For that type of project, look to the hedge fund community. I know of 2 hedge funds that have built their own storage systems that way - Ethernet, Linux, direct attached disk, and a lot of custom code. My world doesn't allow me to get into the details, so I can't elaborate. My only point is that their are folks doing this and it tends to be the guys with large storage needs, moderate budgets, and a great deal of freedom from corporate standards and vendor influence.
Very few, if any providers charge solely by square footage anymore. Like shipping packages where the fees are combination of volume, weight, distance, etc. Data center pricing is typically priced based on a combination of space, power, power density, circuits, contract length, continguous space, etc.
The concept of "free cooling" is gaining significant momentum in the data center space. I don't have any free or public information, but rest assured that leveraging winter air and other technique are being looked at very hard. Of course, this is not altruism or "green" thinking. It's our old friend financial greed. Reduction in capital expenditures for chiller plants and reduction in utility bills.
My situation is different, but with the same requirement for a Windows host OS. VirtualBox fills this need quite nicely. The latest release enables the use of VMware disk images, but I haven't tried that. You may wish to try out VirtualBox.
I can't comment on why VirtualBox doesn't get more press, but I can confirm that I've had very good results using VirtualBox 1.3.x on fairly low powered machines. My guess is that it gets lumped under QEMU when comparisons are made.
Open like: (E)IGRP, HSRP, CDP, ISL, BGP hacks, and many, many other protocols and technologies. Please, Cisco was looking to use the trademark as a tool for wedging their way further into the consumer market segment and gaining some form of inside track on a device that Apple wants to keep third parties off of. Combination WiFi and cellular phones are somewhat hot in the minds of some corporations as are many forms of communications "convergence".
Pretending that Cisco is open is like pretending that Microsoft is an innovator. There are shreds of evidence to support the claim, but by and large, it's untrue.
While I don't necessarily disagree with you. It should be pointed out that this mentality has a much larger operational impact: cost for facilities. Power consumption from these massive deployments of PC servers is responsible for an explosion of operating expense budgets - especially for financial firms. Power (and cooling) requirements are exhausting existing capacity and forcing the contruction of massively powered data centers at a cost of $300+ million each. Paying the power bill is the other problem. Power costs typically exceed the cost of capital for the build after 10-15 years depending on your utility rate. these costs only include the physical, mechanical, and electrical components of the data center. Add in the systems, migration costs, MAN/WAN bandwidth and things get even uglier.
In short - you're applying a very inefficient solution that impacts other departments - namely the data center guys.
Out of curiosity, how do you compensate the two individuals? Or more specifically how is the disparity in work effort reflected in their compensation. As some have pointed out, you 9-to-5'er is doing his job and earning his salary. However, your dedicated employee is far exceeded the job requirements. We have struggled with this issue for a long time.
Sorry to be so cynical, but why do you put more merit behind something from a University? They're competing for research dollars and don't actually have to produce anything that works in the field or that they'll have to support for many years. In much the same way that corporations extend/enhance the truth to attract customers, Universities extend/enhance the truth to attract grants.
Despite what my tone may reflect, I'm very curious to your thought process.
Both of these are huge. I don't know of a single major financial firm that is shrinking their mainframe footprint. Also, most of the talent is retirement age - so their is a promising future for those entering now.
Perhaps most interesting to this community is that Linux on the mainframe solves a major problem that all large institutions are dealing with: Power. Power density and consumption for intel/amd boxes is through the roof and is breaking most data centers. Exponential growth is not an understatement. Mainframes however, remain very predictable with a fairly flat and linear power curve. Porting quantitative trading and analysis applications to the mainframe would solve this problems and literally save 100's of millions of dollars.
