Bob Porras' Blog: Words without the accent...

The random nature of life events can be summarized by the phrases "right place at the right time" or "wrong place at the wrong time."  There is a scene in the movie "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button."  that portrays the randomness of an accident.  How appropriate given the events last month for my household.  The good news is that nobody was injured and that is the most important outcome.  It doesn't stop one from wondering that if one random event was different then the whole situation might have not occurred.

One Friday rainy morning my wife was driving my son to high school.  As she was coming back home at ~7:25 am there was an electrical short circuit on a power line that had shut down the road to one lane.  A junior at the same high school was running a little late and came around the corner of the road only to see traffic stopped in front of him.  He panicked and locked up his brakes and skidded across the road and hit my wife's vehicle.  Not the car in front or behind my wife... but my wife's car as you can see in this picture above.  When I arrived at the scene the high school student was looking glum.  It may have been the surcharge on his insurance he was thinking along with the warning he received for speeding under the road conditions.  I was glad that everyone was physically fine.  Both vehicles had to be towed and the tow trucks were on site quickly.

The next set of events came as a big surprise to my wife as well as me.  Prior to this accident she had never had an accident or even a parking ticket.  She called Liberty Mutual our insurance provider to file a claim.  The woman on the other end of the phone took information from my wife for about 15 minutes.  While still on the phone with the insurance agent my wife received a call from a car rental company notifying her that her substitute transportation (a 2009 minivan with 6000 miles/9656 km) was ready.  The towing company called as well asking if my wife decided on the repair facility and was requesting authorization to deliver the vehicle.  My wife then said to the Liberty Mutual claim representative:

"This is going too easy!..." and the Liberty Mutual claim representative responded: "It's supposed to go this way..."

Needless to say my wife was speechless only having to make 1 phone call.  She was also told that your deductible is being waived and since your vehicle has less than 12000 miles/19312 kilometers; only new original manufactured parts can be used for the repair.  In less than a week the repair shop had the replacement parts and she picked up her repaired vehicle 3 weeks to the day later.  The vehicle had over $5500 in damages!  Looking behind the scenes of the insurance company they have a sophisticated IT infrastructure that automates and consolidates B2B transactions in real time.  As a result all vendors in the value chain have the incentive to respond.  Repeat business and customer satisfaction are main drivers here for everyone.

When you are a customer you know how you would like to be treated.  A good thought to keep in mind with your own customers.

Have you made contributions toward a more ECO friendly environment?  Any and all efforts do make a difference when all added together.  While we have made progress in some areas, it is evident that we need to go faster and stronger.  Stop and think of your own personal carbon footprint.  In other words what are you doing that is causing the emission of greenhouse gasses.  When I look at the picture above it resonates 'clean' (it also indirectly infers Lord of the Rings - "The Eye").

Renewable energy is no longer a passion for environmentalists.  I've taken an interest in wind power.  While driving into Boston on Route 93 South you can see a large wind turbine located on your left by Exit #31.  It is situated in the back of a school which is located right in a neighborhood (look at the center of this Yahoo Map for the small white circle, this is where the turbine now resides) .  The city where this wind turbine is located is called Medford, the city where I grew up.  Being curious and an engineer, I had to get up close and check out this piece of technology.  First of all this wind turbine is HUGE up close!  Even more amazing was that the turbine was right in a schoolyard and neighborhood.  I could not believe how quiet this turbine was operating.  Given that city life is usually noisy with highways, airports and the close proximity of homes; I didn't think that a wind turbine would be acceptable right in a city.  The blades of the wind turbine look high tech.  They reminded me of the Cold War when submarine propeller technology was top secret.  In fact I believe today's submarines are looking at non propeller propulsion.  Why you ask?  Because a submarine that cannot be heard cannot be detected.  The quieter a propeller provides propulsion the harder it is to detect.  It looks like similar engineering went into the wind turbine blade design.  The wind turbine I was standing right under was relatively very quiet.  I assume the turbine's brain adjusts the blades pitch to accommodate the wind speed and weather conditions.  I believe it must have a wind speed ceiling as well as floor as it is not safe to be operating a wind turbine in a hurricane!

In addition to wind there are other natural renewable energy sources such as solar, geothermal and hydro energy generation. There are also biofuel alternatives such as ethanol from corn and sugarcane.  With all the advancements in clean energy and the opportunity to keep our planet safe it makes you just want to be green too.

