CQ2

Michael Nygard has his head in the computing clouds, suggesting that not only is cloud computing in our future, but that there’ll be many of them. He’s right.

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:

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Enterprise IT, and the people that run it, are risk-averse. Things that work are valued, highly, over new things. The kids might all be learning Ruby and Scheme, but COBOL and C/C++ still rule in the enterprise, where Java is seen as an up-and-comer. Think mainframes are old news? Then you haven’t spent a lot of time in an enterprise data center.

I spoke recently with a guy worked at a VMS help desk twenty five years ago; he said that he’d recently run into some old colleagues from that time and asked them what they were doing. They said they were doing the same thing, VMS support, and that the team had pretty much stayed the same size, a couple of dozen people. IBM supposedly still has their own VMS help desk for their internal users. (You will recall that VMS is an old DEC operating system, an ancient enemy of IBM’s, so this is an admission not only that they use a competitor’s operating system but also, more to the point, that they can’t get off of it.)

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The MS-YHOO deal is keeping the merger arb guys up at night.

Michael Arrington notes that the Yahoo acquisition is getting very expensive, in terms of Microsoft’s market cap; Microsoft has “lost nearly $40 billion in market cap in the eight trading days since they made their offer.” In other words, “Microsoft has shrunk by a Yahoo in the last eight days.”

Henry Blodget has a must-read piece on the logic of the deal; he argues that Microsoft is confusing the ad-driven consumer business with the license-driven corporate business. This makes sense to me; Microsoft needs to defend the Office franchise in the corporate environment, where even Google is getting license revenue ($50/user/year for Google Apps) in lieu of advertising. Enterprises aren’t going to use ad-supported free software, at least not in any future I can see. So why should Microsoft take on the pain that is Yahoo for the consumer side? Blodget writes, “Put differently, the part of Google that threatens Microsoft’s core Windows and Office business is Google Apps, not Google Search.”

A former client of mine, an enterprise architect and a guy I really respect, recommended Splunk (”not just a dirty word”) to me. They bring, more or less, a search engine approach to log file analysis. Now, this is not the sexiest thing in the world, but it’s critically important, especially in large IT shops. A large enterprise generates humongous amounts of log files; my friend said that he’s pinned a big server with just the logs from their domain controllers. And remember, these are just text files.

So the question becomes: how do you analyze all this? Traditionally, people have taken a static reporting approach, which has its place, but you need more when you have to be actively responsive. When was the last time David Hasselhof logged on? Where was he? What systems did he log onto? Did he look at Michael Jackson’s billing records?

Long ago, people thought that some kind of library-like structure was required in order to discover information on the Internet, but it turned out that brute-force searching was better. Likewise in this case, where the end goal is a Google-like interface. Now, this approach has its limitations. You have to know what you’re looking for, first of all. It doesn’t do correlations. It’s got a beautifully simple interface, but it’s not an easy UI for normal, proactive review. It’s not for canned reports. It’s not a SEM (Security Event Manager, or SIEM: Security Information and Event Manager) tool.

But for what it is, it’s great. It’s easy to look at Splunk and say, “you’re just indexing text,” but there is great power in that; look at Google. There been such a huge emphasis on auditability that we’ve generated huge files of events, but mostly they just sit there unloved. Splunk is a good way to leverage that resource.

Microsoft’s “Silverlight” announcement a few days ago has gotten a lot of positive early attention (see here and here and especially here for examples) and focused attention on the category of Rich Internet Applications. The Mono folks have announced that they’re going to do a Linux version, tentatively codenamed “Moonlight.” OpenLazlo, a pioneer RIA, has been discussed as a Google acquisition target, if AJAX and the persistence engine planned for Firefox 3.0 aren’t enough. And Silverlight, uh, overshadowed Adobe’s recent Flex announcement.

All the initial reports suggest that Microsoft, presumably under the watchful eye of Ray Ozzie, got this one right; it’s fast, small, beautiful, and reclaims space for Microsoft on the desktop. Can Office on Silverlight be far behind?

I’ve used the New York Times Reader (free trial, $15/mo., included with paper subscription) which is based on Silverlight and it is a great experience. You don’t need to be online to use it; in fact, it sort of blurs the distinction between being on and off line to the extent that you don’t really care so much. And it has rich controls for viewing, much better, because it’s customized for reading a newspaper, than a plain old browser, even with all the cool Javascript and prefetching tricks.

Lazlo claims some corporate customers, but from what I’ve seen Rich Internet Applications are in their infancy in the enterprise. Silverlight’s got an advantage there, of course, because of all the armies of VB and .Net developers who now have another tool at their disposal; it will be interesting to see what they build.

From Eben Moglen, a video by Michael Wesch about web 2.0. I know that sounds bad, but trust me, it’s good.

Via TechCrunch, news that Mozy, an online-storage service, has scored a huge contract with GE to provide backup services for all of GE’s 300,000-some employees. Pretty good for a little Utah startup in a very crowded space.As I’ve written before, I’ve been following the online storage for a while and I’m surprised that it isn’t more mature. The market, which seems like a no-brainer, really has not yet taken off. Who doesn’t need it? Mozy’s version of online storage is focused very narrowly on backup; competitors also offer shared workspaces, synchronization between machines, and so on.

