Mobile Devices shifting power to the users, away from IT departments

March 29, 2010 Dave Ohara

When I was visiting Mizzou last week, I was able to visit Clyde Bentley. Clyde writes a blog on Mobile Journalism and the conversation with Clyde was quite useful to build future discussions on mobile devices and its effect on information publishing.

Below is a video of Clyde discussing the change in journalism caused by Mobile Devices.

Clyde Bentley: Why editors should make the move to mobile now from Bill Densmore on Vimeo.

And, what got me thinking more was this post on AgileOperations.

Agile Operations is a concept which combines lean, low-cost service delivery with flexible, just-in-time response to business demands, helping you keep your department relevant and competitive with trendy low-cost solutions available outside the business. In a sort of technology judo, Agile Operations seeks to use the strengths of these alternatives against them, keeping the flexibility and the savings in house and under the control of the IT department without resorting to heavy-handed prohibitions and lock-down measures which simply serve to force users further and further from a state of trust and understanding with the CIO.

This post on AgileOperations and Mobile discusses the impact on IT departments.

The challenge to the IT department in this scenario is to provision and support users with these devices and solutions. This is a far different prospect than traditional IT provisioning and support, and many IT departments are having trouble keeping up. It's not the first time IT has had trouble staying on the same plane as users when new technologies emerge, but this time, the devices and the online solutions are sufficiently cheap that those users don't need the IT department to implement them. While IT has held the keys to the kingdom for many years, there is an increasing chance that the IT department will simply become irrelevant as users bypass it for easier, cheapers solutions. As this Wall Street Journal article outlines, that day is coming.

We have all been frustrated with IT departments who standardize the desktop and laptops we use to reduce IT costs. In Mobile, this is the strength of RIM's Blackberry server and the ability to manage the Blackberry device. But, the rest of the industry is moving so fast, and managed mobile devices are not a priority for many.

I had a blackberry curve last year and now have an iPhone 3GS. There is no way I would go back to a Blackberry device. If anything I would try a Google phone.

Maybe one of the most rapid innovations and growth for Mobile's is the fact they are not in control of many IT departments.

How many of you think you would have a better mobile experience if your IT department made your purchasing decision?

Feel sorry for all those blackberry users who have a choice of one. Unless you are an executive and you can get the more expensive Blackberry one with a touch screen. Ooohhh!!!!

Sustainable Farming Method applied to Sustainable Data Centers, Dan Barber's entertaining how I fell in love with a fish, it's about relationships

March 26, 2010 Dave Ohara

This is a video that has 5 stars. It is entertaining, funny and educational.

Here is Huffington post article about the video.

Dan Barber: How I Fell in Love With a Fish

Chef Dan Barber squares off with a dilemma facing many chefs today: how to keep fish on the menu. With impeccable research and deadpan humor, he chronicles his pursuit of a sustainable fish he could love, and the foodie's honeymoon he's enjoyed since discovering an outrageously delicious fish raised using a revolutionary farming method in Spain.

Here is a picture of the fish farm.

Which is different than a typical fish farm.

One of the best lines that gives you the method, the secret to success in the sustainable farm is the biologist isn't an expert in fish, but is an expert in relationships. If you go to time mark 8:10 you can listen to this.

Dan asks How did he become an expert on fish?

Fish?? I don't know anything about fish. I am an expert on relationships.

Why is this so important? Because the people who are doing the most innovative data center work understand the relationships of the site to the building to the IT equipment to the software and the services provided. This is what good system engineers know in mature industries. This is beyond the data center building with its power and cooling systems. The enlightened are looking at the energy supply chain with a focus on cost, carbon impact, and changes in the supply chain in the future. What is the future of services and applications that need to run on servers, storage, and networks. This is one damn hard problem to address as the silos in data center are powerful and entrenched in a companies organization and the rest of the industry.

I just came back from Missouri and got a chance to talk in more detail to the Civil Engineering company, Allstate Consulting who is working on site analysis of the Ewing Industrial Park. Over the past 9 months there are a variety of people who are being exposed to data centers who had no previous data center experience. Yet, there are many instances of where potential site users are surprised on the engineering analysis and drawings prepared.

Having a pizza at Shakespare's Pizza in Columbia, MO, with Chad Sayre, VP of Design Services at Allstate Consulting.

Chad W. Sayre, PE, Vice-President

Mr. Sayre obtained a Master of Science and a Bachelor of Science in Civil Engineering from University of Missouri-Columbia. Since 1994, Mr. Sayre has been a Project Engineer for Allstate Consultants. In 2000, he became Principal/Vice President and Chief of Design Services for the firm. He is responsible for municipal and land development engineering projects including forensic, water, wastewater, land planning, environmental compliance permitting, highway design, hydraulics, and stormwater projects. He is closely involved with construction administration, inspection, specification preparation of public and private projects and has a considerable amount of experience in expert testimony.

