Rabu, 26 Januari 2011

Declining IT Innovation in the Enterprise

The Hollowing Out of Enterprise ITReasons for and Implications from Innovation Moving to Consumers


Today, the headlines and buzz for information technologies centers on smartphones, social networks, cloud computing, tablets and everything Internet. Very little is now discussed about IT in the enterprise. This declining trend began about 15 years ago, and has been accelerating over time. Letting the air out of the enterprise IT balloon has some profound reasons and implications. It also has some lessons and guidance related to semantic approaches and technologies and their adoption by enterprises.


A Brief Look at Sixty Years of Enterprise IT


One can probably clock the start of enterprise information technology (IT) to the first use of mainframe computers in the early 1950s [1], or sixty years ago. The earliest mainframes were huge and expensive machines that required their own specially air-conditioned rooms because of the heat they generated. The first use of “information technology” as a term occurred in a Harvard Business Review article from 1958 [2].


Until the late 1960s computers were usually supplied under lease, and were not purchased [3]. Service and all software were generally bundled into the lease amount without separate charge and with source code provided. Then, in 1969, IBM led an industry change by starting to charge separately for (mainframe) software and services, and ceasing to supply source code [3]. At about the same time integrated circuits enabled computer sizes to be reduced, with the minicomputers such as from DEC causing a marked expansion in number of potential customers. Enterprise apps became a huge business, with software licensing and maintenance fees achieving a peak of 70% of IT vendor total revenues by the mid-1990s [4]. However, since that peak, enterprise software as a portion of vendor revenues has been steadily eroding.


One of the earliest enterprise applications was in transaction systems and their underlying database management software. The relational database management system (RDBMS) was initially developed at IBM. Oracle, based on early work for the CIA in the late 1970s and its innovation to write in the C programming language, was able to port the RDBMS to multiple operating systems. These efforts, along with those of other notable vendors (most of which like Informix no longer exist), led to the RDBMS becoming more or less the de facto standard for data management within the enterprise by the 1980s. Today Oracle is the largest supplier of RDBMS software globally, and other earlier database system designs such as network databases or object databases fell out of favor [5].


In 1975, the Altair 8800 was introduced to electronics hobbyists as the first microcomputer, followed then by Apple II and the IBM PC in 1981, among others. Rapidly a slew of new applications became available to the individual, including spreadsheets, small databases, graphics programs and word processors. These apps were a boon to individual productivity and the IBM PC in particular brought credibility and acceptance within the enterprise (along with the growth of Microsoft). Novell and local area networks also pointed the way to a more distributed computing future. By the late 1980s virtually every knowledge worker within enterprises had some degree of computer literacy.


The apogee for enterprise software and apps occurred in the 1990s, with whole classes of new applications (most denoted by three-letter acronyms) such as enterprise resource planning (ERP), business intelligence (BI), customer relationship management (CRM), enterprise information systems (EIS) and the like coming to the fore. These systems also began as proprietary software, which resulted in the “stovepiping” or creating of information silos. In reaction and with great market acceptance, vendors such as SAP arose to provide comprehensive, enterprise-wide solutions, though often at high cost and with significant failure rates.


More significantly, the 1990s also saw the innovation of the World Wide Web with its basis in hypertext links on the Internet. Greatly facilitated by the Mosaic Web browser, the basis of the commercial Netscape browser, and the HTML markup language and HTTP transport protocol, millions began experiencing the benefit of creating Web pages and interconnecting. By the mid-1990s, enterprises were on the Web in force, bringing with them larger content volumes, dynamic databases and enterprise portals. The ability for anyone to become a publisher led to a focus and attention on the new medium that led to still further innovations in e-commerce and online advertising. New languages and uses of Web pages and applications emerged, creating a convergence of design, media, content and interactivity. Venture capital and new startups with valuations independent of revenues led to a frenzy of hype and eventually the dot com crash of 2000.


The growth companies of the past 15 years have not had the traditional focus on enterprises, but on the use and development of the Web. From search (Google) to social interactions (Facebook) to media and video (Flickr, YouTube) and to information (Wikipedia), the engines of growth have shifted away from the enterprise.


Meanwhile, the challenges of data integration and interoperability that were such a keen focus going back to initial enterprise computerization remain. Now, however, these challenges are even greater, as we see images, documents (unstructured data) and Web pages, markup and metadata (semi-structured data) become first-class information citizens. What was a challenge in integrating structured data in the 1980s and 1990s via data warehousing, has now become positively daunting for the enterprise with respect to scale and scope.


The paradox is that as these enterprise needs increased, the attractiveness of the enterprise from an IT perspective has greatly decreased. It is these factors we discuss below, with an eye to how Web architecture, design and opportunities may offer a new path through the maze of enterprise information interoperability.


The Current Landscape


Since 1995 the Gartner Group has been producing its annual Hype Cycle [6]. The clientele for this research is the enterprise, so Gartner’s presentation of what’s hot and what’s hype and what is being adopted is a good proxy for the IT state of affairs in enterprises. These graphs are reproduced below since 2006 (click to expand). Note how many of the items shown are not very specific to the enterprise:



References to architectures and content processing and related topics were somewhat prevalent in 2006, but have disappeared most recently. In comparison to the innovations noted under the History discussion, it appears that the items on Gartner’s radar are more related to consumer applications and uses. We no longer see whole new categories of enterprise-related apps or enterprise architectures.


The kinds of innovations that are being discussed as important to enterprises in the coming year [7,8] tend to mostly leverage existing innovations in other areas or to wrinkle existing approaches. One report from Constellation Research, for example, lists the five core disruptive technologies of social, mobile, cloud, analytics and unified communications [7]. Only analytics could be described as enterprise focused or driven.


And, even in analytics, the kinds of things being promoted are self-service reporting or analysis [8]. In essence, these opportunities represent the application of Web 2.0 techniques to bring reporting or analysis directly to the analyst. Though important and long overdue, such innovations are more derivative than fundamental.


Master data management (MDM) is another touted area. But, to read analyst’s predictions in these areas, it feels like one has stepped into a time warp of technologies and options from a decade ago. When has XML felt like an innovation?


Of course, there is a whole industry of analysts that makes their living prognosticating to enterprises about what to expect from information technologies and how to adopt and embrace them. The general observations — across the board — seem to center on items such as smartphones and mobile, moving to the cloud for software or platforms (SaaS, PaaS), and collaboration and social networks. As I note below, there is nothing inherently wrong or unexciting per se about these trends. But, what does appear true is that the locus of innovation has shifted from the enterprise to consumers or the Internet.


Seven Reasons for a Shift in Innovation


The shift in innovation away from the enterprise has been structural, not cyclical. That means that very fundamental forces are at work to cause this change in innovation focus. It does not mean that innovation has permanently shifted away from the enterprise (organizations), but that some form of countervailing structural changes would need to occur to see a return to the IT focus on the enterprise from prior decades.


I think we can point to seven structural reasons for this shift, many of which interact with one another. While all of them are bringing benefits (some yet to be foreseen) to the enterprise, and therefore are to be lauded, they are not strictly geared to address specific enterprise challenges.


#1: The Internet


As pundits say, “The Internet changes everything” [9]. For the reasons noted under the history above, the most important cause for the shift in innovation away from the enterprise has been the Internet.


