Bob Porras' Blog: Words without the accent... Also at: http://bobporras.wordpress.com/

On Halloween I upgraded the desk side PC from Windows XP to Windows 7.  Between multiple reboots, application installs, recovery of email, print server configuration, etc. my wife asked "Why does it have to be so hard?"  As she said this I was looking at the Apple Time Capsule sitting on top of a small cabinet in our home basement. The only item coming out of the Time Capsule was the power cord connected to the power outlet.  I run the Time Capsule as a wireless client in our home network for data backup.  The data consists of many pictures, video clips, songs, the kids homework and basically many various files (some of which are important).

My home (LAN) network has grown over the years from a few PCs connected via an old 802.11b router to a dual band (802.11g/802.11n) router connecting a multitude of wireless clients. These include a XBox, iTouch, PrintServer, OpenSolaris, Ubuntu, Mac, Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7 devices.  Basically a heterogeneous environment.  Will the older Window versions be phased out at home eventually?  Yes.  The Unix/Linux clients will remain out of necessity as well as for hobby.  It's difficult to currently beat the Mac experience.  Adding a Time capsule into my existing home network was relatively easy.  The Airport setup updated the Time Capsule firmware and configured the device in straight forward steps.  It wasn't as "fun" for a "techie" as say CLI commands, but simple is defined as "fun" for most consumers. The Windows XP to Windows 7 full upgrade was painfull but I have to admit the network configuration experience was much improved.  I was pleasantly surprised freeware Bonjour discovery services just worked and the W7 system configured the Time Capsule as a usable share.

One could imply a similar situation in the enterprise space.  For an enterprise business "fun" is defined as high margin dollars on a growing revenue stream.  This usually means your costs are contained, you implement continuous improvements on efficiency and you simplify.  Vendors in the technology industry are all trying to provide a truly "Enterprise Time Capsule" or Appliance.  There has been a large amount of innovation over the past 20 years.  However today's innovation is tomorrow's PDP-11.  Minicomputers were appliances that Mainframes couldn't be.  The evolution has continued over the years in every technology segment.

Enterprise customers want it simple as do consumers.  While the stakes are much higher in the enterprise, the bar is significantly raised for "just working" each and every time.  It doesn't matter if you are playing catchup, you are the incumbent or you are the new thought leader-- the winners will be the set of vendors who provide the tool that "just works" each and every time in the harshest and most complex environments. 

Blog is available also at: http://bobporras.wordpress.com/

The turnout of customers and partners of the enterprise technology segment certainly did not disappoint at Oracle Open World this year.  While other large IT events have been canceled this year do to the economic downturn, Oracle Open World attendance of 42000 IT professionals was basically unaffected from the 2008 attendance.  Even more impressive was that virtually every enterprise vendor that partners, competes and analyzes Oracle attended this yearly gathering in downtown San Francisco. The multiple exhibit halls, sessions, events, activities and networking certainly created an environment for plenty of information exchange.

Every vendor at Oracle Open World is a cog (of varying sizes from small to large) that builds into the enterprise IT stack of:

• applications

• middleware

• database

Every item from storage management, computational speeds, networking feeds, disaster recovery, hosted IT, employee productivity tools and various communication mediums all factor back into connecting the above 3 areas of the enterprise stack.

In my opinion enterprise IT is becoming much less driven by vendor loyalty and a great price to the vendors that can provide competitive advantage to their customers.  During an economic downturn as well as post recovery, the competitive advantage will more than outshine a good price.

Blog is available also at: http://bobporras.wordpress.com/

Recent news of increased economic stability in the world is comforting.  However how much of it is based on sound fundamentals?  If you are an investor or run a business where in the world do you want to invest for growth and equity?  United Arab Emerates may be a place of interest.  The UAE growth rate in GDP is astounding.  While not all economic indicators are objectively sound, you have to speculate where can you find a better risk/reward ratio. 

Western based banks have recovered their share price as well as balance sheets, but new credit lending is still tight.  Loan losses are still surging in the West.  In my opinion there remains too many toxic, complex, leveraged, convoluted, imaginary assets out there that have not been exposed to date.  In order for the world economy to move forward the majority of bad credit instruments need to be exposed and liquidated.  Otherwise we will continue to regain the false sense of consumer comfort that eventually got us into trouble. 

Most world economies are driven by consumer spending, but consumer savings is the buffer from repeating what we are seeing today.  One issue is where (globally) to place your assets into safe saving instruments with a secure and viable return. 

I'm not sure anyone out there has all the answers...

Blog is available also at: http://bobporras.wordpress.com/

While the U.S. is still trying to stimulate spending of U.S. consumers with its economic stimulus programs, countries such as India and China appear to be making much better progress.  On a recent trip in September to China and India via Singapore one can visibly see that Asia Pacific is not standing still and putting idled factory workers toward new infrastructure projects.  Talking with customers and partners in China and India only confirms what could be described as a best practice for any nation looking for economic recovery.

