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Scale it Down, Turn it Off

Paul Miller
Thursday, March 10, 2011

Over at InformationWeek, Charles Babcock reports on yesterday’s presentation by James Staten of Forrester. Babcock paraphrases Staten’s words and incorporates aspects of Joe Weinman’s 10 Laws of Cloudonomics, writing that “the way to get the benefit of the cloud is to use it when you need, shrink your use as demand decreases, and shut it off when demand has gone away.” Whilst there’s obviously a lot more to the cloud, this is worth remembering; you only have it or pay for it whilst you need it and are using it. Now isn’t that better than all those idle servers, whirring away in the basement?

SAP Does NoSQL

Staid enterprise giant SAP has been showing off Hana, their take on an in-memory technology for data manipulation and analysis. Whether it's innovative, me-too, or smoke and mirrors, perhaps remains to be seen.

Submitted by Paul Miller
Another University Partially Embraces Cloud

Instead of refurbishing their data center, the UK's Loughborough University is the latest to take a hybrid approach. The university believes it saves £2.5M ($4M) by not building a new data center, plus £200,000 ($320,000) per year in power and staffing costs.

Submitted by Paul Miller
Industrial Ecology and Big Data

A fascinating O'Reilly Radar post by Michael Ferrari, reporting on a Financial Times-organized event, and speculating on the role of data in driving the next round of sustainable investments.

Submitted by Paul Miller
HP Plans Another New Zealand Data Center

I wonder; do relatively remote countries like New Zealand require more local data centers, because latency requires everything to be done locally, or fewer, because latency and other factors irreversibly constrain adoption?

Submitted by Paul Miller
Fusion-io Files for IPO

Solid state memory is hot right now. Fusion-io hopes to capitalize on current enthusiasm by choosing this moment to file for an IPO. They may, of course, just want to get noticed... and acquired.

Submitted by Paul Miller