Infrastructure

Cloud storage and the consumer – and some thanks

by Jason on October 10, 2011 · 0 comments

networking

It’s Canadian Thanksgiving this weekend (we have it a month earlier than the Americans because it has roots in being grateful for a harvest and our growing season is shorter. Or something. Apparently there are lots of reasons.)

I’m thankful for many things, but one though crossed my mind earlier as I ordered some more hard drives. Five terabytes worth. I even threw in a 16 gigabyte memory stick because there was a good sale. And I did this from the cottage, on my laptop, over my cellular data plan. For less money than just about any storage, RAM or disk-based, that I’ve ever purchased before.

I’m thankful that my life is set up that I can make electronics purchases from a relaxing cottage on the lake, of course, but I’m also very aware of how lucky I am to be at a point in the technology curve where things like this are even possible – my mind drifted during the purchase to my days on a 300 baud modem, and I wondered a little how long it would take to fill that much space at that speed, and what I would possibly have been able to find to download in the ’80s to actually do that.

But that got me thinking on another tack, post-purchase. Are hard drives the new writable DVDs, and are they both ultimately short term solutions to the promise of the cloud? Would these be the last drives I ever bought?

At the moment, the numbers don’t support it, at least for personal use. Amazon S3 pricing would let me store 5 TB for about… $600 a month. Or three times the price I paid for the drives as a one time fee. If the drives lasted me 2 years under steady use, that’s a 72x multiple. More if they last longer, but I dropped on a week after buying it, so who knows?

Of course, that’s managed, redundant storage, so cut the multiple in half if I mirror the data on two separate drives. A 36x multiple then. And the replacement drives are taken care of automatically for me, so there’s value there too.

On the other hand, there’s bandwidth costs to deal with too. I don’t see a scenario where I’d download 5 TB of data a month, but my data plan at home only covers 100 gigs or so a month, and there are transfer costs from the cloud as well.

For many businesses, this kind of costing can make perfectly valid sense.  For the average consumer (and moreso for their parents) it simply doesn’t, even if they’ve got a zillion hours of HD home video footage that they’d categorize as priceless.

I still believe that cloud storage is going to win over time, but the nature of what I store, access, and consume is going to have to change – some of it voluntarily by my continued anti-hoarding techniques (no, the new drives don’t necessarily help, but they’re for a specific use that will come out as a wash in the end) but also by innovation in the marketplace redefining my computing activities.

More on that experiment later, but for now I see a gap in the cloud storage economy for safe, secure, and affordable storage on the level that, say, 20% of engaged digital homes are going to need to both insure against regret and share their data with multiple computers in multiple locations.

And most of all, I’m thankful that these are the kinds of problems I have to think about, and even get paid to help solve, versus, say, making sure my family has sufficient shelter and food.

Nike recycles old phone booths, kinda

by Jason on November 21, 2010 · 0 comments

These things still have uses, post-Superman

This is pretty awesome: Nike invented a game in London that turned the city in to a board game for runners, but instead of checking in with a mobile phone (which most people might already have, but might not take with them on their runs,) runners log their activities with the city’s pay phones.

Is there a North American geocoded list of pay phones out there?  Is that even possible with all the private phones that have gotten into the wild?  Is the caller ID on our outgoing calls consistent, or does it get blocked or randomized through some of them?

I guess a non-payphone alternative could be video billboards with changing authentication numbers (like the RSA SecurID tokens) that you’d have to be on site to key into your smart phone, and while that would open up all kinds of secondary advertising opportunities and increase awareness of the game in general, it’s just not as cool to me right now as pay phones.

It’s been many years since I bought a cell phone specifically because I couldn’t find a pay phone (long enough ago that it was because my pager was going off,) so I’m not sure what the area coverage is anymore, especially outside of city cores, but I can almost see a business model involving higher-priced calls for alternate reality games.  If it’s still possible to receive a call on a pay phone (I’d heard that was shut off for all kinds of reasons,) being able to track people (oddly, through their GPS-enabled smart phones) and make the nearby pay phone ring would be all kinds of nifty.  Or at least an amazing prank.

In the meantime, my mind’s going to wander every time I see a phone box for the next while.  Toronto’s Santa Claus Parade has an iPhone app this year complete with “Santa Tracker” but how much more fun would it have been if each neighbourhood had a designated child who had to phone in Santa’s checkin when he passed that part of the route?

Phone booth photo by Slack pics

Redudnancy, Redundancy, Redudnancy, Redundancy!

by Jason on January 19, 2008 · 0 comments

(Yes, it’s badly dated Ballmer joke)

When we installed our new setup at our new data center, the sales team pushed redundant network equipment as a major selling point (our previous environment had only a single firewall and load balancer, but granted, the new team happened to be Cisco resellers.)   I didn’t give it a lot of thought, since we’d never had a problem in three years outside of a 20 minute planned outage to do some maintenance, but the pricing didn’t make it overly restrictive, so we went for it.

Was it overkill?  Based on 37Signals’ outage on Friday, I’m a bit happier with our decision:

37 Signals downtime

Here’s the thing: the web world is largely an industry of self-taught developers and designers who have no concept of how to read a network diagram.  “LAMP” doesn’t really go beyond the application, and even then, I’m seeing more advice on how to make an app scalable than I am about reliability, especially from a hardware perspective.  Unless they’re lucky enough to have someone on the team with relevant experience (I know we can’t afford a dedicated network engineer, but we at least have our hosting managed by a team of geniuses at another company, and it’s well worth the cost), the average startup is at the mercy of whoever’s wiring the system up.

Our previous setup was put in place just before I got involved.  It had a single firewall, a single load balancer, and all security was based on static IP rules in the firewall.  There was no network-level redundancy, I have no idea if the servers’ NICs were teamed, we had no VPN, etc., and we were at one of the top hosts in the country.  It’s quite possible that the options came up and decisions were made on a cost basis, but not once did an account manager try to sell me any upgrades or changes.  We had an engineer assigned to us, but unless I found out about a technology and asked about it, I wouldn’t get any advice.

Our new digs are a lot more solid (though we’re still limited to a single physical location), and after Friday’s Basecamp outage I feel a lot better about our extra insurance.  To be clear, I feel for the 37Signals gang, and I’ve obviously spent a lot of time being a single point of failure away from being in their shoes.  My point is that we as an industry need to get better at sharing the nuts and bolts and wiring best practices in addition to things like software design patterns and security concepts.

Are there any sites out there today that can give someone a good grounding without requiring some kind of networking certification to get past the first page?  HowtoForge seems like a start.