Managing L'unix

November 21st, 2009

Educating IT decision makers

Posted by Paul Murphy @ 12:15 am

Categories: Applications, Enterprise Policy, General, Productivity, Strategy

Tags: Education, Risk, Information Technology, Strategy, Management, Paul Murphy

One of the more difficult questions behind some of the discussion here over the last week or so involves the extent to which we should try to educate our users so they can make informed choices.

The most basic problem, of course, is that it’s easy to support education in the abstract and extremely difficult, particularly when you’re involved with real world decision making, to separate education from advocacy.

I’ve got an unusually nasty version of that problem with a project I’m working on because I’m on both sides of the fence: user and techi. As a user I’m quite sure I know better than anyone else what needs to be done, and as a techi I’m quite sure I know better than anyone else how to get it done - the problem being, of course, that’s there’s no actual evidence to support either belief.

In this particular case, and I suspect often enough in other contexts, what’s going on is that I’ve spent a lot more time on this then they have, and as I help them catch up, both their views and mine are going to get modified. We are, in other words, most likely to educate each other about the specifics of the one and only right way of doing this - i.e. the one that evolves for us over time.

However, if I peer deeply enough into my navel, I think I can clearly group the issues or things about which there’s consensual uncertainty into three categories - and maybe learn something from doing that:

1. there are clear issues of fact on which I’m convinced my conclusions are largely unassailable.

   For example, I expect to use open source software, on Unix, for this - and maintain that for the particular class of application we need, Domino is the only proprietary option that makes the slightest sense, but that would be too expensive. (In fact, it would cost about $250K more upfront than using an open source mix, but in the long run the most likely IT related risk to be realized by this organization is that they hire an idiot to run the system - and using Domino could reduce both the risk of that happening and the rate of IT collapse if it does.)

   On these kinds of issues, therefore, I see no distinction between preaching the obvious to my user colleagues and educating them.

2. there are conclusions I’m equally sure about, but can see counter-arguments on - most are cases where cash costs are knowable, but the costs of what happens if some risk is realized, are not.

   For example, I’m convinced that the risks of using cloud anything vastly exceed the cost of owning and operating almost everything (except the net) ourselves. At the same time, however, bandwidth costs (especially in Canada where they’re more than three times comparable U.S. numbers) make a powerful argument for using other people’s bandwidth, and thus other people’s servers. Notice, however, this this isn’t as simple as it seems: a good compromise may be to do everything in house, but rent space on servers maintained by the three network carriers as store and forward points for bandwidth intensive material like videos.

   On these kinds of issues, therefore, I try to very carefully separate advocacy from education - explaining costs and risks in as nearly objective terms as possible, while stressing that decisions made to minimize risk (as opposed to decisions made to reduce immediate dollar costs) are almost always highly subjective. Thus showing them what the cost choices are is mostly education, but valuing risks avoided is mostly advocacy.

3. there are conclusions that reflect little more than bias and familiarity - but that familiarity is a ticket to both risk and cost reduction.

   I’m comfortable, for example, with limesurvey and think it can do a particular part of the job very well. Is it really the only choice? No, but it’s the only choice I’m immediately comfortable with and therefore the one I’d like to educate my users to choose - except, of course, that’s it’s pure advocacy for me to do so.

So where can we sensibly draw the line between advocacy and education? Logically it’s education if it helps them make their own choices, and advocacy otherwise - but, in practice education is often so slanted as to be indistinguishable from advocacy (even by those involved) unless you already know enough about the subject not to need to education. As a result my bottom line is a cop out: the idea that just making sure that both you and your users are aware of the issue and the impact it has on your working relationship is half the battle - while the other half is both so situation specific and touchy-feebly in nature that it’s like walking through a minefield: every step an adventure, and your first mistake also your last.

November 18th, 2009

Shopping at the second-hand server store

Posted by Paul Milligan @ 6:09 am

Categories: General

Tags: Box, Dell Computer Corp., Manufacturer, IBM Corp., RAID, Servers, Storage, Hardware, Paul Milligan

In over 30 years in IT, including my current role as a self employed developer / contractor in Raleigh, NC, I have seen a lot of money spent on hardware, and a lot of it could have and should have been saved.  All too often, the presumption is made that “whatever we need, we have to buy new from the manufacturer,” and this never gets challenged.  Why not consider “Shopping at the second hand server store”?  Whether you need one server or a pallet load, pre-racked clusters or the racks themselves, managed gigabit switches, firewalls or other gear, etc, it’s all available at 15 - 20 % of the original price, for equipment that is only 2 - 4 years old, made by your favorite manufacturers.

