Software, Business, and Life
May 24 2011
Around 2000-2001, Oasis Digital built a system for a client which (in retrospect) took a “cloudy” approach to data storage. 2001 is a few years before that approach gained popularity, so it’s interesting to look back and see how our solution stacks up. The problem domain was the storage of check images for banks; the [...]
Feb 19 2011
I recently transferred a few thousand files, totalling gigabytes, from one computer to another over a slowish internet connection. At the end of the transfer, I realized the process I used had lost all the original file timestamps. Rather, all the files on the destination machine had a create/modify date of when the transfer occurred. [...]
Apr 25 2010
A few months ago I mentioned James Hamilton’s comments on the micro-server trend. Today I came across a talk he gave at MIX10 in which he presented excellent real-world large-scale data, with insightful analysis, about the cost efficiency of data centers. (Here is a direct MP4 download, suitable for viewing across more platforms.) I had [...]
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Jan 29 2010
On Jan. 21, I gave one of the talks at the inaugural St. Louis Cloud Computing User Group meeting. I don’t think there is any video or audio (I forgot my audio recorder), but the slides are on SlideShare: To the Clouds and Back or for download as a PDF.
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Jan 08 2010
The St. Louis Cloud Computing User Group launches on Jan. 21st at Appistry. Sam Charrington over there kicked it off, but I suspect it will shortly grow far past its Appistry roots. I’m giving a talk (one of two) at the first meeting. Contrary to the initial description floating around, I won’t be speaking (in [...]
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Nov 30 2009
I just read James Hamilton’s comments on “Microslice” servers, which are very low-power, but high CPU-to-wattage ratio servers. As he explains in detail, at scale the economics of this design are compelling. In some ways, of course, this is the opposite of another big trend going on, which is consolidation through virtualization. I reconcile these [...]
