GreenM3 Browser Market Share vs. Industry

February 1, 2010 Dave Ohara

Netmarketshare has a report on the market share of browsers.

Periodically I check what the browser share is for www.greenm3.com based on google analytics.

The number of IE and Firefox users are almost equal at 39% each.

Chrome and Safari usage is almost twice the % on greenm3 vs. the overall market.

Bottom line: www.greenm3.com tech savvy forward thinking audience are using Firefox, Chrome, and Safari more than the rest of the industry. My assumption is at least 95% of the readers know how to pick their own browser.

Is the above an indication of what could happen to IE’s overall market share if the total installed base knew how to switch browsers and was tech savvy like GreenM3 readers.

How will the browser usage shift as IE6 support is dropped?

Browser wars: Google and Government turn on Internet Explorer

Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser has come under further attack, as both Google and the Department of Health announced that they would be phasing out use of IE6.

By Matt Warman, Consumer Technology Editor
Published: 9:58AM GMT 01 Feb 2010

Comments 11 | Comment on this article

Microsoft has released a software update for Internet Explorer that will patch security flaws -- but should you switch to a different browser?

The ageing version of Microsoft’s browser is still used by some 300,000 health workers, but the Department of Health is now advising that hospitals and other users upgrade to at least version seven of the software as soon as possible. Security flaws are the main reason that has been cited, but poor performance is also a problem for users of IE6.

Google, which is currently marketing its own browser Chrome, has said that it will begin to phase out support for IE6 from March 1. From that point Google Docs, the online word processor, and Google Sites, the website building tool, will cease to offer the bulk of their functionality in IE6. Both currently invite users to upgrade to a more modern browser, as does Google’s YouTube video site. The company has said that it will phase out all support, including for Gmail, from IE6 by the end of the year.

Cloud Computing Company Watch List

January 21, 2010 Dave Ohara

Cloud Computing is one of the biggest forces driving change in data centers and it has one of the biggest potentials to green the data center.

I had previously written on how there are a lack of cloud computing review information.

Well at least MIT’s Technology Review has a list of the top Cloud Computing companies to watch.

JULY/AUGUST 2009

BRIEFING: CLOUD COMPUTING

Companies to Watch: Private Companies

Name: 10gen, www.10gen.com
Year Founded: 2008
Number of Employees: 8
Major Investors: Union Square Ventures
Total Invested: $1.5 million
Key Product: MongoDB
Technology: Sponsors an open-source database that makes cloud applications easier to build.

Name: 3Tera, www.3tera.com
Year Founded: 2004
Number of Employees: 30
Major Investors: Undisclosed
Total Invested: Undisclosed
Key Product: AppLogic
Technology: Allows customers to move data and applications easily between its cloud platform and private data centers.

Name: Appistry, www.appistry.com
Year Founded: 2001
Number of Employees: 35
Major Investors: Stuart Mill Venture Partners
Total Invested: $23 million
Key Product: Appistry CloudIQ
Technology: Makes it possible to move business functions to a cloud while keeping existing
systems.

Name: Elastra, www.elastra.com
Year Founded: 2007
Number of Employees: 35
Major Investors: Amazon, Bay Partners, Hummer Winblad Venture Partners
Total Invested: $14.6 million
Key Product: Elastra Enterprise Cloud Server
Technology: Helps businesses use public clouds in concert with their internal IT setups.

Name: Enomaly, www.enomaly.com
Year Founded: 2004
Number of Employees: 20
Major Investors: Intel
Total Invested: Undisclosed
Key Product: Elastic Computing Platform
Technology:Creates tools that give customers the freedom to change cloud providers.

Name: XCalibre, www.flexiscale.com
Year Founded: 1997
Number of Employees: 26
Major Investors: Funded by revenue
Total Invested: N/A
Key Product: FlexiScale
Technology: Helps European startups comply with data protection and export regulations.

Name: Heroku, www.heroku.com
Year Founded: 2007
Number of Employees: 11
Major Investors: Redpoint Ventures, Y Combinator
Total Invested: $3 million
Key Product: Heroku
Technology: Allows rapid deployment of systems based on Ruby on Rails, a popular way of building Web applications.

Name: RightScale, www.rightscale.com
Year Founded: 2006
Number of Employees: 100
Major Investors: Benchmark Capital, Index Ventures
Total Invested: $22.2 million
Key Product: RightScale Cloud Management Platform
Technology: Provides essential hand-holding for companies wanting to run applications on a variety of public and private clouds.