Back in the day, companies were pretty much tied to a particular manufacturer ( you were an IBM shop, or an NCR shop, or Honeywell or DEC, etc. ), and you bought ALL your hardware (and much of your software ) from them, like it or not.  One of the Big Hammers they held over you was maintenance and repair - if you didn’t have a service contract with them, you were at their mercy for both parts and labor, as well as at the bottom of their list for response time.

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November 14th, 2009

An interesting exchange on politics and IT

Posted by Paul Murphy @ 12:15 am

Categories: Applications, Enterprise Policy, General, Infrastructure, Productivity, Security, Sun

Tags: Information Technology, Strategy, Management, Paul Murphy

Here’s a comment on last Saturday’s blog by “dedmonst”:

OT: squaring your political & technology views…

Paul,

slightly OT, but something that’s been bothering me…

Please pull me up if I’m being presumptive here, cos I confess to only dipping in to your blogs and comments occasionally, but I had you down as a republican - which I would have assumed (yes I know ass-u-me) put you in the bracket of beleiving that “the market will find a way” - i.e. let the market operate freely and the best operating mechanisms etc etc. will float to the top.

However when you talk technology you are constantly telling us “the market has got it dead wrong”. Your so called “data processing” folks, MS windows, what you call “ghosted virtualization” make up a vast and ever growing part of the market…

So how do you square these views? Or what assumption about you do I have wrong?

I wrote a quick response, ran an errand, and came back to replace the first response with this one:

This circle not square - (earlier response deleted - this is v.002)

The essential difference between people on the left versus the right of the political spectrum is that leftists want to tell others what to do and rightists don’t. Thus Pelosi’s health bill has jail sentences for those who don’t buy into her health insurance ideas while Palin thinks you should make your own decisions.

Put this in the IT context and what you have is a bunch of people on one side in IT who think they should tell the business what to do, and others, like me, who think the business users should make their own IT decisions.

Thus they demand central processing with central control, I argue for central processing on cost, security and reliability grounds with decentralized control for business productivity reasons. They want to tell users what to do and how to do it, I want them to figure out what they need to do and then do it.

But how can I see “the market” as wrong given the DP/Wintel majority in place and still defend people’s right to choose? Easy, I see most people as misled, by themselves and others, on most IT issues. DP had a fifty year headstart, the advantage of a position in finance, and the benefit of the high school nerd vs party people differentiation that keeps senior people from questioning them - and, most of all, ensures that few ever figure out that data processing and computing are different things.

So I tell people to smarten up - saying that the people who comprise the market can and should correct their mistakes. That’s a right wing perspective and approach. Most DP/Wintel people, in contrast, say its settled science and the user should shut up and pay - that’s a classic left wing position.

So, bottom line, no conflict.. :)

I thought this exchange worth repetition here because it strikes at the heart of a conflict most IT managers feel nearly every day: we’re paid to provide services to users but they generally appreciate neither the service nor our skills, most don’t understand what we do, many make demands that seem unreasonable, and a few demonstrate increasing irresponsibility with every action - so why not tell ourselves we know more about how tech should be used than they do and use our organizational leverage to insulate ourselves from them?

My answer is that the only really effective way to address this conflict is to remove it - and that you do that organizationally by either making IT the business or by turning IT people into business people: giving them the power to affect IT change but posting them in user groups and making them report to user management.

This is ultimately why I like Sun and Sun Rays - not because I love the company or the technology, but because this combination enables me to have a very small operations group responsible only for keeping the lights on, the machines running, and the IT bills paid while my sysadmins work in user areas to make that central system do whatever their local users want. You need the right people in the trenches, you need to empower your sysadmins far beyond what seems responsible in other organizational forms, and you need a very light but steady hand at the helm - but the end result is that your people cross train themselves, you get very close to 100% reliability on systems that change in some detail virtually every day, help desk and related PC costs disappear, and the productivity killing user/IT differentiation characteristic of most large organizations just quietly fades away to leave your IT people with better jobs and the business with an electronic nervous system that works.

November 7th, 2009

The real pros and cons of server virtualization

Posted by Paul Murphy @ 12:15 am

Categories: Enterprise Policy, General, Linux, Productivity, Software Licensing, Strategy, Sun

Tags: Data-processing, Server, VMware Inc., Server Virtualization, IBM Corp., VM, System Utilization, Virtualization, Hardware, Paul Murphy

First, lets be clear: this comment is about server virtualization through ghosting - the business of using one OS to run one or more ghost OSes in lieu of applications each of which in turn is able to run one or more applications - it’s not about desktops, not about N1 type technologies, and not about containerization.