One aspect that is quite interesting is the use of Internet-based technologies to provide “outsourced” enterprise applications hosted on Web servers. Such “cloud computing” leverages the technologies and protocols inherent to the Internet. It shifts hosting, maintenance and upgrade responsibilities for conventional apps to remote providers. Initially, of course, this simply shifts locus and responsibility from in-house to a virtual party. But, it is also the case that such changes will also promote more subtle shifts in collaboration and interaction possibilities. There is also the fact that quick upgrades of underlying infrastructure and application software can also occur.


The implications for existing enterprise IT staff, traditional providers, and licensing and maintenance approaches are profound. The Internet and cloud computing will perhaps have a greater effect on governance, staffing and management than application functionality per se.


#2: Consumer Innovations


The captivating IT-related innovations at present are mobile (smartphones) and their apps, tablets and e-book readers, Internet TV and video, and social networks of a variety of stripes. Somewhat like the phenomenon of when personal computers first appeared, many of these consumer innovations have applicability to the enterprise, though only as a side effect.


It is perhaps instructive to look back at the adoption of PCs in the enterprise to understand the possible effect of these new consumer innovations. Central IT was never able to control and manage the proliferation of personal computers, and only began to understand years later what benefits and new governance challenges they brought. Enterprise leaders will understand how to embrace and extend today’s new consumer technologies for the enterprise’s benefits; laggards will resist to no avail.


The ubiquity of computing will be enormously impactful on the enterprise. The understanding of what makes sense to do on a mobile basis with a small screen and what belongs on the desk or in the office is merely a glimmer in the current conversation. However, in the end, like most of the other innovations noted in this analysis, the enterprise will largely be a reactive player to these innovations. Yes, the implications will be profound, but their inherent basis are not grounded in unique enterprise challenges. Nonetheless, adapting to them and changing business practice will be critical to asserting enterprise leadership.


#3: Open Source


Open Source Growth

Ten years ago open source was largely dismissed in the enterprise. About five years ago VCs and others began funding new commercial open source ventures, even while there were still rear guard arguments from enterprises resisting open source. Meanwhile, as the figure to the right shows, open source projects were growing exponentially [10].


The shift to open source in the enterprise, still ongoing, has been rapid. Within 5 years, more than 50% of enterprise software will be open source [11] . According to an article in Fortune magazine last year [12], a Forrester Research survey found that 48% of enterprise respondents were using open source operating systems, and 57% were using open source code. A similar Accenture survey of 300 large public and private companies found that half are committed to open source software, with 38% saying they would begin using open-source software for “mission-critical” applications over the next 12 months.


There are likely many reasons for this shift, including the Internet itself and its basis in open source. Many of the most successful companies of the past 15 years including Amazon, Google, Facebook, and virtually any large Web site has shown excellent performance and scalability building their IT infrastructure around open source foundations. Most of the large, existing enterprise IT vendors, notably including IBM, Oracle, Nokia, Intel, Sun (prior to Oracle), Citrix, Novell (just acquired by Attachmate) and SAP have bought open source providers or have visible support for open source initiatives. Even two of the most vocal proprietary source proponents of the past — HP and Microsoft — have begun to make moves toward open source.


The age of proprietary software based on proprietary standards is dead. The monopoly rents formerly associated with unique, proprietary platforms and large-scale enterprise apps are over. Even where software remains proprietary, it is embracing open standards for data interchange and APIs. Traditional enterprise apps such as content management, business intelligence and ETL, among all others, are being penetrated by commercial open source offerings (as examples, Alfresco, Pentaho and Talend, respectively). The shift to services and new business models appears to be an inexorable force.


Declining profit margins, matched with the relatively high cost of marketing and sales to enterprises, means attention and focus have been shifting away from the enterprise. And with these shifts in focus has come a reduction in enterprise-focused innovation.


#4: Slow Development Cycles in Enterprise


It is not unusual to find deployed systems within enterprises as old as thirty years [13]. So long as they work reasonably well, systems once installed — along with their data — tend to remain in operation until their platforms or functionality become totally obsolete. This leads to rather lengthy turnover cycles, and slow development cycles.


Slow cycles in themselves slow innovation. But slow development cycles are also a disincentive to attract the most capable developers. When development tends to focus on maintenance and scripts and more routines of the same nature, the best developers tend to migrate elsewhere (see next).


Another aspect of slow development cycles is the imperative for new enterprise IT to relate to and accommodate legacy systems — again, including legacy data. This consideration is the source of one of the negative implications of a shift away from innovation in the enterprise: the orphaning of existing information assets.


#5: What’s Hot: Developers


Arguably the emphasis on consumer and Internet technologies means that is where the best developers gravitate. Developing apps for smartphones or working at one of the cool Internet companies or joining a passionate community of open source developers is now attracting the best developers. Open source and Web-based systems also lead to faster development cycles. The very best developers are often the founders of the next generation startups and Web and software companies [14].


While, of course, huge numbers of computer programmers and IT specialists are hired by enterprises each year, the motivations tend to be higher pay, better benefits and more job security. The nature of the work and the bureaucracy and routine of many IT functions require such compensation. And, because of the other shifts noted elsewhere, even the software startups that are able to attract the most innovative developers no longer tend to develop for enterprise purposes.


Computer science students have been declining in industrialized countries for some time and that is the category of slowest growth in IT [14]. Meanwhile, existing IT personnel often have expertise in older legacy systems or have been focused on bug fixes and more prosaic tasks like report writing. Narrow job descriptions and work activities also keep many existing IT personnel from getting exposed to or learning about new trends or innovations, such as the semantic Web.


Declining numbers of new talent, plus declining interest by that talent, combined with (often) narrow and legacy expertise of existing talent, creates a disappointing storm of energy and innovation to address enterprise IT challenges. Enterprises have it within their power to create more exciting career opportunities to overcome these limitations, but unfortunately IT management often also appears challenged to get on top of these structural forces.


#6: What’s Hot: Startups


Open source and Internet-based systems have reduced the capital necessary for a new startup by an order of magnitude or so over the past decade. It is now quite possible to get a new startup up and running for tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars, as opposed to the millions of years past. This is leading to more startups, more startups per innovator, and quicker startup and abandonment cycles. Ideas can be tried quickly and more easily thrown away [15].


These dynamics are acting to accelerate overall development cycles and to cause a shift in funding structures and funding amounts by VCs and angels. The kind of market and sales development typical for many enterprise sales does not fit well within these dynamics and is a countervailing force for more capital when all trends point the other way.


In short, all of this is saying that money goes to where the returns are, and returns are not of the same basis as decades past in the enterprise sector. Again, this means a hollowing out of innovation for enterprises.


#7: Declining Software Rents and Consolidation


As an earlier reference noted [4], software revenues as a percent of IT vendor revenues peaked in about the mid-1990s. As profitability for these entities began to decline, so did the overall attractiveness of the sector.


As the next chart shows, coincident with the peak in profitability was the onset of a consolidation trend in the enterprise IT vendor sector [16]. The chart below shows that three of the largest IT vendors today — Oracle, IBM and HP — began an acquisition spree in the mid-1990s that has continued until just recently, as many of the existing major players have already been acquired:



Notable acquisitions over this period include: Oracle — PeopleSoft, Siebel Systems, MySQL, Hyperion, BEA and Sun; HP — EDS, 3Com, VeriFone, Compaq, Palm and Mercury Interactive; IBM — Lotus, Rational, Informix, Ascential, FileNet, Cognos and SPSS. Published acquisition costs exceeded $130 billion, mostly for the larger deals. But terms for 75% of the 262 transactions were not disclosed [16]. The total value of these consolidations likely approaches $200 billion to $300 billion.


