Billing for Clouds

When considering the some of the issues related to building private clouds, the “Usage to Billing” problem was raised and I was reminded of Emlyn Pagden’s Blueprint, “The Utility Model PII” 2003. I had been consulting with a mid sized European Investment Bank, and discussed the architectural problem with them, and Emlyn. Its a while since I have read Emlyn’s paper, but he took the architectural decomposition,  …

Talking about Cloud Computing

The current technical state of systems, storage and networking and specifically the cost of broad band networking has created a tipping point. Over the last 10 years, organisations and people have been learning to build new distributed computing server complexes. It may be too late to copy the leaders, but certain design criteria and the regulatory constraints may mean that there is a slower commercial adoption cycle. Other factors are making the adoption of cloud compelling and this blog article looks at some of them.  …

Sun M9000, the fastest SAP platform

Back in Brussels for a NESSI meeting, the SAP delegate is new and points me to Sun’s M9000 SAP Benchmark results which puts Sun at No. 1 again, although for how long who knows. There’s no doubt that the SPARC 64 CPU is great and that the M-Series systems are mighty systems. On a slightly more measured, and affordable note, Joerg Moellenkamp wrote about SAP Benchmarks on the X4600 yesterday. …

Beyond Concalls

I have been looking at ways of making virtual meetings easier, more effective and fun. As part of that I have looked again at secondlife, and one of my new correspondents pointed me at “The future is virtually here”. This, despite being published last August, and while containing two fun stories about EVE Online, tries too hard in my mind to use language which proves the author’s Yoof credentials. Also quoting IBM and World of Warcraft as the exemplar’s of using virtual worlds is, to my mind lazy. Many (or was it several) companies use secondlife as a virtual store front, although I admit that IBM’s virtual data centre, (see also my blog report on the IBM virtual data center) is a quite a cute toy, but a number of people are on the trail of WoW, and its monthly subscription is high for school students. The killer app. for virtual worlds seems to be training.  …