Rural Telecommunications: No Dial Tone

During the recent ice storm, turns out that the telco central office to the south of me does not have a permanent power generator (UPS). They had to truck in a generator on a truck. Apparently, people were quite well up the creek; one institution was effectively out of service for two days.

Bilbo! 'sup?

Just got power back here (ice storm, my woods went going off like rifle shots last night, my 125 pound dog skidded off front porch, and just got coffee at noon here).

Client to my south is MIA: the entire chunk of the state 10 miles south of me still goes without power. Could be a ton worse, I know.

It’s Tuesday, and I may have the truck chipped open by Thursday.

Regarding Virtual Tape I'm trying to find some kind of angle on it that hasn't been taken in before. Going back to some stuff I wrote earlier, I don't know that anyone would go into a tape environment if they didn't have existing backup software that expected to work with tape. Legacy apps hold back some of the transition.

The industry seems to consolidate towards Disk To Disk To Tape now; I'm trying to get to some true Disk Wallah friends to get better interpretation of that particular issue *but* seems that at least with that middle tier of disk I may be able to do more of the dedupe optimization because I don't have to muck with the serial access of the tape media.

I don't want to proclaim tape is dead, but it surely seems, from reading the "talking heads" usual suspects out there in the analyst community that it has really transformed: what matters is the virtual, not the tape. Still smelling intrinsic lock in, (so what, like, get a manager application to manage the manager manager application?) and there are many extant rants about the "who runs this" and unhappy back doors into the system to enable features like "if 2+2=5 then 2+2=5" kinds of kludges.

"One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them" as Tolkien wrote.

I'm all over the caveats for the emptors, and suggest a vigorous scrubbing of any proposal to ensure that total costs and operational implications are walked through in detail. Something has to be "running" the infrastructure with assurance of the integrity of the data. De Dupe could be the planner who really doesn't game it out. I, truly, glaze over and turn to the serious people with scars and pocket protectors. My sense though is that tape fades: spinning moves to solid state, and even solid state becomes ephemeral with nano and finer grained media. The Virtual Tape business has saved millions of dollars (dozens of Loonies at today's rate) and solves a serious problem by abstracting the media, to a great extent, from the implementation. But a full model of "the business" can work wonders.

Think “The Sims” for Storage.

So maybe I should just post this? Another tree broke, dog is needy.

Failed US Rural Broadband Policy

I posted a shorter version of this comment at the Chronicle of Higher Education in response to their article "Government Report Lauds Broadband Progress."

The two reports discussed are:

• “Networked Nation: Broadband in American, 2007” (pdf) by the National Telecommunications And Information Administration (NTIA) and

• "A Blueprint For Big Broadband"presented by EDUCAUSE at the recent "State of The Net" Congressional Conference

Poor, Known Faulty Sample Method Used

The NTIA report continues to rely upon illogical survey information for broadband: five digit zip codes.

In rural areas, some zip codes cover large areas, but if the respondent at the edge of a city with broadband can say “yep, I got broadband,” that entire zip code counts as having broadband service.

This sampling defect is well known and has been a point of annoyance for policy makers who understand the desire to game the system.

US Rural: Slow Deployment, Low Penetration, Stifled Innovation

With reference to regional and rural economic development, educational facilities here (in Southern Illinois) quickly find the limitations of broadband infrastructure. It’s minimal, and localized, at best, and expectations have been worn down by the incumbents.

Rural broadband is essential to sustainable, self sufficient, United States economies. Not sufficient, but certainly necessary.

This NTIA report will, unfortunately, be used as a rebuttal to those trying to make for rural change.

Those who tout its statistics should note that it is a lampoon of good policy, the data are blurred, and the myth of “competitive market solutions” continue apace.

The changes are coming, but the innovation seems to come from upstarts; the incumbent providers apparently move only when threatened.

Educause Report Substantiates Failed US Policy

EDUCAUSE raises good points vis a vis relative US position, but the emphasis (from my own self interest!) is not so much the 100Mb services as the need to get deployments of above 1Mb services, at a minimum, into the “flyover country” and economically depressed towns.

Netflix, for example, needs at least 1.0 Mb for good video quality, with best quality at 1.5+ Mb services.

But the use of a network adds value to all the connected.

These higher speeds will enable new educational models, new business forms, and new sources of entertainment on demand. Applications (payroll, hr, product catalogs, customer relationship information, health records) are becoming more a Service In The Cloud, and designers are improving the effectiveness of "local" and "distant" cooperative applications.

A small business can deliver much of its own infrastructure as a service reached across a reliable, high capacity, network.

Apple continues to drive innovation in the educational segment: iTunes U delivers digital content for free to students from Kindergarten and up. Apple provides free materials for "how to do this" type of education. But this all depends upon a robust ubiquitous broadband network into the communities served.

And we in the rural parts of the world haven't got that network yet, although this was promised in deals made back in the mid 1990s in exchange for "deregulation".

Poppycock.

And the network latency of many "well you could do this" proposed solutions of EDGE, satellite, etc. is a fable best told to the illiterate.

Of course, the further parts of the guile includes capacity lids for numbers of bits passed through the network to "protect the infrastructure". Balderdash.

Market Failure

Because of the low population density of the rural US, providers using old school thinking and relying upon old economic models give a great example of “market failure”; precisely the sorts of conditions which drove rural electrification and taxes for “Universal Service” for the regulated Bell monopoly.

The relief may well come from initiatives that resemble the TVA/REA works and rural electric coops. By other measures in the news these days, history seems to be repeating itself in other ways as well.

Nonetheless, when my neighbor's copper wire from the road to the house broke, the local telco rolled out a truck and crew to replace the copper wire with.... more copper wire. Three times. Not the crew's fault, but it is a grand example of failed policy. Give those telcos out here the Hobgoblin award.

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.