The transistor counts of both the CPU and GPU are escalating almost as fast as toxic assets from the sub prime mortgage meltdown.  As in every good debate there are usually 2 opposed sides to a given topic.  Political parties such as Democrats and Republicans thrive on the point versus counterpoint arguments.  This analogy certainly is applicable to the technology of semiconductors.  Gone are the days of the CPU as the center of the computer.  With the advancement of visual applications in both the commercial and entertainment sectors, graphic processing has made a claim as the center of the computer.  Today 50 years after the first silicon transistor, semiconductor advancements have exceeded industry predictions 25 years ago.  It is truly amazing that computer and graphic processor transistor counts have gone from 100s of millions and exceeded the billion of transistor ceiling!  That is one large mass of circuits that have to be designed, verified, placed, routed and timed for chip signoff.

As the industry has pretty much hit the celing on clock speed, multiple instances of cores have appeared.  However having a quad-core CPU does not mean that your office productivity suite will run faster on your desktop as this application is single threaded.  Applications that are muti threaded will be able to take advantage of mutiple cores.  A good example is visualization hypervisor software that will run on multiple bare metal cores.  When you are managing multiple virtual machine instances many cpu threads come in handy.

It is obvious that word processing applications do not need extreme graphics processing either.  Then what does require high end graphics?  The graphics capability of the microprocessor is pretty impressive these days.  I can think of two areas: high end video games and visualization software for high end computer modeling and manipulation.  Both of these areas have a viable market as evidenced by the sales of popular gaming consoles out there such as PlayStation3 and the new consoles under development.  In the commercial sector 3D crash simulations are very cost effective for automobile manufactures when designing a safer automobile.

Ferraris and Fiat Cinquecentos both can go 50 mph (80 kph).  However not everyone has the need or monetary opportunity to purchase a Ferrari.  The same applies for CPU and/or GPUs depending on what you are trying to do.

I recently started using a new gadget that has made mobile information access much easier.  However it took some tinkering to get it all working seamlessly. MP3 and iPod music players are almost as common as wrist watches today.  My kids and I have acquired a collection of them over the years.  The latest edition for me is the iTouch which is the newest iPod that enables you to not only listen to music, but watch movies, photos, connect to the internet via w-ifi and install applications.  Basically the iTouch is everything the iPhone offers except the phone service (which you get from a mobile carrier network such as AT&T, Vodafone, etc.).

The internet connection via wi-fi is what really sets this appliance apart from competitors.  At home I can connect to my fully encrypted network.   What astonished me was my ability to connect to unsecured networks in many different localities.  For example while sitting in a medical building waiting for an appointment with my physician, I connected to my opthamologist's office on the other side of the building.  No encryption key required.  I have been able to connect to wide open wireless networks at banks, schools, hospitals, shopping malls, restaurants, and other people's home networks!  While this is rather convenient for me, it is scary at the same time.  I've also been impressed with establishments such as a world renown teaching hospital in Boston that offers guest wi-fi services once you accept terms and conditions.  The same applies to airports around the world where airlines may offer password based complementary or pay per use w-ifi access.

Now let's get to the applications which is the best part of the iTouch.  As is the case with the iPhone you can use a rich set of both complimentary and purchasable applications.  The iTouch comes with a base set of applications such as Calendar, YouTube, Email, Safari, Clock and Stock tracker.  You can also add applications such as Google Earth, Yahoo, USA Today, The Weather Channel, Yahoo, Google Maps, Currency converters, etc.  I loaded a complementary app called Nambu which allows you to post to all of your social networks at once via services such as Twitter, FriendFeed, Linkedin, Facebook, Ping.fm and pic.im.  Posting photos, links, micro blogs, product info, etc. is all seamlessly integrated. With Ping.fm you can post via a browser, SMS or through a 3rd party client such as Nambu. 

A picture is worth a 1000 words and it certainly resonates with the economic global meltdown this past year.  A red flag indicator on the economy is the TED spread.  This metric is an indicator of perrceived credit risk in the economy.  The TED spread tracks the difference between interest rates of interbank loans and short term T-Bills (government debt).  The difference is measured in basis points (bps). Unlike the economic recessions of the past, this spread skyrocketed universally across the globe rather than in specific countries.  Historical averages are usually below 50 bps so when the TED spread went over 450 bps in the Fall of 2008 there was no surprise what was happening in the world stock markets.  Click here to see a TED spread quote from Bloomberg.