Name: Joyent, www.joyent.com
Year Founded: 2004
Number of Employees: 25
Major Investors: Seed investment from PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel
Total Invested: Undisclosed
Key Product: Accelerator, Connector
Technology: Provides on-demand storage and computing services for Web-application developers.

Name: ServePath, www.gogrid.com
Year Founded: 1994
Number of Employees: 100+
Major Investors: Funded by revenue
Total Invested: N/A
Key Product: GoGrid
Technology: Hopes to beat Amazon by wooing IT administrators with management software that behaves more like the tools they are already familiar with.

Is Elastra one of Amazon’s Cloud Computing infrastructure tools? An awesome PDF to understand a better approach to infrastructure management

January 19, 2010 Dave Ohara

I plan on having a meeting with Elastra next week when I am in the bay area. I wrote about their tools last week.

Elastra’s Cloud Computing Application Infrastructure = Green IT with a Model approach

Elastra connects the power use in the data center to the application architects and deployment decision makers.

Plan Composer function lets customers set their own policies based on application needs and specific power metrics (such as wattage, PUE, number of cores, etc.). Therefore, if an application requires 4GB of RAM and two cores for optimal performance, and if the customer is concerned with straight wattage, Elastra’s product will automatically route it to the lowest-power 4GB, dual-core virtual machine available.

Gigaom has a post on Elastra’s Cloud Computing infrastructure addressing greener services.

Elastra Makes Its Cloud Even Greener

By Derrick Harris Jan. 12, 2010, 2:51pm 1 Comment

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Checking out the investors, look what I found.

Amazon.com, Inc.

(NASDAQ:AMZN), a Fortune 500 company based in Seattle, opened on the World Wide Web in July 1995 and today offers Earth's Biggest Selection. Amazon.com, Inc. seeks to be Earth's most customer-centric company, where customers can find and discover anything they might want to buy online, and endeavors to offer its customers the lowest possible prices. Amazon.com and other sellers offer millions of unique new, refurbished and used items in categories such as books, movies, music & games, digital downloads, electronics & computers, home & garden, toys, kids & baby, grocery, apparel, shoes & jewelry, health & beauty, sports & outdoors, and tools, auto & industrial.

Amazon Web Services provides Amazon's developer customers with access to in-the-cloud infrastructure services based on Amazon's own back-end technology platform, which developers can use to enable virtually any type of business. Examples of the services offered by Amazon Web Services are Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon SimpleDB, Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS), Amazon Flexible Payments Service (Amazon FPS), and Amazon Mechanical Turk. www.amazon.com

Then digging more I found this architecture PDF by Stuart Charlton.

I like this picture from his personal site.

better han the corporate one from Elastra.

Back to his PDF. Much of the information in the pdf is on the Elastra technology site, but I found it easier to read the PDF to understand Stu’s thinking.

The introduction targets the use of Elastra for the architect, stating the problems.

Reference Architecture Introduction

In today’s age of on-demand access to applications, compute, storage, and networks, modern IT applications and service management has many complications:

Applications can be deployed across organizationally & geographically distributed data centers. The technology in these data centers, from virtualization platforms, to host, storage, and network infrastructure, is typically heterogeneous, and not necessarily managed with uniform policies and interfaces.

The performance, scalability, and availability characteristics of an application are due to a complex combination of design and operational decisions. The greatest impacts on these factors are due to decisions in the architecture and development of the application, before configuring the data center infrastructure.

Application and infrastructure management is complex and inter-disciplinary. It’s unlikely a system can be diagnosed and maintained by one person to keeping the system design & configuration in their head. Application design, administration, and management typically is a collaborative activity across specialists; there is no “one-size fits all” design tool, management tool or application platform.

The design goals are right on.

Three design goals for an end-to-end cloud design approach include:

Separated Applications from Infrastructure, through modeling the application in terms of its architecture and infrastructure requirements, without tying the application to a specific set of underlying infrastructure

Enabling Computer-Assisted Modeling and Control Automation, provided by a set of control agents and user-guided by graphical design tools. This could help IT architects and operators determine design constraints on the application, match the design to the underlying infrastructure, and enable goal-driven automation to deploy, scale, or recover their IT systems on demand.

Explicit Collaboration To Enact Changes, through models that codify, relate and analyze the constraints and preferences that are appropriate to stakeholders across enterprise IT: from architects and developers, through operators, administrators, and managers.

The document has many great ideas including the use of models.

Declarative models are useful ways to drive complexity out of IT application design and configuration, in favor of more concise statements of intent. Given a declaration of preferences or constraints, an IT management system can compose multiple models together much more effectively than if the models were predominantly procedural, and also formally verify for conflicts or mistakes. On the other hand, not everything can be declarative; at some point, procedures are usually required to specify the “last mile” of provision, installation, or configuration.