Earlier this year Beijing announced a $585 billion (U.S. dollars) stimulus package (~13% of China's 2008 GDP). As part of this stimulus package China will spend this year $50 billion (U.S. dollars) alone on the ambitious worlds biggest high-speed (started in 2005 and expected to finish in 2020) railway which will connect Beijing, Dalian, Xuzhou, Lanzhou, Shanghai, Kunming and Guangzhou. Beijing's economic stimulus is directly targeted at the ~20 million idled workers in China due mostly to the 20% decline in foreign sales.  Notable statistics of the new high-speed railway include:

• The buttresses which carry the tracks will consume 117 million tons of concrete

• 16,000 miles (25,749 km) of new track will be built

• The Beijing to Shanghai line will consume enough steel to build 120 "Birds Nest" Olympic Stadiums

In addition to construction labor the railway will create jobs for engineers and lot's of them.  The railway will be computerized and require a lot of IT spending and resources.  You can be certain the large IT companies are looking to win this business and provide hardware, software, services and support.  A great opportunity.  Bill Powell wrote a great article in FORTUNE magazine with many more exciting facts which you can read here.

India's growth is equally impressive despite the global recession.  India still needs to build massive amounts of infrastructure while China is already upgrading infrastructure previous built.  I like to describe China as organized chaos while India is still dealing with unorganized chaos.  In Beijing you see cars, buses, trains, people, bikes, motorcycles all in congested traffic in harmony with the traffic signals.  In Bangalore you have the same as Beijing but with everyone only in harmony with themselves.  Traffic signals get ignored, motorcycles are riding on the sidewalk and intersections, at rush hour, give no clear indication as to who has the right of way.  It's simply something that every business professional should experience because you need to know the customer you are selling.  Both are beautiful cultures and part of the solution of economic recovery in the world.  India too will consume massive amount of engineers, software, hardware and services not only to fuel their IT outsourcing industry but to rapidly build their own nation, infrastructure and ultimately their own economy as a world leader.

Blog is available also at: http://bobporras.wordpress.com/

Ultimately it is the software application that most IT customers look toward solving their business problems.  However software applications have a lot of moving parts sitting logically under the stack that enables the given application.  Some of these parts include operating system components, hardware and usually a large amounts of data.

A car, like an IT solution, requires more than a few set of tools to complete the job. While companies share many common problems, as do car manufactures, company solutions ultimately need the entire tool box to be fully utilized.  This is necessary in order to get the right solution to a company's IT problem.

Healthy competition amongst vendors enables multiple degrees of freedom for application solutions, but more technologies in a given vendors tool box only enables the ability to build better IT solutions.  The same applies to those who are in the business of building cars.  From a business perspective it is absolutely critical that the technologies have to be articulated into a cohesive and complementary strategy for success.  For example Ford builds cars, trucks and hybrids.  Ford does not depend on putting a truck engine into a Ford Focus and vice versa for obvious reasons.  The same applies for technology.  No "one solution fits all" has ever been successful in any market. 

Venture Capitalists and public companies have been chasing "the" goal for many years that one given technology can satisfy all aspects of a given market.  However when you combine and use multiple technologies in your portfolio and present the right business and sales focus the results can be pretty awesome.

Here is a good example of software technologies:

• Solaris 10
  

• Solaris Cluster 3.2 U2

• SAM/QFS 5.0

• ZFS
  

from the tool box combined with partner technology to produce an ultimate software application solution.

Blog is available also at: http://bobporras.wordpress.com/

Do you remember your first job out of college?  More importantly do you remember your first manager?  Yes that  person who decided to give you a chance.  I was on vacation during the July 4th holiday weekend in Maine and had a chance encounter.  This young person named Pat R., who was working the concierge service, was off in the corner being quiet on a slow night.  My wife Ellen and I along with our gang of three Michael, Michelle and Mikayla (are all versions of the name Michael) were the only guests having an early evening snack.  So I struck up a conversation with Pat.  I asked him if he was from Maine and was this his summer job, to which he said yes to both questions.  I also found out that he was entering his senior year at Colorado College.  I asked Pat what was his major and he replied Computer Science.  Bingo... my wife and kids were probably thinking: "we are going to be here for a while..."  I told Pat I worked at Sun Microsystems and then he started talking about Java, Java and more Java.  Pat admitted to being a Xbox 360 heavy user, especially at college.  My son really liked this part as I pester him for his diligent practice of his  Xbox dexterous skill.  My son enjoyed that Pat was a Halo 3 and Call of Duty player as well.  As we left to go back to our room I wished Pat good luck and we agreed to keep in touch via Facebook or Linkedin since he is a member of both networks.  Even though I only interacted with Pat for a short period of time I sensed he was well rounded and envision him doing well in his future.