While the TED spread has dropped in the first part of 2009, there certainly needs to be additional closure of the spread in order to get back to historical averages. This will only happen, in my opinion, when credit flows normally once again.  There has been too many mixed messages on banks lending again (but to whom???) and being able to assign value on toxic assets that the banks are holding.  Until these two items can be cleared out, the one common solution for both is attracting private investors.

Consumer and private investor confidence is at an all time low.  Government loans and stimulus packages globally all factor into where and what to invest.  Where have all the risk takers gone?  I certainly don't have the stomach to hedge in the current securites environment.  Even governments have retreated to purchasing safe, secure debt for investments so who can blame the private investors to be in a you lead and then I'll follow strategy.

Events got pretty scary last October when the TED spread peaked.  A money market fund defaulted, consumers were running on banks and many financial institution capitalizations were evaporating.  You could literally hear value being sucked out of the market and retreating to liquid assets.  Where did it all go?  It's like we had full balloons in a closed room and suddenly the balloons are all empty... but there is still the same amount of air in the room.  We just cannot find the air to blow the balloons back up again.  Reports have indicated that world banks have written off ~$900B (U.S. dollars) in toxic assets but there remains ~$3.1B still working its way through the system.  The TED spread will be watching...

This is where consumer confidence plays a huge factor. 

Last week I was with community friends in the largest country in the world.  It has the largest forest reserve and its lakes contain 25% of the world's unfrozen fresh water.  Thinking China... well I was in the Russian Federation. I visited 2 prestegious universities:  Moscow State University, Russia's largest and St. Petersburg State University, Russia's oldest and founded by Peter the Great.  It is very rewarding to see adoption of ones technology being put to good use via educational training and academic research.  While commercial innovation of technology is part of every high technology company only a select few lead with open sourced technology.

I was honored to participate in the dedication of an HPC Cluster at St. Petersburg State University.  This system will be part of the world effort where there are no barriers.  Only united scientists throughout the world working together to solve the mysteries of the universe.  The physicists at St. Petersburg State University are participants at the Large Haydron Collider at CERN.  As an engineer I'm amazed how scientists take and use technology for analyzing the mountains of data generated by their experiments.  Experiments that are trying to solve how we all originated from the big bang.  After suffering through 2 years of undergraduate physics, as do all engineers, I'm glad to leave the mysteries of the universe to the physicists.  However, I'm a very interested observer...

Just as important are all the developers who create, use and share technology for the physicists as well as the corporations that need it to run their business.  St. Petersburg hosted a Tech Days 2009 mashup event for the community.  The community showed up in force to talk open sourced software.  Jeet Kaul kicked of the Day 1 keynote and spoke about technology, sharing, innovation and the value the community brings to itself.  Jeet also kicked off the JavaFX coding challenge to the community.  Developers... if you are interested get involved and click here.

On Day 2 my keynote focused on the link between technology adoption and commercial innovation in the open source community.  Independent of the open source community that you choose is the need for continued innovation.  Innovation that can be applied to solving the problems of commercial business and entities.  The benefit to the community is that early adopters get to nurture, proliferate and improve technology with no barriers to entry or exit.  Getting involved costs you only your time to join the experience.  Developers worldwide may be interested in the OpenSolaris Applications of Steel challenge for Community One West on June 1st, 2009.  Get connected.  From university academics and their research to the competitive advantage of commercial cloud solutions using opensourced technology-- the benefits are too compelling to ignore.

I get asked quite frequently about open source software and how can you make any money, especially if you give software away.  My two word response is quite simple: "business model."  Open Source software does have licensing terms & conditions and revenue is part of the business model.  Having personally spent approximately 3 years front and center in the open source software world-- I've explained it many different ways in an attempt to get others to grasp the concept and not get stuck on myths.

My latest analogy to open source software is to use a popular franchise of Major League Baseball, whom some of us know as a customer.  Take the Boston Red Sox. Clearly this is one of the most successful baseball teams in the world, especially since John W. Henry took ownership of the team in 2002.

