Safe Harbor is a red herring…it adds no value
June 10, 2010 – 4:02 pmI was asked a question at CloudCamp Gateshead on Safe Harbor…and I nearly expoded….its my favorite rant topic at the moment…here is a video:
I love start-ups !
June 9, 2010 – 7:42 pmI love everything about start-ups…the anticipation, feverish activity, hard work, late nights and most of all the risk. The energy of a start-up is contagious, infectious and addictive. And it is because of this that I joined StormMQ.
When I got involved in February the company had just started to get the private beta of its service out to a few people. Since then it has been a roller coaster that has seen me and Raph travel all around the UK and Ireland meeting customers, partners and future staff. Some of the highlights have included:
- We moved from private beta to fully launched service today!
- We have signed up three trade partners
- an application dev firm << official announcement to follow
- an outsourced IT firm << official announcement to follow
- an outsourced workflow company<< official announcement to follow
- Registered with RIPE to get our own /22 range … that’s four class C networks!
- Bought a lorry load of equipment and put it into two different data centres
- And the icing on the cake…signed up our first customer << official announcement to follow
We now have four full time staff (we plan to take on another four or five soon) and a day at the office can comprise of sales meetings, staff interviews, server builds (a few pics of our new DELL r810′s below), supplier negotiation and general strategy….every day brings new and exciting problems, challenges and joys. Long let it continue!
Putting private data in the cloud may be breaking the law
May 18, 2010 – 6:14 pmAt CloudCamp Gateshead I gave a presentation on how putting personal data in the cloud is a major problem for companies. This was a presentation that I borrowed from Daragh O’Brien (Castlebridge Associates).
The presentation covered areas such as:
- The cloud computing promise — a nirvana where all your needs are catered for in a scalable and magical way
- The spanner in the works — the data commissioner (boooo!!)
- The actual problems — not having a sufficient contract with your provider and the movement of data outside the legal jurisdiction
- Nailing the exit closed — problems selling your business due to non-compliance with the various data protection acts
- Recommendations — some basic examples of how we (StormMQ and Rozmic) help our clients to get around these issues.
Have a look at the video and my slide deck below. I apologise for jumping around and my stuttered delivery….I did not practice the presentation properly in advance!!
CloudCamp Ireland
April 26, 2010 – 10:32 am| Last week we ran CloudCamp Dublin and CloudCamp Cork.
CloudCamp Dublin was held at the Microsoft offices in Sandyford and attracted over 80 atendees. We started the event with a presentation by Daragh O’Brien from Castleridge Associates entitled Obscured by Clouds – Data Protection and Cloud Computing. This presentation went through all of the data protection issues that are opened up by using a ‘cloud’ provider. |
After Daraghs presentation we had presentations from:
- Gary Ramsay from OpSource
- Raph Cohn StormMQ. You can download Raphs presentation here.
- Andy Edmonds from Intel. You can download Andys presentation here.
- Kevin O’ Connor from Hosting 365.
A special thanks goes to all the sponsors, including Microsoft, Flexiscale, Intel, Rozmic, OpSource, StormMQ and University College Cork.
CloudStorm London
March 20, 2010 – 2:09 pm
On Monday and Tuesday last week I travelled to London to attend the Cloud Computing Congress Europe event at London’s Olympia conference venue. The event was packed full of speeches, demos and panel discussions for the Cloud Computing area. I especially liked the opportunity to spend some 1-2-1 time with the owners, developers and sales teams of the various participants.
I especially liked the CloudStorm event on Tuesday afternoon. CloudStorm is a event that is run by Arvid Fossen from A-Server. The event is run around 10 times a year in various cities around the world. It gives around 8 companies in the ‘cloud’ area the opportunity to give a five minute pitch to the audience. Once the pitches are completed the audience have the opportunity to ask questions to the panel. This can be very helpful for attendees as you can ask general questions and ask various panel members to answer….for example questions on security, interoperability and data consistency are excellent for this type of forum.
CloudStorm was opened up Hamish Macarthur from Macarthur Stroud International. Hamish gave an excellent keynote speech on the topic of cloud services and how they are now moving from the niche arena to the mainstream.
Arvid Fossen, Product Management Director A-Server spoke about how the A-Server platform can be used by a xSP to roll out cloud based services to your clients. I last spoke to Arvin at the CloudCamp Newcastle event in early 2009 so it was an excellent opportunity to catch up. A-Server technology is being used by many xSP’s around the world including SymetriQ.
Raph Cohn, Managing Director of StormMQ was next. SrormMQ is a new entrant to the messaging market. StormMQ’s Messaging Cloud is a new AMQP-based cloud messaging service. It has four variations of service packaging including a fully managed, pay-per-byte cloud service; a shared, multitenant contended-cluster cloud service; a dedicated-cluster cloud service; and a colocated service where some components are installed in the customer’s data center. It is aimed at B2B applications. All messages are persisted so they will not be lost.
Raph and I go back a long way. He attended CloudCamp Newcastle and Dublin in the past. After meeting up with him a few weeks ago I decided to take a Non-Exec position at his company in February. We are on target to launch the BETA in a few weeks!
