Showing posts with label Distributed Computing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Distributed Computing. Show all posts

May 13, 2012

Facebook IPO--Love It, But Leave It

With the Facebook IPO scheduled for this week, valuing the company at as much as $96 billion, many investors according to Bloomberg BusinessWeek (11 May 2012) see this as overvalued.

Facebook will be the largest Internet IPO in history, and would be about 4 times as much as Google was valued at its IPO at $23 billion in 2003.

Further, Facebook could be valued at offering at 99 times earnings.

This is more than the price earnings ratio of 99% of companies in the S&P Index, yet even with some estimating sales of $6.1 billion this year, Facebook would only rank about 400 in the S&P 500.

True Facebook has amassed an incredible 900 million users, but the company's revenue growth has slowed for the 3rd year in a row.

Another article in BusinessWeek (10 May 2012) describes a new social networking contender called Diaspora.

Unlike Google+ which is predominantly a Facebook copycat, Diaspora is bringing something new and major to the table--they are addressing the privacy issues that Facebook has not.

Diaspora is a distributed (or federated) social network, unlike Facebook which is centralized--in other words, Diaspora allows you to host your own data wherever you want (even in the cloud).

Each of these independently owned Diaspora instances or "pods" (dispersed like in the Diaspora) make up a true social "network"--interconnected and interoperable computing devices.

With Diaspora, you own your own data and can maintain its privacy (share, delete, and do what you want with your information), unlike with Facebook where you essentially give up rights to your data and it can and is used by Facebook for commercial use--for them to make money off of your personal/private information.

When it comes to personal property, we have a strong sense of ownership in our society and are keen on protecting these ownership rights, but somehow with our personal information and privacy, when it comes to social networking, we have sold ourselves out for a mere user account.

As loss of personally identifiable information (PII), intellectual property, identity theft, and other serious computer crimes continues to grow and cost us our money, time, and even our very selves in some respects, alternatives to the Facebook model, like Diaspora, will become more and more appealing.

So with social networks like Facebook--it is a case of love it, but leave it!

Love social networking--especially when privacy is built in--and others don't have rights to what you post.

But leave it--when they are asking for your investment dollar (i.e. IPO) that could be better spent on a product with a business model that is actually sustainable over the long term.

(Source Photo: here with attribution to Allan Cleaver)

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November 27, 2011

Running IT as an Ecosystem

The New York Times (27 November 2011) has an interesting article under "bright ideas" called Turn on the Server. It's Cold Outside.
The idea in the age of cloud and distributed computing, where physical location of infrastructure is besides the point, is to place (racks of) servers in people's homes to warm them from the cold.
The idea is really pretty cool and quite intuitive: Rather than use expensive HVAC systems to cool the environment where servers heat up and are housed, instead we can use the heat-generating servers to warm cold houses and save money and resources on buying and running furnaces to heat them.
While some may criticize this idea on security implications--since the servers need to be secured--I think you can easily counter that such a strategy under the right security conditions (some of which are identified in the article--encrypting the data, alarming the racks, and so on) could actually add a level of security by distributing your infrastructure thereby making it less prone to physical disruption by natural disaster or physical attack.
In fact, the whole movement towards consolidation of data centers, should be reevaluated based on such security implications. Would you rather have a primary and backup data center that can be taken out by a targeted missile or other attack for example, or more distributed data centers that can more easily recover. In fact, the move to cloud computing with data housed sort of everywhere and anywhere globally offers the possibility of just such protection and is in a sense the polar opposite of data center consolidation--two opposing tracks, currently being pursued simultaneously.
One major drawback to the idea of distributing servers and using them to heat homes--while offering cost-saings in term of HVAC, it would be very expensive in terms of maintaining those servers at all the homes they reside in.
In general, while it's not practical to house government data servers in people's homes, we can learn to run our data centers more environmentally friendly way. For example, the article mentions that Europe is using centralized "district heating" whereby more centralized data center heat is distributed by insulated pipes to neighboring homes and businesses, rather than actually locating the servers in the homes.
Of course, if you can't heat your homes with data servers, there is another option that gets you away from having to cool down all those hot servers, and that is to locate them in places with cooler year-round temperatures and using the areas natural air temperature for climate control. So if you can't bring the servers to heat the homes, you can at least house them in cold climates to be cooled naturally. Either way, there is the potential to increase our green footprint and cost-savings.
Running information technology operations with a greater view toward environmental impact and seeing IT in terms of the larger ecosystem that it operates in, necessitates a careful balancing of the mission needs for IT, security, manageability, and recovery as well as potential benefits for greater energy independence, environmental sustainability, and cost savings, and is the type of innovative bigger picture thinking that we can benefit from to break the cycle of inertia and inefficiency that too often confronts us.
(Source Photo: here)

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