It came with Windows XP, which ran okay. I tried hackintoshing it but it was too nerdy for me and Windows 7 came out in RC around then and I put that on it instead, which works great.  I’ve upgraded the RAM and the HD on it and one thing that’s nice about the machine is how easy it is to work on.

But lately I’ve been running Moblin on it and, after some jiggering to get the wireless working, I think I’m in love. Moblin is a new netbook operating system from the Linux Foundation that Novell is working on along with Intel. It’s based on Linux (Mobile + Linux = Moblin, see?) but the UI has been completely redesigned. It’s different than the Ubuntu Netbook Remix, which is a version of Ubuntu designed for smaller screens; instead, Moblin is different, in the way that the iPhone UI is different than Mac OSX.

Moblin assumes you’re using your netbook for web browsing, checking email, maintaining a calendar, IM’ing, blogging, listening to music or watching videos — doing those social media things that the kids are all into. It’s a recognition that a 9″ screen is not suited for all desktop applications; they’re there, if you need them, but the new UI puts these other activities front and center and hides the others. It’s very well done and worth checking out.

I really think that these very small netbooks are a different category of thing; they’re not just small laptops. I have an old IBM Thinkpad x40 that I’ve used for many years now on consulting projects and it works fine as a real working computer. (Going back to it from the Dell is a revelation; the keyboard, especially, feels huge, which is absurd for a 13″ machine.) At netbook size, you need something different than a remixed desktop operating system, which is what Moblin aims to do.

Plus, these netbooks are cheap; at $200, I’ve started to wonder about using one as a Skype phone instead of buying another cordless phone system or trying to figure out how to use VOIP at home.  And there must be a lot of other uses for a cheap little netbook running Moblin besides DVD player and Skype phone.

This is good for nerds who want to impress their girlfriends* with portable versions of SLES on a USB stick.

It’s better for ISVs (independent software vendors) who want to create appliance versions of their applications

But, I think, it’s best for corporate IT shops that are looking to create a standard build environment for their technology infrastructure.  In Novell’s consulting organization, we have a popular core build [.pdf] offering, which does much the same thing, except with requirements gathering, security reviews, documentation, and all that complicated enterprise-y stuff.  Remember that a distribution is a kind of application marketplace, with more applications than you’ll ever need or want.  Enterprise IT usually wants less, if only for manageability and security concerns, which is why customers routinely hire Novell consulting to come and create custom versions of the distribution for them.

If they want to skip all that, this tool (screencast) allows them to create their own core builds and what we call ‘personalities’ on top of the core build — a personality for a database server will be different than a personality for a web server, for example, but the core build underneath will be the same.

Corporate IT teams can use it at the end of a regular build process to create blessed workloads consisting of “JeOS” (just enough operating system) + personality + custom or packaged applications.  These can be XML config files, .iso images, VMs, or AMIs for deployment to Amazon’s cloud services.  The deployment is just a checkbox option; pretty cool.

*  (You must be new here.)

I have two email accounts, one personal and one for work, and they are both, each in their own way, profoundly broken.  Like most people, I actually have a bunch of email addresses, but they’re logically separated into work and personal.  I use a combination of Gmail and Thunderbird for my personal mail, and Groupwise for my work mail.

I try to manage my personal account so that at least occasionally I get to the mythical zero inbox, but my corporate account with 3,000 messages in it is just a stream that flows by with me on the river bank with a pathetic net trying to catch the most important bits roaring by.  Right at this moment I have 19 emails open on my desktop, awaiting action.

I think that people who don’t work in a corporate environment don’t understand the central role that corporate email systems (Outlook/Exchange, Notes, or Novell’s own Groupwise) play in the lives of their inmates users.  Meetings are scheduled, documents are exchanged, decisions are made, and long-running debates are all handled exclusively within these email systems.  I know that the kids and the Koreans don’t use email any more, but for large organizations, email is practically the system of record for most purposes.  (Xobni Insight for Outlook is supposed to be good, but I don’t have any personal experience with it.)

On the personal, non-corporate side, there have been many runs taken at the Problem of Email.  Notably, there was the  Chandler fiasco; more recent failures were the very nice Seek extension for Thunderbird from the Simile project at MIT, the short-lived “I Want Sandy” email assistant, and myriad universal inbox solutions.

Sandy’s sister, cc:Betty, looks promising, and Thunderbird fork called Postbox has garnered some praise.  I’ve been using the version 3 beta of Thunderbird and I really like it — so much so that I’ve moved back to using a client after switching away for the charms of Gmail.