Now the analogy can apply to any sports team but I specifically am using the Red Sox because of it's presence, reach and magnitude throughout the world which is important for open source software.  If you live in the Boston area, as I do, you know first hand that securing tickets to any home game is an expensive monetary acquisition.  Even if you gain entry into a home game there are tiers within the ball park that dictate how much revenue you contribute to the Red Sox for the service provided:

• corporate suites
  
• .406 club member
  
• season ticket holder
• single game attendee

There is a very wide margin of service one can obtain if they are willing to pay money.  A bleacher seat for a single game is $26 U.S. dollars, while the cheapest seat for the Oakland A's is $9 U.S dollars... see what I meant about reach and presence of a community.   Fenway Park is an enormous revenue generating machine using game tickets, food concession, merchandising, television broadcasting rights and loyalty.

Now let's talk about the vast majority that do not choose to spend money or do not have any money quite yet for the Red Sox.  There is an enormous following of the Boston Red Sox throughout the world.  To be a Red Sox fan costs you nothing, only your involvement with the Red Sox community.  You can watch, follow, cheer and get a similar Red Sox experience for free from a television, radio, free internet game tracker or newspaper box score.  The Red Sox welcome all types of community fans irrespective of where in the cycle of the business model they currently reside.  A subscription is available to every fan depending on their affordable level of service.  Some loyal Red Sox fans commit up front to many years of continued service.  The key point is that fans (community) can come and go and spend or not depending upon their own circumstance.  Free TV fans are adopters where revenue is not a primary focus while premium paying fans are contributing to the Red Sox revenue stream.  In the end both types of fans are customers of the Red Sox and the Red Sox nurture the needs of a varying wide fan base for profit.

The Red Sox certainly want to reach as wide of a fan base as possible including all demographics.  For example that young 11 year old female in bleacher seats with her Dad and pink Red Sox hat may be a future CEO of a Fortune 500 company. Her company may want a corporate suite at Fenway Park some day.  It's very clear to the Red Sox that young Red Sox fans of today usually become future adult Red Sox fans that are likely to contribute revenue to the Red Sox.  When the Red Sox play away games you can see many loyal Red Sox fans at baseball stadiums in Tampa Bay, Baltimore, New York, Oakland, Toronto and Cleveland.

The Red Sox model works for all fans with time and/or money but clearly the Red Sox have been successful by growing their fan base world wide and providing a superior product for their community.  So when you think open source software examples think Red Sox and opensolaris, openoffice, eclipse, ubuntu, mysql, java, opensuse, glassfish, redhat, apache, etc. and the largest contributor of open sourced software in the world.  The choice is yours for choosing the team and community that is right for you.  Developers from many FOSS communities are getting together at CommunityOne West in June.  Click here to register.

It took approximately 15 months for the event to occur, but as it has happened to so many others the RROD was not unexpected.  My son creates lots of computations on his 1 teraflop Xbox 360. Needless to say the gaming community is not very amused with Xbox 360 technical problems.  More about community in a future post.

The console in our house suffered from the lower right quadrant ring of red light, otherwise known as the "E74 System Error."  Microsoft has extended the 1-year warranty to 3 years for the RROD error, but the E74 System Error still only carries a 1 year warranty.  It is becoming obvious that the common hardware failures are interrelated (heat and cold solder joints) but go figure.

Next came the big decision.  Pack up the Xbox and ship it for a costly repair that will take 1 month or do it myself?  There is plenty of information out there in the cloud as to how one can fix the problems that statistically should occur at a much lower percentage.  My soon to be 15 year old son is contemplating a career in engineering so we said let's void the warranty that has already expired and see what happens...

To attempt a fix you need to disassemble the whole unit down to the bare motherboard.  This includes opening the clever injection molded plastic case that has no screws, the metal case that requires Torx screwdrivers, the control PCB that drives the (see picture above) on/off LED button, the CD drive, the air plenum, the heatsinks, the dual cooling fans, the drive power cable and the drive data cable. Next you need to unscrew the motherboard from the metal case in order to expose the back of the motherboard.  Here is where the infamous x-clamps reside. You need to remove the x-clamps that secure the heatsinks to the 2 custom ASICs. The 2 ASICs are pretty impressive. A custom multi threaded (2) multi-core (3) IBM PowerPC-based CPU and a custom ATI GPU. Polygon performance is 500 million triangles/sec and 48 billion shader operations/sec.  No wonder the HPC community is programming GPUs for their computational might.  512 MB of 700 MHz GDDR3 RAM feeds the GPU. Memory interface bandwidth comes in at 22.4GB/sec. Not bad at all but here lies the problem.  The Xbox is a screaming number cruncher which produces electrical resistance and as a result heat.  Thermal expansion (heat) and thermal contraction (cool) cause the motherboard to be bent by the x-clamps.  Repeated cycles of this causes cold soder joints. One bad connection on a signal and your Xbox is toast.  By the way server engineers have been dealing with this issue for years. The thermal problem can be solved, but it can and usually does as the result of adding cost to the product. In my opinion the issue for the Xbox is that it is an extremely high volume product and trading off added cost versus margin to a gaming console is a difficult balance.

