Vinay Pai's Blog

I'm Back

2009-07-27T09:04:00.000-07:00

Now that the dust has settled on the acquisition of PayCycle by Intuit (yeah baby!), I will resume activities on my personal blog-- the one you're reading right now. I still haven't decided whether or not to move the content from my PayCycle blog. There was some good stuff there, especially on agile development. I probably will, late some night.

Anyway, welcome back (or maybe I should welcome myself back)!

I've Moved (Actually, My Blog Has Moved)

2009-05-04T06:10:00.000-07:00

At PayCycle, we just launched our company blog site. Going forward, I will continue blogging, but at the new PayCycle blog site. My new blog can be found at: http://blogs.paycycle.com/vinay/

Just bookmark your browser (or update your RSS feed) to the new location, and keep reading...

Shai Agassi Speaks at Web 2.0 Summit

2008-11-07T14:19:00.000-08:00

Shai Agassi left SAP earlier this year to start Better Place.

"How do you take a country off oil?" is the business problem he's trying to solve. In his model, you are charged for the miles driven and not the battery. The price of a battery and electricity is $0.06/mile for an automobile. In his startup's model, the battery is not part of the purchase price of the car. He will build the network and will purchase electricity to charge batteries. Israel and Denmark are introducing significant taxes (60% - 180%) of the purchase price of gasoline-powered cars as an incentive to drive the adoption of electric cars.

Renault-Nissan will manufacture the initial eletric cars that will be used on Shai's electric network. The cars will arrive between 2010 and 2014.

Digg's Kevin Rose - "How to Be Scrappy"

2008-11-07T14:07:00.000-08:00

Digg's founder Kevin Rose talks about "how to be scrappy" based on his experiences at Digg:

When Digg launched, Kevin kept his day job and worked on Digg in the nights and weekends.
He hired his initial developers on elance-- one in India and one in Nova Scotia. This worked initially, but he hired local developers as the site grew to deal with scalability issues.
As the founder and CEO, he was the face of the company. He recommended Gary van der Chuck - "Personal Brand."
Start a podcast. It's a very cheap way to get publicity.
Use the blog to get PR.
Even now, Digg is launching new products with rented servers and Amazon S3 for storage.

He sees funding going away for consumer internet companies in the short term, but thinks this is a still a good time to start new companies.

Thoughts on Platform Strategy from Google, MySpace, Facebook, and Microsoft

2008-11-07T12:26:00.000-08:00

Max Levchin (Slide) hosted a panel on the platform with Vic Gundotra (Google), Amit Kapur (COO MySpace), David Treadwell (Microsoft), and Elliot Schrage (Facebook).

It's funny seeing these guys on stage. On Wednesday, I asked the Microsoft guy to "keep it down" during one of the sessions.

Google

They developed their platform on open web technologies.
There are different levels of platform, some that are application-specific and others that are more general.
They are interested in advancing the capabilities in the underlying platform, such as the web browser.
In the battle of Windows vs the Web, the Web has won.

MySpace

The platform: (1) drives activity in the ecosystem by enabling users to contribute, drives the creation of new ecosystems, such as virtual goods, and (3) is a great marketing vehicle.

Facebook

The platform allows developers to create new engaging experiences and monetize those experiences.
The Travel Channel developed a Facebook application that generates more traffic than their dedicated web property.
Feedback from developers is critical.
400,000 developers signed up for the Facebook platform, which far exceeded the goals from the original business plan.
Facebook announced a collaboration with Salesforce at the Dreamforce conference.

Microsoft

Building a platform with 3 goals: (1) comprehensive platform, (2) choice, so you can take what you like, and (3) take advantage of computing power available on the client.
As you introduce new versions of the platform, compatibility with previous versions is important.

A Chat with Elon Musk from Tesla Motors

2008-11-07T11:52:00.000-08:00

Elon Musk from Tesla Motors spoke on stage with John Battelle. The $109k Tesla roaster is faster than all Ferrari's except the Enzo, and Tesla is currently manufacturing 800-1500 / year. The current waiting list is 1200 people.

Elon is also starting two other start-ups:

Solar City: solar systems available on a lease basis for residential and small business. Recently completed a large financing round, 3x the previous round.
SpaceX: a 6-year-old start-up dedicated to space exploration technologies. His fourth launch successfully entered orbit.

When Elon went to college, he set three goals for himself:

The Internet
Renewable energy
Space exploration and taking life to other planets

His three start-ups are the fulfillment of his second and third goals. As the co-founder of PayPal, he did okay with checking off the first goal. Check out his bio on Wikipedia.

The Web and Politics

2008-11-07T11:04:00.000-08:00

John Heilemann hosted a panel on politics and the web with Arianna Huffington, Gavin Newsome, and Joe Trippi.