The pre-eminent examples of ghosting OSes are IBM’s zVM - an OS that originated in the late 1960s as one answer to the memory management and application isolation problems confronting the industry at the time- and VMware’s more recent rendition of the same ideas for x86.

Back then, IBM was caught between rocks and hard places: lots of people (including IBM’s own research leaders) were developing system resident interactive OSes aimed at using the computer largely as a central information switch, but its commercial customer base absolutely refused to countenance any advance on the batch tabulation and reporting model around which its management ideas had evolved in the 1920s and 30s.

Thus when the Multics design effort started at MIT in 1959/60, most of IBM’s people didn’t even know there were two sides to the argument but the research people lined up with science based computing while those who made the money for IBM almost unanimously choose the data processing side - and ten years later, after MIT’s people had first won their design battles and then lost the war (by letting data processing get control of the Multics development effort), IBM’s own fence sitting solution: VM, ended up roundly hated by nearly everyone.

Nearly everyone, that is, except people limited to IBM 360 class hardware who had no other means of achieving any kind of interactive use (this was before MTS and a dozen later solutions) - and they, essentially over the objections of IBM’s own management, made VM the success it still is.

All of which brings us to the 90s when available x86 hardware mostly wouldn’t run NT 3.51 and Microsoft’s emergency iVMS port, aka 4.0, contained a misconstrued uaf derivative known as registry that effectively limited it to loading one application at a time - thus forcing buyers to choose between a lot of downtime or rackmounts of dedicated little boxes.

The rackmounts won - at least for a few years; but then data processing got took control of the wintel world and VM, in the VMware incarnation of its ideas, soon became the preferred tool for reducing the rackmount count in the name of their professional holy grail: higher system utilization.

Unfortunately there are two big problems with this:

1. first, NT 4’s limitations went away with NT 4 - addressing them today with VMs achieves a level of absurdity no audience would accept in musical comedy -it’s right up there with using a licensed terminal emulation on a licensed PC to access a licensed server running a licensed PC emulation; and,

2. it is very nearly a universal truth that every gain data processing makes in improving system utilization produces a larger loss in IT productivity for the business paying them to do it.

The reductio ad absurdum example of the latter is Linux running under VM on a zSeries machine: data processing can get very close to 100% system utilization with this approach, but the cost per unit of application work done will be on the order of twenty times what it would be running the same application directly on Lintel; and every variable in the user value equation: from response time to the freedom to innovate, gains a negative exponent.

You can see the latter consequence in virtually every result on benchmarks featuring some kind of interaction processing. For example, the Sun/Oracle people behind their recent recent foray into TPC/C, both demonstrated their own utter incompetence as IT professionals by achieving less than 50% CPU utilization and the user value of this “failure” by turning in response times averaging roughly one seventeenth of IBM’s:

The counter argument I usually hear about all this is that virtual system images are more easily managed than real ones - and this is both perfectly true and utterly specious.

It’s perfectly true that VM style virtualization lets you bundle an application with everything it needs to run except hardware, and then move that bundle between machines at the click of an icon; but the simple fact that this applies just as well to Solaris containers as it does to VM ghosts shows that this is an argument for encapsulation and application isolation, not for ghosting.

Worse, the argument is completely specious because it bases its value claims on two demonstrably false beliefs: first that the only alternative is the traditional isolated machine structure, and second that virtualization lets the business achieve more for less. Both are utter nonsense: Unix process management has worked better than VM since the 1970s, and because virtualization adds both overheads and licensing it always costs more to do less than modern alternatives like containerization or simply letting the Unix process management technology do its job.

Again the quintessential example of this is from the heart of the data processing profession: when you take a $20 million dollar zSeries installation and achieve a 60 way split to produce 100% system utilization from 60 logical machines running applications or ghosts, what the business gets out of it is roughly equivalent to what it would get from four Lintel racks costing a cumulative $500,000.

A more down home illustration is provided by VMware itself - their competitive value calculator computes a cost advantage for their products over those from others on the basis of their belief that their VMs impose less overhead and allow you to get closer to 100% hardware utilization. Thus if you enter values saying you’ve got 200 applications running on NAS connected quad core servers, want to manage virtually, and have average infrastructure costs, they produce a table with this data:

All of which should raise a couple of questions in your mind:

1. first, if the consensus that ghosting doesn’t have significant overhead is right, where is VMware getting the third of the box it claims you can recover by getting its ghosting software instead of Microsoft’s?