Virtualization is HUGE. It helps solve a major problem. With few exceptions, most data centers are running out of power, not space. Servers consume 70-90% of their power draw when the CPU(s) is(are) at idle - and most servers in corporate America run below 15% utilization. If I can combine 4-8 servers into 1, I can save a tremendous amount of power. Here's some simple math. A server consumes 400 W at idle and 500 W when all 4 processors are pegged at 100% utilization. If I take 4 servers that normally run at 10% utilization and combine them onto 1 server that runs and 40-50% utilization, I've saved 1100 W (4 x 400W - 500W). This is a huge value proposition for anyone who manages a data center.
I can rant forever, but trust me - this is no fad. There is a serious value proposition here.
Ok, start by handing over 6+% of your company. If you're good you'll get you business-skill-lacking-self in front of investors. Don't worry, if they like your idea, they'll take care of the legal work for you. Kiss a whole bunch more of your ownership goodbye. Oh wait, you need more money to keep developing, that's where our funding comes in with so many strings attached you'll get dizzy if your patient enough to read the contracts. Don't worry about reading them, however, because the lawyers the VC's set you up with will take care of that. They'll look out for your best interests. Trust them.
Cookie-cutter contracts and business formation legal work can be purchased from numerous places over the 'net for anywhere between $100 and $1000.
Sorry for the cynicism, but if you can "make something people want", you can probably attract enough attention on your own. Isn't that what the Internet enables? As others have pointed out, you won't have to move and if you can't get $6k on your own...
I can't agree more. I've made quite a career out of higher "older" people in the late 40's to mid-50's. They have a ton of experience and knowledge. They're full of advice. On average they have a significantly better work ethic, don't have the feelings of entitlement rampant in our youth today, and I don't need to check up on them everyday.
Working
for yourself by Stephen Fishman is an excellent resource on this topic.
It presents the facts clearly and offers up solutions for improving your tax
situation.
It answers many questions like business form (LLC/S-Corp/C-Corp), what is and
isn't deductible, proper reporting and accounting, tax benefits like health
savings accounts, etc, etc.
I can't say it's great, but TaxCut is less oppressive than TurboTax and can (theoretically) import your TurboTax return. You can work through your independent contracting work, apply deductions, and test out multiple scenarios, etc. The simple fact is that most people don't really need tax software. It's not that hard to do by hand.
Mainframes Old and Out of Style???
on
Java Is So 90s
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
not by a long shot. My clients are very large financial instituions and I don't know one of them who is reducing mainframe capacity. In fact, almost all of them are increasing capacity. Most managers find it troubling that their mainframe-centric data centers continue to be well managed, predictable facilities while their Open Systems (UNIX, Wintel, Linux) data centers are a mess. Horribly erratic power and space consumption and many other woes that make management and planning a nightmare. Blade servers have not solved these problems - in fact, they have intensified them (powering and cooling 1000+ W/sq' is much more difficult than 50-100 W/sq').
While style is subjective, age is not. There's nothing old about the new systems IBM recently announced. Also, if being in style leads to huge cost overruns or getting fired, many of might choose to be a little less stylish.
You're right about location being a factor. Keep in mind that lower Manhattan today is not the same shape as it was 400 years ago. Various forms of fill have been brought in the expand its foot print. The most obvious example is the World Financial Center buildings. Look at pre-1980 photos, you won't see any land in the spot they occupy now. An older example is the where the WTC used to be. When building those towers, they dug through landfill that included artifacts from the 1600's.
In general, no building of size can be built in NYC until they've excavated down to "sounding rock". Yes, a guy actually gets paid to come in with what amounts to an advanced tuning fork and bangs the rock to determine whether it's sufficient.
I don't disagree. However, SBC and the other RBOCs in the US have already killed competition in DSL through less than honorable business practices and more recently through legislation pushed through a corrupt government agency.
This is an example of why competition IS NEEDED in broadband access. There are 2 ways into houses - through the phone company or the cable company. (Yes, you can argue about wireless and others, but they have nowhere near the penetration). If cable Internet did not exist. SBC and the remaining RBOCs could get away with these schemes.
"I have a simple analogy but think it's a poor one: If a students have gotten 100 marks in all his previous examinations, does it automatically guarantee he'll get 100 marks next time?"