He was telling the story of how he attended DataCenterDynamics conference and was in the bar (which is common networking method at all DataCenterDynamics event), and was telling a big data center customer, "A year ago, I didn't know shit about data centers."

But, I'll tell you what Chad does know is the methane gas production issues from the adjacent land fill. How the topography of the site can be used to create isolation areas to protect the site and change building design. How easy it is to dig trenches to connect to additional fiber. How BioMass can be used to generate renewable energy. How construction techniques that have been applied to multiple other industries can be used in manner similar to what Microsoft has proposed.

These facilities will not be pretty and might actually resemble the barns I spent so much time around during my childhood in rural Illinois. That, combined with the fact that these facilities will be substantially lower cost per megawatt to build and substantially lower cost to run, makes it very easy to become excited about what we’re doing here.

William Gibson said it best: “The future is here, it’s just not widely distributed yet.”

When you look for who knows how to build sustainable, green, low carbon data centers, look for those who understand relationships. I am tired of hearing people tout their latest hardware as the answer to the problem, but they can't explain how this new equipment effects the rest of the system.

It would be pretty damn funny, but almost impossible to create a video like Dan Barber did for "How I fell in love with a Data Center"

Actually, I do know lots of people who fell in love with their data centers. But many times it is more like this image, high density, low PUE, with little discussed on the carbon impact or waste.

Wouldn't it be cool if data centers could help the environment?

Pike Research forecasts 2010 to 2015 microgrid growth from 100 to 2,000

March 11, 2010 Dave Ohara

One of the biggest changes coming to the power grid are microgrids. Pike Research has a report on microgrids.

More than 2,000 Microgrids to be Deployed by 2015

January 26, 2010

Microgrids, which are “islanded” power generation and distribution zones that can operate autonomously from the larger electrical grid, are an increasing area of focus for institutions, governments, corporations, and utilities. According to a recent report fromPike Research, a variety of trends are converging to create significant growth potential for microgrids, and the cleantech market intelligence firm forecasts that more than 2,000 sites will be operational worldwide by 2015, up from fewer than 100 in 2010.

“The distinguishing feature of a microgrid is the ability to separate and isolate itself from the utility’s distribution system during brownouts and blackouts,” says managing director Clint Wheelock. “This degree of localized control is compelling for many microgrid proponents during this time of increasing concern over grid reliability.”

Out of the 2,000, one microgrid will be at the Ewing Industrial Park in Columbia, MO, the site where the Open Source Data Center Initiative ideas will be tested.

There is a lot of information in the report which you can buy here.

Key questions addressed:

What is a “microgrid” and what are its key components and features?

Why are inverters the key advance enabling microgrids to develop today despite opposition from many electric utilities?

What are the key market drivers at the policy level – and why does the United States have the best near-term market opportunity?

Why are microgrids inevitable if investments in a smart grid are accompanied by a paradigm shift from central station to distributed generation supply sources?

Who are the big players – and new technology vendors – in the microgrid space, and what is their key role in developing this new energy market?

Who needs this report?

Microgrid Developers

Smart Grid Hardware and Software Providers

Venture Capitalists

Communities, institutions, and corporations interested in building their own microgrid

Distribution Utilities worried about worker safety and market share issues

Policy Makers examining new business models for renewable generation

Even though we could buy a copy of the report. Our first preference is to develop things from scratch with an open source approach, then publish the results. I would assume if we bought a copy of the report, we can't republish anything from it. And, any ideas we come up with potentially could be limited given we bought a research publication.

Which means we most likely will not be buying any other research as it would limit our ability to publish.

Open Source Data Center Initiative openness, flexibility, and methods not for everyone

March 8, 2010 Dave Ohara

There are critics of the Open Source Data Center Initiative. To be clear we don’t expect this to work for everyone. An example that illustrates the different approach is this IntoWorld article discussing the Google Android Phone vs. Apple iPhone. Some people want the iPhone, some want the Android. The Open Source Data Center Initiative is going to appeal to the users who consider the Android for its openness.

MARCH 03, 2010

Where Android beats the iPhone

Android's openness, flexibility, and Java foundation make it the best choice for many developers and the businesses that depend on them

By Peter Wayner | InfoWorld

The author starts out by discussing a simple feature of having a person’s picture show up when they call. You can do this on the iPhone as well.

But, the Google Android does this as well with Facebook integration.

