Google as the 5th Estate

28Jul10

Wikipedia lists the “5th Estate” as an ambiguous addition to the traditional “estates,” including the clergy (1st Estate), nobility (2nd Estate), commoners (3rd Estate), and the press (4th Estate). The term (according to Wikipedia)has been used to describe Max Headroom in Our Ethertrade unions, the poor, the blogosphere and organized crime. It can also be used to describe media outlets that see themselves in opposition to mainstream (“Fourth Estate”) media.

If you believe Larry Page, a co-founder of Google, their vision is to marry artificial intelligence with search engines so powerful they would understand “everything in the world.” A couple of years ago Google further stated a corporate vision to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”

A very compelling and interesting vision, until you begin to understand the extent of that capability. On a positive note it gives us a way find and access codified knowledge we’d never gain exposure to under normal conditions (pre-Google and Internet “normal conditions”), but on the other end of the spectrum personal information and confidential information is also collected, indexed, and made available to anybody with access to a search engine.

Posting a blog entry may get you indexed within seconds, as would posting pictures of your family. Your tax records, home information, educational records, and other personal information, if not guarded with near military discipline (oops, forgot about wikileaks.com), will expose parts of your life never expected to the other 4.5 billion people around the world who may have a voyeuristic or nefarious interest in your life.

Going Nose-to-Nose with a Sovereign Nation

However, perhaps the most interesting step into uncharted territory with Google is in their recent conflict with China.

Google took issue with China’s censorship of search engine results, as well as cyber-terrorism it alleged was raged by Chinese government hackers, who obtained confidential information and email data from Google as well as at least 20 other private companies in what Google described “as a highly sophisticated attack.” (Red Herring)

The issue here is not censorship, the issue is the rights of a sovereign nation, versus the development of a global utility that transcends the control of a nation over its citizens. Kind of a new United Nations of Cyber managed by Google.

China is a good target, as self-righteous citizens of western countries reject the socialist political/cultural environment in the world’s most populous country. Of course those who believe in western conspiracy would note that Google has been linked to the CIA and other global intelligence agencies since inception (1), (2), (3), etc., by a variety of mainstream media and private websites.

But what does happen when a private company reaches a level of power that allows it to set both foreign and domestic policy in sovereign nations? Is there a point when the UK, must check with Google for approval before signing privacy or security policy into law? At what point does a private company “cross over the line” of providing a global utility and become a global “big brother?”

Max Headroom Returns to Our Ether

We’ve written about Max Headroom in the past, and he recently pop-p-p-p-ped up in conversations and magazine artiocles, including Wired Magazine. Max Headroom’s world, although brought to us in 1985, is almost creepy in its relevance to modern times. Just swap Television, studios, and TV with Internet and SEO ratings.

“In the post-apocalyptic future where television sets are more important than food, TV ratings are the all important currency of the nation. A new technique of preventing viewers from channel surfing proves somewhat detrimental to particularly sedentary couch potatoes. The top studio becomes concerned: dead viewers make for low ratings. Edison Carter, top news reporter, is sent to find out more. After a motorcycle accident, his mind is preserved by wizz-kid Bryce and becomes his wise cracking, computer generated alter-ego: Max Headroom, who manages to boost ratings above those of any live hosts to date…”

Is Google and Google SEO the new global currency? Is Google search engine placement more important to a company than Euros, RMB, or Dollars? Is Google the next Max Headroom, an omnipresent component of all aspects of our life, more important than our national or cultural identity?

Maybe it is Time to Change

Our lives are now wired with laptop computers, smart phones, Netbooks, Twitter, Facebook, Google, Yahoo, and Internet. You cannot walk a block without being presented with license plates, billboards, handouts, or airplanes pulling banners or skywriting URLs flogging some Internet site or service. Part of every person’s life in our current world. And Bluetooth has drilled it into our heads with Skype and other applications transcending the government controlled communications infrastructure with packetized everything-over-IP applications.

Binding this together brings Facebooks and Googles into the basic infrastructure of the new world, almost to the point of transcending the value of fiber optics, wireless networks, routers, servers, and switches.

While uncomfortable to us 50-somethings, we are witnessing a harbinger of the future. The future is wired. The future is a global community with little respect for borders and culture. The wired world is the 5th Estate. Only question is if Google or Facebook will join the first four estates as individual companies as representatives of the 5th Estate.


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Social Media Enabling Asia

15Jul10

The Huffington Post recently posted a blog by Thomas Crampton highlighting some of the differences between social media use in Asian countries vs. the United States. Much of it driven by broadband deployment in technically advanced countries like South Korea, Japan, and Hong Kong (yes, I know…), much of it a burning desire by young people in developing countries who want to expand their social and intellectual evolution.

Indonesia is now the second largest user of Facebook in the world. Poor broadband access (generally), low disposable income to buy personal computers, and moral guidelines pressuring young people to follow religious values. How is it possible they could develop that fast?

Growth rates in broadband and mobile access are astounding, with statistics such as Vietnam’s mobile Internet users growing 846% in 2009, 84.3% of Japanese online to the Internet with a mobile phone, and 48.6% of Hong Kong mobile users connecting with a smart phone.

Oh, and mobile phones in Asia are inexpensive. Really, really inexpensive. Almost anybody can afford a mobile phone, and many do – occasionally at the expense of clothing, food, and shelter. In fact, I was able to buy a prepaid phone with around 250 minutes in Jakarta for less than US$20, with messaging, simple data access, and other net-enabled applications.

So the mobile phone represents a means of communication, added to a basic social status issue, and a door to emotional and intellectual exploration and freedom.

What is different in Asia than in the US?

Well, a couple of things for certain. When you start with nearly zero social and technical penetration, and you have the benefit of receiving a relatively mature technology, then it is easy to statistically go from zero to nine hundred miles an hour.

Also, consider the average young person in a country like Indonesia or Vietnam. You go to the occasional movie, you have an opportunity to watch foreign television shows, and you realize it is a very, very big world. Lots of diversity you would not be exposed to without the benefit of technology. Even more, you understand there are real people living in that huge world who are not simple digital renditions of a movie producer’s fantasy.

The Internet helps bring a young person in Jakarta, Samarinda, Semarang, Banda Aceh, or Merauke to Paris, Cape Town, or Burbank. Facebook puts a name and face to distant lands, cultures, and people. And when that young person goes home to their dormitory, house, or relocation home they have a glimmer, even if it is a faint glimmer, of hope that life could be better than it is today.

