April 2009 Archives

Ben Franklin's advice to "do well by doing good" seems to run counter to popular sentiment these days. Still, some companies make an effort to combine profit and altruistic motives. A case in point is yesterday's announcement that network technology developer Cisco Systems signed a set of agreements to combine forces with the Mexican government to foster socio-economic development in Mexico.

At a meeting held at the official presidential residence, Los Pinos, in Mexico City, in the presence of President Felipe Calderon Hinojosa, Cisco Chairman and CEO John Chambers signed collaborative memoranda of understanding with Secretary of Education Alonso Lujambio Irazabal, Secretary of Economy Gerardo Ruiz Mateos and Secretary of Social Development Ernesto Cordero Arroyo. The memoranda outline a series of steps to help improve Mexican economic competitiveness, and deepen the country's technical talent pool. Not incidentally, these agreements are seen to promote digital communication infrastructure development, which can only be good for Cisco, one of the leading providers of equipment for information-technology infrastructure development.

"Today's collaboration with President Calderon's administration underscores the importance that Cisco places on Mexico," said Cisco Chairman and CEO John Chambers. "With business and government working together we can make a positive impact on education, facilitate greater effectiveness in government, and further extend broadband to rural areas. With the network as the platform, we have the potential to bring even greater opportunity to Mexico and its citizens."

Cisco says the memoranda align with its globalization strategy of supporting sustainable growth, innovation and talent development in key global economies.

Among the goals which Cisco plans to pursue in the collaboration described in the memoranda are:

• Cooperation with the Secretaria of Public Education to establish two pilot programs to help improve the teaching of 21st-century skills in basic and middle education by increasing the competency, productivity and professional development of educators.

• Establishment of a co-operative Education Center of Excellence within Mexico, incorporating leading universities, global education experts from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and other leading non-governmental organizations. Its objective will be to help carry out the transformation of Mexico's education strategy.

• Support for a 21st-Century collaboration environment with education leaders worldwide through the Cisco® 3.0 Leadership Program and a Cisco TelePresence™ for Education Network with key universities around the world.

• Establishment of a Center for Competitiveness and Globalization together with the Secretaria of Economy to share best practices and to support the government in the design and implementation of programs aimed at providing government services more efficiently using digital infrastructure.

• Development of a "one-stop solution" for maximizing collaborative work among government agencies to achieve substantial improvements in competitiveness.

• Development of programs for rural connectivity in collaboration with the Secretaria of Social Development, international multilateral agencies and private companies focusing on deployment of infrastructure to provide access to voice, video and data services for rural populations at sustainable economic levels.

• Support for preparation and implementation of a business model to design and prototype an inexpensive and scalable wireless network solution to bring affordable broadband connectivity to rural communities in the region of Yucatán, Mexico.

"We're pleased to work together with the federal government in Mexico to implement these initiatives that should bring about swift economic change," stated Jaime Valles, vice president of Cisco Latin America. "The ability to help educational and governmental institutions around the country take advantage of the network to promote 21st-Century learning skills and develop collaborative work in government is a tremendous opportunity. We're pleased that the federal government in Mexico shares this vision and is committed to implementing these programs."

We hope that more companies will resist pressure to separate profit-motivated activities from altruistic aims. When you're doing something to help raise the tide for everyone, there's nothing wrong with making sure your boat gets a boost as well. It's good business.

It's also good social policy. Instead of eyeing private companies as predators whose only motive is selfishness, government officials and social activists should view them as potential allies. By helping align business interests with social causes, we can harness tremendous energy and resources to make the Universe a better place in which to live.

Among those who have gone down to the sea in ships, the thought of being boarded by pirates sends chills down the spine. Unlike Disney's romantic Pirates of the Caribbean, real pirates are simply armed criminals looking for helpless prey caught far from aid. Throughout most of history, they have been small, isolated gangs hoping to strike and escape before detection is possible. Sailors' greatest fear is that they might slaughter witnesses to avoid identification.

Occasionally, however, geopolitical forces provide an opportunity for organized maritime criminals to create a safe haven for themselves. When that happens, pirate crews become emboldened, thinking they are safe from reprisals. Such is currently the case in Somalia, where political collapse provided an opening for just such a pirate haven.

Figure 1: LRAD directed-sound system acts as a loudspeaker with an effective range of 300 to 3,000 m.

Technology is helping an ad hoc alliance of major maritime nations mount a measured response to this threat. For example, in early April, while western media focused on an incident where a pirate attack on a U.S. flag freighter escalated into a hostage situation, the Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force used an LRAD 1000X directed sound system manufactured by American Technology Corporation (ATC) to help prevent another pirate attack off the coast of Somalia, this time on a Singaporean tanker. Responding to the tanker's distress call, the Japanese destroyer, Suzunami, used powerful voice commands to identify itself and warn the pirates away.

The directed-sound system, which can be seen in an Asian News Network (ANN) report available on YouTube, acts as a powerful loudspeaker capable of communicating from 300 meters to over 3,000 meters with authority and high intelligibility. The Japanese vessel used vocal commands and powerful warning tones to warn the pirates away from their intended victim. The ANN report, unfortunately, is entirely in Japanese. A related report includes comments in English by a French Naval officer describing the international anti-piracy effort.

According to ATC, the company's proprietary Long Range Acoustic Devices (LRAD) are currently used in a variety of government, military and commercial applications around the world, including deployments with the U.S. Marine Corps, U.S. Army, and U.S. Navy. "LRAD has been successfully deployed to help stop several pirate incidents off the Horn of Africa over the last four years," said Tom Brown, president and CEO of American Technology. "Beginning with the attack on the Seabourn Spirit in November 2005, Somali pirates have become increasingly brazen in their attempts to seize ships, crew and cargo for ransom. We are increasing our efforts to support domestic and international military and commercial security forces in the fight to take back the seas from 21st century pirates."

