Under 30. Hate Macs. Spend 0% of my working day on The Facebook.
Cloud 'destroys time' and fracking is great innovation
Dell supremo Michael Dell, EMC CEO Joe Tucci, NetApp opposite number Tom Georgens, soon-to-be VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger and his prececessor Paul Maritz have held court on a CEO-only panel at VMworld, largely reciting the same old stuff about how important it is for CIOs to simplify IT so that sysadmins can be unshackled from …
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Tuesday 28th August 2012 06:45 GMT Anonymous Coward
"Physical location is irrelevant" - yeah, right
Gelsinger offered the opinion that the Cloud has “destroyed time” by reducing the time needed to deploy servers. Cloud has also reduced the cost and IT and made it less dependent on geography by making servers' physical locations irrelevant".
Let me guess, he's an American? From the last few audits I've seen, more and more people drink the US Coolaid that it's perfectly OK to subject their corporate data to the vagaries and legal creativity of the US government via the Patriot Act and other in principle uncontrolled abuse of intercept capabilities.
The problem is that it is very likely to land any non-US company with a Data Protection compliance failure if they have any client data, and they'll be handing off IP to economic espionage if they hold any exciting information like, say, Airbus plans. If you use cloud services you better start looking at those fluffy edges because without a crypto filesystem they leak. Badly. But a crypto file system creatives massive overheads (as does the networking involved).
Oh, and as for Cloud services "freeing" staff - it still needs machines, software, data centres, the works. Sticking another label on it so management and politicians can appear knowledgeable doesn't change the fundamentals, for most companies it mostly changes the packaging.. On the plus side, it keeps them from taking their aura near anything valuable..
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Tuesday 28th August 2012 15:25 GMT Ru
Re: "Physical location is irrelevant" - yeah, right
Even as an American, that's a careless assertion to make.
Hands up everyone who'd be happy having any of their exceedingly valuable trade secrets hosted in, say, China? In a less pragmatic and more government-enforced example, what does HIPAA have to say about bunging stuff in The Cloud and hoping for the best?
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Tuesday 28th August 2012 20:53 GMT Fred Flintstone
Re: "Physical location is irrelevant" - yeah, right
One could, of course, observe that China at least doesn't even PRETEND to have anything like Data Protection or Unsafe Harbour, nor does it need to cook up stuff like the PATRIOT Act to legitimise what it does.
It's amazing how much simpler life gets when you don't have to pretend, isn't it?
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Tuesday 28th August 2012 08:26 GMT Anonymous Coward
"Outgoing VMware CEO Paul Maritz declared that kind of development is necessary because we've entered the “multi-device era”. Backing away from the term “post-PC era”, which he coyly admitted he'd boosted for competitive reasons, he said there are some things he can't imagine doing on a device without a large screen. Making phones, tablets and PCs with lovely big 24-inch monitors work together is, he feels, now the main game."
Something Microsoft didn't pick up on I suspect with their new touchy feely ui.
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Tuesday 28th August 2012 08:53 GMT Pascal Monett
the Cloud destroys time
Yup, right before destroying your data.
Seriously, I love how out-of-touch these high-level management types can appear to be. Listen to their spiel and you think the cloud is all fluffy and comfy, without delays or implementation issues of any kind. They are akin to Greek gods in Olympus, gliding miles above the issues and only seeing what they want to see.
Meanwhile, on the ground, the grunts deal with the nitty-gritty of reality, such as service response times, availability levels, bandwidth and backup, and that is before sorting out which applications and data can be put "in the cloud" and which can't, for whatever corporate reason.
And then we get to the nightmare of daily usage, when the inevitable failure occurs and the only thing the IT department can do is repeatedly dial a phone number that doesn't answer, despite all the service-level agreements and contractual obligations, until it does answer - only to hear that their data and apps have crashed and been restored to a status that was useful 3 months ago. Oh, and maybe they'll manage to get back to the current state, but God only knows if and when.
But yeah, viewed from space, Earth seems to be a pristine planet too - you don't see the oil spills, the rampant deforestation, or the clouds of pollution. From space, Earth is beautiful.
Earth to cloud, Earth to cloud, get down from your fluffy place and come meet the daily grind for a change.
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Wednesday 29th August 2012 04:15 GMT Fatman
Re: the Cloud destroys time....Yup, right before destroying your data.
Ah, another soul that does not drink the kool-aid. How refreshing to see an enlightened and informed viewpoint.
Perhaps, it is because of that clarity, I like working for my current employer.
Each one of the wanna-be PHB's who spoke "cloud" at a C level executive session, got 1) {metaphorically speaking} their ass reamed by a 10 meter diameter tunnel boring machine, and 2) summarily fired for incompetence.
Our IT department enjoys ripping any "cloud" proposal to shreds; in fact, we have turned it into 'sport'. You just have to feel sorry for those PHB's, being led out of the executive conference room, trailing blood from `what used to be their ass`!
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Tuesday 28th August 2012 13:58 GMT Rick Giles
Who are these people?!
They all have an agenda to push because the Cloud will make them all money. The Cloud is probably the second largest scam being foisted on people. Savings & Loan was the first.
Microsloth started their whole "To the Cloud" nonsense to get the idea into peoples brains so that when the go to a business that is going to or is using the cloud, they don't give it much thought. IT people know what kind of shite it really is.
Keep your servers under your control.
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Tuesday 28th August 2012 15:26 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Who are these people?!
Microsloth! Its like the 90s all over again!
Dude, MS are way behind in Cloud-land. If you think they represent the most dire threat in this arena, you're missing an awful lot of other large and powerful companies who have been pushing their cloud agendas harder, for longer, and more effectively than the rather old and confused beast of Redmond.
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Tuesday 28th August 2012 18:42 GMT Anonymous Coward
Cloud 'destroys time'
"Cloud 'destroys time" Why yes Sir it does, and not only in deployment speed.
You see the dirty little secret of VM's is their untrustworthy timekeeping in comparison to a real server with GPS directly connected or a connected to a Stratum 1 server.
VM's are shockingly poor at keeping time (well for my needs they are, but its all relative really) strangely it's more of a problem on lightly loaded servers rather than heavy ones. You can point VM's towards good NTP sources but they are still sloppy with their time.
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Tuesday 28th August 2012 21:02 GMT Fred Flintstone
Re: Cloud 'destroys time'
That's interesting. I think I can sort of reason my way to why as well.
The RTC only provides time until the OS booted up, at which point the OS routines take over, which get calibrated over time by NTP (in my experience, updates tend to taper off after a week or so). The only problem is that that calibration routine was designed for non VM platforms, i.e. the server load was one variable instead of a number composed out of all the VMs versus their load and resource demands.
The idea of NTP auto tuning is that it improves time quality if the higher Stratum or the network becomes unavailable, but a VM will naturally make a royal mess of this because the OS gets time sliced.
Never thought of that, thanks.
As Asleigh Brilliant once said: "I don't have a solution, but I admire the problem" :)
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Biting the hand that feeds IT
