The bomb damaged the Baltic Exchange, a shipping stock market of sorts, based on a coffee shop formerly named The Virginia and Baltick.  At least one exchange employee (there were only 20 in all) was killed in the attack.  The exchange is famous — well somewhat famous in certain circles — for publishing the Baltic Index, a measure of shipping prices around the world that is seen by finance nerds as a good leading indicator of economic activity since there isn’t any speculative action in the index (i.e., it’s all real prices by real players in the wet market as it were) and because it forecasts how much demand there is for moving raw materials which then get turned into food and computers and so on in the future.  Anyway.

The exchange couldn’t afford to restore the damage, so their historic building was dismantled and sold to Dennis Buggins, famous for the NY antique furniture scandal (with the brother of the guy from the previous antique furniture scandal, John and Carlton Hobbs).  Buggins has it listed on his website but other reports say it was bought by an Estonian and was supposed to be set up — delicious irony this — as the Tallin Stock Market.  Baltics and all that, see?  But it doesn’t look like that’s happened.

The demolished building was replaced by Sir Norman Foster’s so-called Gherkin whose official name is “30 St. Mary’s Axe.”  Foster, who among other masterpieces designed the HSBC headquarters in Hong Kong which I think is the most beautiful office building in the world, created the Gherkin as a 600-foot approximation of a zonohedra:

A zonohedron is a convex polyhedron where every face is a polygon with point symmetry or, equivalently, symmetry under rotations through 180°. Any zonohedron may equivalently be described as the Minkowski sum of a set of line segments in three-dimensional space, or as the three-dimensional projection of a hypercube. Zonohedra were originally defined and studied by E. S. Fedorov, a Russian crystallographer. More generally, in any dimension, the Minkowski sum of line segments forms a polytope known as a zonotope. (Wikipedia)

That’s what terrorism gets you.

Did all this spring from nothing?  It seems that there were, in the first centuries after Christ, wandering bands of celibate renunciants in Syria.  And we know about sadhu-like movements and charismatic preachers throughout the world of late antiquity in the eastern Mediterranean.  Around this time there were also ‘philosophical schools,’ such as the Neopythagoreans, which had many characteristics that later came to be called monastic.  But there are many ’sadhu-like’ movements and philosophical schools and few monastic ones.

Only Christianity, Buddhism, and Jainism today have monastic traditions.  Islam never did, unless you count sadhu-like sufi orders.  Likewise Hinduism; definitional sadhus, no monasticism.  Neither did Judaism have monks or nuns, although the Essenes are fun to argue about.  Manicheaism did, and that might be a clue, since Mani lived just before Anthony.  But the Manichean elect were a different than the monastic orders of Christianity, Buddhism, and Jainism.

Buddhist (or Jain) connections to Christian monasticism cannot be proven and represent a bit of a third rail in the study of (at least Christian) monasticism.  I’ve always imagined that a place like Edessa, at the end of the Silk Road, or a cosmopolitan trading port like Alexandria would be good places to look for evidence.

A friend suggested the trade routes from India via Axum in Ethiopia and up the Nile but that got us talking, as we drank beer at Hanger 24, that a much simpler connection is via Syrian Christians on the south Indian coast.  The timing is right; Syriac Christians have lived in what is now Kerela since nearly the time of Christ and there has always been trade back and forth.  Syria is one of the two monastic centers from the early period.  And there were Buddhists in south India in the first centuries AD.  That’s no proof of anything, of course, but not a bad thesis to test either.

Lacking textual evidence, I think monastic architecture might be a good place to start; even within the Buddhist world it’s not obvious to me how the ruins of a Gandharan monastery in Pakistan are similar to those of a monastic complex in Japan or Tibet or Burma or Thailand or at other south Asian sites like Nalanda or Ajanta.  If you could develop a pattern language of monastic architecture to describe the Buddhist variety, you might be able to match that against the Christian variety and identify degrees of similarity or difference.

Well, you’ve done this before, they say, you’re grizzled veterans of the data center; is it two or ten hours for a server?  And the consultant — and I’ve been in this situation, believe me, it sucks — has to say, “Well, it depends.  It could be a thousand hours.”  Which is what everyone is expecting him to say because you can’t get a straight answer out of a consultant.  They’re always going to tell you “it depends.”  Right.