Highlights and take-aways:

"The Internet has killed Karl Rove politics." - Ariana
"The truth keeps intruding into people's rooms." - Ariana (in reference to the power of the Internet in politics)
The Internet medium demands authenticity from politicians.
Joe talked about a "mywhitehouse.gov" as a portal used by the President to reach out to citizens to develop policy and legislation.
There is no such thing as "off the record" anymore.

Demand Media

2008-11-07T09:31:00.000-08:00

Richard Rosenblatt of Demand Media. They generate content for the web. They are the largest producer of video for YouTube.

They've raised $355M

Demand Studios

Has a catalog of content that must be generated, along with the price (e.g. $15).
Writers who are part of their network can checkout a title, write the content, and are paid for that piece.
They have a similar model for generating video content for online advertisers.

Pluck on Demand: is a tool that allows website owners to have content generated for their website. They have a series of widgets (e.g., Related Content) that can be embedded in your website. The content for these is generated by Demand Media, and the widgets contain advertising.

The Twitter of India?

2008-11-07T09:04:00.000-08:00

An entrepreneur based in Silicon Valley, Beerud Sheth is the founder of Webaroo. Their core offering is SMS GupShup (chitchat in Hindi). Using SMS GupShup, you can set up groups of mobile users and broadcast messages to your group. Groups can be created and managed entirely from the mobile handset without requiring any web access.

Webaroo currently has 12M users of SMS GupShup. These users send 500M messages/month, which represents 7% of all SMS messaging in India. Use cases for this product: micro-blogging, news, social networking.

Some interesting data from his presentation.

Globally, there are 1.4B users of http, and there are 3.5B mobile subscribers
The majority of growth in mobile subscribers is in rural areas, with most handsets costing less than $50 (unsubsidized).

Launch Pad at the Web 2.0 Summit

2008-11-06T16:17:00.000-08:00

During the afternoon keynote, several start-ups were given 5 minutes each to pitch to a panel of VC's from NEA, Sequoia, Omidyar Network, Mohr Davidov Ventures, and Panorama.

Carbonetworks - Michael Meehan

Provides companies a platform for managing their carbon footprint and strategy.
Incorporated in 2005. 300 corporate subscribers to date, growing at 2-3 per day.

EveryScape - Mok Oh

3D views of real places online. You can walk around outside, walk in to shops, zoom around.

GoodGuide

Source of product information to find healthy, safe products.
Are there carcinogens in products?
Web-based and also launched an iPhone client. Also available by SMS message.
VC concerns: start-up or public service? content-generation cost? velocity of new products developed is quite high.

Predictify

Platform for online predictions by users.
Revenue model: sponsored questions by marketers. $1/question.
1M predictions with 200K questions since its launch one year ago.

Qik - Bhaskar Roy

Streaming live video from cell phone to the web.
Use cases: sharing video with friends, bloggers, Ashton Kutcher, travel diaries, media companies for live news.
Works with any J2ME phone.
Platform that supports multiple back-ends: facebook, twitter, itunes, blogger, tumblr, youtube.
Will be embedded in Nokia 5800.
VC concerns: monetizing video,
VC's liked: IP, differentiation,

Sungevity - Danny Kennedy

Sells solar panels on-line.
Online quote for solar panel installation.
Web site has a video-based
On target to meet $2.5M first-year revenue goal.

My take-aways

For each presentations, there were very widely varied reactions/feedback by the different VC's.
The passion of the entrepreneur during the presentation does have an impact.

Mark Zuckerberg's Keynote at the Web 2.0 Summit

2008-11-06T13:46:00.000-08:00

After a scrumptuous lunch of cheese-filled tortellini, cesar salad, and dessert pastries, Martin and I are back in the grand ballroom for the afternoon keynotes. (Martin had the chicken, I believe, and I know he enjoyed the dessert.) Surprisingly, most of the panel's sessions, panels, and "conversations" are held in the grand ballroom. There were a few sessions in smaller conference rooms, but most of the sessions are in the grand ballroom.

Growth is their primary driver, and they're busy opening offices around the world: Dublin, France, London. Facebook revenue is in the 100's of millions, but Mark wasn't specific about the revenue generated by the brand vs the channel.

Facebook currently employees more than 700 employees, and they are still hiring. They are aggressively expanding their Sales effort, especially internationally. In France, 7% of the population uses Facebook. Facebook Connect: a new platform for developers that is currently in beta.

An Interesting Way to Look at Your Energy Consumption

2008-11-06T12:10:00.000-08:00

Dr. Saul Griffith showed a beta version of wattzon.com, an energy start-up that lets you calculate your energy consumption. Instead of focusing on carbon footprint, Saul advocates computing your energy consumption.

