Making a few enemies is OK

One of the good lessons I learned working on the Mac II at Apple was to ship something difficult you need to be willing to piss off some people.

I just wrote to a friend.

Making a few enemies is not a problem in life.  You can't be friends to everyone.  if you are you aren't doing anything interesting.

Winston Churchill says this better.

You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life.
Winston Churchill 

I have written some things that have made a few enemies, and that's OK.  And, I'll probably write even more in the future. 

Have you hit $50k a month on AWS? Do you have the itch to move?

GigaOm's Barb Darrow has a post on startups that have moved off of AWS.

Amazon Web Services: should you stay or should you go?

by Barb Darrow

4 HOURS AGO

2 Comments

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SUMMARY:

Startups love the flexibility and pricing of AWS. But then again, no one cloud is right for everyone. Here are a few startups who decided to move at least some of their workloads off AWS.

$50K is the magic number that gets discussed in the article.  One bigger player, not a startup is in the post with their views.

Paris Georgiallis, VP of platform operations for RMS, which builds catastrophe risk models for insurance companies, also put some credence in the $50,000 per month cut off, although he, cautioned that every user’s needs vary. “$50K a month equates to $1.8M of capital spend over 36 months. An experienced IT team can work miracles with $1.8M in infrastructure, especially in a mid-to-large enterprise,” he said via email. 
RMS started out with AWS because well, it’s developers loved AWS. That appeal is Amazon’s ace in the hole. AWS “is winning the developer war much like Microsoft did in the 90s — by creating simple tools and eliminating infrastructure as a concern for developers that attraction is high.” The problem with that is developers tend to treat AWS as an all-you-can-eat-buffet which is fine — to a point. But with poor management of VMs and storage, costs can and often do skyrocket.

And, in the comment section is a reader who references his blog post of host their own server vs. softlayer in London.

The hardware experiment – London colocation

Written by David Mytton

Recently we’ve been reviewing the infrastructure that powers our server and website monitoring service, Server Density, and as a result we have started an experiment looking into buying and colocating our own physical hardware.

Currently, the service is run from 2 data centers in the US with Softlayer and we’re very happy with the service. The ability to deploy new hardware or cloud VMs within hours or minutes on a monthly contract, plus the supporting services likeglobal IPs is very attractive. However, we’re now spending a significant amount of money each month which makes it worth considering running our own hardware.

QTS opens on NYSE at $21, below the range of 27 - 30

QTS went public today on the NYSE.  On Nasdaq.com there is a press release that says the stock was below range.

QTS Realty Trust, a data center REIT operating 10 facilities across 7 states, raised $257 million by offering 12.3 million shares at $21, well below the range of $27 to $30. QTS Realty Trust plans to list on the NYSE under the symbol QTS. QTS Realty Trust initially filed confidentially on 5/31/2013. Goldman Sachs, 

Should you get Excited about Verizon choosing Seamicro? How many boxes? What % is this of installed servers?

I was chatting with an analyst friend today and he asked me what I thought about Verizon choosing Seamicro.  Here is the press release.

Verizon Selects AMD’s SeaMicro SM15000 for Enterprise Class Services: Verizon Cloud Compute and Verizon Cloud Storage

We shared our knowledge of how many sea micro boxes were being used at various customers we knew and our numbers matched.

Here is the question that almost never gets asked.  In the same way that Airbus made a major win over Boeing getting JAL to buy the A350 and the news hits the WSJ.  There is clear announcement of the number of planes bought, and the options acquired for future deliveries.

JAL ordered 31 A350 jetliners carrying a catalog price of ¥950 billion, with an option to buy 25 more of the long-distance planes, the companies said Monday. Deliveries will start in 2019 and roll out over six years.

When the hardware vendors start having press releases that identify the number of units sold over what period then we can judge whether the deal is a big one or not.

What we don't know is what is the rest of the hardware in Verizon's Cloud.  Is SeaMicro 1% of the units?  2%?  5%?  10%?  25? of the total server count.  We don't really know and if you don't know, then why should you think the announcement has an impact on the way you do business.

Warp your thinking, Oil Companies could be the solution for Carbon Capture

Technology Review has a post on a discussion with Shell Executive that they could be the ones who can solve the carbon capture problem.

Wouldn't that be interesting if environmental groups are supporting the transformation of oil companies.

Shell Exec Says Oil Companies Might Become Carbon Capture Ones

An expert from Shell says that oil companies, with their deep knowledge of geophysics, are well-suited to pioneer carbon capture and storage technology.

• By Kevin Bullis on October 9, 2013

 

WHY IT MATTERS

Carbon capture and storage could help reduce emissions, but it will require huge resources.

Dirk Smit speaking today at the EmTech conference at MIT.

Oil companies’ expertise in geophysics might be invaluable in addressing climate change and other civilization-scale challenges, according to Dirk Smit, vice president of exploration technology at Royal Dutch Shell.

Speaking on the sidelines of MIT Technology Review’s EmTech conference today, Smit described a future in which fossil fuels provide a smaller fraction of the world’s energy needs—not because the world will run out of them but because a range of factors, including improved technology and concerns about climate change, make alternatives to fossil fuels more competitive.