And even if there is all the time in the world, this particular answer needs to be in writing on the buyer’s desk by EOD today or the sales guy isn’t going to make his number for the quarter which means that he’s not going to make ‘club’ (his incentive travel event), which his wife is really looking forward to, so this damned consultant is not only not answering a simple, reasonable question from the beloved customer but they are also very directly making his wife mad at him, with the attendant consequences.

Perhaps you think I joke?  Or exaggerate?

Making matters worse, some nerd named Chad has downloaded OpenSUSE onto a machine in their testing lab and moved a couple of apps without incident (some directory changes, a few lines of code) and based on that experience has estimated that moving the three hundred servers will take approximately an hour each.  Seriously: we have clients who want us to tell them that moving unknown production workloads from one operating system to another will take less than two hours per server.

So the consultant sighs and starts to ask questions: What do the workloads on these servers actually do?  Online banking is different from warehouse management.  What platforms are they running?  (What version of J2EE?  What version of RHEL?  What version of Manugistics?)  Are they going to change anything else besides the operating system when they do this move?  Is the software custom or off-the-shelf?  What’s it written in?  If they say something like current Java apps running on a 2.6 kernel going to the same JVM on another distribution, that would be one thing.  If you are looking at non-ANSI C custom code on RHEL 3 on a complex multi-tiered app, that’s something else.  (Moving from the 2.4 kernel to the 2.6 kernel on any distribution is much harder than moving from one current distribution to another.)  What about storage, and backup, and disaster recovery?  Systems management?  There are a thousand more architectural details that you need to understand (one data center or many?  resource utilization?) but everyone is getting impatient with you and your endless questions.

Then you start getting into the enterprise-y aspects, which is where the real time and cost come in.  There’s a difference between Chad moving an app from one platform to another as a technical exercise and the actual time that it takes production applications to go from one to another.  What’s the testing regime?  I would expect that production code moving from one distribution to another would require real testing (stress/performance, UAT, etc.).  Would you include that in the estimate?  What about security?  Does the new OS have to go through a security audit at the company?  (Answer: yes, and it’s going to take a long time for the online banking app, believe me.)  Documentation?

This is all super-boring and bureaucratic and definitely not technical so the nerds aren’t interested and think it’s worthless and the sales guy is hearing his wife screaming at him and the buyer is saying, “Why is this so complicated?”

So, should we skip the backup part?

Really, the way to do this kind of thing is to do a quick assessment and figure out some kind of prioritization and rough sequencing, but that would require the client to spend time and money helping you to figure out how much to charge them and they are naturally leery of such a thing.  You desperately want to avoid getting locked into a fixed figure because you still have no real idea how complex the problem your being asked to solve is, but that is what the client and the others are asking for.

So you end up with a fudge; you commit to moving some edge servers and a cluster of supposedly simple apps and you sign up to do a security-approved core build and an assessment for the rest so that the project can get started and the customer can show progress to their boss and the sales guy can make his number.

Now you’re faced with months in the lab at the client site with Chad explaining to you how completely screwed up their environment is and how there’s no way that he’s going to give up his Solaris servers and anyway they’ve tried to do this themselves a bunch of times already and it never works because it’s not really a current release of Manugistics and they did some customization that they probably shouldn’t have…

Everyone who runs a large data center is today faced with the same set of interconnected environmental problems; space, power, and heating/cooling. And these are environmental not just in the sense of tree-hugging but also in a straightforward practical sense: there is no more space, there is no more power, there is too much heat and not enough cooling. These problems were the domain of junior people a few years ago, worrying about where, physically, to locate all the new Windows boxes. Then it was middle managers trying to sort out power and HVAC issues: “If we deploy a new phone system in our building we won’t have enough power to do any upgrades in the data center,” that sort of thing. Now environmental issues are front-and-center for senior IT management and if you’re a “red-shift” kind of company, for senior corporate leadership too.

You can cloak it if you want to in green terms but businesses are faced with real operational issues that they need to address regardless of their perspective on global warming or riverine dolphins.