You're missing my point. I'm not arguing that they'll succeed because they have succeeded in the past, I'm stating that they've succeeded in the past because they have the ability to try again after initial failures.
Extending your analogy - imagine that the student was given unlimited re-takes for any test that he didn't get 100 marks on. Microsoft's cash, desktop dominance, marketing engine, and other beasts allow them a number of "re-takes". Smaller companies don't have that option.
Ok, so let's look at the revenue associated with these failures and see why they may not have persevered:
Unix - dying fast due to Linux, not MS. Revenue for Linux = ?? Java - not dead, but doesn't MS have a competing product they're about to force on the world. Linux - how much of the desktop does it own? how much is MS losing? Bob - didn't he re-surface as the annoying paper clip we all disable? what impact to revenue does this have if you already own the Office suite market? ISP services - please direct to wildly profitable dial-up provider Government - not sure how this qualifies as a market Apache - good point. lost revenue for MS
Also, I agree regarding Word, Excel, and Netscape. The point is MS could discount them for years if that's what it took to gain market share.
My point wasn't the MS is god or infallible. Just that they have the resources to repeatedly build, enhance and retry after they've failed. I agree that Google has revenue, but how does that revenue compare to their market cap or even MS's R&D budget. Search is hot, Google has to fend off not only MS, but both establish players and upstarts like Quigo who threaten their ad based revenue. I would love to see Google fail, I've just never seen MS fail over a 10 year span. Cisco is similar, they try, acquire, try again, acquire, try again and ultimately succeed. Like MS they have enough revenue and cash to persevere. Their competitors, especially start-ups usually don't. The RBOCs are similar, but I digress.
In short, they may not be there now, but few technologies are complex enough that they can't be equaled and few technologies continually advance so that competition can't catch up. More to the point, few companies have the resources to fail multiple times and stay in business.
Slashdot Mirror
Not to mention the Whistler character from the movie "Sneakers"
For that type of project, look to the hedge fund community. I know of 2 hedge funds that have built their own storage systems that way - Ethernet, Linux, direct attached disk, and a lot of custom code. My world doesn't allow me to get into the details, so I can't elaborate. My only point is that their are folks doing this and it tends to be the guys with large storage needs, moderate budgets, and a great deal of freedom from corporate standards and vendor influence.
Medicine makes money by treating, NOT curing.
Technology (especially chips) make money when you upgrade to the next model.
Very few, if any providers charge solely by square footage anymore.
Like shipping packages where the fees are combination of volume, weight, distance, etc. Data center pricing is typically priced based on a combination of space, power, power density, circuits, contract length, continguous space, etc.
The concept of "free cooling" is gaining significant momentum in the data center space. I don't have any free or public information, but rest assured that leveraging winter air and other technique are being looked at very hard. Of course, this is not altruism or "green" thinking. It's our old friend financial greed. Reduction in capital expenditures for chiller plants and reduction in utility bills.
My situation is different, but with the same requirement for a Windows host OS. VirtualBox fills this need quite nicely. The latest release enables the use of VMware disk images, but I haven't tried that. You may wish to try out VirtualBox.
I can't comment on why VirtualBox doesn't get more press, but I can confirm that I've had very good results using VirtualBox 1.3.x on fairly low powered machines. My guess is that it gets lumped under QEMU when comparisons are made.
Well said.
There are many facts about the US contribution to the problem that could be quoted but aren't.
Open like: (E)IGRP, HSRP, CDP, ISL, BGP hacks, and many, many other protocols and technologies.
Please, Cisco was looking to use the trademark as a tool for wedging their way further into the consumer market segment and gaining some form of inside track on a device that Apple wants to keep third parties off of. Combination WiFi and cellular phones are somewhat hot in the minds of some corporations as are many forms of communications "convergence".
Pretending that Cisco is open is like pretending that Microsoft is an innovator. There are shreds of evidence to support the claim, but by and large, it's untrue.
