BP Oil Spill – Frame of Reference

Looking down onto the ocean from above the sky clearly shows one thing: a disaster.  Millions of gallons of oil in the ocean, devastated coastline, impacted wildlife and a lightning rod of a topic.  Where you sit on this issue depends on what is at risk for you as a person, government, politician, investor, corporation, activist, country, etc.  This was obvious to me from the Capitol Hill hearings last week on British Petroleum (BP).  While one House of Representative member accused BP of not taking responsibility, another House of Representative member apologized to BP for being “shaken down” by the U.S. Government.

If you are a BP shareholder one would be very concerned about the loss of market capitalization of BP.  It does effect you directly in your pocket, despite having done nothing wrong.  If you are a fisherman off of the Gulf of Mexico your livelihood for the foreseeable future is severely effected.  If you are a corporation tied to the oil industry you are probably concerned about the negative impact of the BP disaster, but also understand that drilling for oil on land as well as at sea has risks.

If you are an environmentalist your view is that of outrage and probably rightfully so.  The damage to the environment and all the wildlife is outrageous.  Birds, amphibians, crustaceans, fish, shellfish, etc. will be depleted in the Gulf.  Hopefully no species will become a member of the endangered list as a result.

We all can see this disastrous event from many different angles, perspectives and viewpoints depending on how you are impacted and what you see as your core values.  However in order to realize the comforts and advantages of living in the developed world it’s very obvious how linked we are to mining fossil fuels.  Few remember how much oil was spilled as a result of the destroyed wells of the Gulf War.  Alternate energy has promise but the physics behind the science shows that nothing, as of today, is as efficient and applicable as petroleum based fuels.  Nuclear has big risks too.  Negligence and risks unfortunately are viewed as the same thing for some frames of reference.

It’s an awful situation and all frames of reference need to help fix it.

iPhone 4 or NOT(iPhone 4) ???

Do I really need to go out and buy the latest phone from Apple?  While it can serve as a nice conversation piece about a nice bright and shinny gadget it is still a gadget.  The new features like multi-tasking apps are a me too catch up to Blackberry and Droid.

I think the iPhone has really set the bar for full function and feature hand-held devices but alternatives are now here.  I’m not too concerned about the amount of Apps being less for the Google phone than that of the Apple store.  For the most part all of the standard Apps are there for both.  Do you really need 100s of thousands of Apps anyway?  Most of them are games and offshoots of something already available.

What really has me pondering is who will be more tightly integrated with the Apps and the cloud?  You can’t dismiss the fact that Google is front and center here.  While Apple has defined the benchmark with their success, it doesn’t mean that other choices are no longer possible.

I also hesitate since, for me, coverage with AT&T is fine.  Yes I have had a few instances of an over subscribed population being served in San Francisco but in general AT&T has met my needs.  As a Mac user at work and home (fond of the iMac 27“) I’m going to wait and let the iPhone 4 ramp and work itself into circulation.  There will be millions putting it through its paces before me, but that is OK.  My iTouch and Samsung phone still do the job for me.

But upgrade time (2 year commitment up) is coming in December…  Yes I know that any current subscriber can get the upgrade price, but let’s wait and see.

Outlook or Entourage? VMware Fusion to the rescue…

I’m using Microsoft Outlook again after a long hiatus.  In my opinion it still remains the benchmark for integrated email and calendar management.  While Google Calendar is pretty good it still has not surpassed Outlook Calendar.

For me the dilemma is that I’m now a Mac User.  While Microsoft does provide an Office product set that includes Entourage for email and calendar management, Entourage is not 100% feature equivalent to Outlook.  Entourage is close but the subtle difference of not being able to display multiple time zones in your calender, especially if you travel, can be annoying.

In a couple of hours I bought and downloaded a copy of VMware Fusion and installed it on my MacBook Pro.  Given my MacBook Pro has 4 GB of memory and an Intel Core i5 with 2 cores and 2 threads per core I was optimistic.  I then migrated a virtual machine of my Windows XP Professional running on a Leveno Thinkpad into VMware… seamlessly.

Next I started experimenting with the virtual machine settings.  After some tweaking I had the virtual machine running on two threads of 1 core allocated with 1GB of memory.  The coolest feature for me was the “unity” option of Fusion where you can display the application, in this case Outlook, as an integrated window under Mac OS X (see the top picture above).  Performance of the virtual machine running Outlook was pretty impressive.  Integration with printers, shared folders, ports, devices was seamless as well.

Now I have the best of both worlds: my UNIX environment (Mac OS X) and Outlook thanks to VMware Fusion.  Next up is to see how VMware integrates with storage– who and what.

Who’s Your Virtualization Daddy?

Virtualization technology shows no sign of slowing.  In fact the levels of abstraction are getting broader and deeper.  While several years ago the push began with server virtualization; the momentum continues to build with both storage and network virtualization.

Software advancements with servers, storage and networking will continue to yield opportunity for those vendors willing to broadly integrate virtual capabilities.  The advancements are even being realized by silicon.

Vendors who can innovate and integrate across a vertical landscape of technologies have the opportunity to yield some pretty significant rewards for their customers.

