This was originally written on March 6, 2006.
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A colleague sent this article on virtualization to me today. This is not the first virtualization-related piece of information to come across my desk today either. There are also calls to customers, calls from vendors, and other pleasantries. The main point of the article talks about different strategies for increasing “yield” from a cubic foot of data center space.
The comparison to agriculture is apt, I believe, since for our society information generation, storage, and retrieval mirrors the concerns of agricultural societies in years and millennia past. Data Centers are our fields and granaries, and the network is the road between our towns, those fields, granaries, mills, and bakeries - replaced by online communities, data centers, SANs, database and application servers, and web servers respectively. What data center managers are going through now is similar to the “closing of the frontier” thesis by Turner.
As a result of the closing of the frontier, several significant changes occurred. As the availability of free land was basically exhausted … At the closing of the frontier, we entered a period of concentration — of capital, as with monopolies and trusts — and of labor, responding with unions and cooperation.
We can theorize, that as opportunity to add thousands of square feet of space for data center use becomes exhausted, people actually have to turn to concentrating - or consolidating - their resources for more productivity. Similarly, we power expenditures for running the CPUs and the disks, and power to cool them as well rising proportional to the density and amount of used space, and rising again as the cost per unit of power has increased by 50 or more percent over the last 2 years, managers better be getting something worthwhile from all those boxes. Suddenly, it is not longer possible to just “add a box” to a rack. Like modern agriculture, the “yield” from all these machines must be watered with power, and fertilized with efficient allocations and management.
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There are a lot of rules in photography, and one of the biggest temptations for people is to “break” them. Pretty much always, for pretty much anyone that is a bad idea. Much like driving @ 200 Mph is a bad idea for most people most of the time… Sometimes one does come across compositions and executions that break rules on purpose to good effect. That is rare, but here is one photograph that does this well:
I am never quite sure whether it is alright to repost someone else’s images. In this case, it was posted to a website with no subscription, and I am providing the link to the original post and serve the image directly from the server… To be absolutely clear - I did not take this image. As if this was not obvious already
Meng writes:
“I don’t think I’m going to need iPhoto any more. I have fallen in love with Adobe LightRoom.
Joining the ranks of other DSLR snobs, I will henceforth shoot in RAW, not JPG. “
I have also been on a Lightroom tear for the last month or so. Few weeks ago I had a chance to really try it out during a trip, with a hundreds of [poor] pictures shot over a couple of days - and I have not been so impressed with photo software … ever.
Photoshop is awesome, of course, but it really does not do much for management of the photos. Adobe Bridge has been horrible for years, but I think its recent improvements (with Photoshop CS2) are negligible compared to Lightroom.
Adobe finally got the separation between shoots and collections which are obvious to photographers, but for some reason not to those who create photo management applications for them. Cannot wait until it is fully integrated into Adobe RAW/Photoshop and has more full-featured version control. Ever since I started shooting RAW a year ago, I had problems with my old workflow and could not find a new one that worked. Lighroom finally lets me easily keep my initial files where they are, and create collections from each shoot that can be sent to family and friends, or merged into more specific “portfolio” collections. Now I just need to figure out what to do with the 90GB or existing photos which are already stored according to my old system…
Some of the nicer things about Lightroom compared to other systems:
- implicit understanding RAW and non-destructive editing workflows
- clean separation between shoots and post-shoot categorization
- transparent file structure — no proprietary databases I can not synch between my many backup hard drives and machines, at least as far as files themselves are concerned (not sure about keyword and other info)
- smart control for gauges, and still ability to just type in values everywhere
- fast - even for RAW (especially for RAW!)
- small touches that show understanding of the paranoid photographer’s mind. Such as the ability to immediately copy imported photos to another location as the import goes on. This creates a backup right away, even as files are been copied off the camera or memory card. Easy to do, but so many tools do not seem to get it…
A previous post on this site had a few comments about the different pieces of software I use. All of them have now been replaced with Lightroom.
Preamble: I wrote this a while ago, and moved it to this blog in draft mode. It is being republished because… I do not have time to write anything new. Comments welcome.
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Starting point for ruminations was this - IBM Recruiting ISVs, Partners to SAAS:
Viewing the software-as-a-service market as a major new-growth industry, IBM is offering a package of services and incentives to help software companies and channel partners deploy their products as hosted applications.
IBM is looking for a wave to catch to vault it over Sungard and other, smaller, companies specializing in hosting company’s backup servers and data. It is worthwhile, I think, to look at the generalizing principle on software-as-a-service (SAAS). What are its implications from a resiliency and continuity perspective?
