Archive for the 'Technology' Category

IDC Virtualization Forum West - Eastwood Keynote

Published
by
Brian Berliner
on April 8, 2008
in Software, Technology and Virtualization
. 0 Comments

I attended the IDC Virtualization Forum West 2008 conference today. It was kicked off by Matthew Eastwood of IDC. He shared some of the IDC analysis of the virtualization markets.

Some takeaways that I found interesting:

  • Worldwide IT Spending on Servers + Power + Cooling currently at about $55 Billion annually.
  • Data centers continue to grow with new server purchases annually (and relatively fewer servers retired annually, so absolute growth appears to never end).
  • Server Management & Admin costs are rising at 4x the rate of new server acquisition growth, while Power & Cooling is growing at 8x the rate.
  • Number of Rack “U” used annually increases 25x to 15.4 Million servers - this is 365,000 racks representing $15 Billion, with an additional $30 Billion going to Power & Cooling requirements.
  • IDC conducted a survey where they asked IT customers about their interest in “Green Data Centers”. Result, with n=191, was that 37% would Favor A Green Supplier, 51% thought Green would Help With Compliance, and 81% felt that Green Strategies would help to reduce OPEX.

So, lots of discussion about the need for Green data centers, and the huge amount of Power and Cooling costs that directly affect operating expense. A dynamic and adaptable data center can provide for a green data center - one that can power servers down when they are not needed, performing dynamic server consolidation based on business process needs. In fact, that’s what Cassatt’s Active Power Management and Active Response products do.

Go save the planet. Or, at least increase your corporation’s earnings. That’s important too.

Disclosure: I am a Founder and shareholder of Cassatt.



At IDC Virtualization Forum West Conference

Published
by
Brian Berliner
on April 7, 2008
in Software, Startups, Technology and Virtualization
. 0 Comments

image I will be attending the IDC Virtualization Forum West conference tomorrow.

Many thanks to Simon Crosby (formerly of XenSource, now with Citrix) for the invitation.

If you will also be there and would like to chat, please drop me a line.

I’ll follow-up here with some of the interesting takeaways.

Some Nice Scalr Follow-Ups

Published
by
Brian Berliner
on April 3, 2008
in Open Source, Software and Technology
. 0 Comments

Just ran across a couple of good follow-ups to my article on Scalr: One done by the awesome Amazon Web Services team, and the other done by the kick-ass team at TechCrunch. Glad to see the Scalr project getting some good coverage. Let’s rally around this and make it great!

SugarSync Responds To Negative Pricing Coverage

Published
by
Brian Berliner
on April 3, 2008
in Mobile, Software, Startups and Technology
. 2 Comments

In my article about Sharpcast and their recently released SugarSync product, one of my key criticisms was the fact that the service was priced too high. It appears that I was not alone. Sharpcast has cut their prices in half in response. From their Pricing page:

Looking for the Founders’ Circle (50% off) pricing information? As of April 1, 2008, the Founders’ Circle promotional pricing is our new ongoing, everyday low price, as reflected below. We have listened to your feedback and are excited to offer you the best value possible.

imageSharpcast apparently rolled out the price cut quietly. I would not have known about it had I not read a review by Walt Mossberg (cross-referenced here) which stated the lower price point. I was sure that Walt had it wrong. But, he did not. The price for the service has dropped.

Good for them.

I think they should continue to listen to their "customers". Of course, it seems odd that they would not have known that they were too pricey the week before when they launched. Oh well. Better late than never.

The other thing that surprised me from  Walt’s review was that the much-touted SugarSync Mobile client actually doesn’t sync modified documents:

The cellphone versions can only view photos and whatever documents the phones allow, but changes you make on the phones in documents other than photos aren’t synced back to the computers or to the Web site.

In addition, SugarSync can’t synchronize Microsoft Outlook files and it can’t, say, replicate a new calendar entry or contact change across your computers.

I get that it doesn’t handle contacts and calendar information. It just deals with files. But, customers certainly would be interested in having a single "sync" solution for their entire mobile device that works Over The Air. But my guess is that this would be too de-focusing for SugarSync at this time.

