The media makes it seem like the cloud is everything, but when you look carefully, the cloud momentum isn't as big as some believe. Want some proof? Harris Corporation is shutting down its cloud data center operations as it finds its federal customers want physical space.
‘Cloud’ Data Center Closes Because Federal Agencies Prefer Earth
According to Harris, the government prefers to keep its data in-house. Photo: gregwest98/Flickr
Harris Corporation — an outfit that provides computing infrastructure for government agencies — is selling its super-secure data center in Harrisonburg, Virginia and leaving the “cloud computing” business, saying that both its government and commercial customers prefer hosting “mission-critical information” on their own premises rather than in the proverbial cloud.
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“[The closure will] allow us to refocus our capital and efforts on the secure, cost-effective communications and IT solutions that our customers are demanding,” read a statement from Harris CEO William M. Brown.
Ericsson has launched a Data Center Service leveraging its mobile network.
Ericsson launches Data Center Build and Optimization offering
February 26, 2012, 14:09 (CET) Download:
Ericsson enters the market for data centers, enables telecom operators to offer cloud services for their enterprise customers
Operators ideally positioned to offer high quality, high security and high availability cloud services to enterprises
With an optimized cloud strategy, a telco enterprise customer can lower its IT operating expenditure
Ericsson is reaching out its installed base.
Paolo Colella, Head of Consulting and Systems Integration at Ericsson, says: "Operators are ideally positioned to offer high quality, high security and high availability cloud services to enterprises. We bring telecom-grade thinking to the cloud space, focusing both on availability and security of the services, as well as cost and efficiency gains for enterprise customers. And, in addition, cloud services bring new business opportunities for the telecom operators.
Ericsson joins OpenStack, demonstrates unique virtual data center manager
February 28, 2012, 10:00 (CET) Download:
Ericsson to demonstrate cloud-management solution based on OpenStack's open-source components
Virtual data center manager supports multi-tenant distributed clouds and integrates elastic networking over wide area networks
Automated deployment driven by a service-level agreement drastically reduces costs and time to market
As part of the recently announced Network-enabled Cloud concept, Ericsson (NASDAQ: ERIC) has joined the OpenStack project, an open-source community dedicated to creating cloud software that has achieved strong industrial momentum. Ericsson will contribute to further developing OpenStack to support carrier-grade services and applications. OpenStack provides a flexible alternative cloud management solution that is based on open-source components.
If you didn't think Mobile and the Cloud had much to do with each other, Ericsson may change your mind.
Mike Manos has been on demand as a Data Center executive going from Microsoft to Digital Realty Trust to Nokia and his latest job at AOL. Mike let me know of his latest job being CTO for Huffington Post. First question of course is what what happened to your old job?
on taking the responsibilities of CTO of the Huffington Post Media Group. . .
Today I was asked to take over the responsibilities of Chief Technology Officer for the Huffington Post Media Group and I can tell I am extremely excited for this opportunity. This new set of responsibilities will be in addition to my current role as Senior Vice President of Technology at AOL where I have responsibility for the Operations and Day to Day Delivery of all AOL products and services.
OK, so Mike still has his old job at Sr VP of AOL Technologies. So, what is his new job as CTO of Huffington Post?
Some people familiar with this type of industry may think its nothing more than a simplified website with a custom CMS. I can tell you that the back end systems, custom CMS, widget interfaces and overall flexibility that these systems operate on and develop to are part of the reason for the platforms overall success. In a world where ‘Internet time’ generally means an aggressively accelerated rate of time, the Huffington Post Platform operates at a Faster than Internet time rate. Its an incredible challenge and one I cant wait to sink my teeth into.
Huh, Mike is kind of like a Sr VP of DevOps, expanding into the development of content and web site design.
In computing, "DevOps" is an emerging set of principles, methods and practices for communication, collaboration and integration between software development (application/software engineering) and IT operations(systems administration/infrastructure) professionals.[1] It has developed in response to the emerging understanding of the interdependence and importance of both the development and operations disciplines in meeting an organization's goal of rapidly producing software products and services.