Some highlights

His 2007 energy consumption was 17000W, but the global average is only 2200 W.
The US government uses a significant amount of energy on our behalf.
Current worldwide energy demand: 16 terraWatts (TW)
These figures can be used to determine how much alternative energy must be generated to reduce dependence on energy generation from fossil fuels.

The Future of Media , According to Twitter and Current TV

2008-11-06T11:32:00.000-08:00

At the Web 2.0 Summit, Ken Auletta (the New Yorker) led a discussion with Joel Hyatt (CEO of Current TV) and Evan Williams (CEO of Twitter).

When asked "How will Twitter make money?" Evan first drew a blank and then steered the conversation to how people are using Twitter in new and cool ways. I guess Mark Zuckerburg (Facebook) set the precedent for this question. Where did all the capitalists go?

Joel has an old-fashioned revenue model (his words, not mine) where Current TV licenses content to cable companies, for distribution to households. Joel also appears to have 20 years on Evan, so I guess things like money and revenue are more top of mind for him. :-)

Current TV has user-generated content as well as user-generated ads. Viewers in fact prefer viewer-generated ads. Despite this being a panel session about media, there were several technical glitches in pulling up the video segments during the panel. (Kinda ironic) Toyota sponsors Viewer Created Ad Messages (VCAM's). The one that was shown for the Prius was quite good and better than most of the Prius commercials I've seen. Several other large companies, including Loreal, have sponsored VCAM's.

Attenhut! The Army is Now Web 2.0 Ready!

2008-11-06T11:07:00.000-08:00

General Jeffrey Sorenson, the CIO of the US Army, dressed in battle fatigues, addressed the audience. The "Army of the Future" is preparing for an era of persistent conflict. Geez.

General Sorenson showed an interesting chart that shows commercial technology and army usage of that technology on the same graph. There's basically an 8-10 year lag between the development of a technology, such as the Internet, and the deployment of that technology in the Army.

Battle Command Knowledge System (BCKS). The Army is using software similar to WebEx or Go-To-Meeting for their training and battle planning.

Command Post of the Future: a Web 2.0 app that integrates satellite, video, VOIP, 3D topography, DB access, and collaboration tools for real-time battle management. This tool was developed by DARPA.

In their overall architecture, the Army is using Keyhole Markup Language (KML) to access data from Google Earth and other mapping databases. Field units are using RSS to stay informed with battle commands and information.

Oohrah.

Health 2.0 at the Web 2.0 Summit

2008-11-06T10:10:00.000-08:00

Here I am at Day 2 of the O'Reilly Web 2.0 Summit. I arrived at the tail end of a conversation with Ralph de la Vega from AT&T, and now I'm listening to a panel of geneticists and physicians talk about "Health 2.0."

For $400, 23andme will map out your genome and provides a report that provides insight into your traits and diseases. Pretty scary stuff! Reminds me of the movie, Gattaca. But, intriguing as well. I lost a lot of money in biotech stocks in the late 90's when the results of the human genome project were given out to the public domain. Maybe I should try the kit and reap some rewards from my early losses, I mean investments. ;-)

Cardiovascular disease is the number 1 killer in the USA. There are new start-ups that are working on developing blood tests that will indicate a disposition to heart disease.

Day 1 of the Web 2.0 Summit

2008-11-05T22:16:00.000-08:00

After a long day of sessions and chatting with attendees, day 1 of the Web 2.0 Summit has drawn to a close. I did run out of battery after 6 hours, but here are my highlights from today's sessions:

Now, I'm going to call it a night and get caught up on my day job. ;-)

Keynotes from the Web 2.0 Summit

2008-11-05T14:31:00.000-08:00

Well, I've read my fair share of O'Reilly books (mostly about the LAMP stack), but this is the first Tim O'Reilly keynote that I've attended. Mercifully, the keynotes for this conference are after lunch and not the usual breakfast keynote. (I guess these guys like to sleep in as well.) So here I am sitting next to Martin in the Palace Hotel's grand ballroom, listening to the keynotes. During this afternoon's keynotes, Tim and John Battelle are interviewing several guests in a format similar to a late-night talkshow. Here are some highlights from the keynotes:

Larry Brilliant - Google.org. 1% of the equity of google, 1% of the profits, and 1% of employee time will be used for non-profit purposes. The 1% model was "borrowed" from Marc Benioff at Salesforce. They use a VC-like model to decide which causes to fund. They go after "big problems" that need solving where Google can make a unique difference.

Mary Meeker - Morgan Stanley

Lots of financial data on the economy. (slides)
Facebook: 161M visitors
Youtube: 329M visitors
Skype: 370M visitors
Paypal: 65M visitors - $15B total payment volume (TPV). Non-eBay payment volume up +49% Y/Y.
Ad supply > demand, so CPM's are dropping.
China added 73M Internet users in 2007. USA added 9.8M.
China added 86M mobine subscribers in 2007, India added 68M.

