Brij Singh's Random Musings

Total Cost and Benefit of Ownership of Desktop Computers

Total Cost and Benefit of Ownership of Desktop Computers

This is another good analysis of TCO. Prakash Advani wrote a good comparison between Linux and Windows.

open idea development

open idea development

Interesting analysis on how to make the process of I-have-this-cool-idea more serious.

IBM's definition

IBM%u2019s On-Demand Defition

Eventually it has to appeal to business owners needs and adapt to business process driven architecture. Currently its a classic case of putting horse before the cart.

Amy Wohl is right on target here -

"Transforming A Business Is About More Than Technology

But it's key's to understand that HOW you buy computing - hardware, software and services - is only one part of transforming a business. There are other dimensions that need consideration.

Each business must identify and make the strategic choices that its particular industry requires for it to become a successful on-demand business.

Individual organizations have to assess their cultures in order to successfully make the people and process changes that will enable them to move to the on-demand business environment. "

Sun Enhances N-1 With Provisioning

Sun Enhances N-1 With Provisioning

Wohl on Sun buying CenterRun -

Today, CenterRun is a multi-platform product. Sun pledges to keep it that way, although they believe that Sun customers will prefer it on Sun Solaris. (We hope they avoid the software acquisition trap of pledging support to other platforms and then failing to provide timely updates. That would be too bad.)

Sun seems pleased that its newest acquisition provisions at the application level, rather than at the operating system level. But we have yet to see anyone’s full portfolio for this important new automated systems management market – and there are lots of other acquisitions still to be made – so we will bide our time before declaring a winner.

Amy Wohl : Too Long Away

Units of computing power

From Amy Wohl's blog -

"Units of Computing Power
Ths week I visited IBM's On-Demand Data Center in Boulder Colorado, where IBM can host customer applications that are served up, across the network, as if there were right there on the customer's site.

We are having a lot of trouble figuring out how to price what customers are buying. In fact, in one conversation I had with some of IBM Global Services' technical gurus, we agreed that so far all of these deals are one-off negotiated arrangements between vendor and customer, each unique. To scale up (down really, in terms of deal sizes and customer size), but way up in terms of number of customers served, we'd need an easier way to describe what the customers are buying.

In today's Wall Street Journal, HP's Bernardo Huberman is described as looking for a metric to describe what computers are delivering -- some combination of processing, storage -- and we'd guess services like management and application delivery. HP calls it the computon.

HP, of course, is not alone. IBM has been working on its own method, called a Service Unit, and Sun has Sun Power Units.

So someday we may not buy computers at all, but rather simply power all of our electronic devices from some computing utility, paying a monthly bill for computons -- or whatever they're eventually called -- or negotiating for flat rate deals like the ones offered by the phone companies. "

This is something we have been discussing, about the need to define a unit which is inclusive and representative of all computing resources.

HP's Computon
Sun Sun Power Units
IBM Service Unit

Is This Where Sun Will Shine? :: AO

Is This Where Sun Will Shine?

The second is to focus on driving the complexity out of server side infrastructure, which for CIOs is getting more complex and more expensive. If you’re a CIO, you’re going to invest in directory security and identity technologies because you’re worried about system access and provisioning. You’re going to invest in Web services infrastructures, such as portals and application servers, and Web servers and integration technologies. You’re going to invest in communication and cooperation, email pin messaging, calendaring. And then finally, you’re going to invest in an operating system, which although it’s gone a little out of style, is ever more important in today’s environment. Now look at each of those four broad areas where you’re investing: you license directories by the entry; you identify AP servers by the CP, messaging and communication by the number of mailboxes or calendars, and the operating system by the box, and the file system by the terabyte, etc. And the only point behind outlining all of those is to show that it’s a mess. It’s very difficult for any CIO to get their hands around it.

And so when we looked at really taking the complexity and expense out of that operating platform, we came up with Project Orion. It’s a new strategy on three fronts. First and foremost is synchronizing all of the releases of our technologies on the server side. There will be four releases a year of all system software at Sun. And we will match up all of those products we just talked about with the Solaris release trains, and once a quarter you will get an update that provides forward compatibility of all these basic service infrastructure elements. That makes it a very economic platform to deploy.

....

We have an effort underway called N1 which is all about automating the heterogeneous data center. Taking Hewlett-Packard equipment, IBM equipment, Dell equipment, Windows, Linux, Solaris, HP Lex, and allowing CIOs to really begin operating those at a level of efficiency that they’ve never been able to achieve historically. In essence, our N1 vision is a very simple concept: a computer should be responsible for air traffic control in the data center. If you want to get more performance, more durability, and lower costs, then you should ask your computer to figure out how to make that happen. N1 is the system that does all that thinking, and does all the analysis to make sure you can run provision data centers

Sun's Orion pricing

Sun's Orion pricing expected by June | CNET News.com

Main points -

Employee headcount based pricing
Sun moving away from their own hardware platform, atleast in the entry and mid-server level:

"Neil Knox, executive vice president of Sun's volume system group and the leader of its lower-end server business, said at the conference that Sun is willing to do just that. Although sales of Intel-based lower-end Sun servers will likely cannibalize some of Sun's UltraSparc-based business, that alternative is better than losing sales to others, Knox said.

"If you don't do it, somebody else is going to do it to you," Knox said. "

EmergentDemocracyPaper - Joi Ito Wiki

EmergentDemocracyPaper - Joi Ito Wiki

Need to understand this little better. Very interesting analysis of emerging linked relationships.

Harvard Radical

Harvard Radical

Former Dot-Commers Are Adjusting, Painfully

Former Dot-Commers Are Adjusting, Painfully