And Internet access, with social networking provides an additional escape. Whether it be joining a virtual gaming community, or chatting with persons on a different continent, you are able to escape your surroundings for a brief moment. That moment may be in an Internet café (WarNets in Indonesia), it may be in a home, or it may be at school.

Of course, not everybody in Indonesia, Vietnam, Malaysia, Cambodia, or Laos are poor or underprivileged.

Social Freedom

Asian culture is different than western culture. In many countries it is not easy to be open with relationships, activities, or personal preferences. While American kids certainly find their escape in gaming and social networking, it is even more of an outlet for many young people in Asia.

If you live in a strict religious environment – as many in Asia do, which restricts your ability to freely express yourself in the local “real” community, being able to develop new ideas, discover new ideas outside the control of your “thought leaders,” is an attraction. Facebook and other social networking sites offer a global conduit of hundreds of millions of other people who may also desire to share experiences and ideas.

And the Future

In the past, Americans enjoyed a fair level of economic and social security based on high levels of education, and the desire to increase their status and quality of life. We looked at developing countries with little interest, and in fact many Americans still cannot find more than a dozen countries on a world map.

Young people in developing countries such as those in Asia, who are included in those astonishing statistics of locations rapidly embracing technology and social networking, are hungry. Hungry not only for knowledge, but also hungry to improve their quality of life, with an added hook of national identity and pride.

The intellectual skills gained through accessing Internet and diffusing global communications into their life will give those persons in developing countries the same intellectual tools American enjoy, putting them on a level intellectual playing field. With the additional ability to participate in eLearning, those intellectual tools become more important – particularly when compared to the dwindling education levels and achievements in America’s education system.

Social networking sites may help draw young people to the Internet, but once there the skills learned far outweigh the social value Facebook or other sites provide. With the largest countries in the world representing the fastest growing component of the internet (China, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand), within another generation or two those young people may intellectually match or exceed the capabilities of their age group counterparts in the United States and Europe.

This is all good, as educated people generally are much more likely to quickly recover from disasters, are less likely to become involved in extremist movements, and are more likely to break down political, cultural, and secular barriers that have polarized nations in the past.

It is scary to Americans, as we will need to prepare ourselves to accept the rest of the world as our intellectual and economic equals. It is inevitable.


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Riding the Economic Roller Coaster of TransJakarta Route 1

03Jul10

The little girl, not more than 4 or 5 years old, was lying motionless in a fetal position, discarded like trash, on a ramp leading to the Sarinah station on TransJakarta‘s Route 1. Passersby displayed only one emotion – annoyance they had to step over, or step around the little body. A little body that had never known the joy of a birthday party, the warmth of a nurturing family, or a family picnic in the park.

Showing the main routes, including Route 1Two stops down the road, at the Tosari Station, sits Plaza Indonesia, an icon to opulence with customers slurping iced lattes and munching scones at a Starbucks, taking a much needed break from power shopping at Christian Dior or Cartier.

The TransJakarta is Jakarta’s attempt at building a mass transit system within the capital city. With 7 major routes, it rivals cities such as Los Angeles in the ability to serve large numbers of people needing to get around the large metropolitan area of Jakarta. All riding on buses traversing dedicated busways which bypass some of the epic traffic jams which routinely gridlock nearly all areas of the city.

Route 1 begins at Blok M, and slices its way through the city center to Station Kota at the north end of Jakarta. Riding the route takes about 40 minutes, and you get to experience all the good, the bad, and the ugly of Jakarta.

Starting at Blok M

Medium qaulity mall near Blok M StationBlok M is known for both shopping and nightlife. With shopping malls running from hundreds of small kiosks in the Blok M Terminal, to new higher end shopping malls within 100 meters of the terminal, Blok M has all the shopping you can handle. But it is the nightlife that most foreigners and expats consider when heading to Blok M. Blok M is known for loud bars, with wall-to-wall working girls, and taxi drivers who take the dumber tourists on long rides throughout the city of Jakarta while enroute to hotels and other destinations.

Station from top of RampThe other part of Blok M is the dust, the trash piling up on streets and sidewalks, and grubby little kids asking for money. Always the kids asking for money.

You work your way up Route 1 to the beginning of a scattering of high end shopping malls, including Senayan City, Pacific Place, Plaza Semmangi, and Plaza Indonesia. Immediately adjacent to most high end shopping malls are small communities of homeless people living in cardboard boxes or lean-to shacks. There is the irony, you go shopping or eating donuts a J. Co at City Walk Mall, and the trek back to your hotel passes through a fairly large homeless community surrounding the Intercontinental Hotel or le Meridien.

The Le Meridien Pool next to Abandoned Construction SiteEach station requires you to walk up a ramp, cross an over pass, and walk down another ramp to the bus ticket stand and platform. Passing children and a photo album of disabled persons with ailments that – if you do not harden your heart and soul to the images, will keep you up long hours at night thinking.

The entire corridor leading from Senayan City to the area around the National Monument (MONAS) resembles a deep ravine resting between skyscrapers hitting 60+ stories housing every multinational company in existence. There is a tremendous amount of money passing back and forthnear the Monument MONAS Bus Station between the buildings creating this Grand Canyon of Jakarta. You can dine at the Jakarta Hard Rock Café, the Outback Steak House, Tony Romas, or Burger King and McDonalds – all within a 15 minute bus ride on the TJ-1.

Heading North to the Kota Station

As you pass the National Monument, Jakarta’s landscape starts to change back to the dust and poverty we started with at Blok M. The buildings start to show more and more signs of decay, the people showing more and more signs of despair, and the smell of open sewage hits your senses. Then you realize it is actually a small stream, a living part of the sewage system, and there are children playing next to it.

You cannot escape the smell near streamsAdd the thick, syrupy smell of diesel exhaust, 2 stroke motor engines, and sidewalk vendors cooking over open fire, and you wonder how a child could possibly make it to 5 years old without serious lung problems.

You pass Mangga Besar and Olimo, famous in the expat community for its massage parlors and prostitution, and finally find your way to the end of the line at Station Kota. Straddling the port on one side, a shopping mall on the east (Mangga Duo), and a concentration of museums adjacent to the station, it is a mix of images and senses that don’t quite fit into one small geographic postage stamp in the city.

A poriton of sky scraper alley in JakartaOne afternoon, 20 bus stations, and a million images, emotions, and memories. Nowhere in the world can you observe the best and worst of life in such concentration. As a foreigner, taking pictures of everything I see, you would expect a reaction of annoyance and contempt from those who become part of your album. But not once did I receive a negative response, a sharp comment, or even a cold stare. Almost a feeling of people wanting the scenes to be recorded, preserved forever. Recorded so nobody forgets Jakarta the way it is, was, and provide a basis for what Jakarta can aspire to for the future.

