A nice white paper on the differences between different large scale computing technology is available over at GridBus, The Grid Computing and Distributed Systems (GRIDS) Laboratory at the University of Melbourne.
The white paper provides a lot of information, including some more detailed information on the differences between the different massively-scalable computing systems, and how the current IT climate is ultimately proceeding towards the cloud computing infrastructure.
One of the problems that cloud computing is trying to solve is the issue of dealing with capacity planning for companies and the services that they offer. Current datacenters for individual companies, and where relevant, for entire websites, are designed to cope with a particular peak load.
There are lots of discussions going on right now about cloud computing is, I even touched on at least some aspects of that last week. This story at Slashdot touched on the issue, and the Cloud Computing GoogleGroup is full of the discussion. But I feel there isn’t enough definition of what it isn’t. So here’s a list of what I think:
So far, cloud computing has been a solely Unix, and more frequently Linux, affair. There are some good reasons for this, generally Linux is easy to deploy, easy to copy and quick to update and reconfigure, all vital capabilities when you want to quickly clone and duplicate your host environments across tens or hundreds of hosts.
I’m late following up on my previous X4150 thoughts – I can blame conferences for that at least – but I shouldn’t shirk my responsibilities.
It is very difficult, from a buyers perspective, to decide what that sweet spot is in terms of buying hardware. The current computer market, and more importantly the current computer climate, has completely changed the way that we look at buying computers.
I seem to have been doing more conferences and meetings than anything else this year, and it's always fascinating to keep an ear out for what the latest buzz word.
Right now, it is cloud computing, but it is remarkable just how many people are using for a huge range of topics that may, or may not, be what others consider to be cloud computing.
I heard from an old friend of mine today who is, once again, having trouble with the people managing his computers. As a hotel owner, he doesn’t have the technical ability to manage his own machines, so he has to rely on the services of external computer experts.
But these so-called experts are continuing to cause him stress. He is on his sixth company so far and thought, having had them recommend by his local government business development department, that this latest team would be reliable.
For the past few months I’ve had the Sun X4150 on a long term test and I’ve been throwing a wide range of different applications and problems at it to see what breaks.
As I’ve mentioned before, my test unit has two quad core Xeon CPUs, 16GB of RAM and four 76GB SAS drives, and it saps about the same amount of power as a T1000, that is, in terms of the electrical power required to run the machine. But it is, in fact, a significantly more capable machine in some respects, albeit for a different target audience and range of applications.
For the past 15 years I’ve been using multiple email addresses to try and separate up my email automatically. I have a main email account, one for developing, another for purchases, and another for mailing lists and so on.
Originally this was to try and keep the email addresses that would be low-priority out of my main inbox. It also helped to keep the spam low by ensuring that I had email addresses that were never publicized anywhere, keeping their content relatively clean.
For the past 15 years I’ve been using multiple email addresses to try and separate up my email automatically. I have a main email account, one for developing, another for purchases, and another for mailing lists and so on.
Originally this was to try and keep the email addresses that would be low-priority out of my main inbox. It also helped to keep the spam low by ensuring that I had email addresses that were never publicized anywhere, keeping their content relatively clean.