Rajesh Jain - MD Netcore Solutions

Novatium: $100 network computer for Indian market. 50M middle-class households in India, but only 8M have computers. Their market: the 30M households who visit cybercafes.
NetCore: using SMS for news channels & search on cell phones. SMS is also being used for advertising on phones in India. 4x the traffic of twitter.

John Doerr - Kleiner Perkins
His priorities

Increase US government spend in green energy to $1B/yr. (E.g., healthcare: $32B/yr)
Double the number of engineering and science graduates in the USA (from 30K/yr to 60K/yr)
Restore DARPA to its former self as a research driver, but focused on energy.
2000: $100B VC money invested (50% in Internet ventures)
2007: $37B VC money
2008: $15B VC money
2009: $8B VC money
Doesn't think there will be a market for exits for a couple of years. Prepare and "hunker down"
Kleiner: spending 30% in digital, 30% in green, life sciences a little smaller.

Tips

Act now. Get a loan or secure more financing.
Protect the vital core of the business. Cut once, cut deep enough.
Make sure you have 18 months of cash on conservative revenue forecast. Talk to current investors and ask for additional funding now.
Defer facilities expansion, capital, and software.
Re-evaluate R&D priorities.
Renegotiate any and all current contracts & leases.
Everyone in the company should be selling the company's value prop.
Offer equity instead of cash.
Secure cash in government-backed securities instead of money-market funds. Still thinks a major bank will fail.
Know your revenue plan. Understand the leading indicators. React quickly.
Over-communicate. Do not sugarcoat.

The iPhone Market Opportunity

2008-11-05T11:31:00.001-08:00

It's standing room only in this session. I guess there are a lot of iPhone afficianados out there. The panel includes: Raven Zachary (raven.me), Bill Dudney (Gala Factory Software LLC), Matt Murphy (Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers), Tom Conrad (Pandora Media).

Raven Zachary - (www.raven.me) product management consultant for iPhone. Helped with the Obama iPhone app.The iPhone is unique for three reasons

It's persistent: mobile broadband, always-on, in your pocket.
Mobile web: 13M iPhone units (source: Apple), 3-6M iPod touch (estimated by Zachary)iPhone OS generates 74% of all mobile web traffic. Beats Windows mobile, Symbian, sidekick. Blackberry is great at e-mail but generates the least mobile web traffic. The Sony PSP generates twice as much web traffic.
Application distribution. Over 6,000 apps in US. 1/3 are games and entertainment. Revenue share: Apple keeps 30% of revenue.

Matt Murphy (Kleiner Perkins)

June 2008 - 6M iPhones (sold 1M 3G iPhones in 3 days, 7M 3g iPhones in 90 days)
Sept 2008 - 13M iPhones
Dec 2009 - expecting 50M iPhones
500 apps at launch, 7200 apps now.
90% of people download apps. Other phones: 20%
5 iFunded companies: whrrl, pelago, iControl (control appliances in home), BooYah! (from world of warcraft guys), ngmoco
>3000 proposals received so far, met with >200 companies, >5 actively engaged, 5 funded. This is 20x other platforms/spaces. Looking for companies that can scale, rather than lifesytle apps.
Plans: business vertical, consumer vertical are the largest, healthcare (12%),
Would like to see more enterprise apps for the iPhone. 40% of all Fortune 500 have iPhone app in trial.
12M iPhones (250M phones total in US). iPhone app downloads: 14M/week, rest of US: 3M/week
iPhone is changing behavior: browsing news, playing games.
iPhone developers in short supply.

Kleiner Perkins iFund success criteria:

Inherently mobile use cases
Context over content
Real-time, immediate utility (apps that need 3-5 mins of training, the usage drops off)
Simplicity
Frequent usage
Inherently viral
Massive scale possible (address a large audience)
Natural business model
Cross platform with mobile integral (attract web users and mobile users)
Take advantage of iPhone platform.

mmurphy@kpcb.com kpcb.com/ifund

Tom Conrad (CTO, Pandora Media)

Largest Internet radio broadcaster. ClearChannel has 20% of all radio.
Apple reviews all app-store apps. Takes 24 hours to 7 days. Brew takes 1-6 months to review, at a cost of $2500, and uses NTSL for testing.

Tech Hunch Thrifty: Web 2.0 Companies Started on a Hunch and a Prayer

2008-11-05T11:26:00.000-08:00

Just finished my first session at the Web 2.0 Summit-- a panel session hosted by Guy Kawasaki. Nine different start-ups, each given 6 minutes to demo their product. Most of the panel members appeared to be twenty-somethings. Eight of the 9 presenters were using Macs. The central theme: the days of $2M in funding with only a business plan and no product to demo are over.

