The visitor rate on gotitsolutions.org is increasing. I thought it might be nice to share some of the stats with the gotitsolutions.org community.

Only 8.6 days in to September and gotitsolutions.org has had 93 unique visitors. These numbers are encouraging and I think this could be a big month.

-RJB

I just finished reading a blog entitled “Developing software by the 15% rule”. Any company providing professional services type work, specifically fixed scope work as defined by a SOW runs the same risk as defined in this blog. I would propose that absoluteness of the 15% is far less important than the message the manifesto sends. The manifesto sets expectations, highlights a methodology and provides perspective clients that warm and fuzzy felling. The feeling that you are the authority and you understand the business.

-RJB

Following my previous post about the Sun Grid I stub bled upon the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) - Limited Beta announcement. It appears that there is a commercial resurgence of time-sharing. IBM is in the mix and has launched e-business on demand as part of this offering they are providing free grid time to ISV.

The community grid concept works, the proof is in the SETI@home project. Today the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) provides the ability for users to join an open source grid community and offer cpu ticks to cure diseases, study global warming, discover pulsars, and do many other types of scientific research.

-RJB

I was recently forwarded an article by a co-worker entitled “Virtualization doesn’t solve any problems”. First let me say that I think the title should maybe be revised to “Virtualization doesn’t solve all problems”, but did anyone ever claim that it did? To say virtualization doesn’t solve any problems is a bit arrogant and I think uninformed. The intelligent virtualization user / implementer is aware of the current limitations such as I/O bandwidth constraints. Virtualization is not a one size fits all but it is a size today that fits a much larger market segment than SMP cluster ting. While there is a segment of the market such as life sciences that is dealing with the need for massive parallel processing and incredible I/O requirements a much larger market segment is struggling with aging infrastructure, massive under utilization, server sprawl, growing environmental costs (hvac, energy, floor space, etch..), and the need to simplify recovery. While SMP clusters are near and dear to my heart (I worked in the life sciences field tweaking code to streamline molecular modeling computational operations, we used SGI at the time Linux HPC and products like Beowulf were just not there) they still have a way to go before they become mainstream, one of the great things about virtualization is the plug-and-play befits, the ability to move from the physical to the virtual and realize benefit immediately. Often in the SMP world applications need to be modified to take advantage of the new compute power. Virtualization players VMware, XenSource, VirtualIron and others are working on hypervisors that hold the promise of the simplicity and functionality that more complex SMP clustering applications provide.

On a final note there is another interesting quote “Virtualization addresses the same problems, such as server glut and management complexity, as clustering does — and it doesn’t necessarily do a better job of solving them” I don’t think that I agree with this statement. There are soft benefits that are just as important as the hard benefits such as server consolidation, environmental cost savings, etc… VMware emerged as the early player in the mainstream visualization market as an offshoot of a Stanford project called the Hive OS, today the Hive OS project is part of a larger project at Stanford called FLASH (FLexible Architecture for Shared memory). I recommend reading about the Hive OS to understand the befits such as isolation that virtualization provides.

Anyway I think I am done for now. I would enjoy hearing your thoughts and/or comments.

-RJB