The fix basically involves reflowing the solder balls in the CPU, GPU, RAM area with a heat gun. Assuming this is successful you have to put the whole game console back together.  But before you do this you replace the x-clamps with metric screws to attach the heat sinks.  You have to be very careful to clean the old heat paste completely from both ASICs before applying artic silver 5 thermal paste.  If you do not do this correctly your heatsinks will not work efficiently and your unit will overheat quickly.

We put the whole thing back together and powered it up around 10:30pm after spending about 6 hours working and 2 trips to the hardware store and RadioShack . It worked!  My son was happy as he was able to get to level 65 on Call of Duty 5.

I suggest that if you want to increase the odds of not getting RROD on your Xbox then mount your console in the tower position (standing on end) rather than flat like a laptop.  When the console is in the flat position the motherboard is on the bottom of the unit and cooling is more difficult.  When the console is mounted on it side (which is a valid position since it has skid pads on its side as well as bottom) the motherboard is cooled more efficiently. It's even better if you can can mount the Xbox on 4 small blocks so that more cool air can flow into the unit from all top, bottom and side intakes.

It was fun showing my son aspects of engineering in practice but even more enjoyable to actually have fixed the console for him.  On the downside-- given the data out there on these RROD problems, I know the unit will ultimately fail again...

Almost everyone in the IT infrastructure business is feverishly working on cloud solutions today.   This includes the incumbent providers as well as the infrastructure providers to the incumbents.  An excellent blog can be found here which outlines the trends that have accelerated over the past 5 years with respect to what has morphed into the cloud.

One tool that is platform agnostic across Linux, Windows, OpenSolaris, etc. is Sun's open sourced Grid Engine.  There is no need to look for a better policy based workload manager which includes dynamic provisioning of application workloads.  We are just about to release update 2 to the 6.2 release.  More platform support (see below) and of course more and better features such as improved resource management of parallel jobs.  Grid Engine is used fairly regularly in HPC stacks throughout the world.  In fact Grid Engine is in use at some of the largest compute installations in the world.  Keeping 60,000 processor cores busy is a formidable task.  A hard requirement that only makes the product that much better.  I can't wait to see how solutions will be able to combine other tools from the toolbox and create technology for clouds, HPC engines and who knows what the limits will be.  We have come a long way since the Turing Machine from the 1930s.

In addition to being excited about the advancement of technology it is also very rewarding for your technology to contribute toward the benefit of solving some very difficult problems.

Grid Engine supports the following platforms:

• OpenSolaris
• Solaris 10, 9 and 8 Operating Systems (SPARC Platform Edition)
• Solaris 10 and 9 Operating Systems (x86 Platform Edition)
• Solaris 10 Operating System (x64 Platform Edition)
• Apple Mac OS X 10.5
  
• Apple Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger), PPC platform
• Apple Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger), x86 platform
• Hewlett Packard HP-UX 11.00 or higher, 32 bit
• Hewlett Packard HP-UX 11.00 or higher, 64 bit (including HP-UX on IA64)
• IBM AIX 5.1, 5.3
• Linux x86, kernel 2.4, 2.6, glibc >= 2.3.2
• Linux x64, kernel 2.4, 2.6, glibc >= 2.3.2
• Linux IA64, kernel 2.4, 2.6, glibc >= 2.3.2
  
• Microsoft Windows Server 2003
• Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 1 or later
• Windows 2000 Server with Service Pack 3 or later
• Windows 2000 Professional with Service Pack 3 or later
• Windows Vista
• Windows 2008 Server
  

Being an old server guy a common rule we live by is: "It's not the bandwidth, it's the latency that gets you."  How so appropriate for storage today. Applications put a tremendous demand on accessing data when and where you need it.  Users nor customers are willing to deal with waiting a long time for their data.  With Web 2.0 services spanning a multitude of needs, response time is critical.  For certain real time applications interrupt response time and minimal latency is a must.  A real time data feed comes in an instant and you have to be ready to respond to the telemetry data as that satellite passes over that receiving station.

