In The Cloud do you have visibility of the Physical Infrastructure? No, which means a problem when a Superstorm like Sandy Hits

The way some people talk the Cloud is the only way to go.  Part of being the Cloud is it is Opaque. You can't see the details.  The Cloud is not transparent.  What kind of transparency.  If you knew Superstorm like Sandy was coming to hit an area where you have your Cloud Service, can you determine the physical risk to the facility?

I was reading GigaOm's Barb Darrow's post on lessons from Superstorm Sandy for IT and it is a good summary of some of the lessons.

What superstorm Sandy taught us about protecting IT infrastructure

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photo: Getty Images
SUMMARY:

Some post-storm lessons are no brainers — make sure you have the right fuel hoses as well as the fuel itself? Duh. Others may come as surprise.

Then I thought.  Wait if you are in a Cloud service in NYC, you can't find out anything like she suggests.

3: Carefully assess the backup power situation

Even if you have plenty of fuel for backup generators, it won’t help if the generators themselves or the pumps to supply them get flooded in a basement. If this gear must stay on lower floors, make sure it’s fully encapsulated and waterproofed, said Michael Levy, analyst at 451 Research.

Post Sandy, service providers should also make sure they have roll-up generators as well as fuel hoses onsite and easily accessible, said Ryan Murphey VP of operations for PEER 1 Hosting. Oh, and make sure those hoses fit both the generators and the fuel trucks.

If you were in a colocation site, you can tour the facility to do your own assessment and you have contacts to discuss the physical facility.  Can you communicate to the facility department at AWS in Ashburn, VA?  Hell no.

If you have mission critical information in the cloud do you want more transparency?  Hell Yes.

Add this to another reason why users move out of Cloud's like AWS to colocation facilities.

Here is an example where AWS's data centers went down vs. Digital Realty and Dupont Fabros during a power outage.

The two largest wholesale data center operators in the northern Virginia market said their data centers performed flawlessly during last weekend’s electrical storms, maintaining electrical power during grid outages and keeping customers online. Digital Realty Trust (DLR) owns 19 data centers in the region, whileDuPont Fabros Technology (DFT) operates seven facilities. Between them, the two companies operate more than 3.3 million square feet of data center space in northern Virginia.

The announcements provide a contrast to the performance of Amazon Web Services, which had a data center that was knocked offline by power outages during the storms that hit northern Virginia Friday night. While the storms were powerful, other leading data center operators were able to keep their facilities online. The announcements also indicated where Amazon’s failures didn’thappen. Amazon is a major tenant for Digital Realty, leasing 448,895 square feet in six properties, including several in northern Virginia. The announcement made it clear that the Amazon outage did not occur in one of Digital Realty’s buildings, as some have speculated.

Digital Realty said its data centers in northern Virginia “operated as designed and engineered to maintain the highest degree of reliability. These uptime metrics are based on a comprehensive evaluation of the Company’s facilities worldwide using standard industry methodology.

Cloud's have outages.  And with lack of transparency of physical facilities your risk exposure is unknown.  Kind of scary.

 

What is the next wave after Mobile? Services beyond devices

I've spent 33 years in the tech industry.  Working at HP, Apple, and Microsoft was great to ride the wave of desktop computing.  In the world of Mobile there is so much going on I find it much better to figure out what is going on being independent.  Last night I spent a few hours with some of the thought leadership folks going to GigaOm Mobilize, chatting about new services.

Microsoft had a vision of a computer on every desk.  The new vision is a mobile device on every person.  You can continue down this track to think the future are google glasses, implants and more hardware stuck to you.  I don't.  Although I am sure we will see plenty of people who will think they are so much better than the rest based on what mobile gear they have.

Every week day, I spend an hour in an aerobic workout and reading a book on a Kindle Paperwhite.  I've been doing this for about 2 months now.  At first 45 minutes, and now an hour.  At the beginning I was using my Galaxy Note, reading with the Kindle app.  This setup though had me reaching to check e-mail and surf the web.  No. I am going to spend an hour a day just reading.  No distractions.  This turns out to be a good aerobic workout routine and a good exercise for my mind to focus on learning something new.  It is well documented that contrary to popular belief multi-tasking is less productive. Juggling a bunch of different things may feel better, but it is an illusion of control.  You can't see your mistakes.  The things you drop and don't do as good as a job.  Or things you completely miss.  Opening your mind to see every day you are making mistakes recognizes you are human.

So, what is the next thing after Mobile?  Services that help you see you focus and see your mistakes.  With everyone having a mobile device connected to the cloud, new services can be created that let you know where you stand in relation to others.

There are so many people who did not have the benefit of an education in math or science.  They may take this statement as saying they need to live the life of Mr Spock.  No.  They would find it much easier to face the facts.

Here is one article on where Astrology is Science.

Astrology is not a very scientific way to answer questions. Although astrologers seek to explain the natural world, they don't usually attempt to critically evaluate whether those explanations are valid — and this is a key part of science. The community of scientists evaluates its ideas against evidence from the natural world and rejects or modifies those ideas when evidence doesn't support them. Astrologers do not take the same critical perspective on their own astrological ideas.

What happens when your data mining is flooded with SPAM? NSA's data center problem

Washingtonpost discuss the problem of the NSA data center being flooded with SPAM.

The NSA's data-collection activities are so resource-intensive, the agency can't complete its new server farms fast enough. But when it does, a significant share of what gets held on those servers could wind up being worthless spam.

We now know the NSA collects hundreds of thousands of address books and contact lists from e-mail services and instant messaging clients per day. Thanks to this information, the NSA is capable of building a map of a target's online relationships.

The abundance of SPAM is probably one of the top reasons so many users try not to use e-mail.

The writer closes making the point that part of what is stored in the NSA data center is lots and lots of SPAM.

Industry reports show spam accounts for an overwhelming share of all e-mail. Other internal NSA documents obtained by The Post's Barton Gellman appear to agree. If what the NSA is downloading is at all reflective of the broader Internet, then it's fair to conclude the agency collects a significant amount of spam and has little choice but to store it — meaning that of the "alottabytes" of storage the NSA brags about in its Utah data center, a heap of them will be filled with junk.

Rethinking what is the Truth in Economic Data, Premise Challenges Government Reporting

The movie Trading Places with Dan Aykroyd and Eddie Murphy made millions gaming the government disclosure of OJ futures.

It does seem pretty fragile that the future prices are determined by decades old manual methods.

A startup came out of stealth mode today.  I caught the news first in the WSJ print version, and there is a SFGate article that also covers the new service.

He began to wonder what information the government was relying on, and how they were gathering and analyzing it.

"They're reporting on about half a percentage point of reality," he said.

Soloff thought that in the digital age, there had to be more complete, reliable and rapid ways to collect the data that informs critical monetary decisions, here and abroad. A year and a half ago, he co-founded a company that aims to prove it, using an unusual online and offline approach that could offer fresh economic insights.

It's called Premise Data Corp., using the term from logic meaning the assumption that something is true. But it remains to be seen whether the company's own premise is true - that it can make money selling better data, indexes and tools than vast government agencies.