Here is a diagram showing VMware Virtual Center (Private Cloud Inventory) and Amazon EC2/EBS (Public Cloud Inventory).

Elastra’s Cloud Computing Application Infrastructure = Green IT with a Model approach

January 14, 2010 Dave Ohara

Elastra connects the power use in the data center to the application architects and deployment decision makers.

Plan Composer function lets customers set their own policies based on application needs and specific power metrics (such as wattage, PUE, number of cores, etc.). Therefore, if an application requires 4GB of RAM and two cores for optimal performance, and if the customer is concerned with straight wattage, Elastra’s product will automatically route it to the lowest-power 4GB, dual-core virtual machine available.

Gigaom has a post on Elastra’s Cloud Computing infrastructure addressing greener services.

Elastra Makes Its Cloud Even Greener

By Derrick Harris Jan. 12, 2010, 2:51pm 1 Comment

0 0 33

Elastra has incorporated energy efficiency intelligence into its Cloud Server solution, allowing customers to define which efficiency metrics are important to them and then rely on the software to route each application to the optimal resources with their internal cloud environments. Elastra’s efforts are just the latest in a growing trend toward saving data center costs by using the least possible amount of power to accomplish any given task. Especially in the internal cloud space, power management capabilities are becoming a must-have, with vendors from Appistry to VMware offering tools to migrate workloads dynamically and power down unneeded servers.

Digging into the press release I found Elestra uses a modeling approach.

Elastra accomplishes this through two technologies available in the product. The first technology is the ECML and EDML semantic modeling languages. ECML is a language used to describe an application (software, requirements, and policies) and EDML is used to describe the resources (virtual machines, storage, and network) available in a data center. These languages can be easily extended to enhance the definition of the applications and resources.

These modeling languages coupled with the Plan-Composer in the Elastra Cloud Server enables users to synthesize a plan for execution. The Plan-Composer analyzes the proposed application designs (expressed thru ECML) and data center resources (expressed thru EDML), comparing them against a library of actions and outcomes. It then generates a plan based on the energy efficiency policies of the organization that can be executed by the Cloud Server against a customer’s infrastructure.

The cool part is Elestra uses OWL and RDF to support their modeling approach.

Elastic Modeling Languages

The Elastic Modeling Languages are a set of modular languages, defined in OWL v2, that express the end-to-end design requirements, control and operational specifications, and data centre resources & configurations required to enable automated application deployment & management.

While the foundation of the modeling languages is in OWL and RDF, developers can interoperate with the Elastra Cloud Server through its RESTful interfaces; all functions available to the Elastra Workbench are available through this interface, which are based on Atom collections and serialized JSON, XML, or RDF (XML or Turtle) entries.

Declarative models are useful ways to drive complexity out of IT application design and configuration, in favor of more concise statements of intent. Given a declaration of preferences or constraints, an IT management system can compose multiple models together much more effectively than if the models were predominantly procedural, and also formally verify for conflicts or mistakes. On the other hand, not everything can be declarative; at some point, procedures are usually required to specify the “last mile” of provision, installation, or configuration.

Gartner predicts by 2012 Cloud Computing will allow 20% of businesses to be all Cloud based with no physical assets

January 13, 2010 Dave Ohara

ZDnet has an article referring to Gartner’s prediction.

Gartner issues its own 2012 prediction: end of IT as we know it

Posted by Joe McKendrick @ 1:59 pm

Which will come first: the end of the world on December 21, 2012, or one-fifth of organizations dumping their IT assets?

I don’t know about the first item, but the Mayans certainly didn’t seem to see the cloud computing wave coming. But Gartner says it did, and issued a prediction that by 2012, 20 percent of businesses will own no IT assets. Gartner says this is a result of cloud and virtualization, and extends to client systems as well — employees will be using their own personal desktops, notebooks, and devices on corporate networks. In other words, all third-party ownership:

Here is the Gartner news release.

By 2012, 20 percent of businesses will own no IT assets. Several interrelated trends are driving the movement toward decreased IT hardware assets, such as virtualization, cloud-enabled services, and employees running personal desktops and notebook systems on corporate networks.
The need for computing hardware, either in a data center or on an employee's desk, will not go away. However, if the ownership of hardware shifts to third parties, then there will be major shifts throughout every facet of the IT hardware industry. For example, enterprise IT budgets will either be shrunk or reallocated to more-strategic projects; enterprise IT staff will either be reduced or reskilled to meet new requirements, and/or hardware distribution will have to change radically to meet the requirements of the new IT hardware buying points.