Archived Posts

Now, I’m not bashing anybody… but in early 2003, I did some beer-coaster calculations of the trends in power consumption caused by the advent of a new beast: blade servers. It seems the manufacturers had devised a way to jam an entire server’s electronics onto a blade, and stuff lots of those blades into a single chassis.

As I sit here watching the snow fall at 6,500 feet in beautiful Lake Tahoe, the peacefulness has allowed me to formulate some conclusions on the exciting events of the past week. Everyone is talking about Amazon’s EC2 outage...

I spent a day in San Francisco recently, meeting a couple of potential customers and one new one. Interestingly enough, they all wanted to talk about Amazon, and they all had used Amazon EC2 at one point. The common question was, "so what do you think about the outage?" This would be a great time to bash on Amazon, but in reality, the responsibility here really needs to be shared with the users.

When I left the industry in 2005, there were no large providers of custom, complex, compliant solutions. Most hosting companies used an approach akin to a “Meal d’Value” at the local burger joint – and special orders certainly upset them!

Lately, I have been putting a lot of thought around what to think about all these questions we’re hearing with the latest cloud-related buzzword, “Platform”. “What is your IaaS platform running on?” “What do you think about the OpenStack platform?” “How is your platform better than Amazon’s EC2?”