WuFoo – Kevin Hale

Online HTML forms builder
Can embed form directly into website, including CSS.
Can process online payments: through PayPal, Google Checkout,
Business model: hosted, monthly subscription fee: free - $199/month.
Y-Combinator seed funded: $18k + angel money $100k. Profitable. Based in Tampa, FL

Yoics - Instant networking

Built into various devices to network-enable them. For example, surveillance cameras.
Can load the yoics client onto other PC’s
Business model: license the technology to manufacturers.
Bootstrapped by 2 founders. Raise money from there.

DropBox – founder Drew

Share files across computers. Synchs files across computers. Files show up in a folder, using standard file management. Files are synched across network.
Can easily “export” files by dropping them into the dropbox folder.
Files also available over web. Files are automatically versioned. Can restore to previous versions of files or undeleting.
9 person start-up: Windows, Linux, Mac.
2 gigabytes free. 50 gig: $20/month or $100/year.
Developed prototype in 4 months (while working at another start-up). $15k in Y Combinator + $5k loan for 9 months total.

Disqus – Jason

Management system for blog comments.
Central place to track all my comments on web sites. Can also follow comments from other disqus users.
As a publisher, can manage/moderate/view comments from all websites.
Supports blog platforms, but needs a plug-in that you drop into
Biz model: subscription model. Also looking at going to bigger publishers.
Financing: Y Combinator funded 1 year ago: $15k in summer 2007.

Mighty Quiz - Kelly Bennet

Trivia site – you can make your own quizzes.
Can plug into blogs or social networks.
People can create questions. Other people can rate questions (thumbs up/down)
Authors can write questions. Can add questions to categories. Automatically pulls in images from Yahoo images.
Portable, available as a widget.
Cyworld (social network) imports Mighty Quiz widget.
Y-Combinator funded: $10k. Raised few hundred $100’s K. Based in San Francisco.

SlideShare – Rashmi Sinha (CEO)

Share power point presentations online.
Space on the web to upload and share presentations.
Presentations converted to YouTube-like video format. Users can comment on presentations.
Typical use case: people upload a presentation, then link to their website/blog.
“Meet Henry” presentation: a preso format for advertisements. Has created a category
Can also synch presos with audio. (mp3 file or podcast) to create a slidecast.
Traffic: 9M unique visitors last month. SlideShare avail on LinkedIn. Some traffic from organic search.
2000 presos uploaded / day (not counting LinkedIn)
Funding: $0 funding. Built prototype while working at other companies. Launched, written by TechCrunch. Revenue from other funding. 2 years into company, secured angel funding then Series A.

Posterous – Garry Tan (co-founder)

Blogging by e-mail. No sign-up required.
Blog directly from e-mail account. post@posterous.com.
Automatically expands links into pictures/video widget.
Zip files automatically expanded into a JavaScript picture viewer.
Use it as a way to share pictures and videos with family.
Raised $50k from Y-Combinator from Boston session. Launched in the summer.
Biz model: premium services.

Rescue Time – Tony

Time management software
Measures which software and websites you’re using. Provides aggregated stats to manager. Lets people know how they compare to their average team member.
Tracks apps (Word, Excel) and individual web sites (active use).
Can also block different websites
Lets managers get data by dept, group, etc.

Poll Everywhere - Jeff Dunap

Text participation during presentations.
Realtime participation by people sending SMS messages.
$0.30/participant/month for size of 100’s of people
For 250 person audience, costs $65/month. Monthly charge =
Financing: $9k (self-funded), $20k (Y-Comb), cash flow positive, based in Chicago & Boston.

Live from San Francisco... It's the Web 2.0 Summit

2008-11-05T10:11:00.000-08:00

Now that the election's over, it's time to return to real life. Okay, sort-of. I'm at the O'Reilly Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. Over the next few days, I'll be blogging live from the conference. So watch this space!

PayCycle: In the News Again

2008-09-26T12:26:00.000-07:00

Forbes just published an article about my company, PayCycle. In these turbulent times, the small business sector is weathering the storm much better than Wall Street. And having a SaaS sales model is definitely the way to go. For all the details, check out the article.

The Luster Wears off Google Chrome

2008-09-11T22:28:00.001-07:00

After a week of browsing with Chrome, I've switched back to Firefox 3. I did used to Chrome's rather unusual UI layout, but it wasn't the missing menu bar that did in Chrome. For me, there were two missing features that caused me to switch back to Firefox:

Chrome doesn't support the TinyMCE editor, which is used by Atlassian Wiki. As a big Wiki user at work, the lack of support for the rich text editor was a big deal.
Chrome doesn't support plug-ins ala Firefox. Although I didn't miss my Alexa plug-in, I did miss the Selenium IDE.