While I don't necessarily disagree with you. It should be pointed out that this mentality has a much larger operational impact: cost for facilities. Power consumption from these massive deployments of PC servers is responsible for an explosion of operating expense budgets - especially for financial firms. Power (and cooling) requirements are exhausting existing capacity and forcing the contruction of massively powered data centers at a cost of $300+ million each. Paying the power bill is the other problem. Power costs typically exceed the cost of capital for the build after 10-15 years depending on your utility rate. these costs only include the physical, mechanical, and electrical components of the data center. Add in the systems, migration costs, MAN/WAN bandwidth and things get even uglier.
In short - you're applying a very inefficient solution that impacts other departments - namely the data center guys.
Out of curiosity, how do you compensate the two individuals? Or more specifically how is the disparity in work effort reflected in their compensation. As some have pointed out, you 9-to-5'er is doing his job and earning his salary. However, your dedicated employee is far exceeded the job requirements. We have struggled with this issue for a long time.
Sorry to be so cynical, but why do you put more merit behind something from a University? They're competing for research dollars and don't actually have to produce anything that works in the field or that they'll have to support for many years. In much the same way that corporations extend/enhance the truth to attract customers, Universities extend/enhance the truth to attract grants.
Despite what my tone may reflect, I'm very curious to your thought process.
Both of these are huge. I don't know of a single major financial firm that is shrinking their mainframe footprint. Also, most of the talent is retirement age - so their is a promising future for those entering now.
Perhaps most interesting to this community is that Linux on the mainframe solves a major problem that all large institutions are dealing with: Power. Power density and consumption for intel/amd boxes is through the roof and is breaking most data centers. Exponential growth is not an understatement. Mainframes however, remain very predictable with a fairly flat and linear power curve. Porting quantitative trading and analysis applications to the mainframe would solve this problems and literally save 100's of millions of dollars.
Virtualization is HUGE. It helps solve a major problem. With few exceptions, most data centers are running out of power, not space. Servers consume 70-90% of their power draw when the CPU(s) is(are) at idle - and most servers in corporate America run below 15% utilization. If I can combine 4-8 servers into 1, I can save a tremendous amount of power. Here's some simple math.
A server consumes 400 W at idle and 500 W when all 4 processors are pegged at 100% utilization. If I take 4 servers that normally run at 10% utilization and combine them onto 1 server that runs and 40-50% utilization, I've saved 1100 W (4 x 400W - 500W). This is a huge value proposition for anyone who manages a data center.
I can rant forever, but trust me - this is no fad. There is a serious value proposition here.
Ok, start by handing over 6+% of your company.
...
If you're good you'll get you business-skill-lacking-self in front of investors. Don't worry, if they like your idea, they'll take care of the legal work for you. Kiss a whole bunch more of your ownership goodbye. Oh wait, you need more money to keep developing, that's where our funding comes in with so many strings attached you'll get dizzy if your patient enough to read the contracts. Don't worry about reading them, however, because the lawyers the VC's set you up with will take care of that. They'll look out for your best interests. Trust them.
Cookie-cutter contracts and business formation legal work can be purchased from numerous places over the 'net for anywhere between $100 and $1000.
Sorry for the cynicism, but if you can "make something people want", you can probably attract enough attention on your own. Isn't that what the Internet enables? As others have pointed out, you won't have to move and if you can't get $6k on your own
I can't agree more.
I've made quite a career out of higher "older" people in the late 40's to mid-50's. They have a ton of experience and knowledge. They're full of advice. On average they have a significantly better work ethic, don't have the feelings of entitlement rampant in our youth today, and I don't need to check up on them everyday.
Working for yourself by Stephen Fishman is an excellent resource on this topic.
It presents the facts clearly and offers up solutions for improving your tax situation.
It answers many questions like business form (LLC/S-Corp/C-Corp), what is and isn't deductible, proper reporting and accounting, tax benefits like health savings accounts, etc, etc.
I can't say it's great, but TaxCut is less oppressive than TurboTax and can (theoretically) import your TurboTax return. You can work through your independent contracting work, apply deductions, and test out multiple scenarios, etc.