Johnny Patterson, Account Director SymetriQ was next up. SymetriQ is an enterprise ready cloud computing infrastructure provider…with a special slant for users with elevated needs for security and resilience. Jonny has taken over at SymetriQ from Phil Huber. Phil was the host of the most recent CloudCamp Newcastle event.
I really liked finding out how each of the companies got to market, their successes and shortcomings. I find CloudStorm to be an excellent way to keep an eye on the market!
CloudCamp 2010 schedule
March 1, 2010 – 10:41 am
Today we announced our 2010 CloudCamp schedule for the North of England and Ireland. The events are:
I hope that we have not taken on too much!
CloudComputing Congress Europe
February 15, 2010 – 10:02 amI am looking forward to attending the Cloud Computing Congress Europe event at Olympia in London on March 15 & 16th.
I attend quite a few CloudCamp events every year and they are a great way to meet other developers in the CloudComputing space, but events like the CloudComputing Congress allow me to meet with some of the business leaders…both users and innovators.
Have a look at the impressive line up of speakers…they include top execs from Rackspace, CA, Royal Mail and a few public sector people too.
CloudSeminar — Sponsored by NorthernNet
February 9, 2010 – 6:32 pmI was not able to attend the CloudSeminar event in Teesside last month but SuperMondays recorded the event on video, these are here:
Steve Caughey from Arjuna:
Andy from Onyx:
The event was sponsored by NorthernNet. So, who are NorthernNet? Well, they run a collection of of pay-as-you-go use of Media Access Bureaus which are basedin convenient locations across the North. These MAB’s are available for rent by freelancers and small businesses. Why did they set these up? Well, the North didn’t have the speed and capacity for data storage and transmission in the past. NorthernNet have built the MAB’s to change that and for the first time the North West, Yorkshire and the North East will have a single high speed, digital network that connects the region’s creative and digital industry sectors and customers.
Viral marketing tactics
February 5, 2010 – 11:04 amWhen is email spam or ham?
We all send silly emails to our friends and colluges…but last December one young London woman got the fright of her life when she found that her email had suddenly gone viral!
Holly Leam-Taylor, a trainee at the London office of Deloitte planned an awards ceremony to name the most attractive men in her office. Thinking this would be a bit of tongue-in-cheek fun, she emailed a small number of her colleagues at the City accountancy firm asking them to vote. With nine categories such as “Fittest body” and “Boy most likely to sleep his way to the top”, her message certainly grabbed attention. To Holly’s amazement the email was forwarded around the world, spreading like wildfire over the internet. Soon millions of people had read it. But it wasn’t such a laughing matter for her managers and less than 24 hours after sending the email, Ms Leam-Taylor felt obliged to resign.
Speaking from the Surrey home where she lives with her parents, the 22-year-old said, “It was just a lighthearted joke to celebrate Christmas. It’s a complete shock that one email could spread like this and who would think it could get so far out of hand? In retrospect, it was a stupid thing to do but there wasn’t anything controversial or sexist in there. But if I could take it back I would and I will be so, so careful about sending any emails in future.” She hit the send button on her Christmas Awards email on Tuesday, December 8, and when she arrived at her office the next day found her inbox full.
While her email was certainly not work related, I wonder was it spam or ham? Arguments could be made for both sides, regardless, spam filters should have stopped it and prevented its spread around the world!
Upscaling servers makes sense, but upscaling a system is better.
January 30, 2010 – 2:34 pm
One of the great problems that any system manager has to deal with is capacity. In a strange way we all aspire to have capacity problems…in my opinion capacity problems come hand in hand with success and it is very rare that you have one without the other.
If you work for an enterprise then the problem is rather academic…you simply throw money at the problem. Well, we don’t live in the perfect world. I run a small business and our system has evolved over a period of two years under my ‘bootstrap and transition’ business plan so we have a very diverse network full of equipment from various brands and technologies….when we think of the emailcloud network we don’t think of homogeny 
So, how does a system designer / manager deal with capacity issues? Well…there are a few rules:
- Downtime is unacceptable
- 7 P’s (Prior Planning and Preparation Prevents Piss Poor Performance)
- Listen to your friends but emulate your peers
All too often we make strategic infrastructure or technology decisions on a whim or on the advice of well intentioned friends or colleagues….often these are the first steps down a very long dead end.
In our case we deliberated for months about how to add capacity to our infrastructure. After years of buying bulk equipment on ebay and cabling it up by the cabinet load we came to a number of pinch points:
- Power. The average age of our infrastructure components were 3.4 years old. With the advances of new power units we felt that we could save on our power bills significantly by replacing some of our equipment. But, buying new servers is expensive, event if you use the new Carbon Trust 0% loans
- Upscaling servers makes sense, initially. Well, buy being more specific about what servers you buy you could have an investment strategy to upscale them over a period by adding components…for example adding more RAM or upgrading the disk drives to faster models etc. These changes can be made very easily, but it is expensive and very soon you reach the limit of the hardware.
- Re-design the infrastructure / system….this is a never ending process.
I believe the answer to adding more capacity (on a budget) is to use all of the above, the mantra should be ‘upscaling the system’ rather than ‘upscaling servers’ makes sense.
Ps. I hope that this article kicks the ass of the other GoogleGroope hopefuls