Clearly, the market is now favoring large players with large service components. This consolidation trend does belie one early criticism of open source v proprietary software: proprietary software is likely to be better supported. In theory this might be true, but vanishing suppliers does not bode well for support either. Over time, we may likely see successful open source projects showing greater longevity than many IT vendors.


Positive Implications from the Decline


This discussion is not a boo-hoo because the heyday of enterprise IT innovation is past. Much of that innovation was expensive, often failed to achieve successful adoption, and promoted walled gardens and silos. As someone who ran companies directly involved in enterprise software sales, I personally do not miss the meetings, the travel, the suits and the 18-month sales cycles.


The enterprise has gained much from outside innovation in the past, from the personal computer to LANs and browsers and the Internet. To be sure, what we are now seeing with mobile phones has more computing power than the original Space Shuttle [17], and continued mashup and social engagement innovations will have unforeseen and manifest benefits for enterprises. I think this is unalloyed goodness.


We can also see innovations based on the Internet such as the semantic Web and its languages and standards to promote interoperability. Breaking these barriers is critically needed by enterprises of the future. Data models such as RDF [18] and open world mindsets that better accommodate uncertainty and breadth of information [19] can only be seen as positive. The leverage that will come from these non-enterprise innovations may in the end prove to be as important as the enterprise-specific innovations of the past.


Negative Implications from the Decline


Yet a shift to Internet and consumer IT innovation leaves some implications. These concerns have to do with the unique demands and needs of enterprises. One negative implication is that a diminishing supplier base may not lead to actual deployments that are enterprise-ready or -responsive.


The first concern relates to quality and operational integrity. There is an immense gulf between ISO 9000 or Six Sigma and, for example, the “good enough” of standard search results on the Web. Consumer apps do not impose the same thresholds for quality as demanded by paying bosses or paying customers. This is not a value judgment; simply a reality. I see it reflected in the quality of tools and code for many new innovations today on the Web.


Proofs-of-concept and “cool” demos work well for academic theses or basic intros to new concepts. The 20% that gets you 80% goes a long way to point the way to new innovation; but the 80% to get to the last 20% is where enterprises bet their money. Unfortunately, in too many instances, that gap is not being filled. The last 20% is hard work, often boring, and certainly not as exciting as the next Big Thing. And, as the trends above try to explicate, there are also diminishing rewards for living in that territory.


A similar and second concern pervades data interoperability. Data interoperability has been the central challenge of enterprise IT for at least three decades. As soon as we were able to interconnect systems and bridge differences in operating systems and data schema, the Holy Grail has been breaking information barriers and silos. The initial attempts with proprietary data warehouses or enterprise-wide ERP systems were wrongly trying to apply closed solutions to inherently open problems. But, now, finally when we have the open approaches and standards in hand for bridging these gaps, the attractiveness of doing so for the enterprise seems to have vanished.


For example, we see demos, tools and algorithms being published all over the place that show promising advances or improvements in the semantic Web or linked data (among other areas; see [20]). Some of these automated techniques sound wonderful, but real systems require the hard slog of review and manual approval. Quality matters. If Technique A, say, shows an improvement over Technique B of 5%, that is worth touting. But even at 98% percent accuracy, we will still find 20,000 errors in a population of 1 million items. Such errors will simply not work in having trains run on time, seats be available on airplanes, or inventory get to their required destinations.


What can work from the standpoint of linkage or interoperability on the Web according to consumer standards will simply not fly for many enterprises. But, where are the rewards for tackling that hard slog?


Another concern is security and differential access. Open Web systems, bless their hearts, do not impose the same access and need to know restrictions as information systems within enterprises. If we are to adopt Web-based approaches to the next-generation enterprise — a position we strongly advocate — then we are also going to need to figure out how to marry these two world views. Again, there appears to be an effort-reward mismatch here.


What Lessons Might be Drawn?


These observations are not meant to be a polemic, but a statement of more-or-less current circumstances. Since its widescale adoption, the major challenge — and opportunity — of enterprise IT has been how to leverage the value within the enterprise’s existing digital information assets. That challenge is augmented today with the availability of literally a whole world of external digital knowledge. Yet, the energy and emphasis for innovation to address these challenges has seemingly shifted to consumers and away from the enterprise.


Economics abhors a vacuum. I think two responses may be likely to this circumstance. The first is that new vendors will emerge to address these gaps, but with different cost structures and business models. I’d like to think my own firm, Structured Dynamics, is one of these entities. How we are addressing this opportunity and differences in our business model we will discuss at a later time. In any case, any such new player will need to take account of some of the structural changes noted above.


Another response can come from enterprises themselves, using and working the same forces of change noted earlier. Via collaboration and open source, enterprises can band together to contribute resources, expertise and people to develop open source infrastructures and standards to address the challenges of interoperability. We already see exemplars of such responses in somewhat related areas via initiatives such as Eclipse, Apache, W3C, OASIS and others. By leveraging the same tools of collaboration and open data and systems and the Internet, enterprises can band together and ensure their own self-interests are being addressed.


One advantage of this open, collaborative approach is that it is consistent with the current innovation trends in IT. But the real advantage is that it works and is needed. Without it, it is unclear how the enterprise IT challenge — especially in data interoperability — will be met.




[1] Though calculating machines and others extend back to Charles Babbage and more relevant efforts during World War II, the first UNIVAC was delivered to the US Census Bureau in 1951, and the first IBM to the US Defense Department in 1953. Many installations followed thereafter. See, for example, Lectures in the History of Computing: Mainframes.

[2] As provided by “information technology” (subscription required), Oxford English Dictionary (2 ed.), Oxford University Press, 1989, http://dictionary.oed.com/, retrieved 12 January 2011.

[3] See further the Wikipedia entry on proprietary software.

[4] M.K. Bergman, 2006. “Redux: Enterprise Software Licensing on Life Support,” AI3:::Adaptive Information blog, June 2, 2006. See http://www.mkbergman.com/111/the-death-of-enterprise-software-licensing/.

[5] The combination of distributed network systems and table-oriented designs such as Google’s BigTable and related open source Hadoop, plus many scripting languages, is leading to the resurgence of new database designs including NoSQL, columnar, etc.

[6] The Gartner Hype Cycle is a graphical representation of the maturity, adoption and application of technologies. It proceed through five phases beginning with a technology trigger and then, if successful, ultimately adoption. The peak of the curve represents the biggest “hype” for the innovation.The information in these charts is courtesy of Gartner. The sources for the charts are summary Gartner reports for 2010, 2009, 2008, and 2006. 2007 was skipped to provide a bit longer time horizon for comparison purposes.

[7] As summarized by Klint Finley, 2011. “How Will Technology Disrupt the Enterprise in 2011?,” ReadWriteWeb Enterprise blog, January 4, 2011.

[8] Jaikumar Vijayan, 2011. “Self-service BI, SaaS, Analytics will Dominate in 2011,” in Computerworld Online, January 3, 2011.