We are truly living in a virtual IT world.

Back in the Storage Saddle…

In keeping with a baseball analogy from my previous post, I’ll continue with the analogy.

After entering Spring training as an unrestricted free agent and talking to small, medium and large market teams; I officially signed with a new baseball team.  It was really hard to leave my old team and fellow baseball players but as we all understand it’s part of the business.

I was fortunate to have multiple conversations with remarkable people from several clubs.  It’s quite an experience to be recruited to ball clubs that basically want your services because they know you can run, hit, field and have a strong arm.  For me personally, one incredible experience was to have fruitful conversations with a club GM who is a retired U.S. Navy Admiral, fighter pilot and test pilot.  I always wanted to be a fighter pilot myself but it did not happen.

Imagine what courage it takes to land a F/A 18-A Hornet onto an aircraft carrier at night, with no moon, high seas and battle conditions (no lights).  Talk about intestinal fortitude!

As a veteran baseball player I have many friends that are on other baseball teams.  We continue to keep in touch both on and off the field of play.  Now that the season has started I’m excited to be competing between the white lines of the diamond.  I hope to keep in touch with my friends of my former teams as the MLB franchise is still strong and prospering.  The uniform change is complete.

It’s good to be playing baseball again, a physically and mentally challenging sport.

Conservation Conversation

There is so much hype out there today on numerous important world issues.  Most people, myself included, want to know the unbiased facts of these issues.  If you would like a glimpse into the facts of some of these issues then “Physics For Future Presidents” by Richard A. Muller is a good place to start.

The book gets at the heart of the issues by explaining the math and physics behind the issues.  As I fondly remember a physics professor say in engineering school, “Physics Doesn’t Lie.”  What’s great about the book is the explanation in layman’s terms. However for those interested the math and physics formulas/calculations are footnotes and included in the notes at the back of the book.

I learned somethings that I was previously not aware.  For example there is no energy source currently more potent or economic than oil and coal.  While there is certainly promise for clean energy, economics will continue to be a big barrier.  A barrier that will be important for emerging nations.

I am encouraged by pebble bed reactors since they eliminate water for cooling.  However regulation in the U.S. currently requires water cooling for safety.  The book’s title signifies what any president must balance between scientific facts versus the general public perception on these issues.

If you’d like to learn more scientific facts for key issues such as:

• Terrorism
• Energy
• Nukes
• Space
• Global Warming

Then this book is a great start.  However until a new form of energy becomes economically available there is no better solution than conserving the energy that you do use.

Airline Compliments, Complaints and Comparisons

I’ve spent a lot of time on these puppies over the years and have formed my own perspectives both good and bad.  I want to share the kudos and their carrier names, but for complaints I’ll leave out the actual airline names.  With respect to comparisons of various carriers we will focus on the positive as well.

You can usually find out in the airline magazine on the plane all the types of aircraft and their approximate ages.  Keep in mind the airline industry is a very capital intensive business.  Owing or leasing aircraft requires the airline to produce significant revenue in order to stay in business. I personally tend to stick with carriers that fly newer planes.  Newer planes tend to ride better just like a new car does and the bathrooms work (see below).

Top 5 compliments:

1. Best Airline – Singapore Airlines Airbus 380 service (London to Singapore in Business Class)
2. Best Service – Air China (Tokyo to Beijing service) included quilted comforters in Business Class for a redeye.
3. Best Consistency – Lufthansa is my 1st choice to Europe and India.  All U.S. carriers should emulate the consistency.
4. Best Non-Stop Long Flight – Washington D.C to South Africa on South African Airways Airbus service.  15 hour flight.
5. Best Surprise Airline – Air New Zealand‘s Auckland to San Francisco service was awesome.  Go Kiwi’s!

I also have to say that the United Airlines international service has gotten so much better since they upgraded some of their planes with new lie flat beds in Business and First Class.  Planes are no different than hotels.  Comfortable beds on long flights equal happy customers.

Now for the Top 5 complaints:

1. Bathrooms must be clean and usable.  An unused coffee filter pack is NOT an air freshener!!!
2. Snoring passengers on International flights.  Thankfully there are Bose headphones.
3. U.S. security screening.  Audit what Germany and China are doing much quicker.
4. Talkers on red-eye flights.  The lights are out for a reason… sleep or read and voice box must be off.
5. Get a new airport in Bangalore, India.  They heard me the new airport is great!

Finally for comparisons you certainly can’t go wrong with the carriers mentioned for compliments above.  However it’s my opinion that International carriers based outside of the U.S. have an edge over U.S. carriers.  It’s one reason why consolidation will continue in the U.S. airline industry.  Other carriers that provide good solid service include:  Dragon Air, Swissair, Virgin Atlantic, All Nippon Airways and Aeroflot.  I was on a flight from Moscow to St. Petersburg and someone told me to make sure your flight is always on non-Russian manufactured planes.  I asked why and he said that they sometimes break in the air!  Not sure if he was trying to scare an American…

Flying the friendly skies…

Where is Your FLASH and I don’t mean Player…

Solid State Disk (SSD) technology is now a checkbox item for storage.  In a few short years the advancement of MLC and SLC NAND technology, density, cost and reliability has enabled a lot of innovation by storage product vendors.