My Maxtor Hard Disk Clunks To Death

Published
by
Brian Berliner
on April 3, 2008
in Mac OS X and Technology
. 0 Comments

imageWhen your disk drive starts making loud, squealing noises when you first turn it on… That’s a sign.

When your disk drive starts making clicking noises as if it were a metronome… That’s a sign.

When your disk drive starts throwing I/O Errors to the console… That’s a sign.

When your disk drive no longer mounts its volume… That’s a sign.

Yeah - A sign that your disk is about to die or is already dead.

That’s what happened to my Time Machine disk that is attached to my Apple iMac desktop computer. It was a 750GB Maxtor One Touch III, purchased just 7 months ago.

The Good News is that it was just my backup drive and not my primary drive. My primary drive is a 1TB disk, as shipped by Apple, and thankfully has hummed along perfectly. So, I could keep working.

The Bad News is that you are no longer making hourly backups, and all of your Time Machine backups are no longer available, so you are completely exposed. I.e., I need a Time Machine backup disk for my Time Machine disk! Or, multiple Time Machine volumes (if that’s possible?)…

So, I surf over to the Seagate/Maxtor site and check the warranty coverage. The disk has a 1-year warranty, so I’m good since I bought it about 7 months ago. The warranty process is very streamlined at Maxtor - completely hands-off and web-based. I was given the choice of paying $20 for expedited replacement (two-day shipping), or a free replacement that could take a couple of weeks (I would have to send in my disk first, then get one back through slow mail).

I like my backups, so I chose the $20 option, and the disk arrived 3 days later (submitted the form on Sunday night, it was processed and shipped on Monday, and arrived on Wednesday).

It took all night (about 10 hours) to re-sync my Time Machine backups. About 1,256,435 files in 600GB of data. I was quite surprised to see that I’ve got over a million files… Hmm.

Ah, I feel safe again.

New LinkedIn Feeds Work For Me

Published
by
Brian Berliner
on March 31, 2008
in Personal, Startups and Technology
. 0 Comments

I must admit that I’m finding some clear networking value in the newly releasedLinkedIn RSS feeds.

You can get Public feeds from LinkedIn Answers (which I don’t care about), or a Personal feed of your Network Updates (which I very much care about). Here’s the announcement.

From the Home page while logged in to LinkedIn, click on the subscribe link next to the Network Updates.

Then, read it with your favorite news/feed reader. Mine’s Google Reader.

Makes it easy to snoop keep up with the connections happening in your network of friends & associates.

Enjoy!

Tags: LinkedIn, RSS, Feeds, Google Reader, Brian Berliner, brianberliner

Scalr - Open Source Framework For Scalable EC2 Deployments

Published
by
Brian Berliner
on March 31, 2008
in Open Source, Software and Technology
. 1 Comment

I’ve written quite a few stories about Amazon Web Services, including their EC2 and S3 offerings. They are heading in the right direction toward utility computing in the cloud. I’m definitely a fan.

My most recent article highlighted how Amazon now allows you to use Static IP addresses with your hosted services - a clear step toward true, secure hosting in the cloud.

Of course, it’s still the wild west out there, and you do have to roll your own EC2 management and deployment services. Amazon gives you API’s to do this, but it’s still work and testing.

Enter Scalr:

Scalr is a fully redundant, self-curing and self-scaling hosting environment utilizing Amazon’s EC2.

It allows you to create server farms through a web-based interface using prebuilt AMI’s for load balancers (pound or nginx), app servers (apache, others), databases (mysql master-slave, others), and a generic AMI to build on top of.

Very cool. The project is very young yet, but they are going in the right direction (building easily scalable application tiers).

This project appears to be supported by Intridea.

Tags: Open Source, Scalr, Amazon, EC2, S3, Utility Computing, Scalability, Intridea, GPL, Brian Berliner, brianberliner

Sony Vaio UX Running Mac OS X At The Hockey Game!