[9] According to Google on January 12, 2011, there were 251,000 uses of this exact phrase on the Web.

[10] Amit Deshpande and Dirk Riehle, 2008. “The Total Growth of Open Source,” in Proceedings of the Fourth Conference on Open Source Systems (OSS 2008), Springer Verlag, pp 197-209; see http://dirkriehle.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/oss-2008-total-growth-final-web.pdf.



[13] For example, according to James Mullarney in 2005, “How to Deal with the Legacy of Legacy Systems,” the average age of IT systems in the insurance industry was 23 years. In that same year, according to Logical Minds, a survey by HAL Knowledge Systems showed the average age of applications running core business processes to be 15 years old, with almost 30 per cent of companies maintaining software that is 25 years old or older.

[14] For general IT employment trends, see the Bureau of Labor Statistics; for example, http://www.bls.gov/oco/ocos303.htm.

[15] See, for example, Paul Graham, 2010. “The New Funding Landscape,” Blog post, October 2010.

[16] This chart was constructed from these sources: Oracle — http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_Oracle; IBM — http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitions_by_IBM; and HP — http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_Hewlett-Packard. Of course, other acquisitions occurred by other players over this period as well.

[17] Current smartphones may have around 2 GHz in processing power and 1 GB of RAM; see for example, this Motorola press release. By comparison to the Shuttle, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle#Flight_systems.

[18] M. K. Bergman, 2009. “Advantages and Myths of RDF,” AI3:::Adaptive Information blog, April 8, 2009.

[19] M. K. Bergman, 2009. “The Open World Assumption: Elephant in the Room,” AI3:::Adaptive Information blog, Dec. 21, 2009.

[20] See, for example, the Sweet Tools listing of 900 semantic Web and -related tools on this AI3:::Adaptive Information blog.

Wedding Style - Leigh and Amy

romantic rustic decor wedding on Thompson Island, Boston, MA, Bernadette Coveney Smith - 14 Stories, photos by Kathempel Photography

The couple: Leigh and Amy

The wedding: 9.12.09 - Thompson Island, Boston, MA

What three adjectives that best describe your wedding? Mystical, ethereal, “moonless night”



What inspired your personal wedding style, and how did you incorporate your style and personalities into your big day? We wanted our wedding to reflect our lifestyle – we split our time between St. Croix USVI and Florida. Leigh spent much of her childhood on an island off the Florida Panhandle so the location of the wedding being on an island was important. (Being in Massachusetts so that our marriage was legal was also important – we incorporated part of the state Supreme Court opinion affirming the fundamental right for all people to marry the person of their choice in our ceremony). We wanted a mystical, otherworldly feeling so we chose a schooner to transport our guests and we chose to get married by candlelight under a huge tree with lots and lots of flowers. Amy wanted white flowers and Leigh wanted a broader range of colors, so the ceremony flowers were white and the reception flowers were intended to look more woodland garden/fairy-like. We used a bagpiper and a Celtic harpist to create the atmosphere we wanted. We wanted our guests to commit to support us and so we asked each guest to join us in processing to the tree and each to carry a candle and to affirm our commitment during the ceremony. We also wanted the ceremony to express our love for each other but not be too informal, so we worked with our celebrant to craft a ceremony that was very personal but also had elements of a traditional service.


romantic rustic decor wedding on Thompson Island, Boston, MA, Bernadette Coveney Smith - 14 Stories, photos by Kathempel Photography



Looking back, what are the moments, decisions or memories that you love the most about your wedding? During the rehearsal the day before, the reception location had not yet been transformed, so there were literally fishnets with plastic fish hanging behind the bar! We did not see the reception site until after the ceremony so when we walked in with the Celtic music playing and it had been transformed into exactly what we wanted with gorgeous flowers and linens and candles everywhere – it was a total wow!



Looking back I would not change a thing about the wedding (except maybe that it could have stopped raining sooner, although it certainly created a misty, romantic feeling we were trying to achieve.) It was beautiful and felt like we were in another magical alternative reality the whole evening.



We had a snafu with Amy’s clothes when a Florida designer let us know at the last moment that her clothes would not be ready for the wedding. Boston designer
Denise Hajjar performed a miracle and created an outfit in 48 hours with a bustier that matched the blush color of Leigh’s Vera Wang dress. Her design was better than what we had originally ordered. Amy’s clothes were literally delivered at 3 pm the day of the wedding – what an exciting moment!



Oh, and the Cake! Yum!



Wedding color palette: Peach, chocolate brown, blush pink and white



romantic rustic decor wedding on Thompson Island, Boston, MA, Bernadette Coveney Smith - 14 Stories, photos by Kathempel Photography

The Wedding Team:



Photographer: Kathempel Photography

Event Planner: Bernadette Coveney Smith - 14 Stories

Ceremony Venue: Thompson Island

Reception Venue: Thompson Island

Officiant: Deb Goldman

Invitation Designer: J Sherman Studio

Calligrapher: Pier Gustafson

Catering: Above and Beyond Catering

Florist: Spruce Floral

Cake: Above and Beyond Catering

Wedding apparel: Vera Wang (dress) and Denise Hajjar (suit)

Make-up: Justin Tyme

Live music: Aine Minogue Ensemble, Kevin Wisehart - bagpiper

Lighting: Boston Uplights

Transportation: Tall Ship Formidable and Carol Kent Yacht Charters

Rentals: Be Our Guest Rentals

Thank you so very much for sharing your wedding with us Leigh and Amy!



To find all kinds of inspiration for your own personal wedding style, don't miss our wedding image gallery!



All images above by Kathempel Photography.

Looking back at 2010 – Happy New Year 2011!

The year is coming to an end, so what better time to take a nice cup of tea and go into nostalgic mode to write up a summary.


Travels and conferences


Robert Nyman introduced JavaScript.


2010 was really a fantastic year in terms of traveling and getting to meet tons of great people! And yeah, sure, I know everyone say that, but the number of outstanding individuals I have come across in very different places, I really regard as a blessing.

To get other peoples’ perspective, to see what their life and environment is like, and just to be able to chill with really cool folks is fantastic!


robert nyman


From the awesome heavy metal night in Bulgaria and discussing theories on Lost by an old castle, to a luxury suite and lots of wonderful people at Fronteers (Amsterdam); from a truly great stay by a fiord outside of Oslo to the roughness (in a good way) of the JSConf crowd in Berlin. And what about FOSDEM in Brussels when there were so many people watching my presentation I had to literally step over the ones sitting on the stage next to me?


Robert Nyman at the party


I could go on and on, but I can honestly say that each place, so different from the other, has been wonderful, and I feel I really come alive when I travel and go on my adventures. :-)


Robert Nyman


Robert Nyman


For me as a speaker, I would like to say: practice makes perfect. However, I’m far far from perfect, but at least I’m getting more decent with all the chances I get to talk in front of great crowds. Small rooms with maybe 50 people to larger venues with 400-500 attendants – it’s all different, and every time something new happens and I learn another thing or two.


Robert Nyman talking to Paul Irish


And on top of that, especially during the fall, there have been some speakers I have gotten the pleasure to meet over and over again, both to learn from their vast knowledge and superior presentation skills, but also hanging out with people I really look up to.


Nerds!


All my presentation slides, and upcoming speaking events for 2011, can be found in my speaking page.