Any storage vendor who is not incorporating SSD technology is missing the boat.  About 4-5 years ago iSCSI was a new cost effective technology to implement inexpensive SANs in place of more expensive Fibre Channel (FC) based environments.  SANs or the block based applications are not going to disappear over night.  In fact SAN environments continue to grow.  In the IT world certain technology continues to be a very viable and profitable businesses.  As an example look at the mainframe market which people have predicted going away almost 30 years ago.   The point being that some technology continues to be used long after the new.  It doesn’t mean that we don’t need new innovations, it simply means that we as an industry have yet to find that “God Box” technology that will replace any and everything.  It doesn’t mean though that the industry should stop trying…

I particularly like what’s been done with SSDs.  Once again it’s a morphed idea just like virtual machines and distributed databases.  Twenty years ago some computer companies created RAM disks.  These were disks using RAM chips instead of spinning platters.  Of course the density was much smaller, but the concept was basically the same.  The big difference with SSDs today is to use them as a cache rather than just a fast volatile disk.  And this is a big difference.

Probably one of the best applications of SSDs is as a tertiary cache for the server.  A L2 cache extends the cache of the processor and main memory extends the L2 cache.  SSDs can extend main memory.  Data reads using a SSD cache can be significantly faster than doing those same reads from traditional disks.  A key item is having SSD aware software.  Some items to consider:

• Should servers have PCI-e SSDs?
• Should all storage appliances incorporate SSD technology?  The job is to serve data as quick as possible…
• Should networking products in corporate SSD technology?  See above.

I think there are multiple architectures and solutions that can put SSD technology to great use.  It’s up to the customer at the end of the day to decide who are their IT partners.

Easter Island – Parallels with Today’s Environmental Issues

Have you heard of Easter Island in the Pacific Ocean?  It is one of the world’s most isolated inhabited islands.  Easter Island’s is famous for the massive Ahu statues erected predominately along the island coast.

Easter Island serves as a great example of a society that collapsed as a result of over exploiting its own resources.  Ultimately is was the competition between competing chiefs and their clans that led to their destruction.  Chiefs were compelled to erect bigger and bigger statues which required more food, rope, wood, etc. in order to accomplish this feat.  Deforestation led to erosion which decreased food crops.  With no place to flee because of its isolation, Easter Island people went into a vicious spiral.

There are other past civilizations that have collapsed as well.  For example the Maya and Anasazi.  There is a great book which looks at how societies choose to succeed or fail.  The book’s author Jared Diamond has created a 5 point framework that attributes a society’s collapse.

1. environmental damage
2. climate change
3. hostile neighbors
4. friendly trade partners
5. society’s response to its environmental problems

What I find interesting is that the above 5 point framework can and should be applied to modern societies as well.  There is much debate today on global warming and the environment.  Clearly we cannot sustain abusing our global environment.  However what is more interesting to me are the ultimate effects that hostile neighbors and friendly trade partners will have on a modern society’s success or failure.

The New IT Cold War?

The talk and actions over the past 6 months clearly indicate that the IT industry is aligning for a new world.  Are these events a new trend or simply part of the constant expansion and contraction of the technology organism?  History has taught us that a strategy of “going at it” all alone can leave countries isolated.  However at the same time countries must be particularly careful in choosing their allies.  Without naming any countries, time has shown us that allies end up become enemies and vice-versa throughout the world.   Some would argue that this is as a result of having converging or diverging interests with each other.

The big Fortune 100 information technology providers have all been trying to assemble a complete as possible vertically integrated solution stack.  This stack encompasses the major building blocks of the network, compute, data and applications.  I can think of two other industries where there are some parallels.  In the beginning of the last decade the large telecommunications carriers were being severely challenged by small upstart carriers that were deploying next generation switching technology.  Provisioning new capacity no longer required weeks but merely seconds by the click and point of a mouse operator.  Huge cost savings and efficiency with much less hardware and overhead.  The telecom industry was a melting pot until the 2001 bubble occurred.

The second example is the automobile industry.  Over the past 30 years the auto industry has experienced growth, joint ventures, mergers and recently massive contraction.  The auto industry will recover eventually and ultimately there will be cooperation among the auto industry.  It is understood that consumers will not tolerate a single automobole supplier for the world.

For the IT industry companies are the consumers.  Most if not all businesses do not tolerate a single sourced supplier arrangement.  For example if widget x is critical, a company will ensure that widget x is supplied by vendor a and vendor b.  Some businesses will also ensure that vendor c can supply widget x as well on short notice.  It makes logical sense that most businesses will treat their IT supplier(s) in the same manner as all their critical suppliers.

The progression in the IT industry will keep moving forward and that is truly exciting.  However dominant players may need to construct a strategy that can deliver both vertically and horizontally integrated solutions.  Ultimately it is the IT providers and IT customers that depend on each other.

Consumers (businesses) will not tolerate a single IT provider for the world either.