With IBM acquisition of SoftLayer joins battle of Microsoft & Google vs. Amazon Web Services

GigaOm's Barb Darrow posts on IBM's acquisition of SoftLayer.

Who would have thought 7 years ago when AWS launched that they would be a threat to IBM's business model.

IBM’s acquisition of SoftLayer is a bid to make the IT giant relevant in a world where Amazon Web Services has come in from left field to snarf up workloads that IBM would very much like to own. That’s a big problem for Big Blue.

Increasingly, IBM is not just competing with age-old hardware and software rivals like Oracle and HP, but  also with Amazon. Going forward, IBM will butt heads more with Google and Microsoft, which have staked big claims in public cloud infrastructure.

It is interesting to think of this as a battle between IBM's software developers and Amazon Web Service's software developers.  IBM has acquired SoftLayers developers, IP and customers.   When start-ups outgrew AWS the two two places almost everyone evaluates is a move to Rackspace or SoftLayer.  Why the move?  Many times developers want to being run on dedicated hardware.

The second major change was us moving from Amazon Web Services - EC2 and RDS in particular - to running on dedicated hardware, which we rent through Softlayer.

There's nothing wrong with AWS - indeed, we still run a staging environment there - but our database benefits greatly from the low latencies of physical disks, and there aren't very many hosted PostgreSQL services on EC2 that fit our needs.

So, consider that SoftLayer is not just Cloud.

Mike Eruzione's Keynote inspires Data Center Audience at 7x24 Exchange

At this year's 7x24 Exchange in Boca Raton Mike Eruzione gave the opening keynote.

Going for the Gold

Mike Eruzione shares how to overcome any obstacle and go for the gold. When the 1980 US Olympic Men's hockey team, led by Coach Herb Brooks and captained by Mike Eruzione, defeated the mighty USSR team in the semifinals and went on to beat Finland for the gold medal, it truly shocked the world. This stunning achievement, which was captured in the popular 2004 Disney movie Miracle, is considered by many to be the "greatest sports moment of the 20th century." Drawing from his experiences in the 1980 Olympics, Eruzione reveals to audiences how true commitment is at the heart of super achievements

Mike Eruzione
Capitan of the 1980 US Olympic Hockey Team and Subject of the Hit Film “Miracle”

The stories Mike told where insightful and entertaining.  A big part of the story was how the team was built and developed, the story behind the success.  Something that a data center crowd can relate to.

Mike played a video of the 1980 game winning goal vs. Russia as he admits many times the audience has people who were not born yet in 1980.

 The impact of Mike's presentation was more than many expected.  To give you an idea of how impactful Mike's 1980 game winning goal is consider his 1980 memorabilia sold for $1.3 mil.

NEW YORK (AP) -- The jersey worn by hockey great Mike Eruzione in the U.S. Miracle on Ice victory over the Soviet Union at the 1980 Winter Olympics was auctioned for almost $660,000 Saturday, though surprising strong interest in the stick he used to score the winning goal and his gold medal game jersey pushed the overall sale to more than $1.3 million.

Spirited bidding drove the value of the hockey stick to $262,900, more than five times the $50,000 it was expected to go for as a 9-year-old boy and his father outbid others, earning a high-five slap and a hug for the youth from Eruzione himself.

Convention Photography are courtesy of Professional Images Photography Joe Rodriguez 2013. 

Rumor is true, IBM buys Softlayer

There has been a pretty widely discussed rumor than IBM would buy SoftLayer.  And, GigaOm's Barb Darrow reports on the rumor being true.

It’s official: IBM to buy SoftLayer

by Barb Darrow

10 MINS AGO

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SUMMARY:

SoftLayer and IBM’s legacy SmartCloud will form the basis of a new Global Cloud Services division.

In one of the industry’s worst-kept secrets, IBM is buying SoftLayer, a respected cloud services provider.

Google secures Swedish Wind Power for its Hamina Finland Data Center

Google has a blog post on its latest renewable energy agreement in Sweden.  Below is a map of the location of power from origin, where it exists in the grid, and the location of the Hamina Finland data center.

Google bought 100% of the wind power for 10 years.

Here’s how it works: O2, the wind farm developer, has obtained planning approval to build a new 72MW wind farm at Maevaara, in Övertorneå and Pajala municipality in northern Sweden, using highly efficient 3MW wind turbines. We’ve committed to buying the entire output of that wind farm for 10 years so that we can power our Finnish data center with renewable energy. That agreement has helped O2 to secure 100% financing for the construction of the wind farm from the investment arm of German insurance company Allianz, which will assume ownership when the wind farm becomes operational in early 2015.

Commencement Speech Parody by Simpson's Rob LaZebnik executive producer/Writer - You're pampered, privileged, oversexed, with dim job prospects

WSJ publishes a hilarious parody of the commencement speech by Rob LeZebnik.  I've gotten great laughs retelling the story. I won't spoil any of the story by clipping parts.  Enjoy

A Message for the Class of 2013

Dear Graduates: You're pampered, privileged and oversexed—but at least your employment prospects are dim.

The WSJ article is a derivative of this video filmed in 2009.

American humorist Rob LaZebnik delivers a speech to the Harvard-Radcliffe Class of 1984 at their 25th Reunion Entertainment Evening, June 5, 2009, Sanders Theatre, Harvard.

Here is an example of how ridiculous things have gotten with the pampered and privileged class.  NBCnews has a post on a high school with 21 valedictorians.

In fact, at South Medford High, all of those 21 valedictorians can tellcolleges they are No. 1 in their class.

This is where “New School” has crushed “Old School.” And this is where college administrators say they are growing increasingly suspicious about the surge in applicants who boast the laurels of “valedictorian” and “head of class.”

“Yes, it has definitely watered things down a little bit,” said Jim Rawlins, president of the National Association for College Admission Counseling. “Definitely, the more ultra-selective universities have to be more critical and skeptical of class ranks than before.