2. and, second, wouldn’t the money VMware wants you to spend on ghosting ($241K in this example) be better spent on hiring people who can move these applications to free environments like Linux or OpenSolaris?

So what’s the bottom line? Simple: the real ghost in ghosting is that of 1920s data processing - and the right way to see this particular con job for the professional cost sink it is, is to focus on costs to the business, not ideological comfort in IT.

October 31st, 2009

Scaring yourself and others

Posted by Paul Murphy @ 12:15 am

Categories: General

Tags: Operating System, Halloween, Sun Solaris, Virtualization, Cloud Computing, Storage Management, Utility Computing, Operating Systems, Software, Hardware

I pay Shaw cable for a static IP address, so it came as something of a surprise when they changed it - and worse, the changes this imposed at my end brought home the sad reality that I don’t know Solaris as well as I thought: it took several rounds of things silently going wrong over the course of several days to discover that I’d sabotaged myself by breaking the link between the hosts and ipnodes files.

Finding out that something you normally treat as known background magic isn’t, is frightening because it strikes at the heart of your self image as a competent professional in your field - and, of course, when others point this out to you the usual human response is to strike back in anger.

And that has a corollary: if you really want to scare yourself, pick something your bosses think they understand and force them into a position where they find out that they don’t.

Halloween is a really good time for this - particularly if your bosses think virtualization is the answer to anything beyond their own need for budget management. People have finally started to catch on that there are performance costs to ghosting - the practice of running multiple guest OSes (or ghosts) under one real one.

In this context Sun blogger Jan Brosowski draws an interesting conclusion from a comparison between the results obtained from a SAP benchmark running under VMware and the same benchmark running on a similar machine in a Solaris container:

Do two “half-box” virtual machines on the same box perform better than the full box? Well, obviously no: Due to Intel’s Hyper-Threading technology it’s complicated to extrapolate from half of a system to a full utilized system. Both benchmarks used 8 virtual CPUs representing 8 of the totally available 16 threads, and not a single CPU. So they will have used 8 cores, but only the first thread of each.

Will the use VMWare mean a significant loss of performance?: Well, obviously yes. Of course, some of the lower performance is caused by the OS. We have already shown in several benchmarks the advantage of Solaris as OS for SAP. But - we speak about a lower performance of 36%, more than one third! So, there is a major impact of the virtualization.

Although containerization has much lower overheads than ghosting (because there’s only one OS running) and his conclusion therefore makes intuitive sense, there are other issues that would have to be resolved before we could accept his conclusion as general - but if you just want to scare ghosting fans on Halloween, using this to show people selling PC virtualization as hardware efficient that it’s arguably about a third less efficient than containerization should do the job nicely!

And if that doesn’t suffice for you - try reminding them that their job is to provide the best possible user service, and that virtualization always reduces the quality of service by slowing system response.

Either way, you’ll get your happy Halloween thrill - because their response? guaranteed to scare you first and them later!

October 24th, 2009

What Windows7 could mean for Linux

Posted by Paul Murphy @ 12:15 am

Categories: Apple, Applications, Development, Linux

Tags: Marketing, OpenBSD, Microsoft Corp., Linux, Operating Systems, UNIX, Open Source, Software, Paul Murphy

I’ve had people using Windows 7 for about three months now, and everything about it so far seems to confirm my first impression that it’s a lot better than Vista: effectively reprising the consolidation and debugging Windows 98 offered over 95.

Once you get past the sheer shock of using a Microsoft OS that doesn’t fail daily, however, you start to fret about the things that aren’t there: as a Mac/Solaris user, for example, I find the absence of multi-screen capabilities and the relative inflexibility of working panes and icons extremely frustrating. Still it is usable; and that’s a long step forward - at least until you get to development work.

Then the frustrations set in: Visual Studio is very slick, but very limited. Specifically, it’s great if your application is going to use a super-computer desktop as a graphics terminal but pretty much counter-productive if you want to sidestep client-server and produce genuinely integrated multi-host applications.

So why? Well, mainly because Microsoft’s inability to transcend its own 90s focus on helping its sales force make money selling client-server into businesses has left the whole .net thing Microsoft promised to integrate into Longhorn and its successors implemented, along with the promised PICK-like file system and security conscious display frameworks, only in marketing documentation.