Oh well, I'm sure Google will continue to evolve Chrome at a frantic pace. In the meantime, Chrome remains installed on my laptop. It's just not my default browser.

All of a Sudden, Browsers are Hot Again

2008-09-03T21:04:00.000-07:00

Tuesday afternoon, I downloaded and installed Google's Chrome browser on my laptop. Although I had just upgraded to Firefox 3 last week, I figured I'd see for myself what's up with all the buzz around Chrome. My first reaction was "Where's the menu bar?" A few of us at work downloaded Chrome, and we did have some "water cooler" talk about the new browser.

Chrome claims to have a faster JavaScript engine ("V8") and a faster rendering engine, based on WebKit. Each tab also runs in its own process, for better security and reliability. I turned to the video from the Google developers to learn about Chrome, but Paul checked out the cartoon. See for yourself to get the inside scoop.

I've switched my default browser from Firefox 3 to Chrome. I guess an extended test drive is in order. Check back in a week to see how Chrome holds up...

A Stroll along Pebble Beach

2008-08-30T23:03:00.000-07:00

In the spirit of celebrating Labor Day, I will not blog about anything work-related this weekend. Earlier today, we met several friends at Carmel-by-the-Sea for a day at the beach. This was a cozy little beach, tucked away behind the cypress trees and quaint shops along Ocean Ave. And the beach offered magnificent views of Pebble Beach Golf Links. As it turns out, there was a Champions Tour event at Pebble Beach, and we did see the cameras on the course.

After mid-day, the fog cleared, the sun came out, and the weather warmed considerably. It was a fun day of catching up with friends, throwing the football around, playing catch, and of course eating. Throughout the day, we munched on assortment of Indian dishes, pasta salad, sandwiches, and snacks. And after we watched the sun set over Monterrey Bay, we headed home for Silicon Valley.

Sent from my iPhone

2008-08-24T19:50:00.001-07:00

Well, not really, but keep reading. On Saturday, my son and I decided to check out a movie at Shoreline. We both decided to pass on "Star Wars: Clone Wars" and check out "Longshots" instead. Somehow, an animated remake of the Star Wars trilogy didn't appeal to me and my son-- two hard-core Star Wars fans, btw. Turns out "Longshots" was a good call.

After lunch in downtown Palo Alto, we did a little window shopping at Magnolia Video and then headed over to the Apple store. Fifteen minutes later I was all set with my new 16GB iPhone 3g. Although the guy at the Apple store denied any reception issues or 3g performance issues, later that day I did install the iPhone software update to correct the 3g performance issues. And thanks to some help from Jeff Brewer, I've got my Exchange e-mail configured on my iPhone.

Now I've just got to figure out how to blog from my iPhone. I'm not sure the little touchscreen keypad's gonna do it, however.

My Alma Mater's Movin' on Up

2008-08-23T17:32:00.001-07:00

It's been two decades since I graduated from Rice University. When I was an undergrad, Rice always hovered around #20 in the college rankings. In this year's list of America's Best Colleges from US News and World Report, Rice has moved up to #17. Some notables:
#1: Harvard
#4: Stanford
#6: Caltech
#14: Cornell
#17: Rice
#21: UC Berkeley

Check out the entire list for yourself.

Would You Like Red or White with Your Series A?

2008-08-21T22:19:00.000-07:00

It was another warm summer evening in Menlo Park, and the air was filled with the buzz of business plans, revenue models, and talk of summer travels. Oh yeah, and various vintages of merlots, cabernets, and pinots from a VC-backed vintner. This is Silicon Valley, and a few hundred execs descended on the grounds of Sierra Ventures on Sand Hill Road.

One of my former colleagues, Gamiel Gran, is now an associate at Sierra. Over a nice pinot noir, Gamiel and I reminisced about some of our adventures at Cassatt, including a very memorable trip to SAP headquarters in Walldorf. During the course of the evening, I bumped into quite a few Cassatt alumni: Steve Levine, Polly Sumner, and Karl Perron, a former Cassatt customer.

During the past few weeks, I've run across PayCycle customers at several social events. Today was no exception. I spoke with one individual who use PayCycle for his small business and another who uses our household payroll product. And both were happy customers!

As the sun set, I sipped a nice cotes du Rhone and a full-bodied cabernet. I also sampled some cheeses, including a tasty blue and a gruyere. Finally as the patio lights turned on, I called it a night and took the familiar drive up Sand Hill Road, cut across the Stanford campus, back to familiar mid-town Palo Alto. Just in time for the men's 400m!

