ExtremeLabs, Inc

Last year, in 2008, DEMO was held here in San Diego with just a few hints at the financial crisis about to explode. Barack Obama hadn’t been elected. There wasn’t even such a thing as ‘stimulus money’. Fast forward a year and the world’s changed significantly.

A couple of signs: the press room that I’m perusing at DEMO has no wireless yet. No candy bars on the table, no rafts of literature. That’s odd, as there are 70 DEMO demonstrating organizations that will be standing on stage over the next two days, here at the Sheraton Harbor Island Resort.

This will be the last time Chris Shipley, long steward of DEMO, will be on stage. The standard bearer will change to a new regime, one that’s been reviewing this round of DEMOnstrators. How’s that going to work? You’ll here about it here over the next few days. Stay tuned.

We used a modem that has Comcast VoIP capability, but didn’t use this capability. Changing out the modem brought our speed up to near normal. It’s not glorious, but at least it’s a consistent speed. This took three trips. Perhaps Comcast’s contractors aren’t as adept as they thought. Truck-rolls cost money.

When I moved to Bloomington Indiana, the residence had AT&T DSL. It was about $143 for what the telcos call “triple play” which means cable TV+Internet+landline phone. The DSL was plainly awful, even after upgrade. Largely, DNS was unresponsive and pages had to be loaded multiple times, it seemed. DNS cache was also churned to quickly making DNS hits for page loads untenable: SLOW.

The cable TV portion wasn’t much better. Selections were few; DVR selections plainly stank. The landline was a landline; hard to screw that up as the technology is about 100+ years old, even if it does sit on top of the DSL circuitry. Bah.

Comcast was $43 cheaper. More TV channels. Phone was good. The Internet quality was good, but not as good as we’ve seen Comcast do in other places. We put Comcast into our office. It plainly stinks. It had ping times that can be measured in decades. Three techs have come out to try to get it to work, and a fourth is scheduled soon. In the meantime, downloads are like a roller coaster, and Skype seems to be especially bad. No, it’s plainly awful.

Yes, the price is less, but we’re still not satisfied with Comcast. Perhaps that’ll change.

Gosh, Sept 9th Apple’s going to announce something.

Gosh, Microsoft’s going to sponsor Windows 7 parties at the launch date.

There’s something about the currency of news that has cheapened in the computer industry. What were once large changes that grew the industry by leaps and bounds are now yawners. We’ve become gossipy. We seem to be distracted away from major issues that address real problems in the industry, and the use of technology in the world at large.

All that seems to count these days are hits. Not quality, not substance, just hits. It’s like many writers in the industry have turned into Rush Limbaughs, waiting to something to polarize with. This pays them money by hit counts. How droll that we use this as our currency to determine quality of content and substance transfer. How incredibly crass.

And The NOC is Cloudy All Day

Once upon a time in the computer industry, there were data centers, and little and diffuse installations of “network servers”. Those servers eventually replaced most all of the iron in data centers. The racks of servers were termed “server farms”. If the servers were located someplace else, say in a different city alongside other servers, they were called “server hotels”. You’d “park” the servers remotely to suit distributed network needs.

Maybe the servers might be in a branch office somewhere, connected by some type of trunk line back to the data center. Maybe the trunk line was on a private network– not the Internet– or maybe they were linked together via virtual private connections, or “virtual private networks”, a/k/a VPNs. Now the terminology has changed.

It’s all about “cloud computing”…. whatever that means.

Ten encounters yields ten definitions by sales and marketing people. My rough survey at VMware World revealed that the definition is looser than a two year old’s shoe strings. There’s a vacuum of gradations and taxonomy to describe what cloud is and means. So I’m going to invent my own shortly.

Data Proliferation for Fun and Profit

Along with virtual machines is an incumbent data storage problem. VMWare World vendors are also trying to satiate the need for storage constructs, ranging from data de-duplication through to Fiber Channel over Ethernet, iSCSI, huge racks of pre-disposed disk arrays, and so on.

Here, too, is ambiguity and solutions-in-search-of-problems. What’s nice to see, however, is the increasing diversity of solution sets for storage networking, as though they’d been invented yesterday. Many are merely warmed over constructs with the new secret VM or cloud sauce, while still others have wonderful management controls for organizations controlling thousands and thousands of VM instances– along with other resources.