Organizational disfunction aside, I think the key technical reason for this has been that getting those things done within the underlying memory and process management paradigm Windows NT+ inherited from VMS has proven, if not actually impossible, at least too hard for Microsoft to make a commercial success of.

So now it wants to sell cloud computing and applications rentals but doesn’t have the OS foundation on which the development of these products has to rest - and that’s going to force Microsoft into a build or buy decision.

They’ve been trying to build a network based, vaguely Unix like, OS for PowerPC for about six years now -with no success to speak of, so my guess is that the build exponents will eventually lose the argument - leaving Microsoft with three mutually exclusive choices:

1. get there through a licensing deal with Apple;

2. do it by adopting and extending OpenBSD; or,
3. do it by adopting and extending Linux.

Each approach has pluses and minuses: the Apple approach would cost the most upfront, but drop a leading competitor out of Microsoft’s desktop markets; the OpenBSD approach combines low cost with a high quality code base and a well deserved reputation for security; and the Linux approach capitalizes on the breadth and capabilities of its community while threatening IBM.

You’d think Microsoft could do the Apple deal at the drop of a phone call to Mr. Jobs - who clearly wants to be out of the traditional PC business anyway - but my guess is that the emotional barriers to rational behavior on this will prevent that phone call.

If it comes to shootout between the OpenBSD and Linux options I suspect Microsoft’s techies will line up favoring OpenBSD as offering the stronger foundation for all the neat stuff they dream of doing, while all the marketing types will favor Linux - and in that company marketing trumps technology every time.

So the bottom line for Linux on Windows may be simple: Windows7 is probably Microsoft’s best OS yet and will therefore slow the move the Linux in the short term, but the limitations built into Microsoft’s development stack show it to be a dead end that will leave Microsoft marketing magnificent visions of its unfolding future while quietly figuring out how and when to abandon that code base for something else - and because that something could very logically be Linux it might be time for the Linux community to start paying a lot more attention to legacy interoperability with Windows.

October 17th, 2009

Of snow, rocks, a book, and another partisan attack on IBM

Posted by Paul Murphy @ 12:15 am

Categories: Defenestration, Enterprise Policy, General, Government, Sun

Tags: Sun Microsystems Inc., IBM Corp., Attack, Oracle 11gR2, Mainframes, Servers, Security, Hardware, Paul Murphy

Merry Christmas!

I’ll be out of town later this week so I’m writing this on Wednesday - between staring out the window at gently falling snow and contemplating the tragic reality that if the present solar minimum leads to massive crop failures around the world next summer, Gore et al won’t be among the two billion or so facing starvation as a result of policies they advocate - policies favoring the conversion of food to SUV fuel, the doubling of fertilizer prices, and the near elimination of critical pesticides and herbicides.

Speaking up for IBM.

Here’s a bit from an article by Information Week’s senior editor Bob Evans about a justice department decision to go after IBM on anti-trust charges:

I was going to say that it’s almost incomprehensible that Justice is preparing to once again mount a vague, circumspect, and generally unsubstantiated attack on one of the most creative, innovative and valuable companies in the world, but that would be unfair. Because there’s no “almost” about it - to anyone outside of the Justice Dept.’s giant-shoe red-nose horn-honking clownish view of the world, this grandstanding effort to attack IBM and teach the company its proper place is completely and 100% incomprehensible.

If it weren’t so pathetically and potentially misguided, it would almost be funny. But it’s not -no, not by a long shot.

Perhaps I’m out of phase on this, and perhaps all of us should sleep more comfortably knowing that our Attorney General’s trust-busting warriors are out there protecting all of us from IBM’s devious schemes to dominate -yes, to monopolize -the mainframe market.

While I think that IBM regularly resorts to non market means (e.g. the courts, the press, financial markets, and politics) to go after competitors they can’t beat in the marketplace and that this often amounts to legal but dishonorable conduct, the reality is that Evans is right here. For the U.S. Justice Department to after IBM on its mainframe business is unfair, unreasonable, and utterly perverse because that monopoly is not sustained by anything IBM does - on the contrary, from the Future Systems project to PowerLinux, IBM has repeatedly and honorably invested real money and corporate goodwill in trying to break customers out of that ghetto - but by the insistence and loyalties of a customer base that’s forty years out of date and absolutely refuses to advance.

The bottom line on this is simple: if the customer demands the right to buy mainframes at dollars to the value penny, then the customer’s bosses should fire him but IBM’s executives owe it to their shareholders to take the money and run - and if Holder wants to prosecute somebody on this, he could perhaps be reminded that most data processing managers are middle aged white guys who pay taxes and vote Republican.