Alongside these environmental issues, data centers are also facing a crisis of manageability. A large enterprise data center is a staggeringly complex thing, too complicated. Also, if the truth be told, most of them are not that well run; would you expect, for example, that an auto parts distributor would have great technology management skills? No, of course not, and the fact is that they probably wouldn’t want to spend the money to acquire that talent and technology even in they could; their differentiation, the competitive advantage of their business, lies elsewhere. So they have a complicated, and sub-optimized, technology infrastructure.

The answer to all of these problems — Monday edition — supposedly lies in virtualization. Novell gets brought into these conversations because inevitably data center managers have a roadmap that looks something like this:

1. Simplify and Standardize

The operations guys, who run the apps once they’re written, are finally getting the teeth to enforce common standards on the development side of the house. This is a political process as much as anything else, but it’s as hard as any technical issue, something that nerds are woefully bad at understanding.

What are the preferred options for operating systems? For databases? For Java platforms? For development languages? And so forth. The answers don’t matter so much as the fact that there are only one or two of them. Some shops use the model of Legacy/Supported/Preferred/Emerging, where Legacy is bad, Supported is headed to Legacy, and Emerging is headed to Preferred. So, for example you might say that Oracle and SQLServer are your preferred databases, while DB2 is supported (reluctantly) for a particular reason. Sybase, let’s say, is around still in the environment but it’s Legacy and thus unsupported: if you have problems with it, don’t come crying to Ops about it. Emerging would be MySQL and that sound you heard after the Sun acquisition was ten thousand infrastructure architects moving MySQL from the Emerging category to Preferred.

One of the key elements here is Linux. Data centers in the future are going to run Windows, in some form or another, and Linux. That’s it. Now, that’s going to take a long time, since we know that IT is conservative, and there will still be Solaris and VMS and so on in the data center of the future, but that’s not where the action is. It’s going to be Linux and Windows. But, as we’ll see, that may not make so much of a difference.

2. Consolidate and Virtualize

So once we’ve started to enforce rules on the heterogeneous chaos, we can begin to take advantage of that consistency. We’ve probably already got a SAN and perhaps an Oracle RAC environment (in addition to all those single instance databases), so the idea of virtualized pools of IT resources is not a new idea to our customers out in the business units. And it isn’t a new idea for sure for the mainframe guys, who are laughing their asses off, inside of their oxygen tents.

So now we start to consolidate servers through virtualization, inevitably beginning with the development and testing environments. You give the developers standard virtual machines to work on and then, magically, they’re going to migrate — after proper testing, mind you, we do have our dignity — into virtual production environments. At the same time, there is more likely than not a server consolidation project going on to move single servers into virtualized environments. Ten:1 or even 20:1 is common in production environments.

All that virtualization creates management headaches of its own; for infrastructure software vendors like Novell, the game is going to play out not at the level of the hypervisor — which is going to commodity status before reaching general availability — but at the level of the management tools. That’s what people will pay for.

Virtualization is not as easy as I’m making it out here; properly configuring hardware, for instance, is not yet straightforward and the performance hits on mis-configured hardware can be significant. Memory is king in the hardware for virtualization, and blades don’t seem to cut it because of their I/O and other physical constraints, so lots of shops looking at virtualization are re-thinking their blade investments that are just a few years old.

Even if you get that and the management of virtualization under control, you still have the basic architectural design of your virtualized data center to consider: is every application going to run its own virtualized stack? What about single apps on single physical servers? Are you still going to incur the hypervisor tax in that situation? Is the management & DR benefit worth it? And I’m ignoring the desktop side of things here but that is an other, huge, mess that you could virtualize.

3. Cloudify (? Cloudize? Cloudit?)

Let’s say that you’ve done all this and you’ve got a few standard platforms (Windows, database, Java, web server/LAMP, raw C++ for super-special stuff) that you’re supporting in your Preferred environment, plus some Supported and Legacy stuff that’s still lying around. For the most part, you’ve broken the tight linkage between the physical resources — the disks and the CPUs — and the abstract/digital ones, which means that you can now start to think about moving them around. Hedge funds might not want to put their algorithmic trading systems too far from Wall Street, but their HR systems don’t really need expensive Manhattan real estate, do they?

