Google Withdraws From Yahoo Offer

November 5, 2008 Dave Ohara

I discussed the Justice depart vs. Google as a battle in this post.

And, Google withdraws from its Yahoo offer to avoid the battle.

Google Withdraws From Yahoo Deal

By JESSICA E. VASCELLARO

Google Inc. backed out its advertising agreement with Yahoo Inc. Wednesday, as the Department of Justice notified the search giant that it planned to file a lawsuit to block the deal.

"Pressing ahead risked not only a protracted legal battle but also damage to relationships with valued partners. That wouldn't have been in the long term interests of Google or our users, so we have decided to end the agreement," Google's Chief Legal Officer David Drummond wrote on the company's blog.

In a statement, Yahoo said it "continues to believe in the benefits of the agreement and is disappointed that Google has elected to withdraw from the agreement rather than defend it in court."

The Justice Department issued a statement, saying it had determined that the deal would have made the companies "collaborators rather than competitors for a significant portion of their search advertising businesses, materially reducing important competitive rivalry between the two companies."

Server Vendors Push Cloud Computing

November 4, 2008 Dave Ohara

WSJ has an article about the server vendors push towards Cloud Computing. All the big boys, HP, Dell, IBM, and Sun have started data center practices.

Firms Push 'Cloud Computing'

By SCOTT MORRISON and BEN CHARNY

Dell Inc., Hewlett-Packard Co. and International Business Machines Corp., along with a host of software and Internet companies, are racing to develop products and infrastructure to support a growing technology known as "cloud computing."

Last month, Microsoft Corp. became the latest entrant to cloud computing -- in which consumer and corporate IT services are provided over the Internet, rather than loaded onto individual PCs or corporate computers. Microsoft said it will use specially designed, high-density Dell servers to power the data centers behind its new Azure service, which will run online applications on behalf of start-ups and large companies.

Cloud computing is also fueling an investment boom by Internet players like Google Inc., Yahoo Inc. and Amazon.com Inc., which are building massive data centers to deliver consumer Web services and flexible access to powerful computer and storage resources for corporations.

One of the points made.

Forrester Research analyst James Staten said the emphasis on data center systems will require computer makers to rethink their approach because they currently are structured to sell relatively small enterprise systems to a large number of corporate customers. The advent of massive data centers will force them to now focus on winning a fewer number of huge contracts.

"If Microsoft is going to build another 1 million square foot data center and you lose that contract, that's a big loss," said Mr. Staten. "The stakes are a lot higher."

Cloud Computing has the potential to consolidate data centers into more efficient utility service based model. As Amazon Web Services team has discovered, there is a hybrid approach as well, where companies use the cloud computing for some areas, and keep their own data center for baseline services.

Amazon Promotes Frustration Free (Greener) Packaging

November 4, 2008 Dave Ohara

How big is Green? Amazon chooses to make Frustration Free (Greener) Packaging highlighted on its home page today.

One of the products featured is this pirate ship.

In addition Amazon has an environment site that points to a study online shopping is is more environmentally friendly than traditional shopping.

Economic and Environmental Implications of Online
Retailing in the United States
H. Scott Matthews1 and Chris T. Hendrickson2

Abstract

The advent of the Internet and e-commerce has brought a new way of marketing and selling many products, including books. The system-wide impacts of this shift in retail methods on cost and the environment are still unclear. While reductions in inventories and returns provide significant environmental savings, some of the major concerns of the new e-commerce business models are the energy and packaging materials used by the logistics networks for product fulfillment and delivery. In this paper, we analyze the different logistics networks and assess the environmental and cost impacts of different delivery systems. With a return (remainder) rate of 35% for best-selling books, ecommerce logistics are less costly and create lower environmental impacts, especially if private auto travel for shopping is included. Without book returns, costs and environmental effects are comparable for the two delivery methods.