That Sun TPC/C thing

The single best report I’ve seen so far from the Oracle OpenWorld techfest is by Ben Rockwood. Here’s what he says about Sun’s TPC/C benchmark result:

Larry drove the point about synergies between Oracle and Sun home in 2 ways. The first was talking about the previously released Sun/Oracle ExaData v2 product (pictured above). The second was to show that Sun’s technology today, pre-acquisition, is the best platform available for Oracle even against IBM’s monster POWER 595 system which consumes 76 standard racks. Sun’s solution that beat it consumes only 9 racks, is fault tolerant, based on SPARC (Niagara), got 25% more throughput, gets 16 times better response times, and obviously uses a hell of a lot less power to boot.

I had a conversation with the PAE guys there and got a lot of great details on the configuration and how they made it work. Here are some highlights…

So the Sun system that beat out the 595 was based on T5440 (UltraSPARC T2) systems connected to the new F5100 Flash Array. In order to make all this work in a fault tolerant way COMSTAR was used and throughout the process required absolutely no modification! Apparently the biggest “problem” they ran into some some minor tweeking in the mpt and sd drivers because they weren’t designed to hand the extreme number of IOPS coming from the flash arrays. More shockingly, when they got the TPC-C number that beat IBM the CPU’s were 50% idle! And, if you can believe it, during the whole time Sun was working on this benchmark of all the flash modules involved, only a single one failed! Just one!

Ok, it’s not ROCK (which technologies by the way, are up for resurrection!) but beating IBM with a production ready, off the shelf system, providing nearly instantaneous response at 50% CPU sure rocks.

Oh, and the most interesting thing at OpenWorld for non Sun users? Oracle 11gR2 has a flash memory extension of the SGA - add:

db_flash_cache_file = /lfdata/lffile_raw
db_flash_cache_size = much more than ram (e.g. 128GB)

to your setup file, mount an F20 Flash Accelerator card in a PCIe slot, and those nasty OLTP transactions that access some enormous working set suddenly go a lot faster. This is dumb in a Solaris/ZFS environment, but brilliant everywhere else because it makes the system’s biggest bottleneck disappear for peanuts.

Blackbelt IT?

And, speaking of opportunities for failure .. things are a little slow right now, so I’m about to dive into the long delayed business of rewriting the infamous Unix Guide to Defenestration series as a single book.

Since it really has two messages and two audiences: a strategic one aimed at senior executives telling them that IT should be delivered by IT professionals but run by user management; and a tactical one describing how Unix can be combined with smart displays to provide the efficiencies of centralized processing with the business value of fully decentralized control; pulling this together is going to be a neat trick - and one that probably requires a new title.

I’m wondering about “Blackbelt IT”, but if anyone has a better suggestion (and no copyright aspirations), I’d sure be happy to hear it.

October 10th, 2009

Clouds vs. Appliances

Posted by Paul Murphy @ 12:15 am

Categories: Applications, General, Strategy

Tags: Data Center, Information Technology, Data-processing, Data Centers, Cloud Computing, Virtualization, Strategy, Storage, Hardware, Data Management

When people talk about cloud computing as the future of corporate IT they’re generally thinking more or less in terms of traditional applications coupled with some processor intensive work in areas like business analytics or numerical analysis. I don’t think any of that’s going to happen - instead I think that cloud computing will evolve mainly into services for smart phones and ultimately form a kind of connective fog: an extension of present internet usage providing the processing needed to accomodate mostly store and forward type functionality.

If the upside of traditionally conceived cloud computing is exactly that of 70s style time sharing - namely, that you neither own nor operate the infrastructure and can therefore largely bypass internal IT to get applications working on it - its nemisis is exactly the same too: cheap local computing.

That’s what the PC promised and why so many corporate managers took advantage of data processing’s eagerness to buy from IBM to order hundreds, and often thousands, of PC/ATs when those first came out - and it’s also why many became even more cynical about IT when the first machines turned out to be laughably inadequate and later ones proved so unreliable that technologies brought in to free users from the data center are now owned by the data center and run by the data center.

Appliance computing, a model under which the customer buys a service delivered via a local processor local IT does not have root access to, had a brief resurgence in the ninties but neither the machines nor the software then available could handle larger, more complex, corporate applications without considerable on site expertise. At the time, therefore, that solution was largely limited to perceived simple and peripheral tasks of the kind we now associate with “purely hardware” solutions (like routing) or hosted services (like running Apache servers).

