Facebook has “opened” their server technology and announced the creation of the Open Compute Project to distribute this intellectual capital.

Cheers,
-pmh

It has been said that Oracle’s main interest in Linux, and Linux support, is to facilitate the hosting of Oracle’s proprietary products. (Oh, and if that cuts Microsoft out of the picture so that customers can spend more with Oracle so much the better!)

The Portable Consultant, whose present work happens to involve infrastructure design including database hosting options, agrees.

Oracle’s VM announcement seems to align with this approach: when hosting Oracle products, consider using Oracle-supported Linux and (New!) Oracle VM.

Whether Oracle’s free VM will challenge VMware in all its roles remains to be seen. My guess it that it is aimed primarily at hosting Oracle products and that is where Oracle development and support will focus.

Cheers,
-pmh

virtual competitors
Item One is the IPO of VMware which, The Economist assures us, is not a repeat of the Internet Bubble years despite the fact that the stock rose 76% on the first day.

Item Two is the acquisition of privately held XenSource by Citrix which is seen by The Motley Fool as a reasonable response to the changing technology that threatens their main product line.

virtual uses in the data centre and at home
As a technical architect I had been waiting for some time for VMware and similar virtualization options to catch on for server virtualization. Amongst my customers this has been happening during the past couple of years. As a parent I have been using VMware Workstation for several years now as a way to isolate my child from upsetting my fragile Windows configuration on the family PC.

the future of XenSource
It is interesting that a company based on proprietary software, Citrix, has looked to a company based on open source, XenSource, to save its bacon. This further validates the open source business model. It will be interesting to see how Citrix now deals with its new open source property and the open source based businesses and communities that have been instrumental in the success of XenSource including Novell and Red Hat.

Cheers,
-pmh

It seems customers are demanding not to be inflicted with Microsoft Vista’s teething troubles in great enough numbers to force Dell (perhaps others?) to offer new machines preloaded with XP instead.

The Register has the story here and The Inquirer has it here.

I suppose I underestimated non-business users’ desire for the same stability that businesses demand. Good work, folks!

Cheers,
-pmh

…pretend you are a business!

If you visit a web site such as Dell.com that has the option of indentifying yourself as a “Home & Home Office” or “Small Business” choose the business option. In many cases the same machine will be offered with XP installed.

Businesses know the value of a stable operating system.

Cheers,
-pmh

dead links
In two recent incidents Internet backbone providers intentionally cut off network traffic and caused major disruptions for hundreds of sites and thousands of paying customers.

This summer Telus, the second largest telecommunications company in Canada, decided to blockade one specific web site for political reasons due to a labour dispute (the site was that of the Telecommunications Workers Union) and ended up blockading hundreds of others due to the technological method used. The folly was that users on other providers’ networks were not affected in the least and smaller networks that purchase connectivity from Telus were also cut off. You can read the details of the story on Michael Geist’s site in several articles including this one .

This month Level 3 Communications cut off data flowing from Cogent Communications citing commercial reasons. The result was a serious disruption not only for users but also for many sites whose connectivity depended on what is known as a peering agreement between Cogent and Level 3. A Google news search will give you the latest developments or you can read this story at Cnet.

reducing the risk
That Internet network providers would use, some would say abuse, their power for commercial ends is not surprising. This has been predicted since the Internet moved from public funding into private hands. It has happened before and no doubt will happen again. It is up to individuals and businesses to protect themselves where possible.

The use of multiple Internet connections, links to different backbone providers, has been common for large businesses since the early days. Hosting providers, whether they run their own data centres or re-brand services of a hosting “wholesaler”, have always touted the risk mitigation benefits of their connection to multiple Internet backbones like Level 3, AT&T, Cable & Wireless, Global Crossing, Sprint, NTT/Verio, etc., etc.

But small to mid-sized enterprises are not likely to have the resources to configure, deploy, and manage multiple links. Even larger enterprises would rather avoid the cost and complexity of managing and monitoring multiple networks. This is not a task for the average IT department. This work is highly specialized and good specialists are not cheap.

hosting services offer multiple backbones
For many the answer is to outsource essential Internet site infrastructure to a large and reliable hosting service.