The Many Faces of Robert Nyman


Personal life


Of course, with every year, just as with life overall, there are ups and there are downs. My relationship with Fredrika came to an end and there have been, and still are, some tough things to get through. However, we are both treating it, and each other, very well and in a mature respectful manner, so things are coming along as good as they can and the children seem to accept the new situation the best they can. As their father, I am immensely proud of them, of their wisdom and how they deal with the changes.


My blog


I think I have been pretty decent at still keeping on blogging – sure, this fall saw a break for obvious reasons, but otherwise I keep on producing and it’s really what I like the best (together with the travels and meeting people). Currently I have about 11 700 people daily following my RSS (direct link) feed every day, and a little over 2 000 people following me on Twitter.


Do you have a friend in web developing not reading? Make them a Robertee! :-)


And as always, all blog posts can be found in the archives.


Celebrities who died in 2010


This might seem a bit morbid, but looking back at the year I usually also remember famous people that I have come across through their work in some kind, who have passed away during this year.



Robert Nyman, politician

When I started blogging, naturally what I wanted was to have the first hit, and page, on Google when you searched for my name. For a long time I competed with State Representative Robert J. Nyman, and through that, I felt a weird sort of connection. Unfortunately he passed away this year at the age of 50.

Ronnie James Dio

Dio was most likely one of the best heavy metal singers ever, and I wrote about his passing in Farewell, Ronnie James Dio.

Corey Haim

Childhood actor who I saw in lots of movies when I was young and who was in, amongst other movies, The Lost Boys.

Dennis Hopper

A great actor starring in classics such as Easy Rider and Acopalypse.

Gary Coleman

Child actor most known from Diff’rent Strokes.

John Forsythe

People who grew up during the 80s most likely saw Dynasty, and remember his role there.

Tony Curtis

Actor starring in many movies, where Some Like It Hot and Spartacus probably are the ones most people know about.

Leslie Nielsen

Leslie starred in many movies and genres, but without a doubt, his quest for fame came with the The Naked Gun movies.

Blake Edwards

Best known for writing and directing the The Pink Panther movies with Peter Sellers.

Peter Steele

Most recognized for his band Type O Negative

Paul Gray

Bass player in Slipknot.


Happy New Year!


Thank you everyone for 2010, and here’s for a great 2011! See you in the future!

Telco 2.0 News Review

Telco 2.0 Top Stories



[Ed: A date for your diary - the next Telco 2.0 Best Practice Live! virtual event is on the 2nd and 3rd of February. Sign up now!]



Dan York thinks that the arrival of the iPhone at Verizon will be worse news for Google than for carrier rivals like AT&T - Verizon Wireless will no longer be the marketing champion for Android devices. The big question is how the expense of doing an iPhone that lives on CDMA2000 is justified when VZW is well on the way to deploying LTE. Informa has a stab at the numbers, and reckons that VZW will be forking over at least $3bn in handset subsidies. However, in return for that, they can expect to boost their population of high-spending subscribers, while Apple gets to ship more units. However, if you're a rural Verizon affiliate, not so much.

Amid a heavily speculative piece at Engadget, the probable explanation - Apple is going to be using one of Qualcomm's new radio chips which can handle HSPA, EV-DO, and some other air interfaces too in software. Connected Planet notes that Verizon is keeping the restriction that FaceTime video only works over WLAN in place, and is probably right in thinking that the real issue is latency rather than data rate.



T-Mobile USA responds with a knocking campaign against Verizon's network.



As relief from all the iStuff, Phone Scoop has a thoughtful piece on the most overhyped phone features and wonders why nobody boasts about voice call quality. That done, back to the hype.



Millenial Media reports that Android devices are now pulling more adverts from its servers than the iOS fleet (46%). Is this the first non-touchscreen 'droid?



LG expressed disappointment with Windows Phone 7, but plans to crack on with it in order to have some non-Android devices in the lineup. Meanwhile, Intel CEO Paul Otellini reckons that the new version of Windows for ARM chips might actually end up displacing Windows Phone. Yet another mobile ad company reckons that it serves more adverts to Windows 98 users than WP7 ones. This is after it was caught mysteriously sending and receiving cellular data on its own.



In fairness, the Chinese government is starting a crackdown on fraud involving dialler trojans on Android devices. RIM launched a new SDK offering more features and cross-platform development for BlackBerries and PlayBooks. And Rebtel's VoIP app is now available for BlackBerry.



The Register has another instalment of its series of interviews with Symbian veterans - this time it's the CTO, Charles Davies. Saddest detail: Cisco wanted to use Symbian in a line of enterprise gadgets, until they discovered there were multiple flavours to worry about.



Is app store carrier billing a fundamentally flawed idea?



BT Openreach has announced its prices for regulated access to ducts, poles (no sniggering at the back, there), and trenches. One metre of duct space costs 95 pence per annum and each pole attachment £21. The launch is planned for this summer. The details are still a draft proposal so far, awaiting the opinion of OFCOM - always a jolly opinion to have.



The EFF has its official response to the FCC's call for apps and research papers into the extent of net non-neutrality. More seriously, the Open Internet Order issued on the 21st of December goes into force on the 18th of next month, and the big question is whether Level(3) will serve a complaint against Comcast as part of their epic traffic dispute.



Google says that it's now serving 200 million videos a day to mobile devices, as it prepares to release a lot more music as part of a deal with VEVO. Hardly surprising that Tata Comms just bought Bitgravity, a CDN operator.



Or that SK Telecom needs a 4G network. It may be more surprising that they're going to do LTE, plus a hell of a lot of WLAN access points - these are the people who brought you WiMAX, remember. Relatedly, there may be problems with LTE interfering with cable TV, which looks like a serious issue for femtocells especially or media centre devices that have a cellular radio.



LightSquared, Phil Falcone's wholesale-only LTE operator, has coughed that it expects to send about 0.005% of its data traffic via the satellite element of the system. The NTIA is not pleased and the project is looking a lot like a transparent attempt to get round the spectrum rules. Also, there's a possibility of interference with GPS, and you know who owns the GPS satellites...



Renesys's annual IP transit scoreboard is out, and the big winners in 2010 were Level(3), Global Crossing, and NTT, with IPv6 specialists Hurricane Electric doing well further down the scale. On the other hand, Sprint is sinking steadily down the rankings. Also, France Telecom, DTAG, and Telecom Italia all became transit-free during the year.



An important moment in Google's history: the Department of Justice opens an antitrust inquiry. Into what? Their acquisition of ITA, an airline data company. Is collecting too much data anticompetitive? At the same time, a Spanish court wants to make Google hide any links that could be libellous. Good luck with that.



Elsewhere, Google is going to drop support for H.264 video encoding and rely instead on the open-source codecs WebM or Ogg. Lots of analysis at the link.



High Scalability has a fascinating post on how the data store in Google App Engine works on a deep technical level. And one blog sent Mark Pilgrim's Dive into Mark more traffic in 2010 than Bing.



Having turned down a $5bn offer from Google, Groupon is now looking at an IPO with a valuation as high as $15 billion. This has to be a bubbly valuation, but it does show the opportunities there are in the SMB world.