Data needs to be stored or retrieved for devices that span from the small mp3 player to that large cloud that you provide and/or utilize.  Specific to the storage of your data, performance fundamentally comes down to how you manage your reads and writes.  File and block serving of data needs to be tuned, staged and ultimately not waiting at any stage of the pipeline from disk to client.  Today that requires a lot of intimate knowledge of processor caching, storage controllers, I/O software stacks and much more.  Having knowledge of this information is only part of the solution as the whole application topology is further mystified by unknown bottlenecks, resource hogs and just plain alchemy. 

The unknowns are attempted to be turned into knowns by expensive analyzers, network sniffers and debug tools.  What could one do if a visual dynamic analysis tool was made available to you?  The you being that novice with limited knowledge as well as that you with all the intimate knowledge of hardware, kernel, drivers, application software, cache coherency, round robin scheduling, relational databases, etc.  For the investor world we have Cramer's Mad Money.  I'd like to introduce you to Gregg's Mad Storage.  Brendan Gregg  has a great post on explaining how a hybrid storage pool of solid state disk and cheap SATA disks can significantly outperform traditional storage.  It's not only RAM and disk any longer, rather RAM, SSDs, cheap disks and the ZFS file system.  The heat maps from Analytics of storage latency are just so visual.  Using Analytics (Dtrace) in the Unified Storage Server 7000 Appliance is very intuitive and straight forward.  No clumsy logs files to comb through.  No debug points to capture state.  Only point and clicks of your mouse and loads of visual histograms of data for your eyes. Brendan does an awesome job of breaking down fundamental performance problems using analytics built into this storage appliance.

There even is a Unified Storage Server 7000 emulator available on VMware.  Check it out for yourself and see what commodity hardware, an open sourced operating system, innovation and differentiation can do for your storage needs.  You may also want to bookmark Brendan's blog as his posts on performance for hybrid storage appliances are just as passionate as the technology.  Stay tuned for more on solid state disk technology where we'd rather lead than follow.

Flying into Singapore, one of the worlds largest ports, I noticed something odd.  There seemed to be too many ships anchored in the waters.  From the SwissHotel in Singapore you have a beautiful view of the port.  From this view you can also see the Singapore Flyer.  One rotation on this structure takes 30 minutes.  It is B-I-G.  Unfortunately it was closed as mechanical problems caused some people to get stuck at the top for several hours.  Not a pleasant thought if you don't like heights...  This Ferris wheel measures 571 feet (165m) in height!  During my attendance of Sun's TechDays 2009 in Singapore I spoke with a lot of developers and customers among the ~1300 that attended (see below).  During the event reception, on the 70th floor of the hotel, we had the backdrop of the port amongst several conversations (see below). 

I was speaking with folks about Singapore's Port Terminal and why so many ships at port.  I was not surprised to find out that many of the ships are short term moored, since imports and exports have slowed.  One individual told me that ship movements started to slow in October, then some more in November and plummeted in December.  The decrease in port activity is in direct correlation with the economic slow down worldwide.  Another person described the port activity as "crawling."  While activity may be off in Singapore's port, it still processes 1/5 of the worlds export/import containers and serves as an economic barometer in my view.  I noticed a large number of oil tankers in the port as well...  Short term mooring of vessels at Singapore is measured in days and it makes sense to stage vessels there-- especially if you consider the amount of throughput at this port.  One only needs to watch the ship activity at Singapore's port terminal to gauge if the world economy is getting better or worse.  No need to listen to all the analysts, experts, press, news feeds, ect.  Simply watch the ships in Singapore.

Moving up North to Tokyo I met with some customers in the mobile provider business.  I've been able to visibly see evidence that businesses world wide are interested in cost savings.  That does not necessarily mean stop spending, but rather spending to improve efficiencies via consolidation (cloud computing) and commoditized components (storage). 

