Carlos Selonke's posterous

Late last week I met Jim Kaskade of SIOS at a Seattle-area Starbucks for a meeting and a product demo. With the very cool (and appropriate) title "Chief of Cloud", Jim was the right person to demonstrate his company's new cloud-powered high availability and disaster recovery solution.

Jim's Mac laptop was running Centos. He used Xen and Red Hat's Virtual Machine Manager to host a couple of virtual machines representing the web, application, and database tiers of a SugarCRM installation. Each of the guest operating systems was running a copy of the new SIOS CloudStation product. Each copy of CloudStation was configured (using a web-based GUI) to replicate the state of the virtual machine to an Amazon EC2 instance running in a user-selected Region.

Once everything was up and running, Jim showed me how he could selectively kill the local virtual machines while keeping the application running. The demo was designed to feature a very short RPO (Recovery Point Objective) so that changes made locally just seconds before the database was killed were available from the cloud-based virtual mirror. Jim walked me through a number of different failure and recovery scenarios.

It was quite impressive and makes a great demo of the cloud-based DR (Disaster Recovery) and HA (High Availability) that I've been telling my audiences about for the last couple of years. Once configured, CloudStation can fail over from local processing to the cloud, from one cloud region to another, or even from one cloud provider to another. It can also be used as a migration tool, or what is sometimes calls P2V (Physical to Virtual) or P2C (Physical to Cloud).

Read more in the Solution Brief (PDF) or sign up for the March 24th webinar.

-- Jeff;

<-- back to schedule

CloudCamp Rio de Janeiro, Apr 27, 2010

About CloudCamp:

CloudCamp is an unconference where early adopters of Cloud Computing technologies exchange ideas. With the rapid change occurring in the industry, we need a place where we can meet to share our experiences, challenges and solutions. At CloudCamp, you are encouraged to share your thoughts in several open discussions, as we strive for the advancement of Cloud Computing. End users, IT professionals and vendors are all encouraged to participate.

To be organized with Cloud Computing Brazil

Photos from Previous Camps

The avionics system in the F-22 Raptor, the current U.S. Air Force frontline jet fighter, consists of about 1.7 million lines of software code. The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, scheduled to become operational in 2010, will require about 5.7 million lines of code to operate its onboard systems. And Boeing’s new 787 Dreamliner, scheduled to be delivered to customers in 2010, requires about 6.5 million lines of software code to operate its avionics and onboard support systems.

For today’s premium cars, ”the cost of software and electronics can reach 35 to 40 percent of the cost of a car,” states Broy, with software development contributing about 13 to 15 percent of that cost. He says that if it costs US $10 a line for developed software—a cost he says is low—for a premium car, its software alone represents about a billion dollars’ worth of investment.

Platform shifts happen every decade or so in computing. The leaders of the previous generation are rarely successful in dominating the next generation platform. IBM dominated the mainframe business. They didn%u2019t lose their dominance because another company built a better mainframe. They lost it because the market shifted to a new platform%u2026Mini computers. Digital Equipment, Data General, and a few others dominated that market. Another platform shift is happening today, from PCs to Mobile devices, and another industry leader will be left behind. John Herlihy of Google Europe says %u201CIn three years time desktops will be irrelevant%u201D

The future of computing is that your cell phone will become your primary computer, communicator, camera, and entertainment device, all in one. The exciting new applications are running in the browser, with application code and data in the cloud, and the cell phone as a major platform.  I think in the near future there will be docking stations everywhere with a screen and a keyboard. You simply pull out your phone, plug it into the docking station, and instantly all your applications and data are available to you. You can connect to the Internet via your cell phone service, WiFi hotspot, or wired connection.  Your phone will have enough storage so you can decide which applications and data are stored on your phone, and which will be in the cloud. Replication will work seamlessly in the background so that you always have a backup copy of your data in the cloud. Where does that leave the PC industry leaders? Scrambling towards mobile.

Why do leaders fail to adapt? The Innovators Dilemma, made famous by Clayton Christensen, clearly explains why market leaders fail to make the leap. Innovation usually happens at the low end of the market where the products are simple, prices are low, margins thin, and the market totally undefined. The industry leaders have great margins, high prices, and customers who want more features and are willing to pay for them. The industry leaders always move up market and leave the new emerging market to smaller innovators. The process usually follows these 6 steps;

1. The disruptive technology is discovered, often by the market leading company.
2. Marketing people seek reactions from customers and industry analysts.
3. Established companies decide it is a better strategy to speed up the pace of sustaining technical advancement in their own product rather than go down market with the disruptive technology.
4. Start-ups learn about the disruptive technology and see opportunity. They keep their cost structure low, build the technology, and find new markets through trial and error.
5. The start-ups get some initial success and then move up market and eat away customers from the market leading company.
6. The market leading company finally jumps on the bandwagon reluctantly with a half hearted attempt and fails. It is too late.