Bagels and PayCycle for Breakfast

2008-08-14T20:40:00.000-07:00

Earlier this morning, my CEO, Jim Heeger, was interviewed by Fox Business News in New York City. (Search for the "PayCycle" video). The segment aired on Fox earlier this morning, but I missed it. I did catch the video replay, however. It's a 3-minute video-- only a minute longer than Michael Phelps in the 200m IM. And I don't think Jim eats 12,000 calories each day. Check it out for yourself.

Ever Heard of a Social Network for Shopping?

2008-07-27T10:23:00.000-07:00

Me neither, until I talked with Kaboodle at TechCrunch (also see my last blog post). Kaboodle is a Web 2.0 site that targets teen shoppers. As a parent of a teenage daughter, I fully understand the power (monetary and influence) of this demographic! If all those teenagers stopped spending, I think W's economy would take an even faster nosedive.

Now Kaboodle is different in that it doesn't sell anything. It's not an e-tailer, and it's not a web presence for a bricks-and-mortar site. I think of Kaboodle as digg for shopping, even though thefolks at Kaboodle didn't like my analogy.

For this to make sense, think of yourself as a young shopper-- a teen or twenty-something. As you surf around the internet, you can basically tag items (shoes, blouses, skirts, pants, pursues, you get the picture) and these to the collective catalog on kaboodle. From Kaboodle, you can put together different outfits, and you can also rate different items. Kaboodle shows you where you can buy these outfits, and off you go to these other sites to purchase your items!

Kaboodle's revenue model is advertising (just like every other Web 2.0 site). I thought it was a creative way to apply a Web 2.0 model to shopping. From a technology perspective, Kaboodle is implemented with JSP, Servlets, and Apache Spring, and it runs on Tomcat.

I don't know if I'm going to shop there, and I'm not sure I'll pass on their url to my daughter. But, who knows? Maybe she's already been kaboodling!

The TechCrunch Party at August Capital

2008-07-26T13:17:00.000-07:00

It could almost pass for a college party. A bunch of twenty-somethings milling about with drink in hand. But wait, some thing's amiss. There's a new Tesla parked outside, with the owner proudly chatting up the passersby. A limo pulls up and a somewhat awkward-looking techie emerges with a model on his arm. He's a VC who's flown from LA for the event. Although we're walking distance from Stanford, this ain't no college keg party. This is Sand Hill road, and we're at the TechCrunch party hosted by August Capital. The host, David Hornik from August Capital, is also one of our Board members. Jane and I met our gracious host in the lobby, and chatted with him about some of the things we're cooking up for the next board meeting.

The event was attended by over 1000 entrepreneurs, techies, and VC's. And there was a healthy distribution of established tech companies, mid-sized start-ups, and brand new start-ups. Web 2.0 was definitely in the air.

I attended with Jane Willis from PayCycle, and we ran across several colleagues from our pasts. I ran across Milton Howard, a former colleague from Cassatt, who was attending with Michelle Fisher, CEO of Blaze Mobile. Michelle's 18-person start-up has developed a platform that allows folks to pay for services using their mobile phone. Milton and Michelle (who are flanking Jane in the picture) were attending to chat up VC's who might become Series A investors. Good luck, Michelle! As it turns out, Milton has been a loyal PayCycle customer for many years. He uses PayCycle's household payroll product to pay for his nanny.

After another hour of navigating through the crowd, Jane and I decided to find a quieter area on the patio, someplace away from the music and crowd. While we were chatting, two gentlemen greeted us and let us know how happy they were with the PayCycle product. Ike Eze and Tuyen Vo are serial entrepreneurs, and they've just started their third start-up, Centrro. They must have done okay from the sales of their previous start-ups, because they're self-financed and not actively seeking VC money. With their latest start-up, Ike and Tuyen have developed a platform for brokering credit card applications and loan applications on behalf of financial institutions. They have just a few employees and many contractors, and they're very pleased with the PayCycle product. They did have some suggestions and product ideas for me and Jane, which we'll talk over with our teams when we return to the office.

I did run into a few other folks during the event, including a potential business partner we had met with earlier that week. It was a perfect summer evening in Menlo Park, and I had a health sampling of samosa, spring rolls, and weissbier. I decided to call it a night around 8:30pm so I could head home and start the weekend with the family. It was my first TechCrunch party, and it was definitely a great event. I look forward to the next one.

The Next Chapter Has Begun

2008-07-13T09:10:00.000-07:00

I just completed my second week at PayCycle, where I joined as the VP of Product Development. In my new role, I've now moved to the other side of the table. In my prior roles at Cassatt and Sun, I was a producer of enterprise technology. Now, I'm a consumer of enterprise technology and a producer of a consumer web property. My new responsibilities include development, QA, and IT.

