The New Disruption in Computing

Since 2000, we've been progressively bumping into limits, or end-points, in all areas of silicon technologies. Some I've mentioned previously.

The thesis of this piece is the Next Technology Disruption is No Disruption, No Revolution:

instead of exponential growth of technologies, decreasing unit prices and increasing volume sales, we're now seeing zero or slow growth, steady or increased unit prices (especially if supply-chain is disrupted), and in all but a few market segments, sales are in decline and profits are stressed in many vendors. I believe these are linked.

Why new Secure Internet solutions are technically Hard

Information Security is both very hard and very easy at the same time.

Not only are Internet Nasties a nuisance, or worse, they prevent the  new, useful Applications and Networks like e-Commerce, i-EDI, e-Health, e-Banking, e-Government and other business/commercial transactions systems.

Perfect Security isn't possible: ask any bank.

Defenders need to be 100.00% correct, every minute of every day.
Attackers need just one weakness for a moment to get in.

Not all compromises/breaches are equal: from nothing of consequence, up to being in full control with system owners not being aware of it.

All 'Security Systems' can only be "good enough" for their role, which depends on many factors.
How long do you need to keep your secrets? Minutes or Decades?

A new world of IT - appliances, clients, infrastructure, services

A thought on some new taxonomies in the I.T. world.

Even the meaning of "I.T." has changed - it's now Business I.T.
Somehow that also includes what we do at home...
But not the development of embedded devices.

So what about the tinkerers? (what's the collective noun of 'tinkers'? A gadget of tinkers?)
What is it that they do?? It isn't Business I.T. - but is often done on the same hardware/equipment.
These are the people that would've once been 'ham' or amateur radio operators.
My local Linux Users Group is where I find them now - or LCA - Linux.Conf.AU - if I was prepared to pay ;-)

Business Systems, are constructed from all these components.
In Business I.T., a chief concern should be for The Data.
If you upgrade MS-Word or MS-Excel and can't access old documents, is that important to someone??

If your business includes such documents in a critical business process/system, it's now bought a whole whirl of cost and trouble "migrating" them.

New Dimensions

• Appliances vs General Purpose Computing Devices (fixed/single or general purpose devices?)
• Desktop/client Applications vs Server Applications (Where does your App. run?)
• Infrastructure vs Server & end-user devices (Invisible or visible to the user?)
• Services vs Applications (indirect or direct user app.)

Implications for Design, Operations and Performance Analysis

Design

• Appliances: are "fungible". They perform relatively fixed, simple functions and conform to standards. Managers can compare specs and prices meaningfully. They also depreciate in a more understandable way. Today's high-end NAS appliance will still be useful in a role in 5 years. Ten year-old routers may still work and handle useful traffic.

Operations
A manin objective of I.T. Operations and Admin should be to invent themselves out of a job. So they can get on with more important and valuable work. Automation is the name of the game.

We don't have "Tape Operators" any more. Those jobs have been automated away.

We need some metrics to quantify this:

• Number of operators/admins per 100 users
  
• Number of servers per operator/admin
  
• Number of Gigabytes per operator/admin
  
• number of databases * Gigabytes per admin

And my favourite, the "R-Mark":
How big an office, desktops, servers and services, can a informed non-professional set up with a credit card and the local computer 'superstore'.

The "R-mark-II" is:
How many networked offices


Performance Analysis

100% Availability of networked services is becoming more easily and cheaply achievable.
It's a target that can be generally aspired to.
And hardware is becoming 'so cheap', that for most sites, there should always be enough capacity.
And for those that can afford it, we should be seeing "Datacentre in a Box" solutions soon.
[i.e. a shipping container fully loaded with servers and disk. Maintain once a year, if at all.]

In this world, do we have a greater or lesser need for performance analysis and capactity planning?

Other things
Don't have time to expand on all these just now...

appliances, rich/thin clients, infrastructure, services