My Home Office is Working Better than I thought, Driving only 20 miles a week

November 4, 2008 Dave Ohara

I bought a ScanGauge II device to get some data from my car. I decided to top off the tank to calibrate the device, and saw I only drove 120 miles in 5 weeks. 20 miles a week. Less than 3/4 gallons of gas a week.

This is my data to prove my home office is working to keep me at home working.

Here is a picture of my home office.

I have 500 sq ft of space and a treadmill to exercise given I am not walking much.

A view out the window.

And we don’t go any where far in the summer. Here are pictures from our Summer Soiree Party.

And this space works well for executive off sites as well.

Load Testing From The Cloud, A Killer App?

November 4, 2008 Dave Ohara

There are debates over the usefulness of cloud' computing for enterprise. Amazon Web Services blog has a post on how one company is using AWS to create load testing to test other web sites.

SOASTA - Load Testing From the Cloud

I met Tom Lounibos, CEO of SOASTA, at the Palo Alto stop of the AWS Start-Up Tour. Tom gave the audience a good introduction to theirCloudTest product, an on demand load testing solution which resides on and runs from Amazon EC2.

Tom wrote to me last week to tell me that they are now able to simulate over 500,000 users hitting a single web application. Testing at this level gives system architects the power to verify the scalability of sites, servers, applications, and networks in advance of a genuine surge in traffic.

Here are a few of their most recent success stories:

Hallmark tested their e-card sites in preparation for the holiday season, and are ramping up testing to over 200,000 simultaneous users using CloudTest.

Marvel Entertainment is doing extensive cloud testing in order to get ready for the release of the sequel to IronMan.

A division of Procter & Gamble is using cloud testing to get ready for new releases of their web site.

Soasta also has a monitoring capability.

See Across Your Entire Web Application Infrastructure.

Resource Monitoring

Monitoring is the ability to monitor a resource (hardware, network, load balancer, firewall, Web server, database, application server, content management system, etc.) and capture usage information about that resource. Resource monitoring is a key component of professional Web testing. While it is crucial that a Web application functions correctly, resource usage and end-to-end response are extremely important. When there are problems, you need information about resource usage across the entire infrastructure of your Web application.

Resource information can be captured from any available resource in the Web application infrastructure—not just the Web server hosting the Web application. SOASTA CloudTest can monitor all three tiers of your Web application—the Web server, the application server, and the database server. It can also capture valuable information about other components in your network architecture—load balancers, for example.

Soasta says load testing is the killer app for cloud computing. Didn’t think about it until now, but makes a lot of sense.

"Load and performance testing is the ‘killer application’ for cloud computing," said Tom Lounibos, CEO of SOASTA. "Companies can very easily create a real-world test environment without having to invest in it. Developers have virtually unlimited and affordable access to thousands of servers, memory, storage, etc. and can, essentially on demand, simulate load and performance tests for tens of thousands of users without having to purchase the hardware."

Why SOASTA CloudTest Lab is uniquely different:

It’s Real World: Load and performance testing in cloud computing environments is the closest thing to running an application in production minus the worry of negatively impacting your customers. SOASTA CloudTest Lab provides you with a controlled environment to thoroughly simulate and stage a real world scenario before it goes into production.

It’s On Demand: No more costly investment in new hardware or worries about staffing up for support and management. Ready when you are, SOASTA CloudTest Lab serves as a virtual test lab at your service 24x7x365 and has you testing in a matter of minutes.

It’s Scalable: An overloaded Web site is a major problem. Being prepared and understanding the limits of your application is crucial to maintaining availability and a quality customer experience. SOASTA CloudTest Lab allows you instant access to up to 1,000 available test servers when needed, and the ability to shut them down when unused to reduce costs. In short, you pay only for what you need. Find out, without the cost and time of setting up and tearing down hundreds if not thousands of servers, whether or not your Web application can scale exponentially at a moment’s notice.

It’s Affordable: Load and performance testing is no longer cost prohibitive. A capability that would typically cost hundreds of thousands of dollars is now available to companies of all sizes in a matter of minutes for only a few hundred dollars.