A few weeks ago, the CEO of a large, very competent computer services company made me feel much better by publicly admitting that he didn't know what people were talking about when they mentioned cloud computing. I, too, had been made to feel inadequate by the term.

Like "fuzzy logic," the term "cloud computing" sounds like its meaning should be obvious, but it isn't when you actually think about it. If you ask the average technophile what cloud computing is, you're likely to get a response like: "Cloud computing is ... unh ... I'm not sure what it is!"

So, I did a little digging to start coralling a meaning for this slippery term. Here's what I've been able to piece together:

Cloud computing seems to be a way to monetize unused capacity of large data storage and analysis facilities by "renting out" the extra capacity on a more-or-less short term basis. Statistics are available that indicate that large distributed computer systems (such as the server farms maintained by Internet service providers) typically run at 10% of capacity most of the time. They need the extra capacity for peak loading, but peak loads appear only occasionally.

This is, of course, similar to the issue that led to the rise of multi-tasking computer operating systems during the 1970s. The solution is similar: provide systems that allow multiple users to time share the unused computing resources at off-peak times.

The difference is a matter of scale. Multitasking operating systems allow multiple users to independently access single-processor computing hardware. Cloud computing systems allow multiple users to independently access large multi-server installations. The effect is the same: as long as the computing resources do not become overloaded, users gain low-cost access to computing resources they never could afford to install themselves.

Users access the resources on an as-needed basis via the Internet. So, a scientist or engineer with a large compute-intensive problem, such as simulating how a protein folds, might rent out unused capacity from, say Yahoo, or Google, or another provider that has a large server farm. Servers are, after all, just high-speed computers with really, really big hard drives, whose sole raison d' etre is to download web pages to every Tom, Dick, and Harriet who makes a request via the network. For big server farms, "the network" is usually the Internet, but it could be a corporate intranet.

The provider's cloud-computing system would create a virtual machine (VM), which appears to the user like a supercomputer dedicated to his or her problem, while looking like just another application program running in the background on the provider's massive multiprocessor system. During peak loads (which appear more-or-less randomly for relatively short periods), the server farm drops the scientist's problem and handles the load for its owner. When the load peak passes, it again activates the VM, which picks up the protein-folding problem where it left off. Since any problem big enough to make cloud computing worthwhile would take a very long time on a desktop machine, the user doesn't even notice the hiccup as the virtual supercomputer runs off to take care of its file-serving duties during the load peak.

After solving the scientist's protein-folding problem, the VM downloads the results (perhaps by emailing them to the user, or by storing them in a file for later download by the user) and disappears. The scientist pays only for the computing time actually used. The cloud-computing provider earns extra income from spare capacity that would otherwise be wasted. Everybody wins.

We like that!

Goooood technology. Nice technology. Now, roll over like a good puppy and I'll scratch your tummy.

Our friends at virtual infrastructure developer Virtual Instruments, and IT technology research firm Taneja Group plan to host an interactive and educational webinar on April 29 titled "Virtual Infrastructure Optimization: What You Can't See Can Hurt You." This live session will feature Dave Bartoletti and Jeff Byrne, both senior analysts and consultants at the Taneja Group, and Mark Urdahl, CEO of Virtual Instruments.

Our March 18 blog entry "Cisco, HP, and the forgotten factor of virtualization" introduced the concept of software virtualization in the context of data servers. These systems should be on the minds of everyone interested in infrastructure expansion and modification while the U.S. economy shifts from contraction to expansion later in 2009. While most folks who think of "infrastructure" as bridges, highways, and buildings, the real infrastructure of the technology-driven U.S. economy, as well as the economies of the fastest growing nations globally, is information technology (IT).

While brick-and-mortar infrastructure is certainly important, and woefully in need of attention, most of the effect of the Federal government's stimulus efforts will be to boost IT infrastructure. That is, it will drive expansion of public and private sector organizations' abilities to store and communicate mountains of data. We will be modernizing, building, and expanding data servers and the networks that interconnect them.

Virtualization will surely be an important core technology built into most, if not all, of this expanded IT infrastructure. As pointed out in the 3/18 blog entry, virtualization provides critical capabilities to data server operators, whether they are in government, financial, healthcare, or other sectors. Anyone involved in any of these sectors needs to understand what virtualization is, what benefits it provides, and how it provides them.

Attending the 4/29 seminar on optimizing virtualized data servers is a good way to bone up on the critical information everyone involved in activities enabled by data-server technology needs to know. To attend, visit the webinar's free registration website. the webinar will be held live on April 29, 2009 at 8:30 a.m. PT (4:30 p.m. GMT)

According to Virtual Instruments, the webinar will introduce new research on the topic of virtual Infrastructure optimization (VIO) - the market category of solutions designed to significantly improve the performance of virtualized applications and to help optimize the utilization of both storage and server resources. The hosts will highlight how IT managers and administrators can:

* Tackle challenges associated with deploying virtualization for performance sensitive, business-critical applications, including visibility into and managing the internal cloud.

* Proactively avoid over-provisioning and under-provisioning of server and storage assets

* Track system interdependencies to accelerate identification of performance choke points

* Select monitoring and analysis tools with the instrumentation needed to address today's scale and complexity

* Gain clear visibility into real-time virtual SAN performance

* Confidently deploy virtualization in business-critical environments

Speakers and audience participants - who will be able to ask questions during the event - will discuss how new solutions enable administrators to peer into multiple dimensions of the infrastructure in real-time and obtain the integrated monitoring and analytics required to optimize and troubleshoot virtual infrastructure performance holistically across every element of the system - from the application to the spindle.