This also points to the fact that these infrastructure services are utility-like, as Nicholas Carr described in his readable The Big Switch. Java developers really should not care what operating system, or what hardware platform, or what storage system is running in the background. (They also shouldn’t care whether it’s WebLogic or WebSphere or JBoss but the fact that they do is another story.) You don’t care what operating system Google, or Bank of America’s website, or this blog, is using, do you?

Anecdotally, I’ve heard about corporate developers that have used Amazon’s pay-by-the sip service to develop apps without having to go through the laborious approvals process for infrastructure, and then the business sponsors of the application have said to just leave it there rather than moving it back ‘inside.’ But, as Nygard writes, this doesn’t necessarily mean that Amazon’s EC2 service — or EMC’s or Sun’s or Dell’s… — is going to suck up all of these virtualized enterprise machines, although that is one option. Another option is that enterprises are going to build their own clouds and host their platforms themselves. Again, the issues are not so much technical as political: no less real, just different.

The existence of the pay-by-the-sip services is, however, going to cast a harsh light on the value of corporate IT services. The business owners will be able to see, exactly, how much more they’re paying for supposedly secure inside-the-firewall services compared with out-in-the-wild services. And by services I mean computing/storage/etc.

4. Ongoing

So where is this all going? In a characteristically insightful piece, Tim Bray surveys the landscape and sees change all around — in programming languages, databases, desktops, and elsewhere. For instance, if you’re looking for the new Emerging-category database, Bray suggests Apache CouchDB, Amazon’s SimpleDB or Google’s BigTable. I don’t know if that’s right or not but he’s smarter than me. And this is what he has to say about the strategies to make money from all of these observations:

Business Models · Servers, they’re easy to understand. Blue-suited salesmen sell them to CIOs a few hundred thousand dollars’ worth at a time, they get loaded into data centers where they suck up too much power and HVAC.

Well, unless you’re gonna do your storage and compute and load-balancing and so on out in the cloud. Are you? The CIOs and data-center guys are wrestling this problem to the ground right now.

And as for software, used to be you shipped binaries on magnetic media and charged ’em a right-to-use license. Nope, nowadays it’s open-source and they download it for free and you charge them a support contract. Nope, that was last century; maybe the software’s all going to be out there in the cloud and you never download anything, just pay to use what’s there.

Personally, I don’t think any of those models are actually going to go away. But which works best where? The market’s working that out, right now.

For now, that seems to be just about the right answer to me.

Here’s some press coverage including the priceless hed “Novell focuses future strategy around endangered mongoose” from the UK edition of ZDNet.

For the Indology nerds: there are a set of clay tablets at the Guimet, I think on the second floor, which have as their provenance a Buddhist monastery in Kashmir. The panels have raised images on them which are clearly not Buddhist. I suspect they’re Ajivika and I seem to remember an article, which of course I can’t track down now, describing how the Buddhists reused the materials from an Ajivika complex as the flooring in their monastery, as an insult. But I can’t pinpoint the source and it’s driving me nuts.

Since then, I figured out that they were from Harwan, a site outside of Srinigar, next to the Shalimar Gardens. But I still couldn’t find the article I was thinking of or, really, any good information on the deeply enigmatic tablets.

This past fall, the Asia Society in New York sponsored an exhibit entitled The Arts of Kashmir, which — despite my best intentions — I never got to visit. (Here’s a review by the great New York Times Asian art critic Holland Cotter.) Consoled with the catalog to the exhibit by Pratapaditya Pal, I found some helpful references.

The beautiful catalog itself is much more substantial than a typical exhibit catalog — it’s really a collection of art historical survey articles about Kashmir, including architecture, sculpture, painting, calligraphy, and crafts.

The Harwan tiles appear in John Siudmak’s piece on religious architecture, which seems to summarize what we know about the site:

The earliest surviving Buddhist site is at Harwan, near the Mughal Shalimar Gardens, probably dating from the fifth century and of Hephthalite patronage, and mostly known for its terra-cotta tiles impressed with figural and floral designs used to decorate a large circular terrace on the hillside, which was destroyed by an earthquake. [...] Similar terraces have been found elsewhere in the valley; the most extensive at the site of Hutamura, in the Lidder valley. Their religious affiliation still remains a mystery. However, excavations of a rectangular courtyard in a lower terrace uncovered the triple basement of a stupa, a number of cells, and several terra-cotta figural fragments and three plaques impressed with stupa images (fig. 37.) [...] The stupas on the Harwan plaques compare closely with three Gandhara bronze examples, one also with columns at the corners, and confirm a Gandhara influence. (pp. 55-56)