It's rather scary to see more public companies report disappointing earnings and forecasts.  Benchmark companies such as Microsoft, Nokia, Toyota, LG, Lockhead, Sony, Hyundai, TSMC, GM, BofA, Barclays and HSBC have all slashed their outlook as well as stating reduction of operating costs.  One analyst quoted in the Financial Times has predicted trouble for some British banks who refused help from their government and may be over exposed to emerging market borrowers.  Some are speculating that these worldwide economic problems are accelerating computing away from the PC.  That means margin pressure for the businesses who center around this particular computing platform.  As PC computing moves more toward laptop to netbook to handhelds and thin clients, this will only accelerate the opportunity for those who can differentiate in the computing infrastructure environment.  This in my opinion is why the storage market and now the cloud market (virtulization 2.0) has become so visible.
Open sourced efforts will only gain momentum with a bad economy. The computing industry will become a low barrier to enter and exit among suppliers.  Look at the auto industry.  If you can drive a car your loyalty can move between any supplier.  The only way an auto manufacturer can “lock you in” is via your experience.  That is not so true in the IT industry today.  Apple does a great job today of keeping you as a customer because of the excellent experience with their products.  However look at Sony.  They had that edge previously, but commodity economics has caused Sony to retreat and regroup.  Customers are interested in solving new problems in different ways, especially if there is a savings in cost.  For example SATA disks and Solid State Disks (SSDs) combined can give you better performance than buying more expensive Fibre Channel 15K Disk Drives. If I give some quick thought as to what the IT commoditization order looks like I would list it as:

1. memory
2. processor
3. networking
4. operating system
5. storage
6. database

Items 1,2 and 3 are in advanced stages of being a commodity.  Items 4, 5, and 6 are early or accelerating stages of being commoditized.  In an accelerating economy leaders of new innovation who commoditize technology are usually venture backed private firms.  In a deteriorating economy the leaders of new innovation tend to be publicly traded entities who have the expertise to combine technology into new solutions.  Also it's important to not be squeamish on changing the business model for these new solutions.

In Tokyo a fellow colleague asked me how the economy was in the U.S.  I asked him has he been reading the papers or watching the news to which he said "yes."  He then told me he wanted to hear it first hand from someone in the U.S.  I asked him why and he stated that he still finds it unbelievable that the downturn is world wide.  It's obvious to him in Japan and he's living it, but the other economy woes worldwide are only news to him and difficult to fathom.   Having seen the downturn firsthand around the globe I don't need to ask anyone.

Keep innovating, keep commoditizing... the time is ripe for opportunity.

Today the 44th President of the Unites States of America is sworn into office. For me it signifies not only eliminated barriers but also the beginning of new horizons.  Horizons that parallel past frontiers that once seemed impossible to tame.  World wide economic woes have linked countries together.  It's ironic that this linkage also holds the solutions for the recession.  Some nations need to lead, but it will require more from the followers as well.  Don't expect one person to go about and fix it all.  "Yes we can" is about everybody, everywhere getting the inspiration to help change your nations situation as well as your own. 

As someone who is fond of history I'm currently reading the biography of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.  His leadership and inspiration during the Great Depression was a catalyst.  FDR's personal ailments and struggles as a polio survivor were part of that catalyst.  While no nation's leader is ever lacking of critics, FDR included, he served during a very difficult period of time.  His New Deal programs and the struggles of that time have been told to me numerous times by my parents.  My parents watched my grandparents struggle through the Great Depression.  In some ways those stories have shaped me.  FDR's voice and words were his medium.  One did not see a man ravaged by polio in steel braces, but rather a leader who inspired many to solve problems. His famous quote, "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself" during his inauguration speech is so appropriate.

"Yes we can" is for all.

Happy New Year.  2009 appears to be a busy year for clouds.  Virtualization has added several players since VMware momentum appeared a few years ago.  One can now select from an array of hypervisors, both of the bare metal and hosted variety. While VMware still remains the incumbent, healthy competition is now front and center for this business.  The added competition will only stimulate the innovation even more as products strive to differentiate.  Price will become more elastic as equality among base product capability matures.  In fact open sourced hypervisor offerings may become a tipping point, especially in the current worldwide economy.  Desktop hypervisors are almost a required application these days for developers.  Here is to healthy competition continuing in this space.