I won’t use a picture of the little girl on the ramp, as it would be a dishonor to her memory. But I won’t forgetObama at Plaza Indonesia that a little life, and her memory is recorded, and the image will never be lost. Too bad she couldn’t beg, I would have given her something, anything.

900 words in a blog cannot describe Jakarta. It is a wonderful city, one of the great cities in the world. Great memories, horrifying memories.

LA has South Central, San Francisco the Tenderloin District, Chicago has the South Side, and Honolulu has Hotel Street. We cannot be sanctimonious, as every country and city has poverty and rough areas.

Bus station near Le Meridien HotelAt some point, whether it is the Philippines, Mongolia, China, Indonesia, Thailand, Mexico, Uganda, or Palestine, poor areas all start looking the same. The sad thing is that once they all start looking the same, we become accustomed to seeing poverty, and it does not bother us any longer. It almost becomes expected and natural to step over little girls discarded on the side of a road.

Then we are in an airplane, 16 hours later we pop out in Burbank, and again prioritize worrying abHigh Tech mall near Station Kotaout getting a jaywalking ticket for walking across San Fernando Road outside of a painted cross walk on your way to Fuddruckers.

It is a roller coaster

NOTE:  You can see full sized pictures by clicking on each photo.

You can see all photos HERE


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Data Center Consolidation and Cloud Computing in Indonesia

26Jun10

2010 brings great opportunities and challenges to IT organizations in Indonesia. Technology refresh, aggressive development of telecom and Internet infrastructure, with aggressive deployment of “eEverything” is shaking the ICT industry. Even the most steadfast division-level IT managers are beginning to recognize the futility in trying to maintain their own closet “data Skyline near the Jakarta Stock Exchangecenter” in a world of virtualization, cloud computing, and drive to increase both data center economics and data security.

Of course there are very good models on the street for data center consolidation, particularly on government levels. In the United States, the National Association of State Chief Information Officers (NASCIO) lists data center consolidation as the second highest priority, immediately after getting better control over managing budget and operational cost.

In March the Australian government announced a (AUD) $1 billion data center consolidation plan, with standardization, solution sharing, and developing opportunities to benefit from “new technology, processes or policy.”

Minister for Finance and Deregulation Lindsay Tanner noted Australia currently has many inefficient data centers, very suitable candidates for consolidation and refresh. The problem of scattered or unstructured data management is “spread across Australia, (with data) located in not just large enterprise data centres, but also in cupboards, converted offices, computer and server rooms, and in commercial and insourced data centers,” said Tanner.

“These are primarily older data centres that are reaching the limits of their electricity supply and floor space. With government demand for data center ICT equipment rising by more than 30 per cent each year, it was clear that we needed to reassess how the government handled its data center activities.”

The UK government also recently published ICT guidance related to data center consolidation, with a plan to cut government operated data center from 130 to around 10~12 facilities. The guidance includes the statement “Over the next three-to-five years, approximately 10-12 highly resilient strategic data centers for the public sector will be established to a high common standard. This will then enable the consolidation of existing public data centers into highly secure and resilient facilities, managed by expert suppliers.”

Indonesia Addresses Data Center Consolidation

Indonesia’s government is in a unique position to take advantage of both introducing new data center and virtualization technology, as well as deploying a consolidated, distributed data center infrastructure that would bring the additional benefit of strong disaster recovery capabilities.

Much like the problems identified by Minister Tanner in Australia, today many Indonesian government organizations – and commercial companies – operate ICT infrastructure without structure or standards. “We cannot add additional services in our data center,” mentioned one IT manager interviewed recently in a data center audit. “If our users need additional applications, we direct them to buy their own server and plug it in under their desk. We don’t have the electricity in our data center to drive new applications and hardware, so our IT organization will now focus only on LAN/WAN connectivity.”

While all IT managers understand disaster recovery planning and business continuity is essential, few have brought DR from PowerPoint to reality, putting much organization data on individual servers, laptops, and desktop computers. All at risk for theft or loss/failure of single disk systems.

basic map showing palapa ringThat is all changing. Commercial data centers are being built around the country by companies such as PT Indosat, PT Telekom, and other private companies. With the Palapa national fiber ring nearing completion, all main islands within the Indonesian archipelago are connected with diverse fiber optic backbone capacity, and additional international submarine cables are either planned or in progress to Australia, Hong Kong, Singapore, and other communication hubs.

For organizations currently supporting closet data centers, or local servers facing the public Internet for eCommerce or eGovernment applications, data centers such as the Cyber Tower in Jakarta offer both commercial data center space, as well as supporting interconnections for carriers – including the Indonesia Internet Exchange (IIX), in a similar model as One Wilshire, The Westin Building, or 151 Front in Toronto. Ample space for outsourcing data center infrastructure (particularly for companies with Internet-facing applications), as well as power, cooling, and management for internal infrastructure outsourcing.

The challenge, as with most other countries, is to convince ICT managers that it is in their company or organization’s interest to give up the server. Rather than focus their energy on issues such as “control,” “independence (or autonomous operations),” and avoiding the pain of “workforce retraining and reorganization,” ICT managers should consider the benefits outsourcing their physical infrastructure into a data center, and further consider the additional benefits of virtualization and public/enterprise cloud computing.

Companies such as VMWare, AGIT, and Oracle are offering cloud computing consulting and development in Indonesia, and the topic is rapidly gaining momentum in publications and discussions within both the professional IT community, as well as with CFOs and government planning agencies.

It makes sense. As in cloud computing initiatives being driven by the US and other governments, not only consolidating data centers, but also consolidating IT compute resources and storage, makes a lot of sense. Particularly if the government has difficulty standardizing or writing web services to share data. Add a distributed cloud processing model, where two or more data centers with cloud infrastructure are interconnected, and we can now start to drive down recovery time and point objectives close to zero.

Not just for government users, but a company located in Jakarta is able to develop a disaster recovery plan, simply backing up critical data in a remote location, such as IDC Batam (part of the IDC Indonesia group). As an example, the IDC Indonesia group operates 4 data centers located in geographically separate parts of the country, and all are interconnected.

While this does not support all zero recovery time objectives, it does allow companies to lease a cabinet or suite in a commercial data center, and at a minimum install disk systems adequate to meet their critical data restoral needs. It also opens up decent data center collocation space for emerging cloud service and infrastructure providers, all without the burden of legacy systems to refresh.