So there are more of these sites, besides Harwan, although “their religious affiliation remains a mystery.” And nothing about the Ājīvikas. The second half of this redacted excerpt is on firmer ground, unraveling the Buddhist elements of the site; the complex symbolism of the stupa is a favorite topic of study and Siudmak’s comments helpfully locate early Kashmiri, presumably wooden, examples in the timeline between Greco-Bactrian Gandhara and later versions, especially Tibetan. (Tibetan and Central Asian religion and art is deeply indebted to Kashmir.) Note, by the way, that the tiles or plaques with clearly Buddhist stupa images are different — made differently and different in appearance and style — than the rest of the Harwan tiles.

But most interestingly to me is a footnote at the end of this excerpt, to a 1989 article by Fisher. Unfortunately, the scholarly apparatus of the catalog is shoddy and there’s no further reference to Fisher in the bibliography.

The curator of the exhibit, Pal, has a long useful essay (the metal sculpture section alone is fantastic) entitled “Faith and Form” in the catalog which also refers several times to the Harwan tiles:

The earliest sites that have yielded terra-cotta objects, which, according to tradition, go back to the Kushan period, are Semthan, Harwan, Hutmora, Ushkur, and recently Kutbal. These sites are particularly noteworthy because of the large, stamped tiles with figural and symbolic forms that represent an independent local artistic tradition. Although tiles for paving floors and walls of monasteries were used in Gandhara, they are not as richly and diversely decorated as those from Kashmir. The figures in the Harwan tiles further show both Indian and foreign ethnic types, strange crouching ascetics unique in the Indian plastic tradition and convincingly rendered flora and fauna. Both the Harwan and the Kutbal finds reflext a mature and confident state of artistic skill but, strangely, the tradition did not continue. There is no certainty about the exact dates of these sites, although the consensus is between the third and the fifth century. (p. 66)

So now we have a whole set of sites related to Harwan, including Siudmak’s afore-mentioned Hutamura — presumably the same as Pal’s “Hutmora” — plus Semthan, Ushkur, and Kutbal! Again, though, the scholarly apparatus of the catalog fails us, since the endnotes in this passage aren’t correctly referenced; #9 appears twice in the excerpt above and only once in the notes; the only usable reference (a pers. comm.) is to the recent Kutbal find. And still no Ājīvikas.

Even though I couldn’t get an exact citation, some heavy duty googling yielded reference to a 1982 article by a Robert E. Fisher in Art International, a now-defunct (I think) journal. For the record, it’s:

Fisher, Robert E. The enigma of Harwan, Art International, 1982, XXV(9)33-4

There may be a later, 1989, Harwan article by Fisher, too, as Siudmak suggests, but I haven’t been able to find it. (Fisher’s early 1980’s Ph.D. dissertation at USC was on the Buddhist architecture of Kashmir.)

I think that Fisher’s article, the one that I was looking for and finally tracked down, thanks to my wife and the wonders of inter-library loan, more or less definitively addresses the enigma of Harwan. Fisher proves — at least to my satisfaction — that the tiles are part of an Ājīvika religious site, later reused in a nearby Buddhist monastery. (Thus Siudmak’s reference to [monastic] cells adjoining the stupa.)

Fisher, although not cited in the 2007 Kashmir catalog, acknowledges Pal in his endnotes: “It was his belief that there is more to Harwan than has been published as well as his careful screening of my evidence that inspired this essay.”  And, although I haven’t yet had a chance to read it, Pal discusses (pp. 223-224) a tile in the LACMA collection, described as “Tile with Ajivaka (?) Ascetics” in vol. 1 of his Indian Sculpture (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, University of California Press, 1986) book.

Alright, if you’re still with me, some quick background on our suspects:

We really don’t know much about the Ājīvikas, except from what we read about them from their successful rivals, including Buddhists and Jains. It’s a similar situation to, say, gnosticism in late antiquity in the eastern Mediterranean: most of what we knew, up until the Nag Hammadi finds, about gnosticism was hearsay, and the hearsay treated the tradition as heretical.

