You don't have to look too hard to see examples of businesses that have been impacted as a result of a change in the business model that they
served. One example that is still clear in my mind is the music industry. There are many empty record store buildings as a result of how the internet has shifted the business model of distribution, sharing and mindset. The music industry shift continues to this day, but some artists have gotten in front of the change
rather than try to resist. What is the one thing that drives most change? I'll give you a hint. It is the most powerful army in the world. As I learned in business school, military war is plain awful, economic battle is simply brutal. The perfect storm is when you have a declining economy and a changing business model that implies commodity. Looking back at change it is easy to understand what happened to the slide rule, floppy disk drives, cathode ray tubes, drive-ins, the home delivery milkman and the home delivery iceman.
There was a lot of discussion about the Amazon S3 outage last Friday. Some folks were quick to jump on the cloud computing is dead wagon. Their probable cause was left to this new storage/compute paradigm is crazy, see what will happen if you buy into this new IT economy. Storage has to be expensive. Come on, it's the only thing expensive left... man. Of course only start ups and daring enterprises would use such a service. Well I disagree. Having been personally involved in outages with previous companies and relying on 27 years of industry experience, it is true that major outages also occur with proprietary server/storage solutions of yesterday. In fact some pretty severe outages and no vendor is excluded. Cloud computing is not going to go away. It is only going to get stronger. Economics will drive it. New services economically attractive to businesses, individuals, students, etc. will continue to grow it.
As my Dad use to say: "Lead, don't follow."

competitive landscape it has managed to maintain demand of its most mature product "Coke" while constantly bringing newer beverages to market such as "Full Throttle." It is remarkable the beverage industry has convinced consumers to spend money buying 
Dresden Germany hosted the ISC '08 (International Supercomputing Conference) as well as
and visited Sun's development site. A beautiful city with a lot of history and culture. I understand now why Albert Einstein lived there and had the opportunity to eat at one of his favorite places. Prague is one of the centers of Eastern European growth as evidenced by the presence of many U.S. based technology companies. The busy commuter trains, congested technology parks and many construction sites are all you need to witness. Here's to Macura, Michal, Martin, Victor, Marcin, Zsigmond, Jana, Lubomir, Alena and Michael.
to lead in design trends you may be able to do better. Take the so called blather around
Another 
The community showed up in full force last week in San Francisco, CA for JavaOne. To kick things off the CommunityOne day had the OpenSolaris 2008.05 release on center stage. Lot's of Live CDs were distributed and even more downloads occurred last week. For those of you who could not attend you can get the image to download and 
features to experiment with including the new package repository, zfs booting, snapshots, kernel CIFS server, network configurator, data services and a new look and feel. Keep in mind this OpenSolaris CD comes from the same pedigree as the Solaris that many customers are running their business in the enterprise for scalability (100s of CPUs, 100s of threads), performance and stability.
are actively contributing source code as well as building
to
For example, end to end data integrity WITHOUT intelligent hardware
When I first viewed this video I was amazed more than my kids. I'm still in awe with what can be created when you pull various engineering disciplines together. The mechanics, digital electronics and software enable this machine to perform as an almost living organism. The gas engine sound is a good clue that you are seeing a machine. However if you turn the volume down and view at a distance you will think otherwise. A machine that can be kicked, slip on ice, climb in snow and leap tall bounds and recover from these events certainly speaks
contribution focuses on the area of
With our
)-- this book is a must read. Alan also gives you some insight into the current market meltdown.
I've just returned from beautiful Johannesburg, South Africa and
I am
considering this implementation is not proprietary and uses industry standard APIs. Our contribution to XAM further emphasizes the commitment to eliminate the barriers in the fixed content storage arena. No more closed APIs to a specific vendors hardware or software stack, but rather as an industry standard such as
cloud, etc. . "Some people spend time to save $$$ and some people spend $$$ to save time." In the open
source arena the majority of folks (actually it's a pretty vast majority) are spending the time to save the $$$. 50,000 downloads a day of the most popular open sourced database is an eye opener. That certainly sounds like a vibrant and
course. When those customers are ready to do so on their terms because it is a business decision. Think of "free" but drop the letter 'r' (for me it's easy since I'm from Boston) and you have "fee" for commercial grade deployment-- which typically means support, various service offerings and SLAs. If you become "the" largest open source company in the world you drive for new and repeat customers via opportunities not by mouse traps. Opportunities are generated by
today. The internet has created quite a medium for content delivery of podcasts, blogs, webcasts, webinars, etc. This blog itself is an example. Storage solutions are abundant, but don't forget that some storage vendors charge you for every neat feature. Yes you pay for that special hardware that does compression to save storage space. You also pay for every one of those protocols that you need (iSCSI, CIFS, NFS, etc.) and let's not forget about those important data services for protection (replication, clustering, anti-virus engine, etc.) Some vendors even charge big money when you grow out of your storage pool and want expansion. Can you say fork lift upgrade? Well not all storage vendors want to charge you twice. As the storage market approaches commodity some of us are getting ahead of the curve. It is true that all storage companies want to make money... but the difference is leading the way versus fighting against something that will happen anyway. Even new
(Common Multiprotocol SCSI Target). It is a clever framework which enables protocol plug-ins which speak differnent flavors of storage like Fibre Channel, iSCSI, etc. For me it is analogous to the old port and class driver model of my youth. For more info on COMSTAR click 

