Business

Clouds and The Fate of the Help Desk

As an efficiency nut there’s one thing that makes me really happy about Tablets:

The Help Desk will be going away.

It’s important to understand the meaning of the term “Help Desk”. I don’t just mean people who sit around all day with headsets, answering phone calls. It turns out there are a *lot* of people employed in IT whose job it is to just keep the lights on. Vendors, Integration specialists, Sysadmins, and the guy whose entire job it is to click the right button to clear the printer queue. Entire countries have devoted a lot of resources to greasing the gears of computers. They all work in a Helpdesk somehow.

CTO’s and CIO’s are starting to appreciate that their function at a company isn’t about technology implementation – it’s about how technology can help their business. Who cares if your OS is running Windows or Linux if all you need is a Word processor (and Solitaire). It’s become totally irrelevant.

What matters is the applications that are delivered to the end user; everything else is just implementation dogma. The people doing these implementations are Help Desks too, they’re just a few degrees removed from the end-user and prefer snazzier titles like ‘Application Services Engineer.’

It’s gonna take awhile. The PC will be around for a long time and people still need to type. But as we shift to tiny, integrated, crash-proof devices we need help desks less and less. The intuitive nature of the computer will suggest that it’s no longer important to be adept at using them. Not only that, but as we cycle through generations of people, the technical citizens will supplant the technical immigrants

Business / cloud / General — No Comments
29
Jan 10

The Efficiency Paradox

I’m a pretty firm believer in Infrastructure-as-a-Service, and I spend a lot of time thinking about better ways to squeeze more efficiency out of data centers and IT operations. A lot of the lower hanging fruit involves savings in power utilization, reducing cooling costs, and virtualizing hardware; getting less to do more. Economies of scale, and automated controls mean you can be extremely price competitive, and for end users that can lead to greater savings.

Popular wisdom suggests that this would mean we get to save something; We conserve energy because were powering less servers.

It turns out the opposite is true.

Jevons Paradox explains the effect that technological progress has on reducing prices of a resource, only to increase the actual consumption of that resource. Typically this applied a lot to the Oil industry, and its a rather well understood phenomenon, but the same thing applies to Network and Computing infrastructure.

Bandwidth is perhaps the easiest example of Jevons Paradox. Back when a couple megs of throughput cost you $1500 a month, you would find ways to reduce and conserve that bandwidth as much as possible. Technology has progressed to the point where some lucky individuals can get a LAN quality connection for as little as $30 dollars. It’s obvious that the cost for bandwidth has dropped through the floor. While that kind of progress should lead to greater efficiencies, it simply doesn’t work out that way. We dont conserve those pipes – we just use more of them.

Elastic Demand for Work: A doubling of fuel efficiency more than doubles the amount of work demanded, increasing the amount of fuel used. Jevons Paradox occurs

The same thing is happening in utility computing.The cost of computing is quickly becoming too cheap for us to save any energy, or to force us to squeeze more out of a system. While at layerboom we build advanced systems that can generate more revenue per physical server, the end result for utility operators is that they will sell more units. For them, this is a totally acceptable solution (and I wont complain either!). However, it has some dire implications for energy usage and conservation. Most of this infrastructure is running 24×7. Idle or not.

In North America, the infrastruture required to run the internet consumes about 10% of our electricity. Do our Data Centers need to get bigger? Or do we really need to start figuring out how to not only make these pieces of infrastructure more efficient, but find a way to ensure those efficiencies at least counter the growth in the system?

Business / Development / Geek / Geekness / General / Vancouver — 4 Comments
2
Sep 09

How to get Started in Vancouver Tech

I’ve been meeting quite a few people who are new to Vancouver and are looking to get involved in the local Web and Tech scenes. There’s quite a bit going on, and Google is your friend, but if you want to save some time here are the best places to go, meet people and see what’s going on. There’s also a score for how nerdy or business-y (?) the event is on a scale of 1-10.

Do your research

Nerdy: 5
Business: 4

Find out what you’re interested and search for companies based in Vancouver that do what you love. If you’re enthusiastic people will make time for you. Ask someone out for coffee or a pint and just talk. Don’t try and get a job, just figure out what’s going on. Like any “scene” you’re likely to hear conflicting viewpoints. Keep an open mind. Look for and talk with local bloggers and tech reporters. Look for events happening in your area. If you’re interested in Open source projects, find out if the people who work on them are in the area.

Democamp Vancouver

Nerdy: 7
Business: 5

Like most unconferences, Democamp is a loosely organized evening event where the people that attend make up the conference. In this case you bring an idea, and the idea is your demo. You don’t have to present, and it’s a good way to meet people that are interested in starting something new, or are working a project already. Democamp doesn’t happen nearly as often as it should, so if you’re interested in helping out there, check out the site and get in touch.