For starters, SAAS goes beyond the now well-understood Application Service Provider (ASP) model. ASP implies that an application, usually one which covers at least one complete business process, is hosted by a service company rather than an internal IT department. From a computing perspective there is often little difference. After all, most large and medium-sized companies today have widely distributed IT deployments and most users do not know whether the web application they are using is coming to them from a data center 3 floors above or 3 thousand miles away. So what does it matter whether someone else is running a web server instead of your organization? Better organized resiliency programs certainly take this outsourcing into account when creating plans, treating ASPs as critical vendors as much as someone else supplying financial data or iron ore might be.
SAAS is a slightly different beast. One can think of an ASP provider as an implementation of SAAS, providing that “service” in SAAS in fairly large and monolithic chunks. But it need not remain that way. What if a SAAS provider is someone like former hitbox, providing a very specialized service of web analytics, or qualys continuously searching your network for vulnerabilities. In both cases, data might be downloaded and analyzed by a tool hosted by some other 3rd party, or internally. This software service is now provided as a small part of an overall business process, and may not even be known to the business unit as a component of the process that is provided by an outside vendor. To re-use the examples of services in this paragraph, we can consider the following scenario for web analytics:
IT Department provides traffic report and analysis to all departments in the enterprise. Most likely 90% of the department could not care less about the accuracy and granularity of the results. Marketing; however, is an exception. While it carefully tracks website usage all the time, a day-long outage of analytics would not be a major problem unless it coincides with a test run of a new marketing campaign. At which point and to which internal customers should IT direct an awareness campaign of the outside vendors it is using for the moment? Once a service become part of the enterprise services, their origin becomes largely transparent to the business level consumers of the service. It is worth noting that for most services only a small number of users will have a critical need of it. How should vendors be now evaluated for reliability and contracts structured?
Previously, when a department wanted to use an ASP both that business unit and IT would be involved in the evaluation process. However, SAAS will now allow both IT and business units to go it alone. That’s where things can start falling through the planning cracks since a lot of the services may not be part of the primary impact analysis process. In our scenario Marketing may not be aware that web analytics is separate from web server maintenance, and IT may not know that its outsourced analytics service is critical to some group - in this case Marketing - 3 weeks out of the year.
Similarly to how cheap Windows and Linux servers proliferated in workgroups a few years ago, cheap and transparent services will have a huge impact on how applications and business processes are assembled and executed in the future. Different providers may even be used for similar process steps in various locations or processes across the enterprise. How should customers reconcile their needs for efficient and cost-effective services with an increasingly flexible software services environment? One way, of course, is for an organization to forbid the casual use of outside software services and require than any allowed uses go through a rigorous evaluation process for each service, with clearly identified IT and business level integration points and fully performed cost-benefit analysis. That would work to keep smaller service vendors out, but they are also the most innovative ones.
Another way is for someone like IBM to step in. Salesforce is already doing something similar with its AppExchange, and I think other players are gearing up. IBM has an advantage over Salesforce and others, such as SAP or Oracle in that it has a much more independent platform. IBM can become, effectively, a guarantor of a service, whether it was developed by them or not. By providing the infrastructure, IBM can make sure the basic hosting things go well - such as service uptime, bandwidth, power, etc. Furthermore, IBM can host the same service in different configurations - critical for Marketing and delayed for other department, for example. Its market power would require service vendors to certify their products for stability and scalability, and remove the uncertainty from customers of dealing with a small and unknown entity. Organizations could then provide business rules for department to use, or at least test services, provided they comply with certain requirements - certified by IBM, and are hosted by a reliable vendor - such as IBM. At some point a need to both a certified host and certifying authority will become too strong not to produce a whole sub-industry. Currently, Accentures & Delloite’s of the world have the lead on certifying implementations (information security, for example). However, IBM already has a host of certification programs for its WebSphere Catalogue, as well as Ready for Virtualization and others relevant to organizational resiliency. Moreover, IBM has the ability the Accenture and its ilk lack of becoming insourced not only at the customer level, but vendor level as well. What that means is that vendors could develop services and solutions concentrating on their core competencies, not peripheral requirements of hosting an on-demand software service, for example.
As someone who works for a small vendor, I know that I would not very excited about having to build up a tremendous amount of infrastructure and support capabilities instead of farther developing our product. We did what we needed to do for our customers, but the less we have to do of things we have no competitive advantage in, the more value-added activities we can engage in. I am sure many other vendors feel the same way, and I think a lot of customers would be much happier if they could both easily use innovative services and have world-class hosting support to guarantee the robustness of that service.