A survey of SMBs shows that sales and marketing applications are the key ones that drive them to make use of the cloud. Connected Planet's Susana Schwarz says:

While companies like Amazon and Google (as well as IBM, VMware, and Microsoft) are the first to come to mind, telcos might be up and coming in the race to attract SMBs if they can offer greater ease-of-deployment and better management by business people possessing less than optimal technology skills.



We'll drink to that. Verizon, meanwhile, is building a truly gigantic data centre or six.



Benoit Felten tries out a suite of SMB cloud services and reports he's satisfied. Why's he doing that? Because he's having a start-up, that's why.



If you used Facebook Connect to log in to Gawker websites, you don't have to worry about the massive disclosure a couple of weeks back. You only have to worry about Facebook.



Financial blogger Felix Salmon is trying to work out the business model of partner site Seeking Alpha. And Apple is trying to prevent newspapers from offering free iPad apps to their print subscribers, apparently in an effort to help out News Corp's coming iMag project.



Back in core telco news, as Queensland floods, Telstra categorises 262 local exchanges as no-go areas, but so far all data centres except AAPT's were still online. Bharti Airtel outsources all its African IT to IBM. Vimpelcom/Wind is a done deal.



T-Mobile tries to explain why you can't see the YouTube video in the Facebook page after their new data cap comes in - hilarity ensues. Read the whole interview and the original statement. But you wait until they have to explain it to the advertisers.



RIM vs. India - it's a mess. KPN shuts down the payphones. CS fallback is tested. RevK has strong feelings about DHCPv6. Cyberwar is overhyped.



Johannesburg's traffic lights are an M2M application - some of them contain a GSM/GPRS module so the transport department can remotely control the phasing. Unfortunately, thieves discovered this, lifted the SIM cards, and started running up some seriously large phone bills. Hint: disallow voice calls and set a private APN.



Innovative two-sided business model: Chatroulette has come up with an elegant solution to its funding problems, and a few other problems besides. The Web site, which provides users with instant video chat with other randomly selected users, is notorious for the large percentage of users who are naked men and who usually do something obscene as soon as they are connected. It is estimated that about 10% of the site's daily 500,000 average unique users are nude and that something pornographic occurs in one in eight chats. An analysis of their statistics is here, with the worrying conclusion that British users are more than twice as likely to be described as perverts than the general user population.



Now, once a user has been the subject of five complaints, they get redirected to one of several porn or adult-dating websites. These upstream customers pay Chatroulette for the traffic.The revenue from this is significant - $100,000 a month for a three-man startup is a lot of money. This also gets rid of a problem - the perverts tend to be looking for other perverts, so they rapidly reject anyone who isn't and therefore cause heavy load on the database server. Presumably, the non-perverts also tend to hit the 'next!' button pretty quickly as well. So sending them on their way is a saving, too.

Telco 2.0 News Review

Telco 2.0 Top Stories



[Ed: Telco 2.0 presents our Best Practice Live! virtual event in two weeks' time. On the 2nd of February, 0900-1500 GMT, and the 3rd of February, 0900-1500 Pacific Standard Time, we're presenting a succession of talks from key innovators in the industry and on-line discussions. Sign up here - it's FREE more details are here]



A clear top story this week: Eric Schmidt hands over after 10 years as Google's CEO. Schmidt's hopping upstairs to stay on as chairman of the board, in fact executive chairman, while Larry Page will take over as CEO. On the official blog, Page said that he now felt he no longer needed adult supervision. Not many other startups would have decided to give the top job to an outsider because they didn't feel mature enough to run the business - it's one of the reasons Google is such a special company. Meanwhile, Sergey Brin is moving to a new role heading Google's product development.

Although Facebook is now the world's most visited web site, Google was able to announce outstanding fourth-quarter results to go with the personnel changes. Net income in the quarter was $2.5bn, up 29% year-on-year on sales of $8.4bn, themselves up 26%. So not only did they gain volume, they also improved margins. An interesting detail from the results was that although Facebook accounted for 13.6% of US display ad revenue in 2010, just ahead of Google on 13.4%, this compares with 7.3% and 4.7% respectively in 2009 - so Google's catching up fast, even outside its search-ad core business.



There's a decent Schmidt retrospective here - note that Google has some $35bn in cash on hand. What would Richard Kramer say?



Google Voice briefly launched mobile number portability this week, offering its subscribers the chance to move their original number onto the new service. That sounds like a significant enhancement, but hardly had the link appeared on the GV web site than it vanished again - perhaps, as with Google Nexus One activation, they've discovered that being a telco is quite difficult. And Google Voice, technically, is just that - it's a CLEC.



There's an idea: Telcordia is up for sale and there's very little the company that was Bellcore doesn't know about OSS. A snip at $2bn!



Elsewhere in the Googleplex, Google says it mostly bought the iconic-for-engineers 111 8th Avenue carrier hotel for the office space, and it wants to move its East Coast engineering centre in there. Data Center Knowledge points out that the buy single-handedly represents a spike in Google's CAPEX for Q410. And having failed to buy local-ads company Groupon, the Google is going to make its own version.



Android intellectual property is going to get tiresome this year; here's an interesting summary of the various patent disputes. The latest one involves what Oracle claims is patented code (from Sun, originally) that was distributed with some Android devices, probably as part of vendor customisations. Details are here - some people argue that the code in question is a unit-test module that should never have been included in production builds anyway, and would most likely have been distributed by accident. Further analysis is here and suggests that it may be more serious and might involve Dalvik, Google's homemade Java virtual machine.



But do those patents apply....in space? The UK's fantastic satellite-building start-up, Surrey Satellite Technologies Ltd., is planning to evaluate an Android-based smartphone's baseband as the controller for a tiny satellite. A team of their engineers are working on a nanosat as a spare-time project that would test how well the operating system and the hardware stand up to space - if it works, it would be a major step forward in terms of the cost of building a satellite and also in terms of developing and testing the software that goes into it. Smartphones have already been used in high-altitude balloon projects, but this goes a step further.



On the other hand, all you can say about this is 'ouch!' Security researcher Ralf-Philipp Weinmann will demonstrate at the Black Hat 2011 hacker conference an exploit against Apple iPhones and some Android devices that allows an attacker to turn the phone into a bug, activating the microphone and relaying whatever it can hear to a phone number of their choice. Worse, the exploit is against a bug in the radio firmware rather than the operating system, and this one is present in both the Infineon chip used in most iPhones and in some Qualcomm Mobile Station Modem devices. The good news, if there was any good news, is that the attack vector does require you to set up an evil base station with OpenBTS and make sure the target comes close enough for their phone to connect with it.



The bad news is that any airport will be full of roaming devices looking for the strongest signal nearby....the EFF, meanwhile, reckons that mobile OS vendors are poor on pushing out bugfixes.



On related issues, here's the first part of a tutorial on how to use the popular Arduino microcontroller with a GSM modem. But why bother when people leave their voicemail PIN set to 1234?



Nokia, meanwhile, seems to have pulled its X7 smartphone. A Telco 2.0 trip around Oxford Street this weekend suggested that most of the UK retailers seem to be marketing Nokia devices as being the cheap option, which is probably not what they want to hear even if it reflects post-Christmas discounting. Carphone Warehouse, at least, said that it had an excellent Christmas, that 20% of its prepaid sales were smartphones, and that Android devices were the big hit.



