14:21:56 -0500

Cloud Computing Ecosystem Map - Appirio

JavaScript-based Amazon Web Services Simple Monthly Calculator

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 09:41:01 -0500

JavaScript-based Amazon Web Services Simple Monthly Calculator

Cloud computing can help you reduce costs, increase flexibility,...

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 09:29:27 -0500

Cloud computing can help you reduce costs, increase flexibility, and reduce risk. You can leverage the cloud to host applications ranging from the business critical to the experimental. But not all applications are suited for cloud computing environments. When deciding whether and how to move an application to the cloud, you must first assess the expected risks and rewards. Once you’ve determined that an application can run in the cloud, you next should determine whether it can be further optimized to harness the energy of the cloud. This white paper presents a methodology for determining when and how to refactor applications for cloud computing environments. (via Optimizing Applications for Cloud Computing Environments )

"The ‘aha!’ for big data management is to realize that traditional data pipeline suffers from an..."

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 09:10:40 -0500

“The ‘aha!’ for big data management is to realize that traditional data pipeline suffers from an architecture problem – of moving data to applications – that must change to allow applications to move to the data.”

- Winning with Data » Blog Archive » The Era of “Big Data” Applications

"China is a very big [networking] market that we can go after. It’s actually a bigger market..."

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 08:30:59 -0500

“China is a very big [networking] market that we can go after. It’s actually a bigger market than the server market and a bigger market than the storage market.”

- HP’s 3Com acquisition: An inside look
- Network World

"I wanted to let everyone know that IBM has recently released two papers on cloud security and would..."

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 14:36:23 -0500

“

I wanted to let everyone know that IBM has recently released two papers on cloud security and would welcome your thoughts and suggestions about them.

The first is a new white paper called, “IBM Point of View: Security and Cloud Computing.” This paper takes a balanced look at the key issues in securing cloud platforms without getting into a lot of hype. Unlike any other cloud security guidance I’ve read, it describes the relationship between the cloud platform’s security and SOA security so you can see how the cloud specific parts of security relate to existing security infrastructure and techniques.

[…]

The second paper, “Cloud Security Guidance: IBM Recommendations for the Implementation of Cloud Security” is a more checklist-oriented discussion of issues that should be considered in evaluating cloud environments. It combines many of the IT security issues you’d expect to discuss in any IT environment with cloud-specific issues that are particular to cloud-computing. combining many aspects of IT security.

”

- Visible IT

T-SCIF: High-Density Heat Containment Cool!

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 11:09:49 -0500

T-SCIF: High-Density Heat Containment

Cool!

"Sales for these services are driven by two things: price and trust. The more generic the service is,..."

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 09:32:17 -0500

“Sales for these services are driven by two things: price and trust. The more generic the service is, the more price dominates. The more specialized it is, the more trust dominates. IT is something of a special case because so much of it is free. So, for both specialized IT services where price is less important and for generic IT services — think Facebook — where there is no price, trust will grown in importance. IT is becoming a reputation-based economy, and this has interesting ramifications for security.”

- Schneier on Security: Security in a Reputation Economy

I/O Virtualization and the Double-Edged Sword - blog.scottlowe.org - The weblog of an IT pro specializing in virtualization, storage, and servers

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 12:02:04 -0500

I/O Virtualization and the Double-Edged Sword - blog.scottlowe.org - The weblog of an IT pro specializing in virtualization, storage, and servers:

Skip the post and go straight to the comments. Interesting conversation on Xsigo’s IB based approach vs CEE/FCoE