Players in this market include Xdrive, ElephantDrive, DriveHQ, Box.net, Streamload, and many many others. Omnidrive is especially interesting. Joyent offers Strongspace and BingoDisk.  The latter, based on WebDAV is cheap ($20/year for a basic account) but the WinXP implementation of the WebDAV protocol essentially renders it unusable.

Mozy is venture-backed, including investment from Drew Major formerly of Novell, and offers several tiers of service. The cheapest is free for two gigs of backup, in return for the occasional spam email. That seems like a fair trade-off, but a little cheesy. I avoided Mozy because of that, but they also have non-spam paid options. They have a client (Windows and Mac) that backs up selected folders in the background. Apparently the service works well, although there have been some complaints about the restore process being too cumbersome.

Getting GE’s imprimatur is a huge coup, though, and it’s made me look at them again. My own solution consists of a mirrored RAID array with nightly backups via SyncBack (which I love) to a NAS device. For offsite storage I’ve been doing weekly backups of TrueCrypt (which I’m afraid of) encrypted volumes via FTP to a hosted site that I have space on. But that’s a pain to set up and it feels fragile; and I can’t believe that the broader public is ever going to put up with things like configuring TrueCrypt. So I’m going to check out Mozy.

The most promising offering is Amazon’s S3 service, which simply offers raw storage. I haven’t seen any good, stable, usable front ends for this yet, although JungleDisk, S3 Backup, and S3Fox (a Firefox extension) look like they have potential. I’ve played with S3 a bit and it’s cheap and reliable but I’d really like some solution that makes S3 appear as a part of my native file system. Perhaps open source? That would be sweet.

See also Fred Wilson, Jeremy Zawodny (also here), TechCrunch, here, and here.

Interesting new ‘community’ site from Dell, “Ideastorm.”

[Later: Jon Bultmeyer points to a similar site at Salesforce.com.]

Kevin Rollins was famously ambivalent about the consumer market. His ouster, Michael Dell’s return, and other recent changes, including Ideastorm, seem to suggest that they’re looking again at the consumer business. Ideastorm has a very Web 2.0 look and the early discussions are what you would expect from the same group of 25,000 people who try everything first: pre-load Linux(es), Open Office, get rid of the pestware that comes with new Dell PCs, etc.

I’ve written before that a bad support call made me swear off of Dell consumer products. I still like and recommend their enterpise-grade stuff, but when I needed to get a new desktop machine for myself, I ended up getting a sweet deal from EndPCNoise and never thought of going to Dell.

Hans Rosling displays some amazing visualization software tools in a talk he gave in February at the TED conference, on the topic of rich vs. poor countries. It’s really worth watching, for at least three reasons: first, the topic is important and we are operating with faulty assumptions about poor countries; second, it’s a virtuoso performance that is exhilarating in its own right; and third, it’s one of (if not *the*) best examples of visualizing data to prove a point that I’ve ever seen. Seriously. Hans is rockin’ it in a plaid shirt and Countryman mike. Some of the software, by the way, is available at Gapminder.

Thanks to Jon Bultmeyer for turning me onto CX Now, a simple but powerful data visualization tool from Business Objects. It’s free. You import your Excel (sorry, Open Office Calque*) model and then manipulate it with all sorts of handsome graphical elements, dials and graphs and slider bars. Then you can export it in a variety of formats, including Flash. So, for example, here’s fifteen minutes’ worth of goofing around with the tool.

Lazyweb, wouldn’t it be great if we could integrate this sort of thing (an open source alternative?) into an “analyst’s workbench” SLED, targeted at the sophisticated but under-served enterprise business analyst, who is still sorely lacking tools? Maybe it could be a virtual machine that runs inside of a Windows desktop, taking advantage of our new Relationship. That would then make it “virtualized visualization,” which might qualify it for tax exempt status as a religious movement. But, seriously, Rick Sherlund has argued that the path to desktop Linux adoption is via individual adoption, and that is going to come from people having needs that are better met with open source tools. One community of users is these empowered but under-served Excel jocks that manage the spreadsheets that run companies. Can we make them mid-level heroes? And one way to get at them might be via virtualization, so that they can keep their Windows desktop and have the swiss army knife to solve problems. (Maybe a Knoppix-like Live CD? USB key pre-loaded?)

* This is a really terrific pun.

From Radar O’Reilly:

Greenplum - Scott Yara. At the heart of most web 2.0 applications is the management of big data. Greenplum’s massively parallel Postgres database is the highest performance open source database around.

Hyperic - Javier Soltero. If operations is advantage, Hyperic would like to help more companies find that advantage. They’re also building a Web 2.0 ecosystem in which the software gets smarter the more people use it.

Django: Adrian Holovaty. Like Rails, Django is a case where the application was kept proprietary, but the framework used to build it was released to the world. Is this the new model for how to open source a web application?

DabbleDB - Avi Bryant. OK. This thing is built with smalltalk. What else do you need to know? It’s a web-based database, potentially asymmetric competition for Access and Filemaker, but it’s also a data multiplexer that can help to give people more control over their own data.

Alfresco - Matt Asay. There are a lot of open source content management systems, but Alfresco is the one that’s targeted where the money is, and that has built the robust data store to meet the needs of big companies.