The simple fact is that most people don't really need tax software. It's not that hard to do by hand.
not by a long shot.
My clients are very large financial instituions and I don't know one of them who is reducing mainframe capacity. In fact, almost all of them are increasing capacity.
Most managers find it troubling that their mainframe-centric data centers continue to be well managed, predictable facilities while their Open Systems (UNIX, Wintel, Linux) data centers are a mess. Horribly erratic power and space consumption and many other woes that make management and planning a nightmare. Blade servers have not solved these problems - in fact, they have intensified them (powering and cooling 1000+ W/sq' is much more difficult than 50-100 W/sq').
While style is subjective, age is not. There's nothing old about the new systems IBM recently announced. Also, if being in style leads to huge cost overruns or getting fired, many of might choose to be a little less stylish.
You're right about location being a factor. Keep in mind that lower Manhattan today is not the same shape as it was 400 years ago. Various forms of fill have been brought in the expand its foot print. The most obvious example is the World Financial Center buildings. Look at pre-1980 photos, you won't see any land in the spot they occupy now. An older example is the where the WTC used to be. When building those towers, they dug through landfill that included artifacts from the 1600's.
In general, no building of size can be built in NYC until they've excavated down to "sounding rock". Yes, a guy actually gets paid to come in with what amounts to an advanced tuning fork and bangs the rock to determine whether it's sufficient.
Umm, there was one item on that site that referred to an attempted "land grab" with the City of San Jose. Am I missing something?
I don't disagree. However, SBC and the other RBOCs in the US have already killed competition in DSL through less than honorable business practices and more recently through legislation pushed through a corrupt government agency.
This is an example of why competition IS NEEDED in broadband access. There are 2 ways into houses - through the phone company or the cable company. (Yes, you can argue about wireless and others, but they have nowhere near the penetration). If cable Internet did not exist. SBC and the remaining RBOCs could get away with these schemes.
"I have a simple analogy but think it's a poor one: If a students have gotten 100 marks in all his previous examinations, does it automatically guarantee he'll get 100 marks next time?"
You're missing my point. I'm not arguing that they'll succeed because they have succeeded in the past, I'm stating that they've succeeded in the past because they have the ability to try again after initial failures.
Extending your analogy - imagine that the student was given unlimited re-takes for any test that he didn't get 100 marks on. Microsoft's cash, desktop dominance, marketing engine, and other beasts allow them a number of "re-takes". Smaller companies don't have that option.
Ok, so let's look at the revenue associated with these failures and see why they may not have persevered:
Unix - dying fast due to Linux, not MS. Revenue for Linux = ??
Java - not dead, but doesn't MS have a competing product they're about to force on the world.
Linux - how much of the desktop does it own? how much is MS losing?
Bob - didn't he re-surface as the annoying paper clip we all disable? what impact to revenue does this have if you already own the Office suite market?
ISP services - please direct to wildly profitable dial-up provider
Government - not sure how this qualifies as a market
Apache - good point. lost revenue for MS
Also, I agree regarding Word, Excel, and Netscape. The point is MS could discount them for years if that's what it took to gain market share.
My point wasn't the MS is god or infallible. Just that they have the resources to repeatedly build, enhance and retry after they've failed. I agree that Google has revenue, but how does that revenue compare to their market cap or even MS's R&D budget. Search is hot, Google has to fend off not only MS, but both establish players and upstarts like Quigo who threaten their ad based revenue. I would love to see Google fail, I've just never seen MS fail over a 10 year span. Cisco is similar, they try, acquire, try again, acquire, try again and ultimately succeed. Like MS they have enough revenue and cash to persevere. Their competitors, especially start-ups usually don't. The RBOCs are similar, but I digress.
In short, they may not be there now, but few technologies are complex enough that they can't be equaled and few technologies continually advance so that competition can't catch up. More to the point, few companies have the resources to fail multiple times and stay in business.