In a land of volcanoes, typhoons, earthquakes, and man-made disasters Indonesia has a special need for good disaster recovery planning. Through an effort to consolidate organization data centers, the introduction of cloud services in commercial and government markets, and high capacity interconnections between carriers and data centers, the basic elements needed to move forward in Indonesia are now in place.


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Indonesia’s Wireless Vision Goes High Speed

19Jun10

In Los Angeles we are pretty happy with our Android phones, iPhones, and other smart handheld devices. We can buy EVDO card for our laptops, and now 4G cards are starting to POP up in some locations. In Jakarta people laugh at such nonsense. With high speed wireless infrastructure covering HSPA Sales Media in Jakarta Mall Ambassadorover 95% of the addressable Indonesian population, the country has leap-frogged not only America, but also much of Asia in delivering high speed wireless service.

If you take a walk through Jakarta’s Mall Ambassador you are presented with a dizzying array of high speed wireless access options for both smart phones and USB flash modems – and oh yes, even EVDO if that is what you really want. So you select your option, is it HSPDA? HSPA? HSPA+? In Jakarta you can easily buy HSPA+ flash modems and base stations that actually deliver between 21~42Mbps to an end user device.

While the highest speeds may not be affordable to the masses, nearly all smartphones and base stations are more than adequate for web browsing and streaming media. In fact, Indonesia has the largest number of mobile FaceBook users in the world, and that number continues to grow at an astonishing rate, as more Indonesians invest in internet-enabled devices as a tool for their future.

But let’s go beyond the city limits of Jakarta, and look at what this means toHSPA Flash Modem Sales Jakarta other rural and remote parts of the country.

If 95% of the population is covered by wireless antennas, and all of those antennas are capable of supporting at least some level of Internet access, then the need for laying copper cable to end users in remote locations becomes less important. An HSPDA base station that connects to a 7.2Mbps data stream can easily connect a LAN of dumb terminals (NetBooks) to a school in remote parts of Sumatra or Papua. eLearning, including remote transmission of lectures, lessons, podcasts, or other means of delivering knowledge becomes possible, giving a level academic playing field to anybody in the country.

City offices, commercial businesses, and even individual homes can connect to the HSPDA signal, allowing Internet access with the same or better performance many users experience with cable modems or organizational LANs connecting to a local ISP or carrier. Add a bit of cloud computing offering a suite of hosted SaaS applications and secure storage in a data center available to users throughout the country, and we have the beginnings of national access to the 4th Utility (marriage of broadband access and cloud computing resources) in Indonesia.

WarNet in Samarinda IndonesiaBut probably the most interesting, and useful example of delivering Internet access to those who need it most is the WarNet. The Warnet is the Indonesian version of an Internet Café. In many rural communities and urban inner-city areas people do not have the money to afford buying their own computer, or do not have the ability to connect to the Internet from their homes or offices. The WarNet may connect a small Internet Kiosk to wireless Internet in a remote location, offer some basic printing services, and that kiosk becomes a social, educational, business, and entertainment hub for small communities.

Schools could follow the same model as WarNets, connecting to broadband wireless through a local base station and extending an access LAN to student workstations and terminals. Again, with eLearning those terminals can be dumb, with the applications and student working storage on a data center hosted platform.

HSDPA Base station in JakartaHigh speed broadband wireless is effectively bringing the Internet to nearly all Indonesians. Now the effort needs to be making access devices more affordable and more available, as well as producing high quality content and content delivery into the wireless networks. As most of the wireless networks are still not exceeding ~30% of their transmission capacity at peak, there is ample room for growth.

Backbone fiber networks owned by the wireless carriers and wholesale providers will continue to expand, enhancing the wireless operator’s ability to increase their capacity to meet the potential of future wireless technologies such as LTE and 4G. And Indonesians will continue to approach the Internet’s technical edge.

Not bad Indonesia… not bad at all


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”Insert the Tip Into the Buckle…” – an IPv6 Analogy

10Jun10

How many times have travelers been annoyed to hear the sanctimonious words of flight attendants reminding us how to use a seat belt? Rather than a simple “please fasten your seat belt,” the FAA and airlines insist on giving a detailed example of how to insert the tip into the seatbelt latch and pull the excess fabric to tighten the belt.

Fasten your IPv6 Seat BeltApparently there are still people in the world who have never fastened a seat belt in their lives, and need instruction on how to operate the belt. In California we are bombarded daily with “Click it or Ticket” billboards and radio campaigns reminding us the “police are on the lookout” for those who are not wearing seatbelts, talking on cell phones while driving, texting while driving, and driving after consuming massive amounts of drugs or alcohol.

Everybody knows right from wrong, and what is a violation. However the message is still thrown in the face of every person hitting the roads or commercial airlines as if it is a revelation.

“IPv4 is Facing Exhaustion – Move to IPv6,” repeat message

OK, the same message has been pushed forth into the Internet community for more than 10 years. Everybody who has been through a basic indoctrination of the internet knows that this IPv6-thingy is important, will impact our lives, and is not going to fade away any time soon.

And just like the message on wearing seatbelts and not texting while driving, most of the Internet community still has not accepted the fact if they violate the law (or ignore the message of IPv4 exhaustion), they will either get a professional ticket, or at a worst case go sailing through their Internet windshield (“windscreen” for any Englanders in the audience) and end up in a bloody connectivity pulp.

NANOG 49 is getting ready to kick off their summer meeting in San Francisco, has a whopping 3 named sessions out of around 40 dedicated to the IPv6 topic. One is the obligatory Google presentation reminding everybody how smart they are, and the other two are fairly important topics giving an IPv6 adoption update from Renesys, and a discussion from Comcast on driving IPv6 into the home through the cable TV network.

Of course Hurricane Electric and the patron saint of IPv6 evangelism, Martin Levy, will be hanging around the halls providing thought leadership. Of note, Hurricane Electric is one of the few companies actually engaged in bringing the IPv6 message to the public, with one kind of cool tool called their IPv6 Certification process. This is a semi-serious, semi-fun Pre-IPv6 101 course intended to stimulate users to think more about IPv6 and accept the undeniable fact it is an important part of our future.

But the NANOG Crowd is Not the Audience

NANOG (the North American Network Operators Group) meets three times a year. In the early days, much like Internet Society meetings, it was a place for engineers and thought leaders to indulge in a fellowship of mindshare and development. There is still a glimmer of cooperation and desire for many of the old timers to lead masses through complicated development of the Internet and Internet deployments, however much like the “Inet” conferences of the past, it is now spoken more in terms of parties and sales opportunities than creating the next generation of Internet.