The founder of the Ājīvika tradition, Gosala, supposedly was a contemporary of Mahavira, the founder of Jainism and thus a near-contemporary of the Buddha and possibly from the same north-central region of India. (Fisher points to a 1951 book by A.L. Basham, History and Doctrine of the Ājīvikas, which I haven’t read yet. There’s also a workmanlike Wikipedia article.) They were famously ascetic, and one story that really left an impression in my mind was that they supposedly meditated (or committed slow suicide) inside of clay pots. This is such a disturbingly powerful idea that just thinking about it makes me start to physically panic. Whether or not this has any basis in reality, of course, is another matter, but Ājīvikas are closely associated with pots, pottery, and the like. Thus, as you might have guessed, all the clay tiles. And look again at the ascetic figures in the tiles; don’t they seem like they could be crouching in pots?

Fisher, citing Basham, notes that caves in Bihar, with Ājīvika inscriptions from the 3rd century BC, had three foot deep deposits of clay fragments in them when excavated by Alexander Cunningham in the 19th century. These caves, it’s important to note, had what Fisher calls “an unusual shape”:

apsidal in plan with a circular construction at the far end. If Buddhist, this arrangement would indicate the presence of a circular stupa. According to Basham, these caves may originally have been stone replicas of the earliest Ājīvika meeting-place, a circular thatched hut at the end of a courtyard. (p. 43)

If, like me, your vocabulary doesn’t include “apsidal,” Wikipedia comes to the rescue. It’s a form of “apse“:

In architecture, the apse (Latin absis “arch, vault”; sometimes written apsis; plural apses) is a semicircular recess covered with a hemispherical vault. In Romanesque, Byzantine and Gothic Christian abbey, cathedral and church architecture, the term is applied to the semi-circular or polygonal section of the sanctuary at the liturgical east end beyond the altar. Geometrically speaking, an apse is either a half-cone or half-dome.

And, you may have guessed correctly already, that is the same plan as the Harwan site.

Furthermore, other images — especially flowers, elephants, and swans –common in the tiles have Ājīvika associations, based on our very limited knowledge of their beliefs.

In his article, Fisher goes to great lengths to disprove other associations: that Harwan is not exclusively Buddhist, that the images have connections to but are different than other traditions, and so on. So he surveys Hindu and Buddhist images for ascetics, and crouching figures, and floor tiles, and looks at Parthian evidence for the horse rider images and the potential architectural connections between Parthain fire temples and the Harwan site. But he concludes this section with the following comment (p. 39):

Amidst all these images, be they foreign or Indian, one stands apart with compelling force. The repeated portrayal of a crouching ascetic forms a dramatic border to the variety of lively forms of the floor and provides the most enigmatic problem for the entire site.

And this, to me, is the central issue; a really enigmatic problem. These figures look like nothing else: in Pal’s words, the “strange crouching ascetics [are] unique in the Indian plastic tradition.” I can still remember the surprise I felt seeing the tiles at the Guimet, how odd and otherworldly they seemed.

I think that Fisher’s solution, the Ājīvika attribution, is a brilliant contribution, one that’s unfortunately not been widely accepted. (This, I suspect, is due to issues of distribution not disagreement.) If we add in the comments from the Kashmir catalog that Harwan is one in a set of similar finds, including Hutamura/Hutmora, Semthan, Ushkur, and the supposedly spectacular Kutbal site, we have suggestive evidence for a large Kashmiri Ājīvika movement in the early centuries of our era, ca. 300 – 500 C.E..

Check out these houses:

Note that each of them has a garage – in a country that is essentially without roads. Garages make sense (well, as far as it goes) in Orange County but not so much in a country like Burma. The oddness of these houses in that context cannot be overstated.

My guess is that these houses are inspired by similar-looking developments in suburban Bangkok or perhaps Singapore or Shanghai.  Those housing developments — in their overall master plan and in the particulars of the architecture — in turn draw directly on American suburban housing, especially in southern California. All of that seems reasonable to me: Burmese generals visit Bangkok and see new housing developments which are influenced by Thais returning from, say, Irvine. As much as Burma has any contact with the outside world, it’s with Bangkok and Singapore.

