Morgan Stanley publishes report that AWS will continue domination for another 10 years

Barb Darrow has a post on Morgan Stanley's report.

Killer cloud: report says Amazon Web Services threatens all IT incumbents

by Barb Darrow

11 HOURS AGO

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photo: Flickr/Will Merydith

SUMMARY:

New Morgan Stanley research expects AWS to hit $24 billion in revenue by 2022 and to put the hurt on legacy IT providers in the process.

Barron's also has a post on the report.

Amazon’s Web Services Threatens Almost All IT, Says Morgan Stanley

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By Tiernan Ray

Morgan Stanley’s Scott Devitt, in a longish (32 pages) report in conjunction with colleaguesKeith Weiss, Ehud Gelblum, Simon Flannery, Katy Huberty, Joseph Moore, and Adam Wood, this morning writes that Amazon.com (AMZN) is “making waves” in conventional IT by “applying retail economics” that is making it an “emerging IT mega-vendor.”

Devitt, who has an Overweight rating on Amazon shares, writes that Amazon’s “Amazon Web Services,” which runs compute tasks on its servers for a fee, should be able to reach $24 billion in revenue by 2022, through a combination of services that produce greater scale in computing tasks, and by offering “a continual downward pressure in pricing.”

The authors size the total addressable market for Amazon Web Services at $152 billion, and offer a graphic for that:

Seeing good data center friends at 7x24 Exchange

I started my data center conference attendance 5 years ago with Uptime Symposium, then DatacenterDynamics.  Eventually going to Data Center World and Gartner data center conference.  I had heard about 7x24 Exchange, but I was so busy going to the other conferences I didn't fit in a trip to 7x24.  Thanks to words of encouragement from David Schirmacher, I decided to go and convinced another data center executive as well to go to a 7x24 exchange conference and compare.  Now keep in mind what I am sharing is biased.  David Schirmacher is a good friend whose opinion I trust and he is now the President of 7x24 Exchange.  I get to go to almost all the conferences as media so I get access to people and information that people are interested in having written up.  So the value of what I am getting from these conferences is not looking for equipment or ideas to put in a data center that I run. I am looking for who is the most innovative in the industry and interesting to write about.

I just went through the speaker list for 7x24 Exchange and more of my friends are speakers at 7x24 Exchange than any other conference.  These are good friends that we will chat in bar, hang out to discuss a variety of topics, get together whenever we are in the same town, and would gladly cook a meal in my woodstone pizza oven.  Here is picture of the oven on a pallet before installation.  It does kind of look like something that could be installed at a data center. :-)

This is my fifth 7x24 Exchange, going twice a year for 2 1/2 years and one simple measure of why I go is I see more of my friends as speakers at the conference than any other one.  Which has the side benefit of when I do want to write a blog entry for a presentation I have access to the speaker.  Writing about my friends can create a bias, but why try to fool anyone with unbiased reporting.  Everyone has biases.  My bias is to help my friends spread the word on where the industry needs to be going.

Is it green to ship USA wood pellets to EU for carbon goals?

The WSJ reports on EU utility companies buying USA wood pellets for renewable energy.

The push isn't in North Carolina but in Europe, where governments are trying to reduce fossil-fuel use and carbon-dioxide emissions. Under pressure, some of the Continent's coal-burning power plants are switching to wood.

But Europe doesn't have enough forests to chop for fuel, and in those it does have, many restrictions apply. So Europe's power plants are devouring wood from the U.S., where forests are bigger and restrictions fewer.

Surprise Surprise, a networked based energy solution gets acquired by Cisco

Two years ago I first had a chat with folks at Joulex on their energy efficiency solution.  Their solution is an agentless approach that inventories the IP addresses of all devices on the network to identify the power uses.  There are very few devices running in a data center that don't have an IP address.

And, Cisco has announced intent to acquire Joulex.

JouleX’s energy management solution, together with Cisco EnergyWise™, will provide customers with a simple way to measure, monitor and manage energy usage for network and IT systems across the enterprise, without the use of device-side agents, hardware meters or network configurations. JouleX’s software helps to reduce energy costs by monitoring, analyzing and managing energy usage of all network-connected devices and systems through a set of policies derived through analytics tailored for an enterprise’s needs.

I haven't run into many who have used Joulex in a data center, but with Cisco's acquisition there could be a new push into the data center market.

Do you have a bug from hell running in your data center?

Before working in data centers I worked on operating systems at Apple and Microsoft.  Creating software and working on data centers are kind of a yin and yang - soft and hard, white and black, etc.

In Chinese philosophy, the concept of yin-yang (simplified Chinese: 阴阳; traditional Chinese: 陰陽; pinyin: yīnyáng), which is often called "yin and yang", is used to describe how seemingly opposite or contrary forces are interconnected and interdependent in the natural world; and, how they give rise to each other as they interrelate to one another. Many natural dualities (such as male and female, light and dark, high and low, hot and cold, water and fire, life and death, and so on) are thought of as physical manifestations of the yin-yang concept.

Never thought about it until now that the hard part of IT is it is yin and yang.  Software and hardware.  bits and physical buildings.  web services and real physical infrastructure.  a SW engineer and a mechanical engineer.

Getting everything to work in a data center just right can be frustrating as things sometimes don't work exactly the way they are supposed.  In all that physical infrastructure there are software are bugs from hell.  Bugs that are so nasty and nerve wracking it will make you want to pull your hair out.  Some of these nastiest bugs exist at the transition from light and dark like yin and yang.  Here is a description of bugs from hell.

A BugFromHell is any bug where several hours or more of time is spent by a veteran developer attempting to track-down (and fix) the cause of a software bug. By definition, any bug that takes this long to find is almost always the result of a side-effect of the problematic code (otherwise, the problem would be readily visible via typical debug tools--e.g., stack trace, stepping through code in debug mode, etc). A BugFromHell is very elusive and is typically cannot be isolated or consistently reproduced.

• Hours? Nah, a true BFH is one that takes weeks to find. (Especially in embedded systems work, when "it's a hardware problem" is always a possibility).

The effects of a BugFromHell typically appear anywhere except near the problematic code. Such a bug will write to random part of memory, flip bits that aren't detected for a long period of running time, or appear to happen randomly without appearing to have been triggered by anything; or, worse, appear to be affected by the act of observing it (a HeisenBug).

In the example that the author uses you can see many of these bugs from hell exist at the interface between software and hardware.

Examples:

• overwriting part of the stack frame
• writing to a memory location that has been moved or deleted (and is now occupied by a different object)
• using an uninitialized variable that ultimately leads to writing to a random memory location
• an unforeseen interaction between two threads or processes that only has a very small chance of occurring
• thread interaction that won't happen running on a single CPU box, but which manifests on multiple CPUs
• assumptions made by developers of one webbrowser that aren't made by any other. (You'll always have a <title> tag when setting the charset.)
• Hardware drivers that aren't sufficiently paranoid / robust.
• JMPing into an unprotected NULL, or into some other executable gibberish.
• returning from a function with an unbalanced stack (primarily when embedding assembly code, for embedded systems).

Bugs from hell are running in every data center and are so frustrating.  

Why did I write this post, because my SW dev lead has been in three weeks of bug from hell working full time to fix.  Ouch three weeks of unexpected productivity sapped by a bug so nasty it was elusive yet extremely damaging.