There are many stories throughout the world from people who speak of remembering that first chance that “someone” gave them.  Through all walks of life from business, entertainment, sports, cuisine, medicine, etc. there are instances of people not forgetting that initial opportunity that started their climb in life.  I was in New Zealand recently and was told a story by my driver of his friend. His friend is the sole provider of beef in New Zealand for a large U.S. based fast food franchise.  Many years ago this gentleman responded to a small local newspaper advertisement.  He eventually won the contract over much larger companies in New Zealand because the decision maker had a good instinctive feeling about him and was willing to give him a chance.

I've been fortunate to have given several college graduates their first chance in their career and it is one of the most satisfying parts of the job.  To be able to watch young college graduates transform into seasoned industry veterans is similar to watching your own children grow into adults.  Listening to graduates from all over the world tell their story of what education has enabled for their lives is humbling.  It reminds me of the stories of my grandparents when they immigrated to the U.S. They too got that first chance which eventually led to my own first chance in the working world here in the U.S.

As an engineering undergraduate I had to complete 2 years of full time work experience in order to graduate from Northeastern University.  In 1979 Tom Seiker gave me my first cooperative education job at AVCO Research Laboratory in Everett, MA.  I also completed cooperative education at the Mitre Corporation in Bedford, MA.  Bob Preuss, Dr. Greg Robertshaw, John Roberts and Dr. B.N. Suresh Babu all gave me a chance at Mitre.  In fact, Bob Preuss made me do an official daily written status report that was logged and filed as part of the company record.  As you can imagine few engineers enjoy writing words, myself included, but because of his insistence writing became much easier for me.

My cooperative education was  mostly working on classified projects that required a secret clearance, so I naturally interviewed with the National Security Agency (NSA) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).  I decided that the commercial industry was right for me.   Ten companies wanted to give me a chance and I picked Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC).  Bob Raspallo, Jim Scott and Mike Pennington gave me my first chance at DEC.  Thank you, I have not forgotten and continue with what you started with me.

Blog is available also at: http://bobporras.wordpress.com/

Despite the global economic downturn some businesses are aggressively spending for the opportunities of the future.  However the spending of today has conflicting objectives that some would argue are necessary.  Let's take wireless mobile providers throughout the world.  In this market, competition is fierce and beneficial to consumers.  The services offered to subscribers are plentiful and rich but they do come at a high cost for the providers.  Subsidizing the phones from the likes of Nokia, Apple, Samsung and Blackberry is one big cost to get the customer's subscription.

It's great that technology has enabled GSM phones to work almost everywhere in the world except Japan "where you'll need a special phone that either supports CDMA or uses the 3G standard UMTS in the 2100 MHz frequency band. Sony Ericsson, Nokia, and a few other phone manufacturers now offer multi-band GSM phones that also include support for UMTS 2100. Coverage also extends to some cruise ships." There is a crowded group of companies looking for the opportunity to connect to individuals to provide any and all content. It's as if companies have discovered another Gold Rush.

I'm excited to see wireless and cable providers compete and innovate for delivering services to all of us around the world.  Watching cable providers offering land line service over IP and phone companies offering internet connectivity is a good example of the competitiveness out there.  The days of just delivery of service or being only the data pipe are long gone.  Providers want to delivery the data but more importantly they want to create the applications that produce the data.  The telco, cable provider and handset manufacturer all want to own as much of the subscriber stack as possible.  Now that's competition!  Here in the U.S. Comcast and Verizon are aggressively competing to win one subscriber at a time for internet, phone and HD television service.  As a result both companies are making massive investments in capital expenditures.

In fact, despite the global recession, capital spending continues throughout the world by some companies as a competitive advantage for the rebounding economy in the future.  Having spent the past few weeks talking to customers in New Zealand, Australia, Germany and reading newspapers such as the Financial Times, I've collected a group of random data.  This data can be basically summarized into Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection and applies to business as well as nature.

• world airlines have 866 Boeing 787 Dreamliners on order.  Each 787 averages ~$200M U.S. each!
• new cargo ships ordered or under construction is ~50% *more* than anticipated need
• telcos are making huge capital investments but they understand they cannot be sustained
• will energy become so expensive that transporting it becomes prohibitive?
• will multiple countries practice protectionism such that localization becomes attractive again?

I'm excited that new technology will be able to help address the above as well as new economic problems we will all face in the future.

Blog is available also at: http://bobporras.wordpress.com/

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.

Blog is available also at: http://bobporras.wordpress.com/

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.

Blog is available also at: http://bobporras.wordpress.com/

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. 

Blog is available also at: http://bobporras.wordpress.com/

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.

Blog is available also at: http://bobporras.wordpress.com/

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.

Blog is available also at: http://bobporras.wordpress.com/

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.