To Live and Die in LA

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/google-misses-deadline-in-high-profile-la-deal-2010-07-23?dist=countdown

Note to Google and CSC, both companies I enjoy a working relationship with:

The Cloud is an accounting puzzle, not a technology one. Add up the costs of of hardware, software, bandwidth, secure routers, switches, the whole nine. Divide by the number of employees and there is the cost per employee. Divide this by 730 hours per month and that is the cost per hour per employee.

Security is an issue in any network that needs to connect to another network that connects to another network because you lose control of policy and enforment. The way to deploy a cloud solution is to add up the costs, divde by employees, then by hours. There are implementation costs and 'day 2' costs which are the caring and feeding.

The cloud is a collection of IT stuff (hardware, software, network, people) that we have been deploying for 30 years. Cloud is a billing application. Get the beancounters in to help with the clean up and the software jockeys to write an open source billing app and be done with it.

New Use for Data Centers...

I got the idea from watching the marijuana dispensaries start to pop up across the country and given my line of work in the data center business I had an 'A-Ha' moment.

Grow pot in old data centers

There is adequate power
Raised floors could support water lines for irrigation
The temp and humidity are already controlled so the infrsastructure is there
The facilities are secure
The biggest expense would probably be putting in the right kind of lights

Maybe someone already of this and I am half as smart as they are. Either that or I just figured out a way to make use of the Federal Consolidation of Data Centers without having big empty facilities mothballed.

Nebula comes into its own

This was a project I worked on in the background and I am thrilled to see it come into its own and be part of OpenStack.

Congrats to Chris Kemp and behind the scenes -Bobby, Josh, and Kim - you got it done.