Giants don%u2019t die quickly %u2013 IBM dominated the mainframe computer business in the 60%u2019s and 70s. They didn%u2019t make the shift to Mini-computers until it was too late. They did finally make the transition from a hardware company to a professional services company and IBM is still a very successful, but different company.  

Digital Equipment, Data General, Hewlett Packard, Sun Microsystems, and others attacked IBM from the low end with Mini-computers and Workstations. They didn%u2019t try to build a better mainframe. They moved the market to lower end, cheaper, faster, computing models. I worked at Digital Equipment in the late 80%u2019s when they had over 130,000 employees and billions in revenue. However, when the platform shift to PCs happened none of these industry leaders made the leap fast enough. None of these companies exist today. (Update) Actually, Hewlett Packard does exist today as HP, and is better known for printers...and PCs.

The platform shift to PCs was ironically started by IBM. However, they quickly lost the lead to Compaq, Dell, and others. The real winner in the PC platform shift was Microsoft. Microsoft dominated the PC software business in the 80s and 90s, and extended that dominance into server software like Windows Server, SQL Server, and Sharepoint. Will Microsoft lose its dominance to a competitor that builds a better desktop Operating System? Some would argue that Apple did with the Mac, but Microsoft still has over 90% market share. Another proof point that market leaders don%u2019t lose their dominance to competitors%u2026they lose it to market shifts. Like IBM, Microsoft will be a financially strong company for many years to come. But, an innovator and industry leader?

Platform shifts have 10X the number of devices and users. The move to Mobile is big and fast. Mary Meeker of Morgan Stanley says Mobile Internet usage is bigger than most people think, and it is exploding. Every platform shift has 10X the number of devices and users. There were about 1M mainframes, 10M mini-computers, 100M PCs, and 1 Billion cell phones. The next wave of mobile devices will be over 10B.

Think about the mobile phone you had in 1999, just a little over 10 years ago. Mine was a Motorola StarTac flip phone. It was state of the art at the time, but it had no camera, no email, no text messaging, no web browsing%u2026just a phone. Now think about where mobile devices will be in 10 years. The iPhone you have today will feel like the StarTac of 10 years ago.

There will be an explosion in mobile bandwidth too. Again, think about the Internet access you had 10 years ago%u2026probably 56K dial up or 128K ISDN. Today broadband is nearly universal. With the roll out of the 700Mhz wireless spectrum over the next 5 years we will see an explosion in mobile bandwidth just like we did from dial up to broadband. This will enable amazing new mobile applications and businesses.

Google%u2019s big bets on the future of computing line up perfectly with the vision of %u201Cexciting new applications are running in the browser (Chrome), with application code and data in the cloud (Gmail, Google Apps, Google App Engine), and the cell phone as a major platform (Android). Oh, and that web search thing looks like it will be big too. :-0

Will history repeat itself? Will the previous platform leaders (PCs) fail to make the leap to lead the new Mobile platform shift? Will it happen in three years? All good questions that are open to debate. The direction seems clear, it is just a matter of time.

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Excellent article – US Manufacturing Is Not Dead…

US Manufacturing is alive and well. The real issue is manufacturing employment, which is dropping like a stone. And the reason for the drop is an increase in productivity.

Read the entire article… or skip to the end…

Here are some general conclusions.

1.) The US still manufactures goods. In fact, the US still manufactures plenty of goods. Take a look at the types of exports in the latest trade data from the Census. It includes exports of industrial supplies, capital goods, autos and consumer goods.

2.) While outsourcing does happen — that is, companies do go overseas to open new factories at the expense of US employees — it is not the primary cause of manufacturing job losses.

3.) Going back to the recent post on employment remember that in this recession the unemployment rate of specific groups was heavily influenced by education level. In fact, according to the BLS, higher education levels (college graduates and above) were remarkably untouched in the latest recession while lower education levels (high school graduates, high school with some secondary education) had higher rates of unemployment. Lower levels of education are typically associated with manufacturing and construction employment — the two areas of jobs that account for the largest percentage of job losses in this recession.

US manufacturing would be greatly helped by two developments.

First, China needs to float its currency. A country that has 10% GDP growth but little currency appreciation is obviously manipulating its currency’s value to a high degree. Given China’s growth rate, investors should be flocking to China driving up the yuan’s value. That is not happening. A real free-floating currency would cure a lot of the trade deficit problems.

Secondly, there have been calls for a US industrial policy — that is, for Washington to essentially “pick winners and losers” by promoting some industries that they feel have a high probability of success. Asian countries have been doing this for years with remarkable success and it is a policy which we clearly need to copy. I’m a big promoter of nano-technology, alternative energy and stem cell research, but those are just my choices. There are plenty others out there that would also make sense.