Nokia has also announced the closure of Comes With Music, the unlimited music streaming service that comes with some but not all Nokia devices. This should come as no surprise if you've been reading Telco 2.0.



On the other hand, what looks like a new Nokia tablet has been leaked.



Verizon sued the FCC last week over its Open Internet order, claiming that the order constituted a change to the conditions of each one of its licences separately.



Interestingly (especially when you think of Google's troubles activating Nexus Ones...), VZ is also investing in enterprise identity-management technology from Novell and other vendors. If you want to know why, well, it's been a Telco 2.0 priority for some time. Also, the US Federal government is keen on federated online ID - check out this excellent piece from Ars Technica.



Another Telco 2.0 priority is the smart grid. A partnership between the US Department of Energy and Chattanooga's local power company is going to build a joint smart grid/broadband fibre network that will collect 80 billion measurements a year from the electricity system and deliver 1Gbps symmetric fibre connections to business subscribers.



Comcast is pushing out broadband connections for $9.95 a month for families who fall within 165% of the US poverty line as part of the FCC Broadband Plan.



Troubled WiMAX operator Clearwire is being sued by Sony Ericsson over the alleged similarity of its logo to theirs (one is a swirly green thing, the other is a green swirly thing). But that is probably the last of their worries, what with the cash crisis and the boardroom row and the discovery they'll probably need LTE radios as well. After industry pioneer Craig McCaw quit the board, his old sidekick from McCaw Cellular, John Stanton, who later founded Western Wireless and sold Voicestream to T-Mobile, is in as the new chairman.



T-Mobile USA is happy with its HSPA+ network until 2015, and estimates the cost of upgrading to LTE as $2bn, although it would need more spectrum. In the meantime, it is planning to drench its subscribers in Androids as a way of dealing with the 10% or so of its churners who are off looking for iPhones.



Connected Planet asks T-Mobile USA if it's true about the femtocells, and learns that it's not - the operator is sticking to WLAN for its fixed-mobile convergence, shipping the software built into the routers it supplies to subscribers. They may have a point, if you read Brough Turner's netBlazr manifesto - they're relying entirely on the latest WLAN silicon operating at 5GHz for point-to-point high-capacity links in their mesh network and looking forward to the first beam-steering chips.



3UK has lost a major wholesale customer, Gamma Telecom, to Vodafone. Under the Gamma-Vodafone deal, Gamma becomes something like a MVNO to Vodafone, incorporating Vodafone mobile services into their products.



In news from the intersection of open source, developer communities, and Worse Voice & Messaging 2.0, Skype drops the ball. For years, Skype has had an extension for Mozilla Firefox that permits some integration between your Skype node and the Web - for example, phone numbers or links using the callto:// prefix get highlighted with a Skype button and despatched to the Skype node's API when you click them. Some kinds of contact details can be added to the Skype contacts roster, and your own Skype me! status button gets updated.



More recently, Skype hooked up with a Web advertising firm, Marchex, to monetise this. Now, advertisers could pay for SkypeOut calls placed from the Skype button, which would display 'Free Call!' instead. Unfortunately, something went wrong and the current version of the extension has been kicked off the Firefox Add-Ons site - the original app store, really - as one of the biggest causes of browser crashes (the scoreboard is here), being capable of slowing down Document-Object Model manipulations by 300%. If you insist, you can still install it by clicking through a warning page. Bug 615799 refers.



Tropo.com continues to be one of the most technically interesting Voice 2.0 players - you can now pass asychronous events into a running Tropo script from another program or from the Web API, as if it was a fully-fledged Asterisk server with the Asterisk Manager Interface operating. There's also a new platform for hosting Node.js applications that will let you integrate with the Tropo Web API. It keeps getting easier to build remarkably complex voice applications, and the degree to which you need to control the hardware as opposed to using services in the cloud is steadily falling.



Facebook has, for once, done the sensible thing and decided not to release mobile numbers and home addresses to random apps. O2 subscribers, though, may be invited for a sandwich and a smoothie if they stray too close to a Marks & Spencers under their O2 More advertising programme.



On the other hand, significant numbers of AOL users are apparently still paying for their dialup service although they have cable or DSL. Business Insider has instructions on how to cancel the service.



According to HADOPI, half the population of France is a dangerous Internet pirate. As if to confirm this, someone hacked Nicolas Sarkozy's Facebook page.



Amazon has bought out its UK partner, Lovefilm and is thinking of rolling out the brand to other markets.



Datacentre specialists Rackspace are expanding their cloud offering, which is now available in Europe for the first time. The EFF has a guide to what information social networks give out to the police. Sony to security researchers: shut up. Why does the New York Times iPad app cost more than reading it in the iPad browser? YouView, delayed. The BBC shuts down websites. Cuba peers with Venezuela, thanks to the cable ships of French imperialism.

Technology Short Take #9

Welcome to Technology Short Take #9, the last Technology Short Take for 2010. In this Short Take, I have a collection of links and articles about networking, servers, storage, and virtualization. Of note this time around: some great DCI links, multi-hop FCoE finally arrives (sort of), a few XenServer/XenDesktop/XenApp links, and NTFS defragmentation in the virtualized data center. Here you go—enjoy!


Networking



  • Brad Hedlund has a great post discussing Nexus 7000 connectivity options for Cisco UCS. I’ll include it in this section since it focuses more on the networking aspect rather than UCS. I haven’t had the time to read the full PDF linked in Brad’s article, but the other topics he discusses in the post—FabricPath networks, F1 vs. M1 linecards, and FCoE connectivity—are great discussions. I’m confident the PDF is equally informative and useful.

  • This UCS-specific post describes how northbound Ethernet frame flows work. Very useful information, especially if you are new to Cisco UCS.

  • Data Center Interconnect (DCI) is a hot topic these days considering that it is a key component of long-distance vMotion (aka vMotion at distance). Ron Fuller (who I had the pleasure of meeting in person a few weeks ago, great guy), aka @ccie5851 on Twitter and one of the authors of NX-OS and Cisco Nexus Switching: Next-Generation Data Center Architectures (available from Amazon), wrote a series on the various available DCI options such as EoMPLS, VPLS, A-VPLS, and OTV. If you’re considering DCI—especially if you’re a non-networking guy and need to understand the impact of DCI on the networking team—this series of articles is worth reading. Part 1 is here and part 2 is here.

  • And while we are discussing DCI, here’s a brief post by Ivan Pepelnjak about DCI encryption.

  • This post was a bit deep for me (I’m still getting up to speed on the more advanced networking topics), but it seemed interesting nevertheless. It’s a how-to on redistributing routes between VRFs.

  • Optical or twinax? That’s the question discussed by Erik Smith in this post.

  • Greg Ferro also discusses cabling in this post on cabling for 40 Gigabit and 100 Gigabit Ethernet.


Servers



  • As you probably already know, Cisco released version 1.4 of the UCS firmware. This version incorporates a number of significant new features: support for direct-connected storage, support for incorporating C-Series rack-mount servers into UCS Manager (via a Nexus 2000 series fabric extender connected to the UCS 61×0 fabric interconnects), and more. Jeremy Waldrop has a brief write-up that lists a few of his favorite new features.

  • This next post might only be of interest to partners and resellers, but having been in that space before joining EMC I fully understand the usefulness of having a list of references and case studies. In this case, it’s a list of case studies and references for Cisco UCS, courtesy of M. Sean McGee (who I hope to meet in person in St. Louis in just a couple of weeks).