Today, however, those limits are largely gone and there are no big technical gotcha’s facing a company that wants to sell its customers things like fully vendor installed and vendor monitored ERP/SCP applications running on supplied servers and desktop displays entirely on the customer’s premises and physically in the customer’s control.

To get these the customer would simply sign a usage agreement and provide appropriate space, power, and network access to the vendor. Once installed, users would treat the applications the way they do the telephone: as something that just works and is monitored externally rather than by local data processing people - and, of course, if the vendor went under, they would simply take possession of the equipment, invoke contractual rights to passwords and licenses kept in escrow, and have at least as much time to adapt as they would if traditional IT had brought the applications on board in the traditional way.

The beauty of this approach is that it gives user management willing to accept standardized software direct control of its own IT while reducing both cash costs and business risk - quite the opposite of what this rather inadvertent bottom line comment (from a March 2009 Financial Times report on a gmail shutdown) reveals about the essence of cloud computing:

The glitch that led to the first global shutdown of Gmail since August began on Tuesday, during routine maintenance.

There’ve been what? five so far this year?

October 3rd, 2009

Net Neutrality vs. "do no evil"

Posted by Paul Murphy @ 12:15 am

Categories: Government

Tags: Bandwidth, Internet Service Provider, Net Neutrality, Internet, Internet Service Providers (ISPs), Government, Paul Murphy

The various net neutrality proposals now in process in the U.S. Congress are intended to establish government oversight on all public networks in the United States in the stated interest of ensuring that carriers neither charge extra for, nor artificially retard or accelerate, packets based on origin or content.

On the surface the worst this is going to do is obsolete the priority packet forwarding terms found in many contracts - particularly for people with direct backbone connections, people forwarding broadcast signals, and people still using frame relay type technologies.

Look a bit deeper, however, and you find a lot of people expressing serious concerns - consider, for example, these bits from a Human Events article by Ross Kaminsky:

The idea of ‘Net Neutrality’ is to prevent Internet Service Providers (’ISP’s) from being able to slow down particular internet traffic or charge more for it, even if that traffic is compromising internet service for the rest of their network’s customers. One definition of Net Neutrality is ‘the principle that data packets on the Internet should be moved impartially, without regard to content, destination or source.’

…

So, for example, an ISP will not be allowed to slow down ‘peer-to-peer’ file transfers even if they are disproportionately degrading Internet service for others. Much like our income tax system, it is reported that 10% of internet users consume 80% of bandwidth. And much like our tax system, there are those who want others to foot the bill for their costs. If ISPs can’t have policies which address the fact that bandwidth is limited and that bandwidth hogs need to be restrained so the rest of their customers can maintain adequate service, that puts them in an extremely difficult situation.

Imagine you are a private builder of toll roads who invests a billion dollars in a highway. Then the government tells you that it’s unfair for you to charge 18-wheel tractor-trailers a higher toll than you charge passenger cars despite the fact that the big trucks are responsible for the large majority of your maintenance and repair budget. What would your choices then be? Probably some combination of stopping construction of further roads, raising the prices for everyone (because the government says everyone has to pay the same price), or trying to find legally uncertain ways to game the system. The same choices will apply to ISPs under Net Neutrality.

…

As Dylan Tweney noted in an article at Wired magazine entitled FCC Position May Spell the End of Unlimited Internet, AT&T has repeatedly stumbled in its ability to provide 3G wireless capacity, thanks to the unexpected popularity of the iPhone. Those difficulties lend credence to AT&T’s (and Apple’s) reluctance to allow apps like Skype and Slingplayer unfettered access to the 3G network: If the network can barely keep up with ordinary demand, just imagine what would happen if we were all live-streaming the Emmy Awards over our iPhones at the same time.”

While both the pro- and anti-Net Neutrality sides claim to be on the side of innovation, in the words of Heritage’s Gattuso, “I’m stumped to think of any government regulation which has increased rather than decreased creativity and innovation. This scheme is not made necessary by a lack of competition. It’s made to replace consumer choice with a government rule as to how traffic is to be managed. At the very least, we’ll have a slower, less efficient Internet. The government rules will be a first-come, first-served basis, but I doubt that’s the model the market would come to on its own; it’s not the model that works in most sectors of the economy.”