Launch Party Vancouver

Nerdy: 4
Business: 8

Every few months local entrepreneurs who are launching their projects meet up to celebrate all their hard work. Walk around and talk with people and get to know the people behind these projects. Most of the time the executives are presenting but ask to chat with some of the developers if that’s more up your alley. This is usually a very social event where you’re bound to meet a lot of interesting people – just don’t be shy.

Bootup Labs

Nerdy: 8
Business: 6

Bootup Labs is a local startup incubator which helps companies go from “zero to fundable”. The offices are located at 375 Water St, in Gastown and house a rotating group of Vancouver based startups which are always looking for talented help. Bootup has an open door policy so if you’re new to the area you can generally just pop in, but I suggest getting in touch with them first to arrange a quick (<30 minute) chat. Everyone is really friendly, and it’s a good way to plug in, or at least get pointed in the right direction. Bootup helps run a few of the events in town, so pay attention to their upcoming feed for things that are happening

Techvibes

Nerdy: 5
Business: 5

Techvibes is a tech community blog and business directory. It’s a really good way to get to know which businesses are in the area and what they do. They also publish a list of events happening in town that range from an Entrepreneurial to Developer focus.

VEF

Nerdy: 2
Business: 10

If you’re more into the business and entrepreneurial side of things, I suggest checking out Vancouver Enterprise Forum or VEF. VEF hosts events on a monthly basis and it’s a great way to connect with other like-minded individuals.

Developer Meetups

Nerdy: 10
Business: 3

There are plenty of developer meetups happening in town. The umbrella meetup for all of these is the VanDev network. Join that and you’re bound to meet quite a few people. The most popular is the Ruby/Merb/Rails meetup which has events on a monthly basis.

I hope that’s enough to get you started! Let me know if there’s anything else you want added to the list.

Brainstorming / Business / Geek / Sustainability — No Comments
26
Apr 08

Highly Efficient Datacenters for Grid Computing

Grid services and platforms that are always on and always available are awesome for running cheap, highly-available services on the internet. That’s great, because it means the barrier to entry, and the cost to deliver those services is low making innovations by small teams with little to no cash much more possible. What it means though, is that we’re creating Datacenters with tons of capacity that’s being used during two peak periods throughout the day. After speaking with a few Datacenter architects are the Sun Open House, I realized that not only are todays DC designs supremely inefficient, but most of the stuff running in them isn’t being used up to 80% of the day. Cooling costs are extremely high, and the cost of running a grid to sustain maximum capacity + wiggle room is shocking. So in order to reduce those costs some companies like HP and Sun are actively looking at computers that will turn themselves off or into ‘low power’ mode when not being used. That’s cool, but I don’t think we have to wait for them to build that system. If a computer isn’t required, then a remote ‘green monitor’ can log in and gracefully shutdown unnecessary systems, and the magic known as ‘Wake-on-LAN‘ can be used to bring them back up again. If you could build that into your grid then you could instantly save energy, not only to run a system, but on cooling as well. Of course, this would have to be mapped to a prediction engine that would say ‘traditionally we’ve needed more capacity at 7:30AM Pacific, so boot up some systems’, but that would be a really fun project.

Let’s take it one step further.

If energy costs are really high then you want to use as little of it as possible. So how about grabbing compute cycles from a grid that’s in the peak power zone for Solar? It’s cheap to send a few hundred gigs of data to be crunched, but its expensive to work on it. If you could do that, then you could have your capacity for computing literally follow the Sun. Someone has to work out the math on what’s cheaper – moving electricity, or moving the cycles, but my bets on the cycles because I think a mile of fiber costs less than a mile of High-voltage lines.

DC A wants to send a data crunching job offsite. It’s going to check the International Grid Exchange (I just made this up) for cheap capacity somewhere. DC B’s rate is 5.28$/teraflop hour because it’s in Iceland (which has cheap bandwidth and geothermal energy – oh and its cold). DC A’s rate for the same service is $8.22/teraflop hour, so DC A exports that task to DC B, and when it’s done DC A gets the resulting data set – or a trickle of data comes back over the tasks compute time.

Now we have a market where the most efficient winner gets the utilization. True utility computing, true scaling on demand, no market hype or hand waving.

You could even buy Grid ‘Futures’; You want to make sure you get the capacity, or you could prospect and buy chunks of time for resale later on. Basically turning computing into a true commodity.

I hope that’s one way to make computing a lot more efficient.

trevoro.ca | blogElegant Solutions to Complex Problems