Spent Wednesday in Santa Clara with Sun Microsystems attending a seminar on cloud computing and modular data centers.

One of the highlights was having an opportunity to walk through and kick the tires on their container supporting the Internet Archives (http://www.archive.org/index.php ).  This site basically tries to index media from as far back as the Internet goes in an attempt to preserve the history of the Internet.  My personal favorite feature of the internet archive is the "Wayback Machine," which has a collection of web pages  harvested from search engines and other sources.  If you have a favorite website and want to know what it looked like, or what it had for headlines in 2002, you can pull up many of those images.  I've noticed it clips some pictures and graphics, but all the text is there for you to remember.

Quite a few old guys (like me!) from the early days of the Internet showed up to hear Lew Tucker, CTO Cloud Computing for Sun Microsystems, talk about Sun's vision of cloud computing.  Great presentation, great ideas, but one discussion really hit home.  The effect today and into the future on startup companies looking for venture capital.

While researching some electricity and power issues for a data center project, I stumbled over a couple of statistics that may keep me up tonight.

The first deals with efficiency of servers within large organizations.  This is from a Forbes article "Servers: Why Thrifty Isn't Nifty." (11 Aug 2008).

"A rule of thumb for organizations with 5000 servers is that 30 percent of them are technologically obsolete - that's 1500 servers that could be unplugged with little or no effect.

On the Cloud Computing mailing list supported by Google Groups, a topic came up that is actually quite interesting.

One member asked the question, "if we are going to potentially have a major shift in the number and type of IT jobs over the next 3~5 years, resulting in a large number of IT-related layoffs, are we actually building a new generation of cyber-terrorists?"

Guess the paraphrase of this question could be, "could a generation of scorned computer geeks be the next generation of terrorist?"

A new study was published by Network World this week, produced by the Computing Research Association stating enrollment in computer science (CS) majors at US universities was up 8.1% in 2008.  Some of the better known technical universties, such as Carnegie Mellon University stated CS applications were up 11% over the prior year.

In both information technology and computer sciences fields unemployment is listed nationwide at 1.6%, which Network World believes is considered "beyond full employment..."

This is great news for a number of reasons.  With the number of CS students increasing, it will drive additional skills in mathematics and hopefully software development.  We need those skills to have a strong core of workers ready to bring the US into a strong or even dominant role in emerging technolgies such as cloud computing.

Took the perilous journey to the wilds of San Diego last night to attend  "Cloud Computing : Impact on Business and Architecture."  This seminar was sponsored by the San Diego Software Industry Council (www.sdsic.org).

Microsoft provided the speakers, and the focus of the evening was on Microsoft's new public cloud environment called "Azure."  Probably to the speakers angst ( the speakers were Ned Curic - MS Platform Strategy Advisor, and Woody Pewitt - Technology Evangelist), much of the evening Q&A was taken up with question from the audience asking to compare Azure with services provided byu other cloud players such as Amazon and Google.

Much to the attendees angst, most of the answers were "I don't know," or "it is done with magic."

Had the opportunity to attend a seminar on cloud computing in New York last week put on by Amazon, MySQL, Sun Micro, and a local Santa Barbara company called Rightscale.

While much of the seminar is what you would have expected - heavy marketing and cheerleading on the products and services put on by each company, there were some jewels as well. Probably the most interesting discussion was from the enterprise attendees who were either in the implementation/provisioning process, or in due-diligence phase of preparing a cloud processing proposal for their companies.

Security, surprisingly was not the hottest topic (OK, I am humbled, and admit I was wrong on this point). The hottest topic was the cost of migrating applications from the existing IT infrastructure to a cloud infrastructure, and the fact many companies are still using some very old legacy applications that will require major re-writes prior to bringing those applications into a cloud infrastructure.

Another mind-numbing meeting last night with a cloud company.  Oddly, one of the longer discussions we had dealt with the social and economic benefits of cloud computing.

The average IT installation for even small companies requires quite a bit of dedicated IT facility/room space for housing servers, uninterruptable power supplies, switches, routers, and other network support equipment.  In addition to the value of space consumed by storage systems and applications servers, there is normally a fairly high cost associated with electricity and cooling needed to keep the equipment operating.

Most corporate IT equipment runs at a very low level of efficiency.  This means that, for example, servers are designed for peak traffic and processing requirements, which may only occur once a day or even once a month.  The rest of the time those servers are running at between 5~10% of their actual processing capacity. 

What do you do when your IT storage and processing growth requirement demands a tremendous increase in servers and data center space, but your IT budget is shrinking?  What do you do when disaster recovery requirements demand geographic backups with near zero time recovery point and recovery time objectives?

Ask Bert Armijo at 3tera.  3tera is a young, rapidly growing company based in Aliso Viejo, specializing in cloud computing - specifically the provisioning of cloud computing.

At the last CTC meeting (22 Jan) Bert gave a great presentation on the future of data processing as we know it.  While talking with the audience on a very human level, he was actually passing a level of complex knowledge to the audience that left everybody wondering what had hit them.  And burning many, many brain cells trying to wrap their minds round the implications of computing in the "cloud."

Last night was one of those Pacific Ocean sunsets that make you think a lot about life.  Bright orange that brings out colors in the coastal areas and mountains that draws you into a near trance.  You cannot possibly walk away from the spectrum of light, and the spectrum of inner peace you travel through during that 15 minute period of sunset till dusk.

Back to reality.  We live in a world of Internet, MP3 players, telephones that think they are MP3 players, freeway systems, global economies, containers, refineries, Vegas, war, poverty, and opulence that either thrills or disgusts - depending on your point of view.

But the sunset, that is also reality.  It has seduced beach goers and horizon viewers for thousands of years, and still is able to put us into a surreal trance without interference from the latest techno gadget or global crisis.  Add a couple of circling seagulls, a pod of dolphins jumping on the glimmering copper colored ocean, and maybe even a sailboat off on the horizon, and even the toughest person will take a pause.