The southern California gated community with attached housing, in turn, draws directly on the experience of the mass-produced single family houses of the new suburbias created after World War II for returning veterans and their growing families: Levittown and all that. These communities, in an oft-told tale (see, among others, Anthony King’s history, The Bungalow) mass-produced the idealized American house, derived from the popular craftsman bungalow style of the turn of the century. This style was influenced by the British arts & crafts movement — itself a response to industrialization — and the houses, which they called bungalows, built by returning colonial administrators, especially from India.

In India, these colonists lived in grand houses called “bungalows,” a word whose etymology is disputed but probably derives from Gujarati via the Hindi for “Bengali” (”bangla” thus “Bangladesh”, “land of the Bengalis”) since Calcutta was where the British first built their private houses.

Thus, I think you can draw a line, not too straight, but a connection nonetheless, from these bizarre new Burmese houses to neighboring Bangladesh, via Bangkok and Irvine Ranch and Long Island and Surrey and Simla.

Governor and his friend go to the Netcraft data, though, and find that it’s really a reporting anomaly. Netcraft just began breaking out Google’s web server — which is probably of Apache ancestry in any event — in May, accounting for most of the drop in Apache’s market share. Check out that pink line in the lower right-hand corner:

But wait, Governor says, that’s not all: while Apache may still rule in absolute numbers, Microsoft has long controlled the corporate market. Here’s some less quantitative, more anecdotal information that points in that direction:

Based on my experience (and here’s a survey from Port 80 if that isn’t good enough), this rings true; this is just one among the many ways that enterprise computing is different from the rest of the world.

Okay, so you’ve conducted some kind of identity strategy project to figure out what you want to do with an identity management system for your company. You have an overall idea of the sequencing of work, of the technical architecture, the business case, the goals and requirements, and the people who are going to be responsible to do the work.

Congratulations! Sit back, relax, have a homebrew.

Connect primary identity repositories

Next, assuming that it’s a company with thousands of employees, you’re going to be dealing with a lot of existing infrastructure so one of the first decisions you’re going to have to make is the sources of authority for the initial deployment. There probably are already multiple identity stores in your organization; the HR department, the file & print directory, the badging system, the PBX, and so forth. Technically, you need to figure out how to connect them (may I suggest Novell Identity Manager?), but you’re also going to have to make some business decisions about the ownership of the data and decide on authoritative sources.

For instance, I might have a phone number listed in the corporate PeopleSoft HR system and another one in the PBX. If we connect both of those to the identity infrastructure, which has precedence? If the number changes in the PBX, should that change propagate to the HR system? What is the business rule in that situation? You might say, “PBX,” which seems like the right answer, except that the Personnel department might not like the idea of giving up control of their records like that. So it bears saying and repeating and repeating: HR must be involved from the beginning of any successful enterprise identity project.

Of course, it would be especially nice if I followed my own damned advice; I’m working on a project right now for a mid-sized government agency that is struggling with HR issues precisely because they have not included HR representation from the beginning. So we now have to integrate not only the HR system, but a separate database that the department maintains of pending changes, contractors, and temporary employees. All of which can be handled, and gracefully, by PeopleSoft, if only we had the HR department involved.

So maybe I should amend the rule to say: It makes things much easier to involve HR from the beginning of any successful enterprise identity project. We even have a white paper on this very topic.

Tip: A nice quick way to demonstrate success, always a problem with IT infrastructure projects, is to deploy a white pages applications. This is actually useful to end users and is relatively easy to do (YMMV) once you’ve got the core pieces in place.

Establish an Identity Vault

When we do these first phase deployments, we almost always set up an “identity vault” (IDV) as the centerpiece directory. The IDV is itself not authoritative, which is initially counter-intuitive. In fact, it ought not to hold any unique information at all but simply replicate information held elsewhere (such as, in the example earlier, a person’s telephone number from the PBX.) The connectors, in Novell’s architecture, hold the business rules about the flow of information in and out of the IDV. The IDV needs to be highly available but you don’t necessarily want to be hitting the IDV with a lot of requests, at least not directly. Instead, we usually build out “service directories” that are tailored for particular situations; they may vary by geography or application type and so forth. The service directories can be placed physically close to the users, to improve performance, and the service directories communicate back to the IDV.