Sure, somebody will probably pull the plug on IPv4 wireless access at some point during the conference to show not only how clever they are, but also that Microsoft XP still does not eloquently handle IPv6 on demand – however the message is not necessarily getting to the people who need to know how to fasten their IPv6 seatbelt.

Those networks, and people at NANOG representing those networks, who have not already adopted IPv6 will soon succumb to natural selection. American companies such as Verizon have quietly rebuilt their networks to accommodate IPv6, and in fact are wiring everything in their network to further accommodate providing an IPv6 address to everything they touch. Power companies are implementing IPv6 in the smart grid architectures being deployed – and eventually everything down to your refrigerator will be IPv6-enabled. Some smart people are out there.

So…

The IPv6 thought leadership audience has to be the remaining IT managers in every enterprise in the United States (and of course around the rest of the world…), application developers, all the internet access network providers – basically everybody in the Internet “food chain” up to the end user.

No, I do not want my 80 year old mother being responsible for understanding IPv6 address allocation and management. I want the Internet and Internet applications to be just as transparent to her in the future as it is today. She wants to see my Yorkie over Skype without understanding the network infrastructure bringing her the image – and most of the user world deserves the same insulation from the ones and zeros of network technology.

The 500 people attending a NANOG are a very small audience, and an audience that is just as callous to the topic as I am to an airline safety demonstration, and will not be the audience getting the best use of IPv6 presentations and thought leadership.

IPv4 Depletion is Just as Devastating as the Gulf Oil Spill

ARIN, the American Registry for Internet Numbers, and the group responsible for managing IPv4 address space in North America, continues to remind us:

“With less than 10% of IPv4 address space remaining, organizations must adopt IPv6 to support applications that require ongoing availability of contiguous IP addresses. Internet Protocol defines how computers communicate over a network. IP version 4 (IPv4), the currently prevalent version, contains just over four billion unique IP addresses. IPv6 is a newer numbering system that provides a much larger address pool than IPv4, among other features.”

10% is a very small number.

As the IPv4 address space is further depleted, and if companies and organizations have never prepared their networks for IPv6, the result for American companies will not be pretty. Unable to collaborate on an application level with their peers around the world (yes, as you might expect, those pesky Europeans and Asians are doing everything possible to take a leadership role in front of the Americans with IPv6 – or maybe they are just more fearful of the potential impact of running short on IPv4 address space), American companies will suffer.

All manufacturing machinery will be network-enabled (yes, with IPv6 addresses), ERP, CRM, OSS, BSS – basically everything we build and sell stuff with, requires IPv6.

Good luck Martin Levy. Americans need you to continue spreading the word. Not only blasting it through a loudspeaker, but in the creative manner provided by Hurricane Electric’s IPv6 Academy and Certification process. Fun, but serious.

Us IT guys have a lot of work to do in the next couple years. IPv6, building the 4th Utility, developing cloud exchanges, developing greener data centers. Yes, it is a good time for Information and Communications Technology professionals.


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Mobile Operators Want their Ethernet over Fiber

29May10

A new telecom paradigm is on the verge of becoming reality. Not a disruptive technology, not the right brain flash of a new radical idea – rather it is a logical development of existing infrastructure using better operational execution. It is an acknowledgement of fiber optic infrastructure as an inherent requirement in the development of the 4th utility – broadband Internet, compute capacity, and storage as a basic right for all Americans.

The “utility” label has merit. Just as we need roads, water, and electricity to function in the modern world, we need communications. Much like the roads, electrical distribution, and water distribution systems crossing North America, the communications infrastructure follows a similar matrix of hubs, spokes, loops, and major exchange points interconnecting every square mile of the continent. The matrix includes a well-interconnected mixture of fiber optic cable, wireless, cable TV, copper telephone lines, and even satellite connections.

However, the arteries of this telecom circulatory system remain fiber optic cable. Fiber optic cable allows tremendous densities of communication, information, and data to travel across the street, or across the continent. Fiber goes north and south, east and west, connecting everything from wireless towers, satellite earth stations, collocation and hosting centers, communication carriers, Internet Service Providers, and end users to each other on a global scale.

Geography of the 4th Utility

Let’s take a deeper look at this circulatory system in geographic terms. When looking at a US map, latitude lines run horizontally, parallel to each other based on degrees north or south of the equator. The northern 40th parallel runs from Northern California to New Jersey, hitting parts of 12 states along its path. If we look at the US Interstate Highway system you will see some of the longer “arteries” stretch from the West Coast to the East Coast, such as interstate highway 10, running 2460 miles, hitting 8 states from California to Florida, and 35 major cities.

In addition, I-10 intersects with 45 other interstate highway junctions, and has several thousand entry and exit points serving both major cities and rural locations along the route. If you dig into the electrical grid you will find a similar mesh of interconnections, nodes, and relationships originating at power plants, and ending at the utility outlet in a bedroom or office.

The fiber optic system follows a similar model. The east-west and north-south routes follow the interstate highway system, rail system, and electrical grid – taking advantage of rights-of-way and interconnect nodes all along the route. The routes are generally shared by several different fiber optic providers and carriers, further extending their reach by collocating fiber at major carrier hotels along the coast, such as 60 Hudson in New York, the Westin Building in Seattle, NAP (network access point) of the Americas in Miami, and One Wilshire in Los Angeles, where they splice their fiber with major intercontinental submarine fiber optic systems.

Within North America further domestic interconnections are provided at each major city junction point throughout the country reinforcing the mesh of fiber networks in cities such as Salt Lake City, Atlanta, Chicago, Las Vegas, Washington DC, Dallas, Omaha, and Minneapolis.

The Local Value of a Global Fiber Optic Circulatory System

All this fiber is of little value if its utility does not reach every potential end user in America, or around the world. Much like the interstate highway system sporting several thousand access points and exits, the new fiber optic backbone will support fiber optic connections to every end user in the country, or push wireless broadband to every other addressable mobile and rural user. In the new world, the utility does not end at a wall outlet, but ends wherever the user is located. And that mobility is a local challenge.

Hunter Newby, CEO of Allied Fiber, an emerging fiber utility provider in the United States, advises that “It’s all about fiber…to the tower. For that component the long haul (fiber routes) is just how we get out there and back.” So while we may be able to analogize fiber routes with cities and interconnection points with the idea of a system starting at the driveway in a house to the East Los Angeles interchange and I-10, the wireless towers provide an undefined end point to the telecom grid that is unique.