Storage



Virtualization



  • Using XenServer and need to support multicast? Look to this article for the information on how to enable multicast with XenServer.

  • A couple of colleagues over at Intel (I worked with Brian on one of his earlier white papers) forwarded me the link to their latest Ethernet virtualization white paper, which discusses the use of 10 Gigabit Ethernet with VMware vSphere. You can find the link to the latest paper in this blog entry.

  • Bhumik Patel has a good write-up on the “behind-the-scenes” technical details that went into the Cisco-Citrix design guides around XenDesktop/XenApp on Cisco UCS. Bhumik provides the details on things like how many blades were using in the testing, what the configuration of the blades was, and what sort of testing was performed.

  • Thinking of carving your storage up into guest OS datastores for VMware? You might want to read this first for some additional considerations.

  • I know that this has seen some traffic already, but I did want to point out Eric Sloof’s post on the Xenoss XenPack for ESXTOP. I haven’t had the opportunity to use it yet, but would certainly love to hear from anyone who has. Feel free to share your experiences in the comments.

  • As is usually the case, Duncan Epping has had some great posts over the last few weeks. His post on shares set on resource pools highlights the need to adjust the shares value (and other resource constraints) based on the contents of the pool, something that many people forget to do. He also provides a breakdown of the various vCenter memory statistics, and discusses an issue with binding a Provider vDC directly to an ESX/ESXi host.

  • PowerCLI 4.1.1 has some improvements for VMware HA clusters which are detailed in this VMware vSphere PowerCLI Blog entry.

  • Frank Denneman has three articles which have caught my attention over the last few weeks. (All his stuff is good, by the way.) First is his two-part series on the impact of oversized virtual machines (part 1 and part 2). Some of the impacts Frank discusses include memory overhead, NUMA architectures, shares values, HA slot size, and DRS initial placement. Apparently a part 3 is planned but hasn’t been published yet (see some of the comments in part 2). Also worth a read is Frank’s recent post on node interleaving.

  • Here’s yet another tool in your toolkit to help with the transition to ESXi: a post by Gabe on setting logfile location, swap file, SNMP, and vmkcore partition in ESXi.

  • Here’s another guide to creating a bootable ESXi USB stick (on Windows). Here’s my guide to doing it on Mac OS X.

  • Jon Owings had an idea about dynamic cluster pooling. This is a pretty cool idea—perhaps we can get VMware to include it in the next major release of vSphere?

  • Irritated that VMware disabled copy-and-paste between the VM and the vSphere Client in vSphere 4.1? Fix it with these instructions.

  • This white paper on configuration examples and troubleshooting for VMDirectPath was recently released by VMware. I haven’t had the chance to read it yet, but it’s on my “to read” list. I’ll just have a look at that in my copious free time…

  • David Marshall has posted on VMblog.com a two-part series on how NTFS causes I/O bottlenecks on virtual machines (part 1 and part 2). It’s a great review of NTFS and how Microsoft’s file system works. Ultimately, the author of the posts (Robert Nolan) sets the readers up for the need for NTFS defragmentation in order to reduce the I/O load on virtualized infrastructures. While I do agree with Mr. Nolan’s findings in that regard, there are other considerations that you’ll also want to include. What impact will defragmentation have on your storage array? For example, I think that NetApp doesn’t recommend using defragmentation in conjunction with their storage arrays (I could be wrong; can anyone confirm?). So, I guess my advice would be to do your homework, see how defragmentation is going to affect the rest of your environment, and then proceed from there.

  • Microsoft thinks that App-V should be the most important tool in your virtualization tool belt. Do you agree or disagree?

  • William Lam has instructions for how to identify the origin of a vSphere login. This might not be something you need to do on a regular basis, but when you do need to do it you’ll be thankful you have the instructions how.


I guess it’s time to wrap up now, since I have likely overwhelmed you with a panoply of data center-related tidbits. As always, I encourage your feedback, so please feel free to speak up in the comments. Thanks for reading!


This article was originally posted on blog.scottlowe.org. Visit the site for more information on virtualization, servers, storage, and other enterprise technologies.

Technology Short Take #9


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Looking Back, Looking Forward

Everyone else is doing it, so I figured I might as well also: publish something about how the site fared during 2010. I’m going to do that, yes, but I’m also going to talk a little bit about my commitments to the site (and to the readers) for 2011.


Looking Back: 2010


The site ended the year with just shy of 1.2 million views during 2010. That’s a pretty impressive number (at least to me), but it’s barely unchanged since last year. I guess I’m going to have to find new ways of driving visitors to my site!



Here are the top 10 articles on the site (these articles could have been published anytime, not just in 2010):



  1. ESX Server, NIC Teaming, and VLAN Trunking

  2. VMware vSphere vDS, VMkernel Ports, and Jumbo Frames

  3. vSphere Virtual Machine Upgrade Process

  4. Linux-AD Integration with Windows Server 2008

  5. ESX Server, IP Storage, and Jumbo Frames

  6. VMware ESX, NIC Teaming, and VLAN Trunking with HP ProCurve

  7. Understanding NIC Utilization in VMware ESX

  8. Linux, Active Directory, and Windows Server 2003 R2 Revisited

  9. Linux-AD Integration, Version 4

  10. Creating a Bootable ESXi USB Stick on Mac OS X


The top 10 articles published in 2010 is interesting as well; I found that all of the most popular articles on the site were published in previous years. I don’t know if this means my content is getting worse (so older content is better than newer content) or if it just means the older content shows up better in search results. Anyway, here are the top 10 articles published in 2010:



  1. PXE Booting VMware ESX 4.0

  2. The Future of NetApp

  3. The vMotion Reality

  4. Setting up a CCNA Study Environment with GNS3 and VMware

  5. Enabling RAID 1 on a Mac Mini Server

  6. A Couple GeekTool Scripts

  7. Understanding Network Interface Virtualization

  8. EMC Celerra Optimizations for VMware on NFS

  9. New User’s Guide to Configuring VMware ESXi Networking via CLI

  10. vMotion Practicality


The thing I found interesting about this list is that some of the posts I expected to be on there—like some of the FCoE-related posts—are nowhere to be found. Interesting…


Looking Forward: 2011


For 2011, I have a few commitments to the site and to the readers:



  1. One thing that I haven’t done a good job with over the last year or so is responding to readers’ comments. So, this year, I’m committing to do a better job of responding to readers’ comments here on the site. If you post a comment, I’m going to do my absolute best to respond to your comment, even if that means simply saying “Thank you”.

  2. I am committing to continue to provide full RSS feeds and not just summaries. I’m also committing to not include advertisements of any sort within the RSS feeds. That being said, I might end up switching to excerpts or summaries on the home page in order to draw more readers deeper into the site.

  3. A lot of readers have asked for the return of search functionality. So, this year, I’m committing to bring back search functionality to the site.


I do appreciate every single person who visits the site, subscribes to the feeds, or posts a comment. To each and every reader: thank you! I will strive to provide solid, useful, pertinent technical information that will make it worthwhile to continue to be a reader!


This article was originally posted on blog.scottlowe.org. Visit the site for more information on virtualization, servers, storage, and other enterprise technologies.

Looking Back, Looking Forward


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