I've known Mike for quite a few years and we always enjoy discussing big ideas. So, what can a Sr VP/CTO who gets the paradigm of DevOps do? When you see how the pieces work together. You can implement changes. What type of changes? For Huffington Post it can be how do you create a better web site.
First the integration between the Editorial, Design, and Technology components of the company are truly three equal and dependent legs in the overall delivery of the service. Unlike many media companies where Technology plays a secondary role, at the Huffington Post its an essential and core part of the overall product and delivery strategy. Technology literally iterates on a daily basis.
One of the choices you have is to change when the pain of staying the same is more than the pain of change, but in IT services that can be too late. Isn't it wiser to change before the pain comes? Think of the ultimate pain as an outage. Do you want to wait for an outage before you change? Of course not. The slow performance degradation of a site with increasing costs is what people would run into more often, and is a more realistic pain.
Mike discusses the idea of change in his blog post "Breaking the Chrysalis"
When I first took my position at AOL I knew I was going to be in for some very significant challenges. This position, perhaps more-so than any other in my career was going to push the bounds of my abilities.
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AOL has been around for over 27 years. In technology circles, that’s like going back almost ten generations. Almost 3 decades of “stuff”. The stuff was not only gear and equipment from the natural growth of the business, but included the expansion of features and functionality of long standing services, increased systems interdependencies, and operational, technological, and programmatic “Cruft” as new systems / processes/ technologies were built upon or bolted onto older systems.
This “cruft” adds significant complexity to your operating environment and can truly limit your organization’s agility.
Mike's latest change to CTO and Sr VP of Technologies may be the future of what companies need to replace the CIO and/or CTO role.
Yet more change at embattled AOL: Tim Dierks, the top engineer at its Huffington Post Media Group unit, is out, less than six months after he joined the company. AOL tech SVP Michael Manos will replace him, at least temporarily.
Dierks left Google to work for Tim Armstrong and Arianna Huffington back in September. He was first hired as Huffpo’s senior vice president of engineering, andeventually replaced chief technology Paul Berry, who had helped Huffington build the site and left in February, a year after she sold the company to Armstrong.
A customer who filed a complaint against AT&T after having his wireless data speeds throttled has come out the victor.
One of the points made is ATT is looking to appeal
The victory could be short-lived for Spaccarelli, the AP said. AT&T spokesman Marty Richter told the outlet the company was "evaluating" the possibility of an appeal.
Some have said ATT has a case because no where in the contract does it say it cannot throttle the unlimited data plan.
But, maybe the FCC and FTC can come to the rescue of consumers. How? Remember those overhyped long distance plans, that had restrictions in contracts that were not mentioned in the ads? The FTC and FCC did something about that and created the "Truth in Advertising in Telecommunications and Electricity" dated Mar 2000.
Here are some parts that should get you and ATT thinking. Maybe the rest of the mobile carriers and even Comcast's Internet throttling over 250 GB should consider this as well.
The FTC's of truth-in-advertising law that has been developed through Section 5 of the FTC Act, which prohibits "unfair or deceptive acts or practices," provides helpful guidance to long distance carriers.
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A. General Concepts of Advertising Law
Today, I will describe how the concepts of advertising law apply to the advertising of telecommunications services and electricity. In general, Commission law requires that advertising be truthful, fair, and substantiated.
Each of these concepts is detailed in formal policy statements adopted by the Commission or addressed by statute. A deceptive act is one that contains a misrepresentation or omission that is likely to mislead and be detrimental to consumers who are acting reasonably under the circumstances.(2) An unfair act or practice is one which causes or is likely to cause substantial consumer injury, not reasonably avoidable by consumers themselves, and not outweighed by countervailing benefits.(3) Although the Commission challenges conduct that is unfair, the majority of our actions in the advertising area target deceptive ads.
ATT claimed unlimited data plan.