The bruisin’ comes when one considers the seemingly proprietary nature of many of the solutions. Capex investments into many of these SAN construction kits are both enormous, and a linear vendor relationship play as lots of this stuff isn’t swappable among vendors. Add in backup/archiving/compliance into the mix, and it becomes much like multi-level chess games with horridly expensive commitments and outcomes. Nonetheless, data proliferation has become an onerous and unstoppable force to deal with. The sadness and the bruisin’ comes from lack of commoditization of the building blocks to make SAN solutions flexible and interchangeable. It’s like we’re reinventing hallowed altars of mainframes all over again.

I’d call it VMWorld 2009, but it’s not. What was once an egalitarian show for VM platforms has now limited certain vendors, and has made the show very VMWare-specific. That’s not to say that VMWare hasn’t got a great product line and thought dominance, rather, they’ve made the mistake of limiting the competition.

This means that VMWorld is now a vanity show, not that there isn’t something to love. The sessions are packed, and there’s a bit of misery over the fact that reservations for many sessions have been full for days now. It’s not an inexpensive show to attend, and it’s about 14,000 internationally enthusiastic people trying to make sense of virtualization.

First, there’s something called ‘cloud computing’ which is a term that’s now so nebulous as to have been reduced to anything you might want to associate with the word ‘cloud’.

Then there’s storage virtualization, which means storage not in the server where an operating system instance is living. Lots of that here, that is, dislocated storage.

Then there’s something called VDI, which comes in lots of forms that essentially launch sessions of your favorite operating system (if that’s a form of Microsoft Windows) on a computer some place else. From there, what you can do with that session varies highly. We’ll describe it later.

The show is very successful, and it also shows why vanity trade shows/conferences are dangerous. You think you’re hearing an industry message, but in reality, you’re hearing a subtle and filtered vendor-specific message, and that message is from VMWare. I wish for the old days of pseudo-egalitarian platform virtualization. VMware/VMWorld’s message is now dominant. Good for them. Bad for us.

Comes word today that the new Snow Leopard edition of Apple’s Macintosh operating system doesn’t support the Palm Pre, and perhaps others. I’ve not witnessed this myself.

I would believe it, however: I believe that the state of compatibility– especially in linking phones– is at an all time low and getting lower.

My personal experience has been only moderately gruesome. I have a Treo 700W, which uses WIndows Mobile 5.1. I also own a MacBookPro which runs the more recent version of Apple’s operating system known as Leopard, and that’s Leopard with out the Snow (a/k/a 10.5.something). Natively, the Apple refused to talk to the Treo 700W, claiming no compatible services. This is a lie, and a boldfaced lie. Indeed, the Treo has various services which can indeed be touched and used, but Apple doesn’t want to support these service.

Of course, Microsoft doesn’t really want to support the iPhone, either, but interlopers have figured out myriad ways of being able to do so. One of those is Apple itself. Self-propagation on Apple’s part might be a motivator.

I found and produced a product called PocketMac for connecting the Mac to the Treo. On a good day, it works minimally, and on a bad day, it will crater the MacBookPro to its power switch. PowerMac is inconsistent in its feature set, and isn’t very good in others.

What this means is that the MacOS 10.5 and Windows Mobile are strangers. You guys can do better. Stop trying to control your markets and listen to the pain of your customers. Windows Mobile and its file structure stinks. It was invented by someone that needs to be sacked and deported and maintained by some twit CS grad that needs his/her diploma burned. This means you– when you find this post.

What is needed is a consumer directive that says everyone plays nice, and this market place domination stuff — masochism at best– goes with it. Apple: you should do better. Microsoft: you, too. Palm: don’t get me started. I’m using the Treo as target practice for a friend of mine that has too many guns. I hope she’s a good shot.

So what is it, this broadband stuff?

Once upon a time there was baseband and broadband. They were electrical characteristics of network data transmission. Now, the term is whatever anyone wants to make it.

My sense of broadband is something faster than a megabit per second in data transmission payload. This means that a lot of connectivity posing as broadband today is actually just slow data. This means you, DSL, UMTS, EV-DO, 1xRTT, and all forms of ISDN. It also likely means that the venerable T1 is slower in payload than what should be minimum broadband speed.

But marketing twits across the planet will disagree. Fancy that.