I’m at Gartner’s business continuity management summit (BCM2) this week, and my second talk, upcoming later this morning, is on the relevance of colocation and cloud computing (i.e., do-it-yourself external solutions) to disaster recovery.
My recent written research has been all focused on cloud, although plenty of my day to day client time has been dealing [...]
Entries from April 2009
Recent research
April 29th, 2009 · No Comments
Tags: Infrastructure
Next round, Akamai vs. Limelight
April 27th, 2009 · No Comments
In CDN news this past weekend, a judge has overturned the jury verdict in the Akamai vs. Limelight patent infringement case. Akamai has said it intends to appeal.
The judge cited Muniauction v. Thomson Corp. as the precedent for a judgement of law, which basically says that if you have a method claim in a patent [...]
Tags: Infrastructure
McKinsey on cloud computing
April 16th, 2009 · 3 Comments
McKinsey is claiming, in a report called Clearing the Air on Cloud Computing, that cloud infrastructure (specifically Amazon EC2) is as much as 150% more expensive than in-house data center infrastructure (specifically a set of straw-man assumptions given by McKinsey).
In my opinion, McKinsey’s report lacks analytical rigor. They’ve crunched down all data center costs to [...]
Tags: Infrastructure
You are not dating your vendor
April 16th, 2009 · 1 Comment
One of the ongoing refrains of the analyst job is listening to clients gripe, day in and day out, about the things they don’t like about their vendors. Sometimes these things are niggling annoyances. Sometimes, though, these things are rage-inducing, or, in clients who tend to take everything calmly in stride, at least a distinct [...]
Tags: Industry
DDoS season
April 13th, 2009 · No Comments
We are, it seems, in the midst of a wave of distributed denial of service attacks. The victims include: Neustar’s UltraDNS. (Problems with specific regional DNS clusters, with little customer-visible impact.) Register.com. (Severe impact on Web hosting and email customers.) GoGrid. (Severe impact on cloud hosting customers.) ThePlanet. (Attack on their [...]
Tags: Infrastructure
Google App Engine and other tidbits
April 8th, 2009 · 1 Comment
As anticipated, Java support on Google App Engine has been announced. To date, GAE has supported only the Python programming language. In keeping with the “phenomenal cosmic power, itty bitty living space” sandboxing that’s become common to cloud execution environments, GAE/Java has all the restrictions of GAE/Python. However, the already containerized nature of Java applications [...]
Tags: Infrastructure
Scala, Ruby, cost, and development trends
April 6th, 2009 · 2 Comments
A recent interview of some Twitter developers, on Twitter’s use of Scala has touched off a fair amount of controversy in the Ruby community, and prompting Todd Hoff of the High Scalability to muse on an interesting statement: At some point, the cost of servers outweighs the cost of programmers.
We all know that the scripting [...]
Tags: Infrastructure