Virtualization, Consumers, Networks, No Spin

A small company of 9 people called 37signals.com has a base of over 2,000,000 customers using one of their lead collaborative products. The company's excelled at "Goldilocks" design:not burdening software products with too much function.

From their blog at http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/749-ask-37signals-numbers

Overall storage stats (Nov 2007)

• 5.9 terabytes of customer-uploaded files
• 888 GB files uploaded (900,000 requests)
• 2 TB files downloaded (8,500,000 requests)

They're going Xen, and reducing the number of servers by a little more than half.

What's more: they're a poster child for Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3).

Now, there's Google moving in this storage space, plus new players in the scrum, such as Nirvanix, and the Cleversafe, and who knows what that could be spun out from projects like (US) National LambdaRail.

Consumers

For a current project, looking to use "in the cloud" storage to host multimedia consumer "objects" and also musing upon the potential of little gadgets like iPod Touch to hold 10 hours of video with a price tag for the "1.0" of $300 US (which is, I think, about 80 Loonies this week). Since there's going to be a goat rodeo in producing content and control mechanisims for versioning and etc..... it becomes likely that we'll serve the content itself on an external network.

I'm lobbying for the Storage as a Super Hierarchy (wait for it: StaaSH) involving nothin' but net.

Life's too short.

Virtualization

Meanwhile, I keep looking at virtualization, and virtual tape. Spoke with a friend or two, and the interactivity of virtualization and de dupe starts to get interesting. I'm also of the opinion that no one would by choice run down the road of short tape for their application given the (wave hands) shifting cost curves of spinning drives, and especially considering the growth of solid state drives (I know, I know....) but in recognition also of nano tech showing up in what now..... 14 months.

So, my conjecture is that if one approached the problem set as a greenfield exercise, the pressure's very much in favor of non removable, and probably, non spinning media sooner rather than later. I'd be very interested in anyone's "fully burdened" cost analysis of this tech over time.

We used to have pizza boxes and pickles in the data center.....

No Spin

Spring Peepers Awake

Just a quick note that on this day, the Spring Peepers have started up.

Chakra and Feng Shui of Site Privacy and FCC Policy

I dunno.... maybe its the haze of the pork roast slices I grilled off for a whupass stew that's now biling in the oven.... but I swear like I truly saw an insightful piece in [here] and when I clicked the thingie was taken to a page that began:

"Our site visitors’ privacy and trust are important to us. We provide this notice in order to make sure that your expectations and our practices are aligned, and that you are aware of your choices with regard to our use and disclosure of the information you provide to this site."

1. The policies are even more important to me, t'ellwith "us".

2. Aligned expectations and practices? Oh for the love of....

I'm too unaligned with damn few chakras left these days, and the colors I'm projecting just are purely inconsistent with Feng Shui best practices.

In any event, upon careful reading (ty to the coffee now kickin in) I found the piece to be a rehash of things already published regarding the flat out goofy practices of collecting user data for broadband by zip code (which has the approximate granularity and utility of keeping mosquitos off of the porch with chicken wire) plus an attempt to define broadband with 2meg down, 1meg up as a starting point.


So, in the great blogging tradition, this is a string of ad hominem, invective, and futile musings with no discernable purpose.

Time to go stir the slow cookin good eats.

Happy Christmas & Best

1977 by God

A wanker old friend today had the temerity to suggest I lived in a situation involving a 1966 Ford Pickup with further vile and presumptive opprobrium in reference to the Southern End of Illinois.


This beauty is from 1977 with extensive customization (sort of a security feature, when you think about it.... plus there's no gas tank since July 2007).

Black Friday Haiku.... New Storage Demands

1Gig MP3 Player At Discount Chain $30
20Gb Local ISP "data backup" $ 600 USD/Year
40 Gb Google extra storage $75 USD/Year

Not a very large sample, but thecreation and consumerization of the datasphere's happening apace. Time to dust off the "evergreen" plan and consider the innovation rate plus (for the non rural consumer) improving network speeds.

This may be old news but... several companies (my own employer included) in the days after 9/11 successfully restored the formal data and resumed operations.

The informal data, PDAs, rollodex, abandoned or destroyed laptops, etc. held the heart and soul of relationship information comprising customer contact info and the aggregation of information, most of it informal.

BOHICA, folks.

The complexity and pure units x density calculations will be hitting infrastructures across industries.And from the (rigorous!) pricing example above, the growth of ubiquitous personal and informal data, showing up on iPods, digital photo frames, compliance logs of videoconferences or morning calls, security systems, entertainment....

Well, disruptive would be a mild term.