So why the push for ‘Net Neutrality’? Most of the support from the private sector is from large internet content companies which used to be truly capitalist and essentially libertarian in behavior, companies like Amazon, eBay, and particularly Google. As they add more high-bandwidth content, such as movies and music, they want to prevent ISPs from being able to charge them for using such a high percentage of available bandwidth. Instead, under the guise of ‘neutrality’, they’re trying to use government to prevent the owners of Internet infrastructure from being able to rationally set prices for the use of that infrastructure. In other words, they are trying to steal the ISPs property rights. Is it any wonder that almost all of Google’s political contributions go to Democrats?

One thing I think most of the people commenting on this issue have missed is that the American network infrastructure is currently under built in reaction to the excesses of the 90s - and therefore that these regulations, by killing the incentives for new investment, will eventually raise short term carrier profitability while essentially capping efforts to deliver high bandwidth content via the internet at or below present levels.

In the long run , therefore, the bottom line on net neutrality is is that it’s far from neutral in being good news for traditional media but bad news for internet users and worse news for long term American competitiveness in the world.

September 26th, 2009

Linux as Wintel parasite

Posted by Paul Murphy @ 12:15 am

Categories: Apple, Development, Enterprise Policy, General, Linux, Linux Desktop OS, Sun

Tags: Wintel, Register, Linux, UNIX, Open Source, Operating Systems, Software, Paul Murphy

Last week Linus Torvalds told a seminar group at Portland’s LinuxCon that Linux is getting a little bloated - a consequence of the big blob kernel architecture required by his decision to prefer the efficiency of directly using x86 interrupts to the much more hardware independent architecture Tannenbaum developed Minix to teach.

Sun blogger Joerg Moellenkamp said something particularly interesting about this:

Of course it’s a nice sign of success, when people port more and more stuff to an operating environment and into the kernel. Perhaps this is the price of success. But at foremost it’s a problem. Bloat isn’t just about using more memory, it’s about speed as well.

The Register delivers another interesting piece of information:

Citing an internal Intel study that tracked kernel releases, Bottomley said Linux performance had dropped about two per centage points at every release, for a cumulative drop of about 12 per cent over the last ten releases.

…

Should they rearchitect Linux for the future (the SunOS/Solaris moment for the Linux community). And as refactoring, optimization and rearchitecting are tedious and boring tasks: Who will do it? I think, the next few years will be interesting ones for Linux.

Another speaker at the same event, IBM’s Bob Sutter, really needs to spend a few minutes looking at the history of his own company’s VM product line, but other than that came up with another absolute shocker: Linux won’t succeed on the desktop, he said, unless it creates a unique Linux desktop - or, in translation, that Linux can’t lead by following.

Personally I think that the SuSe business desktop does lead Microsoft in some areas, but, of course, Mr. Sutter wants to sell cloud computing - and so does Eric Mandel, CEO of a company called Blackmesh, providing managed Linux hosting services. He does a very sad and funny presentation on doing what they did: implementing a couple of open source deployment tools (Puppet and Cobbler) to make it fairly easy to configure and deploy Linux server/application combinations. This can be very important in their business, but I thought the retrograde nature of both the solution and its markets unhappily captured the essence of Linux today.

Basically he’s using an open source evolution of the old Jumpstart stuff to provision gear for customers who haven’t figured out yet that letting other people control both their data and their most critical business infrastructure is a recipe for coming to a quick and unhappy end. Cool stuff, for five years ago - but completely obsoleted for customers by today’s cost/risk trade-offs in doing it themselves and for techies by Solaris zones.

When you look at this kind of thing the contrast with BSD could hardly be greater. That group’s focus, despite their many divergences and disagreements, is always on better, faster, smaller - and Apple’s posture as the anti-IBM in personal computing carries over to its relationship with the BSD community: it’s the world’s biggest producer of Unix personal computers, but it doesn’t try to direct BSD research and it hasn’t tried to build services revenues on its own limitations.

Mr. Torvalds set out to build a “free Unix for the 386″ and succeeded brilliantly in doing so - but both its internal architecture and its market success depend on the peculiar dynamics of the wintel market in which x86 forms the common ground between the huge majority using Microsoft software and a rebel group looking for something to call its own.

Thus looking at it as an outsider, I’d say that much of what made headlines at Linuxcon 2009 was in one way or the other about the chickens associated with the reinvention of old technologies for commercial gain starting homeward -with all of it demonstrating that if the Linux community didn’t have Microsoft both to be against and to prop up their shared x86 foundations, it’d wouldn’t exist.

And that’s sad - but not irretrievable because at this point it’s fundamentally a leadership failure, not a community failure, and therefore something that could be changed.