Bill Coleman contends we’ve reached an inflection point. Data centers and current standard practices are not sustainable. It is the end of data centers as we know them. If everything is ‘in the cloud’, the rest is network operations.

He has the sort of background that leads me to believe we should listen to him:

Bill Coleman (Cassatt Corporation) has more than 30 years of corporate and entrepreneurial leadership experience. Prior to Cassatt, he founded and was the first chairman and CEO of BEA Systems, the world’s leading infrastructure software company. Under his leadership, BEA became the fastest software firm ever to exceed $1 billion in annual revenue. Before BEA, he served as vice president of system software at Sun Microsystems, where his team transformed SunOS into the commercially successful Solaris operating system. While at Sun he also founded Sun’s Professional Services Division and co-founded Sun’s Federal Division.

When you consume services from the cloud, trouble-shooting and diagnosing modern complex applications, it isn’t about availability but service health. How do I get enough visibility into the cloud to fix a problem? I’ll need to know more than status equals ‘green’ for healthy or ‘red’ for failure. “It’s not us, we’re ‘green’. Have you called your carrier?”

It is quite possible we’re trading one set of problems for another.

(Subscribe: iTunes: Velocity 2008 Conference)

(See also: blip.tv: Velocity 2008 Conference)
(See also: blip.tv)

(See also: Cassatt: Energy efficiency software for data centers)
(See also: RedMonk: Hyperic review)
(See also: Hyperic: )

(See also: O’Reilly: Velocity 2008)

I liked the idea.

According to the default view, a crime committed in Wisconsin appears in Minneapolis, MN. Additionally, other local crimes committed in Minneapolis appear randomly all over the metro area, with little or no correlation to where they actually happened. There is some clever screen scraping and scripting behind SpotCrime. Though apparently not clever enough. These observations are of my hometown, if this is a representative sample you will likely see the same problems.

At best, the results are not accurate enough to be useful. At worst, they can construct a dangerously inaccurate view of a community.

(See also: SpotCrime: Minneapolis)
(See also: SpotCrime)

I have been an Oracle DBA for over 15 years. I thought this was hysterical.

(See also: Youtube: Unconventional Oracle Installation (part 1))

(See also: Youtube: Database taste challenge)

The new Analytics Reporting Suite brings Google Analytics to the desktop. It’s an Adobe AIR desktop application that delivers the same advantageous as Google’s web version but with a richer experience and extended functionality. All reports can be exported as XML, Excel files, or PDF documents.

Developers expect to release version 1.0 real yet this year. Three editions will be available; basic, professional and enterprise. The basic edition will be free and designed for blog users or managers of small websites. The professional and enterprise editions are targeted towards professional Google Analytics users and will offer some power features and additional functionality.

(See also: Analytics Reporting Suite: for Google Analytics)
(See also: GAS overview)
(See also: Adobe: AIR)

VirtualBox-1.6.2 now installs without error on my 2x 3GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon Mac Pro. I’m currently running three simultaneous guest operating systems (XP, OpenSolaris, OpenSuSE 10.3 (11.0 is almost ready!)). Boot installs from CD/DVDs or ISO images. Sound works in all tested VMs and all appear to run crazy fast. No stability issues detected – this would be deadly in a VM environment. Everything works as advertised. May try a Vista install, if I can think of a compelling reason.

I am planning to build a virtual ROCKS cluster by network booting xVM drones to an xVM head-node. I’ll let you know how that goes. On a related note, there is an Open Source project to integrate xVM into the ROCKS cluster distribution. This will:

… allow Sun xVM Ops Center users to provision the entire HPC software stack to cluster compute nodes with little or no administration via a mechanism called Rolls. Rolls are a collection of packages and configuration details that modularly plug into the base Rocks distribution.

This project is of particular interest as it will allow me to create and destroy virtual cluster configurations as needed. Given enough memory, it would be interesting to simulate the entire environment. No more running down to the data center to do the power-up dance with DVDs.

While I’ll continue to push the limits, xVM will likely become a daily workhorse for XP emulation and IE site testing. This is the reason I run Parallels on my MBP for Visio, billing, and CRM applications.

I’m trying to decide if I can use xVM every time I need a ‘bug in a jar’. What do you use?

(See also: OpenxVM.org)
(See also: ROCKS clusters)
(See also: OPS Center ROCKS group)
(See also: xVM OPS Center 1.1 in a VirtualBox)

(See also: Parallels.com)