The Pervasive Data Center

The impersonal PC

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A couple of weeks ago, I was in Las Vegas for the

I've been seeing more interest among IT folks in alternatives to traditional desktops over the past year since, well, ever. Traditional

And, before the various fanboys chirp in, switching to Linux or a Mac doesn't make all these issues magically go away.

Facebook, identity, privacy, and portability

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Facebook banned someone for using a pseudonym and

Anonymous speech has a

That said, very little of such speech on the Internet falls into "Allowing dissenters to shield their identities frees them to express critical, minority views." (U.S. Supreme Court McIntyre v. Ohio Elections Commission, 1995). Instead, anonymity on the Internet often seems far more about protecting rudeness than protecting political dissent. Thus, I have little problem with a service such as Facebook attempting to ensure that its members are using real identities. (See

This case does, however, raise a variety of points about identity, privacy, and closed social platforms that are worth considering given that we'll see these issues and others like them again and again.

Amazon's newer business model

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A couple of weeks back, Amazon.com announced an expansion of its

One implication of Amazon using VMs is that they can easily offer a variety of different VM sizes up to the size of the physical hardware. That was the most recent change announced. In addition to the default "Small Instance," users can now get "Large Instances" or "Extra Large Instances." These might be useful if, for example, you need to pair a heavyweight database instance with some lightweight Web services.

Another implication is that VM images, called Amazon Machine Images (AMI) in this case, can be archived and transported. This is analogous to

I bring this up because more

Privacy and geotagging

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The initial broad adoption of the Internet was, in major respects, about breaking down the boundaries of place and space. Important aspects of Web 2.0 concern themselves with reintroducing the local into the global.

Thus, it's not particularly surprising that geotagging, associating photos with a map location, is a current hot topic. At the recent Web 2.0 Summit, Flickr debuted an upcoming revamp of its map page and a new "places" feature. (

At the risk of stating the obvious, all photos are taken somewhere. Some, such as studio portraits, don't have location as a

The other P2P revolution that wasn't

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Today, "peer to peer" is inextricably linked to a variety of techniques for P2P file-sharing, whereby the recipients of a large file supply chunks of data to other recipients.

This distributes the load compared with everyone downloading a file from some central. For this and other reasons, P2P networks have proven popular for sharing MP3 music files although they're suitable for distributing any sizable digital content; for example, one also sees P2P employed to distribute Linux distributions, which can run into the gigabytes.

However, a few weeks ago I attended MIT Technology Review's Emerging Technologies Conference and attended a session where I was reminded that another "P2P" was once the subject of great buzz.

At the Fall 2000 Intel Developer Forum, outgoing Intel CEO Craig Barrett called peer-to-peer computing a "." And he wasn't talking about file sharing.

Pat Gelsinger, who was Intel's CTO at the time, was even more enthusiastic in his keynote:

Dell and the end of religion

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Dell 1.0 was a religious company. I suppose you could refer to it instead as merely an intense focus on low costs in all matters of its operations, but it really went deeper than that. Low cost was an article of faith that was the deep guiding principle underlying essentially everything that the company did. Dell didn't merely tilt toward a streamlined supply chain and lean R&D, they were a fundamental part of what it was as a company.

This is not a pedantic distinction. Focus can be adjusted and tweaked; it's that much harder to change your core. Yet that's what Dell had to do. It had to respond to a world where "cheap boxes" was no longer the guiding mantra for server buyers, which made Michael Dell's public pronouncements suggesting that "Dell 2.0" was mostly about better execution so wrongheaded. more

Geotagging to Flickr

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Stephen Shankland of CNET.com has been writing a number of

That said, manually tagging things is a pain and, if one doesn't have obvious geographical features in the photo, it may be hard to locate them exactly on a map. So--how about marrying GPS data to the photos? It's a sound idea, it's doable, but it requires a slightly convoluted workflow as the technology stands today.

Zonbu's subscription PC

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Last month I wrote a research note about some of the

Dan Lyons over at more

The language of facilities

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We often talk about silos in IT. The storyline usually goes something like this. The server guys (computer gear) don't talk to the storage guys (SANs and Fibre Channel) don't talk to the network gals (all that Ethernet and other comms stuff). It's all true enough, of course. But notice something? Facilities doesn't even tend to get mentioned when bemoaning IT silos. All that HVAC and power gear is just part of the landscape. IT folks didn't need to know about bricks. Why should they need to know about power and cooling? Maybe a little UPS here and there, but the big stuff is

I suspect that part of the issue is language. more

The datacenter is everywhere

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When we talk about pervasive computing, we're usually talking about mobile devices like cell phones or, if we're being really exotic, the various sorts of wearable gizmos that get made fun of in Dilbert cartoons. But I look at pervasive from the other end of the pipe. Hence, The Pervasive Datacenter, the name of the blog that kicks off with this post. From my point of view, it's the datacenter, the software that it runs, and its connections that are everywhere just as much as the peripherals out at the end of the network.

This blog will have its home base in the datacenter itself and will cover topics from servers big and small, to multi-core processors, to operating systems, to virtualization, to power and cooling concerns. However, it will also look at the software and the services out in the network cloud that are consuming datacenter computing cycles and storage and thereby determining the future of the back-end. I'll also spend some time on the bigger questions: Is Software as a Service the next big thing or merely Application Service Providers warmed over? What's the future of Open Source in a Web-delivered software model? Do operating systems even matter any longer?