The main difference discriminating the road system and electrical grid from the fiber grid are that in the telecom industry each route has many competing commercial providers. By definition, competition is not neutral. And if not neutral, it is not a utility, and cannot be expected to provide service in a location (or market) that will not be of financial advantage to the service provider – resulting in locations potentially stranded from the infrastructure.

Is this Really Different than the Existing Telecom Infrastructure?

Newby continues “The truth is that it’s the fiber that binds. Our route and its design is unique to today’s needs, unlike the design and needs of the cables from 10+ years ago. There are no neutral colos on those cables every 60 miles. There are also no FTTT (fiber to the tower) ducts (supporting) a separate fiber cable with handholes every 3000 ft on those systems.”

Following telecom deregulation in the United States, companies such as AT&T are no longer monopolies, with infrastructure development based on economic factors. If Carp, Minnesota (population ~100) does not offer sufficient economic incentive for AT&T to build broadband infrastructure, then it is unlikely to happen. Unless broadband is available through wireless networks, connecting to a broadband fiber backbone, and the rest of the world.

With companies such as Allied Fiber entering the market, access to the east-west, north-south routes will include a truly neutral alternative to the private road system of the existing telecom carriers. The long haul fiber routes will connect to regional neutral fiber routes, such as provided by companies such as Fiberlight in the eastern United States, and even more importantly provide both access to towers and interconnections at least every 60 miles (or more often) along the route.

That is because the long haul utility cable system will need to regenerate their signals at 60 miles points, offering a location for towers and regional fiber providers additional local access to supplement the carrier hotels and collocation facilities located at major junction or interconnection points. And financial incentives are available to companies through programs such as the Rural Development Telecommunications Program (RDTA) supporting the US government’s 4th utility Broadband Initiatives Program (BIP).

Hunter Newby brings evangelism to his vision.   

“Add to that the neutral colos allow the rural wireline and wireless carriers to colocate locally – in their county, or closeby by using the short haul duct to get to the closest AF colo – and in those locations they can buy high capacity transport and transit at wholesale rates from the large US and international carriers coming through. Right there! Wholesale! The rural carriers don’t even have to lease dark from us to get to the big cities/carrier hotels if they don’t want to or can’t afford to yet.

The ability to gain access to the power of the major US carrier hotels, but not have to actually get to them is the next frontier in the US.”

The 4th Utility is an American Entitlement
Newby concludes “The fiber laterals will all be built to us (the long haul neutral fiber providers). The tower companies won’t build them, but there are several transport providers that will. The mobile operators want their Ethernet over fiber.” Fiber that connects them to the content and people available on a global network-connected community. Broadband access that allows Americans to function in a global community.

Those wireless companies, whether mobile operators offering LTE/4G services, or WiFi providers offering a local competitive service, will pay the same tariff to connect to the neutral towers and fiber systems without prejudice. Just like an electrical utility doesn’t care if the outlet is supporting a private individual’s television set, a small storefront business’s display case, or an aircraft assembly plant, the only discriminating issue is in volume and required capacity.

A utility. Broadband access is now an expected utility – not a value-added service, available to all, but rather as an entitlement to living in America.


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A Cloud Computing Epiphany

22May10

One of the greatest moments a cloud evangelist indulges in occurs at that point a listener experiences an intuitive leap of understanding following your explanation of cloud computing. No greater joy and intrinsic sense of accomplishment.

Government IT managers, particularly those in developing countries, view information and communications technology (ICT) as almost a “black” art. Unlike the US, Europe, Korea, Japan, or other countries where Internet and network-enabled everything has diffused itself into the core of Generation “Y-ers,” Millennials, and Gen “Z-ers.” The black art gives IT managers in some legacy organizations the power they need to control the efforts of people and groups needing support, as their limited understanding of ICT still sets them slightly above the abilities of their peers.

But, when the “users” suddenly have that right brain flash of comprehension in a complex topic such as cloud computing, the barrier of traditional IT control suddenly becomes a barrier which must be explained and justified. Suddenly everybody from the CFO down to supervisors can become “virtual” data center operators – at the touch of a keyboard. Suddenly cloud computing and ICT becomes a standard tool for work – a utility.

The Changing Role of IT Managers

IT managers normally make marginal business planners. While none of us like to admit it, we usually start an IT refresh project with thoughts like, “what kind of computers should we request budget to buy?” Or “that new “FuzzPort 2000″ is a fantastic switch, we need to buy some of those…” And then spend the next fiscal year making excuses why the IT division cannot meet the needs and requests of users.

The time is changing. The IT manager can no longer think about control, but rather must think about capacity and standards. Setting parameters and process, not limitations.

Think about topics such as cloud computing, and how they can build an infrastructure which meets the creativity, processing, management, scaling, and disaster recovery needs of the organization. Think of gaining greater business efficiencies and agility through data center consolidation, education, and breaking down ICT barriers.

The IT manager of the future is not only a person concerned about the basic ICT food groups of concrete, power, air conditioning, and communications, but also concerns himself with capacity planning and thought leadership.

The Changing Role of Users

There is an old story of the astronomer and the programmer. Both are pursuing graduate degrees at a prestigious university, but from different tracks. By the end of their studies (this is a very old story), the computer science major focusing on software development found his FORTRAN skills were actually below the FORTRAN skills of the astronomer.

“How can this be” cried the programmer? “I have been studying software development for years, and you studying the stars?”

The astronomer replied “you have been studying FORTRAN as a major for the past three years. I have needed to learn FORTRAN and apply it in real application to my major, studying the solar system, and needed to learn code better than you just to do my job.”

There will be a point when the Millenials, with their deep-rooted appreciation for all things network and computer, will be able to take our Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), and use this as their tool for developing great applications driving their business into a globally wired economy and community. Loading a LINUX image and suite of standard applications will give the average person no more intellectual stress than a “Boomer” sending a fax.

Revisiting the “4th” Utility

Yes, it is possible IT managers may be the road construction and maintenance crews of the Internet age, but that is not a bad thing. We have given the Gen Y-ers the tools they need to be great, and we should be proud of our accomplishments. Now is the time to build better tools to make them even more capable. Tools like the 4th utility which marries broadband communications with on-demand compute and storage utility.

The cloud computing epiphany awakens both IT managers and users. It stimulates an intellectual and organizational freedom that lets creative people and productive people explore more possibilities, with more resources, with little risk of failure (keep in mind with cloud computing your are potentially just renting your space).