In all advertising cases, the Commission must determine exactly what claims are made, and whether there is substantiation to support those claims. We look at both express and implied claims. Express claims are claims that unequivocally state the representations. For example, an ad which says: "long distance services to 100 countries" makes an express claim. Implied claims are anything else and range on a continuum from language that is virtually express to language that literally says one thing but strongly suggests something else. For example, an ad which says: " 7 cents a minute" may make an implied claim that there is no minimum charge for each call. In determining the claims that an ad conveys, the Commission examines "the entire mosaic, rather than each tile separately."(5)
Advertisers must make truthful claims and substantiate all objective claims. These rules of the road, of course, apply both to advertisers using traditional media and those who market their products and services on the Internet, telephone, e-mail or through any other media.
Was throttling omitted from ads and should have been disclosed in advertisement?
B. Deception by Omission
Ads can be deceptive because of what they do not say. Let me give you a few examples. If an ad omits material information, an ad can be deceptive even if everything else in the ad is truthful. This is called deception by omission. An ad will be deceptive if it fails to disclose qualifying information that, in light of the representations made, would be necessary to prevent consumers from being misled. We determine whether material information has been omitted by examining a typical buyer's expectation and understanding of the advertiser's claims.
In the Dial Around context, if an ad represents that all calls are 10 cents a minute, but fails to disclose that all calls are subject to a 50 cent minimum charge, the ad would likely be deceptive. A reasonable consumer would likely conclude that a one minute call would be 10 cents, not 50 cents. The same would be true if an ad made specific per minute price claims but failed to disclose that there was a mandatory monthly fee.
C. Material Limitations on Service should be disclosed
Advertisers for Dial-Around and other long distance services must take special care to make certain that material limitations on services are disclosed in the ads. Given the importance of price information, any significant conditions or limitations on the availability of the advertised rates should also be disclosed clearly and conspicuously. I will talk more in a moment about what makes a disclosure clear and conspicuous. But, clear and conspicuous disclosures are important in advertising law generally, and they have special meaning in the Dial-Around context because ads are the primary source of price information for consumers.
Let me give you some examples of situations where disclosures should be used to avoid deception. If an ad features the phrase "10 cents a minute" and that rate is available only during certain times of the day, the failure to clearly and conspicuously disclose the restriction would be deceptive. Likewise, if there are significant geographic restrictions, that fact should also be disclosed. Additionally, terms such as "Basic Rate" should be used only if the meaning of that term is clear to consumers.
An ad cannot refer to a toll-free number or a website to make disclosures that should be made in an ad. While advertisers are encouraged to use customer service numbers and websites to offer consumers more information, these sources cannot cure misleading claims in the ad itself.
When you signed up for ATT's unlimited data plan did you feel like you knew 1.5 - 2GB was the cut off?
In simple terms, disclosures should be presented so that consumers actually see them and understand them. That means disclosures should be clear, prominent, and in close proximity to the claim being modified. There should be no distracting visual or audio elements surrounding the disclosures. Also, legalistic disclosures or those buried in fine print will not be effective. The FTC has a lot of experience with disclosures in a variety of contexts. We enforce certain statutes and regulations that are very specific as to how and when disclosures should be made.
You would think that some of the same people who worked on this FCC/FTC truth in advertising act are still around and they are watching ATT. Remember those old Bell System commercials?
I spent much of my career working at HP on computers, Apple on computers and OS, and Windows on OS with Windows XP the last OS. Now I spend more time thinking about data centers, cloud, and mobile.
How much am I working on Mobile? I have three phones - AT&T iPhone 4S, Verizon Galaxy Nexus, AT&T Galaxy Note
As much as the PC is powerful, it is interesting what you develop when you make a mobile device your primary device with cloud infrastructure.
The above smartphones have dual core ARM processors, 32 GB of storage, 5-8 megapixel back, and 2-3megapixel front cameras. Each of the above have some advantages over the other. This is not about arguing what is best for an individual, but what works best for a usage scenario.
It is amazing how the kids want to play on these devices, and never ask to use my laptop.
