Remember the good old days. Those days when after graduating from high school you could pretty much forget about all your classmates, as within two weeks of finishing school we were scattered to the four winds?  Your buddies in the army, whom you forgot about within a week of transferring to a new assignment?  Frat or sorority friends whom you have not contacted in the past 20 years?

Social networking sites have started changing all the rules of how we interact with others.  Sites ranging from classmates.com to MySpace are bringing not only entirely new communities together, but also bringing us back in touch with those whom we spent quality time with in prior phases of our lives.

Professionally, there also social networking sites that have stood out among their peers - Facebook and LinkedIN.  What makes both of these sites unique is the number of members.  For example, LinkedIN claims over 35 million users representing more than 200 countries, with executive membership from all Fortune 500 companies.  That is a lot of people. 

What do you do when your IT storage and processing growth requirement demands a tremendous increase in servers and data center space, but your IT budget is shrinking?  What do you do when disaster recovery requirements demand geographic backups with near zero time recovery point and recovery time objectives?

Ask Bert Armijo at 3tera.  3tera is a young, rapidly growing company based in Aliso Viejo, specializing in cloud computing - specifically the provisioning of cloud computing.

At the last CTC meeting (22 Jan) Bert gave a great presentation on the future of data processing as we know it.  While talking with the audience on a very human level, he was actually passing a level of complex knowledge to the audience that left everybody wondering what had hit them.  And burning many, many brain cells trying to wrap their minds round the implications of computing in the "cloud."

From a Blueprint for Change

Spent a bit of time reading through technology-related entries on the Barack Obama website.  Of course as a selfish telecom engineer I am always praying for a government that will minimize interference, and maximize a culture of innovation and competitiveness within the USA.
The Blueprint for Change

Well, if words are a promise of change, and hope, then I have to say I've walked away from the Obama website feeling awful darn good about the future.  Let's take a gander at a few of their promises. 

Last night was one of those Pacific Ocean sunsets that make you think a lot about life.  Bright orange that brings out colors in the coastal areas and mountains that draws you into a near trance.  You cannot possibly walk away from the spectrum of light, and the spectrum of inner peace you travel through during that 15 minute period of sunset till dusk.

Back to reality.  We live in a world of Internet, MP3 players, telephones that think they are MP3 players, freeway systems, global economies, containers, refineries, Vegas, war, poverty, and opulence that either thrills or disgusts - depending on your point of view.

But the sunset, that is also reality.  It has seduced beach goers and horizon viewers for thousands of years, and still is able to put us into a surreal trance without interference from the latest techno gadget or global crisis.  Add a couple of circling seagulls, a pod of dolphins jumping on the glimmering copper colored ocean, and maybe even a sailboat off on the horizon, and even the toughest person will take a pause.

'Tis the time to look ahead at the opportunities and challenges we have in store for 2009.

2008 has given us some interesting starting points for the new year.  The economy is going through a roller coaster of speculation, recovery, opportunity, and of course huge losses in value. 

We are starting to see the old world of copper "land lines" fail (such as the bankruptcy of Hawaiian Telcom in Nov 2008).  The companies with money are aggressively expanding their long distance and local loop fiber optic networks in an attempt to keep ahead of demand driven by Internet and entertainment.  Examples of this are Verizon's FIOS and the AT&T U-verse.

Data centers, like most of our economy, are going through a period of change and re-branding. 

In the stone age of data centers (circa 2005) we were able to put data centers on the street supporting somewhere around 100 watts per square foot.  This was considered really high density, supporting a vision for the next 10 years server farms and high capacity switching.

Of course that lasted all of about a year, and data center operators once again found themselves scrambling to figure out how to bring more power into the data center, and even more importantly how to bring enough cooling capacity into the data center to prevent servers and switches from burning up.