If we look at other utilities as a tool, such as a road, water, or electricity – there are far more possibilities to use those utilities than the original intent. As a road may be considered a place to drive a car from point “A” to point “B,” it can also be used for motorcycles, trucks, bicycles, walking, a temporary hard stand, a temporary runway for airplanes, a stick ball field, a street hockey rink – at the end of the day it is a slab of concrete or asphalt that serves an open-ended scope of use – with only structural limitations.

Cloud computing and the 4th utility are the same. Once we have reached that cloud computing epiphany, our next generations of tremendously smart people will find those creative uses for the utility, and we will continue to develop and grow closer as a global community.


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Under Siege in Jakarta

15May10

Entering any major hotel in Jakarta is a multi-stage process. First you pass by security staff near the entrance to the hotel at the street. Security staff look over the car, the passengers, and make a screening decision prior to allowing the car or taxi entrance into the hotel driveway. Then you have swarm of security staff checking under the hood, the passenger compartment, the trunk, and an examination of the under carriage with mirrors. Next, at the hotel lobby entrance, another metal detector, bag check, and a friendly “thank you” as you enter the lobby. Try to go to dinner, and another bag check at the hotel restaurant entrance.

May 14th, 2010.

JAKARTA, May 14 (UPI) — Indonesian police have accused arrested terrorist suspects of planning to assassinate the president and foreigners. The alleged targets included Americans during an Independence Day ceremony set for August.

The head of the country’s police force said the planned attack against President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono was supposed to happen at the State Palace on Aug. 17. The four suspects, one of them shot dead during the police raid, were then going to declare Indonesia under the Islamic religious Sharia law.

July 18th, 2009.

VOANews.com. Investigations continued Saturday into the Friday bombings at two hotels in Jakarta, Indonesia that left nine people dead and at least 50 injured. Little information about the bombings is being released to the public. On Saturday, Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono visited the sites where two bombs exploded at the Marriott and Ritz Carlton hotels.  

On Friday the president said the bombings were acts of terrorism but he made no statement during the visits

May 12th, 2010.

JAKARTA, May 12 (Jakarta Post) — The police’s counterterrorism squad has captured 17 terrorist suspects alive and shot dead five others in a series of raids conducted since Thursday last week. Spokesman for the National Police Insp. Gen. Edward Aritonang said the five suspects were killed in the latest raids on two separate places in Cililitan, East Java and in Cikampek in West Java on Wednesday. The police also arrested a suspect in Cikampek..

“We arrested two yesterday [Tuesday] in Jakarta,” Edward said as quoted by kompas.com

Ritz Carlton Jakarta following terrorist bombingIn Jakarta you cannot walk into a major shopping mall – particularly one catering to foreigners, without going through a metal detector and passing by several security officers trained to identify suspect behavior. Drive through the city center, and you will pass dozens of trucks with army and police forces waiting on standby to respond quickly in the event an incident occurs.

All office buildings in the city center have similar security to the hotels, with multi-stage security checkpoints from the street to your office. Most are surrounded by barbed wire, high iron and concrete walls, and a density of security cameras that make London look weak.

Jakarta feels like a city under siege

In the United States a potential car bomber in Times Square results in hours of “expert” commentary on the cable news stations, most of it meaningless babble produced by experts who have no clue what is really happening, offering only their opinion based on the same information available to any normal citizen by reading accounts from UPI, Reuters, AP, or citizen journalists.

Americans are lead to believe we are the center of the war on terrorism, until you experience the level of security being delivered in a city like Jakarta.

“Muslims are not terrorists”

Indonesia, the fourth most populace nation in the world, is also the largest Muslim population in the world. Ordinary Muslims are not radicals, and my experience shows Indonesians treat each other with a level of respect and courtesy only dreamed about in a city like Los Angeles. Jakarta, as in any major city, has crime. However, having walked around most areas of Jakarta, and several other Indonesian cities, you do not feel threatened at the same level as a Caucasian may feel walking around East or South Central LA, parts of Brooklyn, North Philadelphia, or Washington D.C.

The terrorists in Indonesia, as in most of the world, keep invisible, hiding in plain sight until their button is pushed to produce their violence.

JAKARTA, Indonesia, July 19th 2009 (AP) — The terrorist attacks that struck two luxury hotels in the capital have shaken ordinary Indonesians who had grown more confident after waves of arrests had left the nation’s al-Qaida-linked militant network seriously weakened. Coming four years after the country’s last serious terrorist attack, Friday’s twin suicide bombings at the J.W. Marriott and Ritz-Carlton hotels in Jakarta unleashed a new wave of anxiety in the world’s largest Muslim-majority country.

Co-workers in Indonesia are anxious to let foreigners know they are not terrorists. In any Indonesian office, you have a mix of Muslims, Christians, and indigenous religions represented among the staff. They all get along well, never argue over their ideologies or barbed wires surrounding a major hotel in central Jakartaphilosophies, but do occasionally compare notes on the difference in their faith and cultures. And of course there is a bit of friendly teasing and rivalry between those hailing from Sumatra, Java, Bali, or Kalimantan. Just like people from diverse cultures in any large country.

When a foreigner enters the conversation, the talk does eventually work its way into opinions on terrorism. Most people are afraid, and want everybody to know that Indonesians are not terrorists. Much like the United States, in a country with nearly 260 million people there will be incidents that are violent, and not representative of the population.

And they know Indonesia’s reputation as a sanctuary for terrorism is hurting their image.

Times Online, July 17th, 2009 — Manchester United will not play their match against an Indonesia Super League XI in Jakarta on Monday following today’s bomb attacks. The club hopes, however, that the game can be switched to Kuala Lumpur, having arrived there this morning.

At least nine people, including some foreigners, were killed and at least 50 were injured in two large explosions at luxury hotels in the Indonesian capital. Sir Alex Ferguson and his squad were due to fly to Jakarta tomorrow evening and to stay at the Ritz Carlton Hotel, one of the terrorist targets.

As an international community, we need to offer countries like Indonesia our support in finding terrorists, and eliminating the threat from their country, and the world. As an international community we will have much better success protecting the safety and security of all nations if we work together as an international community, not only on a government to government level – but also on a human level. It is not an issue of Jews, Hindus, Muslims, Christians, or Buddhists – it is a matter of accepting each other’s differences, and working together to improve our global quality of life.

Idaho’s white supremacist Christians are no better than Afghanistan or Pakistan’s Muslim fundamentalists – all distort and corrupt their claimed faith in the interest of power. And then preach their word through terrorism and violence against those who are not like them.