I’m sometimes concerned about the loss of control when IT services are outsourced, but with a good hosting provider the risks are minimal and the benefits many. The risks are minimal because external hosting arrangements can be tailored to provide minimal services. The only essential ones are the physical location and the multiple network connections. Let the hosting centre provide these. Use your own servers, if you wish, under a basic co-location plan or opt for virtual servers with an inexpensive plan that, nonetheless, will include the same benefits of multiple network links.

In almost all cases a well run hosting service that is located in a purpose-built facility is a better choice than an in-house data centre. Access to multiple Internet backbones is one of the main reasons.

buyer beware
Beware: “redundant” and “multiple” don’t necessarily mean the same thing. Network providers who offer their own data centre services will speak of “redundant” connections, but these are likely to be multiple links to their own backbone only. It may not seem to them like good business sense to offer backup connectivity via their rivals.

As well, many smaller providers simply re-brand the services of a larger network. It pays to have the details of all the networks involved researched and mapped out.

Choosing a suitable hosting provider isn’t a trivial exercise and it’s usually best not to rely entirely on a vendor’s assessment of their own facilities. If you can afford it, an independent evaluation might be worthwhile. In any case, my recommendation would be to go with a hosting provider that is independent of any network service provider, of course.

Cheers,
-pmh

“08:20 Adam loves Gmail. Great because of the large storage space available. Works well for receiving audio comments. Also loves search based e-mail. As of today, Adam’s quota is 4GB.” – Adam Curry’s show notes for The Daily Source Code podcast, Daily Source Code 248

$3.42 worth of excitement?
Hey, I think that Gmail is great too! But I thought it would be interesting to put this in perspective in terms of IT economics.

Google has given Adam Curry, Podcaster Extrordinaire, 4Gb of storage. Around here you can buy a 200Gb external USB drive for about $0.85 USD per Gb. Just how excited should you be about a $3.42 service?

Now, Gmail must be using a fault-tolerant storage architecture that likely involves mirroring (2x the number of disks required for a given amount of data) and/or RAID-3 or RAID-5 (roughly an additional 30% space required for the parity data necessary to recover from a failed disk).

So, the 4Gb of storage may require as much as 6Gb x 2 = 12Gb and these large arrays are made up of individual disks that are significantly more expensive per unit than the disk in my local computer store (faster spindle speed of 15K versus 7K, larger buffer, faster interface). But an efficient storage area network (SAN) based on serial ATA disks (SATA) or even a directly attached storage array (DAS) brings costs down a lot – even after software and management costs are considered.

This is not a rigorous analysis, but my guess is that Adam’s 4Gb. is costing Gmail less than $6 USD per Gb per year on an efficiently utilized SAN. Ok… that’s $24 or $2 per month. Add bandwidth and overhead costs to get the full picture.

Alternatives to Gmail for the enterprise.
For business, there are commercial alternatives to Gmail. An enterprise may chose to dispense go to a private online mail service. Such services carry no advertising and can offer the same storage and search capabilities. To maintain the organization’s brand they will use your organization’s Internet domain name.

Another alternative, if your organization is large enough, is to run your own web-based mail server (and I’m not referring to Microsoft’s Outlook Web Access, OWA).

But even for large businesses, there are good reasons to outsource mail to a service that will not only provide superior search capabilities, but also will provide records management and archiving that will comply with government and other legal requirements for data retention and retrieval.

I’ll have more to say on the requirements of enterprise e-mail another time.

What is Adam worth to Gmail, anyway?
Getting back to Gmail: For Adam, the search facility is worth a lot. That’s really Gmail’s added value for him. Of course Google expects to make money on Gmail accounts through advertising. That’s not my area of expertise, but I’d be interested to hear how much a power user like Adam is actually worth to Gmail… not counting the promotional factor of regular mentions of the Gmail brand in The Daily Source Code podcast.

Cheers!
-pmh