Published
by
Brian Berliner
on March 28, 2008
in Entertainment, Gadgets, Mac OS X, Mobile and Technology
. 0 Comments

So, I’m at the Sharks hockey game last night, and I notice a guy a couple rows in front of me using a Sony Vaio UX Micro PC. Hey, it’s the Bay Area. People bring high-tech gadgets to hockey games. That’s just how we roll out here.

No big deal, right?

Well, I look a bit closer, and the device appears to be running Mac OS X! WTF?

Furthermore, the Dock appears to be a Leopard Dock, not a Tiger Dock, so I think the device is running Mac OS X 10.5, even…

Geeks.

Sheesh.

Of course, then I get a pang of jealousy.

After all, it is a 1.2 pound device running Leopard…

Geeks (including me).

Sheesh.

Poking around on Google, I find an old article about getting Mac OS X (which they call Mac OSuX for this device) on the Sony Vaio UX. Lots of scary stuff in there. Just get a Macbook Air. The picture above is from jkOnTheRun (i.e., is not a picture of the guy a couple rows in front of me).

So, you know what this means?

It means that you can develop iPhone applications on your mobile phone!

Only in the Bay Area…

Tags: Sony, Vaio, Sony Vaio UX, Micro PC, Apple, Mac OS X, Leopard, Tiger, Mac OS, iPhone SDK, Brian Berliner, brianberliner

Universal Parallel Computing Research Center

Published
by
Brian Berliner
on March 27, 2008
in Software, Startups, Technology and Venture Capital
. 0 Comments

 

My good friend and advisor, Dave Patterson, has been selected to lead the Universal Parallel Computing Research Center at UC Berkeley.

Patterson has been an advisor for three of the startup companies that I have founded. He’s a great guy and has a brilliant mind. He has a knack for doing research with immensely practical applications. He gets ahead of problems in Computer Science, and addresses them with the end result in mind. I just can’t say enough nice things about him. Brilliant.

The UPCRC is a joint venture between UC Berkeley and University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, funded by Intel and Microsoft. These two universities will spend the next 5 years trying to figure out how we build computing systems that can fully utilize the coming wave of multicore and manycore systems.

This is absolutely critical stuff.

Take a look at some of the coverage:

This is a very interesting project to me, and I will be writing more about it later. Why? Well:

  • I know David Patterson well, and have always admired his work
  • I am a graduate of the UIUC Computer Science department
  • Much of my career has been spent on HPC and supercomputer systems
  • Multicore and manycore systems are coming. You can’t stop it or deny it. There’s a solid reason why Intel and Microsoft are sponsoring this research.
  • I’ve been thinking about this topic of late.

You will absolutely hear more from me about this.

Tags: UPCRC, David Patterson, University of Illinois, UIUC, UC Berkeley, Intel, Microsoft, HPC,Parallel, Multicore, Manycore, Brian Berliner, brianberliner

BeInSync Synchronizes With Phoenix Technologies

Published
by
Brian Berliner
on March 27, 2008
in Software, Startups, Technology and Venture Capital
. 0 Comments

image In the last couple of weeks, I’ve talked about the file synchronization market. Products and companies like FolderShare, Dropbox, Syncplicity, and Sharpcast.

In a timely moment, BeInSync has been acquired by Phoenix Technologies for $25M. TechCrunch covers it well.

BeInSync looks to be most similar to Sharpcast’s SugarSync product in terms of functionality. Sharpcast has support for Mobile devices, while BeInSync does not. BeInSync may only work on Windows (no Mac) in fact. BeInSync charges $39.95 for 50GB of storage per year, while SugarSync charges $199.99 for 60GB of storage per year. BeInSync certainly has the more attractive price!

I must admit that I don’t fully get why Phoenix Technologies was interested, except that Woody Hobbs, current President/CEO and previous President/CEO of IntelliSync, clearly knows what he’s looking for.

And, the $25M price tag can’t be sitting well with the Sharpcast folks, since they’ve already taken down $16.5M in VC money. Sharpcast would need a significantly higher exit for an acquisition to make financial sense.