Working with a heavily enterprise-led customer base, I was excited to see an article looking specifically at how large corporates can extend their workloads into the cloud, within the industry this is commonly referred to as cloud bursting and unicorn spotting.

Last night I read a post by Aditya over at Savvis that looks at “horizontal application scaling into the cloud”, and what such a solution will encompass.

I take an issue not with the article, but the concept itself in the current incarnation when its applied to the area of enterprise applications.

In order for a workload to be able to ‘burst’, and as helped by the dictionary it must be able to “break open or apart suddenly and violently”. When was the last time you’ve seen the tightly-coupled layers of any application be able to be broken apart without induced downtime? There are interdependencies not only surrounding applications but the infrastructure supporting them.

The utopia that seems to dominate the cool-aid drinking cloud echo-chamber is an all-public consumption model, where public-only / single-provider is the method for all IT service delivery. Reality is, in privacy, process and control-centric government and enterprise environments some data will always remain in a highly controlled and self-managed environments.

For me, CB’s most realistic use-case is going from logical-local or private premises to an external provider, what Forrester terms ‘virtual-private’.

In order for CB to be possible, I see two camps developing:

1. The interface between infrastructure, management and monitoring must be very clearly defined to allow for tight integration between all components and thus provide a higher awareness of actions being carried out. Such as performance re-balancing, or disaster mitigation process instantiation

• This is where over the last 2 years we’ve seen companies playing the converged infrastructure card, and spend copious $’s on R&D, integration, testing and product delivery

2. Applications must be designed with an “expect-to fail” approach – a discussion which if memory serves right was between @reillyusa and @mreferre. In summary, by taking care of failure at a higher layer, specific to the knowledge of your application, it’s cheaper than having to design an extensive-feature-rich, all use-case covering container

Both have their merits in todays market, and for shops which are not tech-savvy and have extensive legacy baggage or who’s main purpose isn’t IT differentiation, the first choice is a step in the right direction. On the other hand, if you are developing applications for the new world, creating scalable services and are full of zeal to produce the best possible architecture in your niche, then the latter choice is IMO a good approach.

Whatever the correct choice for your bussiness, one constant remains, you need to begin at the application.

Not saying it’s impossible, but uploading, converting, VMDK/ OVF/AMIs, starting them, adding IP’s to loadbalancers… brr – is a joke at best.

— Roman Tarnavski (@romant) April 17, 2012

 

A question was raised internally the other night, specifically looking at the balance between performance and reliability of NAND devices; asked as a result of a paper titled “The Bleak Future of NAND Flash Memory”. I must admit, sensationalism and geek link-bait executed to perfection.

The paper, written by Laura M. Grupp, John D. Davis and Steven Swanson does make some very valid points, and more importantly it is backed with Read more »

No secret that NAND/Flash/SSD drives are fundamentally different to their spinning cousins. Yet given the relative lack of high-visibility maturity of NAND technologies within the enterprise, adoption of standards has yet to proliferate. Specifically around the determination of failure rate.

When we start looking at availability of mechanical drives or most components inside a server, we first refer to the MTBF.

The consumer-grade disks are generally rated at several thousand hours, whereas enterprise-grade drives typically see 1.3million+ hours of operation.

Due to the differences between spinning Read more »

That wonderful feeling of someone rummaging within the room when you’re trying to sleep is further enhanced by small whispers in a foreign language. None other than the smoothest to the ear, like a broken chainsaw – German.

As my eyes were pried open, I uttered a somewhat able ‘hola’ to the newly found adjacent bunk-bed companions. To which one of them nicely reciprocated – “You look damaged”. Now that’s how you say “hello”!
Read more »

According to the local coffee shops raggy edition of the Lonely Planet’s “Chile”, Torres Del Paine has approximately 100,000 flower tramplers per year. An astounding number of wide-eyed gringos for any destination.

Especially if you consider that the main walk[s] consist of half a dozen variations to a set track, the paths themselves in most places are no more than 1m in width. Pushing through a hundred smelly backpackers as you traverse the peaks of this beautiful terrain would be a horrible horrible thing … that’s why the best time to visit is Read more »

The journey around Torres Del Paine, and adjoining parks is to take nearly two weeks. The vast majority of them will be on foot, thus consideration must be given to the weight of the total pack(s), as there are (unfortunately) going to be no sherpas.

Weather report for this time of year, idled within 2-3ºC below 0 for the night, and a few degrees higher for daytime. Which necessitated the number of thermals throughout the trip, coupled with the self-imposed weight restriction as well as possible lack of showers; more thermals = less smelly experience.

There are many lists online of what people have managed to bring with them along for their trek. To add to the noise, I wanted to provide an OCD technologists view.

Main pack is the Genesis 70, which comes with a very Read more »

Growing up in Ukraine, I’ve seen my fair share of snow, blizzards, and every temperature from -40ºC through to 40ºC, although upon arriving in El Calafate, which is a small town in the Patagonian region of Argentina (that should be oft-described as a tourist trap… – on that later) – the first stop was to be the famous Perito Moreno Glacier which is a magnificent spectacle that is difficult to explain and take in.

Interestingly enough, the best view is far away from the the glacier itself, and on one of the Los Glaciares National Park’s viewing platforms.

By far the most enjoyable part of the journey to the glacier was donning some crampons and spending just under two hours walking around and having the history, growth spurts and inevitable ‘shock’-stories being told by our guide Diego.

After the completion of the walk, we were surprised to be greeted by a table full of glasses, some local chocolate, and a bottle of whiskey. To top it off, the ice for the tumbler, was chipped from the glacier itself.