In Jakarta the siege continues. After a couple days security in the face of everybody becomes oddly comforting. When I go to sleep in my central Jakarta hotel room I feel that I am as safe as possible from violence directed at foreigners in my hotel, and I have no problem presenting my backpack for inspection at a shopping mall or office building. I am somewhat saddened society has come to this point, but I am very happy Indonesians are just as tired of violence as anybody else, and have finally put their foot down and begun securing their country.

Imagine having to pass through a metal detector and screening prior to ordering a latte at the Starbucks on San Fernando Rd in Burbank.  That is Jakarta.


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Communities in the Cloud

08May10

In the 1990s community of interest networks (COINs) emerged to take advantage of rapidly developing Internet protocol technologies. A small startup named BizNet on London’s Chiswell Street developed an idea to build a secure, closed network to support only companies operating within the securities and financial industries.

BizNet had some reasonable traction in London, with more than 100 individual companies connecting within the secure COIN. Somewhat revolutionary at the time, and it did serve the needs of their target market. Management was also simple, using software from a small company called IPSwitch and their soon to be globally popular “What’s Up” network management and monitoring utility.

However simplicity was the strength of BizNet. While other companies favored strong marketing campaigns and a lot of flash to attract companies to the Internet age, BizNet’s thought leaders (Jez Lloyd and Nick Holland) relied on a strong commitment to service delivery and excellence, and their success became viral within the financial community based on the confidence they built among COIN members.

As networks go, so did BizNet, which was purchased by Level 3 Communications in 1999 and subsequently the COIN network was dismantled in favor of integrating the individual customers into the Level 3 community.

Cloud Communities

Cloud computing supports the idea of a COIN, as companies can not only build their “virtual data center” within a Platform as a Service/PaaS model, but also develop secure virtual interconnections among companies within a business community – not only within the same cloud service provider (CSP), but also among cloud service providers.

In the “BizNet” version of a COIN, dedicated connections (circuits) were needed to connect routers and switches to a central exchange point run by BizNet. BizNet monitored all connections, reinforcing internal operations centers run by individual companies, and added an additional layer of confidence that helped a “viral” growth of their community.

Gerard Briscoe and Alexandros Marinos delivered a paper in 2009 entitled “Digital Ecosystems in the Clouds: Towards Community Cloud Computing.” In addition to discussing the idea of using cloud computing to support an outsourced model of the COIN, the paper also drills deeper into additional areas such as the environmental sustainability of a cloud community.

As each member of the cloud community COIN begins to outsource their virtual data center into the cloud, they are able to begin shutting down inefficient servers while migrating processing requirements into a managed virtual architecture. Even the requirement for managing high performance switching equipment supporting fiber channel and SAN systems is eliminated, with the overall result allowing a significant percentage of costs associated with equipment purchase, software licenses, and support agreements to be rechanneled to customer or business-facing activities.

Perhaps the most compelling potential feature of community clouds is the idea that we can bring processing between business or trading partners within the COIN to near zero, as the interaction between members is on the same system, and will not lose any velocity due to delays induced by going through switching, routing, or short/long distance transmission through the Internet or dedicated circuits.

Standards and a Community Applications Library

Most trading communities and supply chains have a common standard for data representation, process, and interconnection between systems. This may be a system such as RosettaNet for the manufacturing industry, or other similar industry specifications. Within the COIN there should also be a central function that provides the APIs, specifications, and other configurations such as security and web services/interconnection interface specs.

As a function of developing a virtual data center within the PaaS model, standard components supporting the COIN such as firewalls, APIs, and other common applications should be easily accessible for any member, ensuring from the point of implementation that joining the community is a painless experience, and a very rapid method of becoming a full member of the community.

A Marriage of Community GRIDs and Cloud Computing?

Many people are very familiar with project such as Seti At Home, and the World Community GRID. Your desktop computer, servers, or even storage equipment can contribute idle compute and storage capacity to batch jobs supporting everything from searching for extraterrestrial life to AIDS research. You simply register your computer with the target project, download a bit of client software, and the client communicates with a project site to coordinate batch processing of work units/packets.

Now we know our COIN is trying to relieve members from the burden of operating their own data centers – at least those portions of the data center focusing on support of a supply chain or trading community of interest. And some companies are more suited to outsourcing their data center requirements than others. So if we have a mix of companies still operating large data centers with potential sources of unused capacity, and other members in the community cloud with little or no onsite data center capacity, maybe there is a way the community can support itself further by developing the concept of processing capacity as a currency.

As all individual data centers and office LAN/MAN/WANs will have physical connections to the cloud service provider (IaaS provider) through an Internet service provider or dedicated metro Ethernet connection, the virtual data centers being produced within the PaaS portion of the CSP’s will be inherently connectable to any user, or any facility within the COIN. Of course that is accepting that security management will protect non-COIN connected portions of the community.

Virtually, those members of the community with excess capacity within their own networks could then easily further contribute their spare capacity to the community for use as non-time critical compute resource, or for supporting “batch” processing. Some CSPs may even consider buying that capacity to provide members either in the COIN, or outside of the COIN, and additional resource available to their virtual customers as low cost, low performance, batch capacity much like SETI at Home or the Protein Folding Project uses spare capacity on an as-available basis. Much like selling your locally produced energy back into a power GRID.

We Have a New, Blank Cloud White Board to Play With

The BizNet COIN was good. Eleven years after BizNet was dissolved, the concept remains valid, and we now have additional infrastructure that will support COINs through community clouds, with enabling features that extend far beyond the initial vision of BizNet. CSPs such as ScaleUp have built IaaS and PaaS empowerment for COINs within their data center.

Cloud computing is an infant. Well, maybe in Internet years it is rapidly heading to adolescence, but it is still pretty young. Like an adolescent, we know it is powerful, getting more powerful by the day, but few people have the vision to wrap their head around what broadband, cloud computing, diffusion of network-enabled knowledge into the basic education system, and the continuation of Moore’s, Metcalf’s, and other laws of industry and physics.

COINs and community clouds may not have been in the initial discussions of cloud computing, but they are here now. Watching a Slingbox feed in a Jakarta hotel room connected to a television in Burbank was probably not a vision shared by the early adopters of the Internet – and cloud computing will make similar un-thought of leaps in utility and capabilities over the next few years.

However, in the near term, do not be surprised if you see the entire membership of the New York Stock Exchange and NASDAQ operating from a shared cloud COIN. It will work.


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