The most interesting question to me is how Android's openness will change the entire ecosystem on the phone. On the first day I had the Nexus One, I created an entirely new test Gmail account to avoid any problems when I returned the phone. Yet when I called a friend by typing in his phone number, his face popped up on the screen. Was this a demonstration of the power of Google's endless databases to link together everything?

After some experimentation, I concluded that the photo came from the Facebook app I had installed on the phone. When I logged in to Facebook, the app pulled pictures, phone numbers, and who knows what else into my phone. I think I accepted this feature when the Facebook app's AndroidManifest.xml file was loaded, and I'm not sure if I can ever get rid of it.

Openness has its benefits.

This deeper openness is going to be the source of any number of surprises that will be even greater and more useful than the unexpected appearance of my friend's photo on the phone. I think some of the more serious companies will start to release APIs to their apps, allowing the programs themselves to link together and solve problems.

Yesterday I blogged about the concept of the Open Data Source Initiative having APIs.

Defining a Data Center API, on the list of things to do for Open Source Data Center Initiative

I have spent so much of my life working with Operating System nerds both at Apple and Microsoft that I take it for granted the concepts of an API.

An application programming interface (API) is an interface implemented by asoftware program to enable interaction with other software, similar to the way auser interface facilitates interaction between humans and computers.

Part of what the Google Android has is a more open development environment which encourages others to be open, but this doesn’t mean everything has to be open if you use the Open Source Data Center Initiative. In the same way that Google controls parts of the Android, we expect companies to implement their own ways to secure, protect, and optimize the designs to meet their business needs. But, at least we helped them with the 60 – 70% that is common across many data center designs.

There are other interesting questions about the role of cloud services in our smartphone future. Google is still guarding access to the Maps API and forcing developers to get an API key before deploying. I wouldn't be surprised if Apple, Palm, and others are frantically working on their own mapping, search, mail, and who knows what other cloud services. Right now the phones are little clients that aren't too closely linked to the Websites, but I can see that changing if better performance makes it possible to tilt the playing field. The quality of the cloud may become just as important as the slick GUI, app store, or number of pixels in the screen.

Consider the difference the author points out between the iPhone and Android audience.

This interaction with the cloud will be a question for the future. Right now, it seems that Apple won over the latte-sipping fashion plates who love the endless stream of cute games. Apple's decision to court the game developers is paying off in some amazing titles, but the Android platform is a real workhorse. Anyone who wants to do more than play games will find a huge range of possibilities in the Android platform.

While Apple is reportedly fixing some of the worst problems with the App Store process, the Android world avoids most of them by giving people the freedom to use the platform as they want. Considering that people have been using this freedom relatively successfully with PCs for decades, it's a welcome opportunity in the world of handhelds.

I have a good friend who is an operating system and application SW developer turned Data Center Service Manager, running online services for a Fortune 1000 company. He is a big user of open source operating system and data center tools, and he made the switch from the IPhone to Android for the development environment. This is a small percentage of the cell phone audience, and his points align with Peter Wayne’s. As Google and Apple fight the cell phone wars, think about all the Google Data Center guys who have Androids running their own mobile data center apps. At Apple and Microsoft, the mobile phone is not their data center tool, but Google it could be happening.

It would be interesting to play with a Google Data Center engineers Android and see their application list. :-) But, I doubt they’ll let it out of their hands.

The author Peter Wayne previously wrote about tools for IT Pros in Jan 2010.

Better Terminal Emulator

The outside world may call it a phone, but it's really a Linux box that fits in your pocket. And that means there must be a command line somewhere. Better Terminal Emulator is the simplest way to open a window into the guts of the machine. Price: $3.99 for Pro, free with ads and fewer features.

bMonitor

Do you worry that your server is down when you're out of the office?bMonitor can test a server with a variety of protocols, such as ping, FTP, and HTTP. If the connection fails, the phone starts ringing. The tool offers a variety of customization options, including the ability to set how often the phone burns up battery power by testing a server. Too many tests can really wipe out a charge. It's not perfect -- I've found that bMonitor can get mixed up if the network connection is unstable or hogged by another app, leading to a false alarm. But a false alarm is often better than none at all. Price: Free.

O'Reilly's Pocket Companion Guides

There are now hundreds of O'Reilly books available as Android applications, so you can answer that burning tech question or settle that bet from the bar without opening up the laptop. All are dramatically cheaper than the books themselves, thus making them a very good buy. Price: $2.99 and up

GScript

You asked for power, and GScript gives you the power to run shell scripts with a push of a button. Whatever you do, though, remember that GScript explicitly reminds you that the authors are "in no way responsible for the damage caused by running scripts with this app." It comes in an ad-supported Lite edition or a professional version. Price: €2.20 or free with ads.