I think  Google’s Gmail was the first real innovation in email in quite a long time.  For me, the progression goes: mail –> elm –> Eudora –> Thunderbird –> Gmail.  And now, Gmail+Thunderbird.   I don’t like everything about Gmail; the conversation view still baffles me, I don’t really use tagging effectively, I can’t stand not being able to sort by sender, and I don’t understand how it treats deleted and archived messages.  But abandoning the complex folder structure I’d developed over the years was really liberating once I trusted the system.  If there’s going to be real on-going innovation in email, I wouldn’t bet against Google and Gmail Labs.

There’s an excellent discussion of the Problem of Email in the comments to an article by Alastair Croll on GigaOM entitled “Why Email Clients Need to Change.”  The article is worth reading but the discussion is outstanding.

Of the new entrants trying to solve the (personal, non-corporate) Problem of Email, the best one I’ve seen is OtherInbox.  It works with your existing IMAP email to categorize and sort your messages.  It in effect applies preset filters to your messages and seems to be directed at people who have lots of social media updates in their in-box — it groups Facebook messages, for instance.  But it points the way forward, I think, by recognizing that there are actually several distinctive kinds of messages in your inbox, each of which can be dealt with in a different but standard way.

What really got me thinking was, as usual, a visual representation of data; this time, of emails in Croll’s inbox, analyzed using the excellent mail-trends tool.

After all, most email is (relatively)  structured text; Croll had a lot of Twitter traffic in his in-box, but that doesn’t seem to me to be an especially mainstream case.  But it’s one of many, viz.:

Purchases

This is a little workflow; you buy something, the vendor sends you a confirmation.  Then when the order ships, they send you a tracking number.  You need to make sure that the order was correct in the first place and then, perphaps after giving it a relevant name (”new sandals” instead of LL Bean Order #2342423) you want the workflow to keep track of it, perhaps in a calendar view, and update you on its status and throw a flag after a certain period if you haven’t received it.  After acknowledging receipt in the workflow, this thread should be silently archived and disappear from view.  It would be in the interest of, say, Amazon, to offer easy hooks to do this.

Mailing Lists

These have a different behavior than order tracking; they’re best put into a bulletin board view by themselves, with some simple, configurable, rules: keep them in a threaded discussion for two weeks unless I take some other action on them.  Then they can silently fall off the end of the thread, unless they’re subscription or administrative messages, which ought to be archived.

Reminders/Alerts

These are more important and should appear in some insistent form, perhaps in some status bar like Growl — “meeting in ten minutes”, “on a conference call”, “on a call” — and/or on a calendar view.  Then, after the time of the appointment has passed, it should automagically disappear.  No threaded discussion view, no workflow.  But wouldn’t it be nice if your calendar automatically updated your status?

Non-spam ads (opt-in vendor mail)

Spam is at this point a solved problem; I’m thinking instead here of emails from the local minor league hockey team advertising kids’ day or a deal from my garden supply store that I want to know about.  I would set up a rule for these to appear in my main stream but automatically disappear after a day or two.  Linking to the opt-out function as a check box or something would be fantastic.  The hive mind would help a lot here.

Account Info

This category requires special handling; I’d like to see anything with username or password information automatically encrypted and stored.  This function alone would be a major win in my book.

Personal Mail

Anything from a recognized (white-list) sender, especially if it is single-recipient, should go to the top of the stream.  It would be nice to apply GTD-style rules as an option.

Travel

This is a big one for me; I use Tripit to manage my travel itineraries, and I think it’s invaluable.  I email Tripit my hotel reservation and my flight information and it puts it together for me; I’d like my email system to do something similar.  After all, Delta’s itineraries are nothing more than structured text waiting to be parsed into a calendar, status, and archive system.  (This is the classic semantic web use case.)

Other

For me, Twitter and Facebook updates aren’t a big deal, but they seem to be important to some — I can imagine that there are lots of other categories that aren’t relevant to me but are everyday hassles for others.

The nerds, he says, will answer Ubuntu; it has street cred on the Interwebs.  (I hasten to add that that includes me: I’m running Xubuntu on an old laptop and it’s great, ideal for its purpose.)

But  for small to medium sized businesses lacking nerds, the real answer, he says is Novell’s SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop.

And why, you may ask?  Well, in a word: services!

In particular, if I don’t really know Linux that well and I’m running an SMB, I want a company that can offer me the full support package. That’s more than just 24×7 phone support. Both Canonical and Novell offer that. Novell also offers other support options such as certification, training, consulting, and even retaining the services of an engineer.

Using their (our) products, customers can “extract IT configuration and workload information in near real-time into a robust CMDB, model how the IT configuration provides business services, and then generate visualizations and dashboards that dynamically show how IT aligns to business services.”

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.