The internet cloud is the next frontier where competition is popping up all over the place.  While Amazon's EC2 and Google's clouds have been around for a while with success, they have certainly invited competition. Microsoft, IBM, Dell, EMC and Sun are each combining their technologies and extending that of the virtual nature to the cloud.  Cloud computing is the next order of magnitude of virtulization.  The cloud will become the place where physical becomes virtual (like memory) and the application is hosted somewhere out there.  Clients to the cloud are no longer desktops but rather devices.  Devices which include the hand held kind (intelligent phones, Nintendo DS, etc.).  Advantage goes to the cloud who has the technology and assembles computes, storage, interconnect, developer tools, systems management, applications, services, choice, price, flexibility, support, etc... the best.  Open sourced software will provide an advantage here.  Stability of the hardware and software will make a difference.  Cloud lock-in will eventually be a barrier that will go away.  Broadband and mobile utilities have no lock in other than service agreements.  Applications will be required to be portable to work across hosted environments.  2009 will be an exciting area for the cloud to watch as well as participate.  I'm excited.  Utility computing has really started to evolve, morph and accelerate.

Another year (2008) will soon be in the past.  Technology has enabled most of our days throughout the world to be busy, productive and sometimes almost endless.  Las Vegas, Nevada is no longer the only city that never sleeps.  On December 11th am and 12th pm perfect conditions were present in Southern New Hampshire and just below in Northern Massachusetts. 

Those conditions enabled tress to get coated with ice mostly without the ice freezing on the ground.  The good news is that motor vehicles and people were not sliding all over the place.  The bad news is that those trees eventually began to explode and split apart from the sheer weight of ice glued to the trees.  Snow is much less dense than ice so snow covered trees are the norm here in New England U.S.A.  While the ice coated trees transformed into beautiful art by nature it wreaked havoc on man made items.   Simply put once the trees started to split apart and break they took down many power lines.  So many power lines were broken that approximately 1.5 million homes were without power. 

As the trees were breaking during the night you could hear them snapping and cracking.  When power lines were breaking you could hear power transformers blowing and sounding off like gunshots.  People in my town, 7 days after the storm, had no power.  When the power lines come down one at a time, the only way to fix the situation is one power line at a time.  However, before you fix the power line you have to be able to get access.  A perfect problem created by nature.

When nature forces you, especially over the weekend, to pause there is a lot to be thankful. With no electricity one is forced to modify their day.  Early to bed and early to rise.  In the Northeast of the U.S.A. this time of the year you need to keep the house warm (fireplace, wood stove, etc.).  For refrigeration you can use the temperature outside to keep food cold.  At night, if cold enough, the temperature will freeze anything solid.  Candles, oil lamps provide basic light at night.  Flashlights allow you to navigate around your house.  Reading by candle light is not as easy as I thought.  Boardgames and good old uninterrupted face to face conversation can certainly pass the time of sans electronic anything.  I paused for 2 full days in an electricity free environment before I caved in for the gas powered generator.

The year of 2008 has presented many challenges throughout the world.  Front and center has been the economy unwinding throughout the world.  Sometimes nature can help cure events created by people.  For example seeing new growth sprout from a brushfire created by a careless individual.  While the economy problems today are more like wildfires, nature still finds ways to recover.  I'm not sure nature can help fix the economy but it may have the ability to get people to pause and think.  After all people are the ultimate creators of the current economic problem.  Any problem creates opportunity and somehow there will be a catalyst to start the recovery.  Happy holidays and best wishes for the 2009 New Year.

The latest release of OpenSolaris (2008.11) just posted a few weeks ago.  As we discussed in Brasil it is so easy to get and so easy to kick the tires using Virtual Box.  The community has been busy building out the latest enhancements to this release.  We have aggregated FOSS components such as GNOME, FireFox and Thunderbird while having innovated as well.  Take notice of our new installer, OpenOffice 3.0, ZFS Time Slider as well as the integrated packaging system (IPS) repository. Innovation and aggregation brought to you by the same source.

Keep in mind the 2008.11 release is built using the SAME technologies that bring you an enterprise operating system.  From a scalable multiprocessing kernel to a GUI interface targeted at Web developers, 2008.11 combines the best of both worlds.  Take some time and use the package repository to add or subtract the thousands of FOSS application available to you.  While the package repository continues to grow every community member has the opportunity to contribute at their own comfort level.

Kudos to the team and stay tuned for the 2009.04 release...  Think about working with the community on the build updates that get posted every 2 weeks at OpenSolaris.org.

Give

it

a

try...

Today. 

Peter Buckingham gave it a spin.