PayCycle provides an online payroll service for small business, and they have 75,000 customers. In fact, three of my former colleagues are customers. PayCycle is a SaaS implementation that's implemented as a J2EE application, sans EJB.

My new workplace is located in Palo Alto, just a few doors down from Fry's. I've been good so far, with regards to purchases from Fry's. I have "window shopped" for Sharp's new 65" LCD hi-def TV. "How much is that TV in the window?" you may ask. Well, at a current stick price of $4500, I'll wait another year and pick it up for 3 grand. For now, all I've purchased during business hours is a Hershey's bar and some gum. The wife is really proud of me, and I'm a little surprised myself, to be quite honest.

I'll still continue to blog about enterprise software, but now with the end-user's perspective. Over the next several posts, I'll talk about our development environment, how we're using virtualization, and talk about some new initiatives. So keep reading, and if you're ever at Fry's, stop by for a visit.

One Chapter Ends

2008-06-20T08:30:00.001-07:00

Three and a half years ago, I had joined a new start-up called Cassatt. At the time, I was working in the Java Web Services group at Sun when I got the call from Cassatt's recruiter. I wasn't closely following Cassatt back then, but it was on my radar. In late 2003, I remember reading about Bill Coleman's departure from BEA to form a new enterprise software start-up. And then in April 2004, Rich Green left Sun to join Cassatt. When I joined Cassatt, I didn't fully understand what Cassatt was trying to do, but I knew it was developing some cool, transformational technology. Bill has this saying "Go big or stay home." Well, I don't ever remember staying home during my time at Cassatt.

When I joined in October 2004, we had just started developing the Collage 3.0 product release, with the codename "Armstrong." The longer codename was "Armstrong, the moon guy, not the bike guy." That was one of the years Lance Armstrong won the Tour de France, but the release was named after Neil Armstrong. After shipping Collage 3.0 in February 2005, we took that one small step and firmly planted our flag in the sea of utility computing. (Remember, it's a moon metaphor.)

Over the next 15 months, we released three more versions of Collage. In January 2006, Collage 3.2 "Apollo" introduced support for Solaris. In April 2006, we shipped Collage 3.3 "Spyglass" which introduced support for managing virtual machines. Along the way, we ended our era of space-flight codenames and started a new era of famous golf courses. Okay, you can aim for the stars, but as far as I know only Alan Shepard has teed it up on the moon.

After the Collage 3.4 "Starbuck" release in February 2007, we transitioned to a new development process. Large releases were replaced by small projects that could integrate to Head of Tree asynchronously. There were two invariants: Head of Tree was always shippable, and projects integrated when they were complete and bug-free. At anytime, there were about a dozen projects "in flight." (Okay, we didn't get away from all the aerospace metaphors. We have too many pilots in Cassatt for that to ever happen.)

This was a pretty significant change in how PD operated, but the results were great for the company and the customers. In 2007, there were over 80 integrations to Head of Tree, and the time to deliver new features to customers was dramatically reduced. There was a renaissance of product functionality. We added support along many dimensions: new hardware from Sun, 64-bit support, Xen VM's, new VMware versions, additional networking support, performance enhancements, stability and robustness.

And then in November 2007, we launched the new Cassatt Active Response 5.0 product line. While supporting our utility computing mission, we added support for power management of engineering labs and dev/test environments. Since then, we've continued to add features incrementally. Just recently, Cassatt Active Response 5.1 introduced demand-based policy that should prove very helpful in power-management and utility-computing environments.

So as I leave Cassatt, I leave with mixed feelings. I've enjoyed my time at Cassatt and look back at fondly at our accomplishments. I will miss all the talented folks I had the chance to work with. But I know "it's a small valley" and our paths will cross again.

Desktop Virtualization

2008-06-11T10:53:00.000-07:00

Check out my new column at Virtual Strategy Magazine. I will contribute to their new "Insights" section, which features contributions from several other authors. This month, I talk about why desktop virtualization is a bad idea (and why it's not new either). (Read all about it)

Let me know you what you think.

Forrester's Views on Web 2.0 Security

2008-05-21T23:21:00.000-07:00

Dr. Chenxi Wang, a Principal Analyst at Forrester, presented a session on Web 2.0 Security Strategies. Here are some highlights from her session:

Web 2.0 is moving into Enterprises, whether you like it or not. She calls this the “consumerization” of enterprises. This is one of the most significant trends in enterprise computing today. All of the existing business software vendors are eyeing this market.

Web 2.0 applications bypass traditional controls that enterprise IT has in place for business data and processes, which introduces an additional need to mitigate external threats. However, Wang advises against blocking 100% of Web 2.0 content in organizations in order to avoid employee backlash.

If you’re developing your own Web 2.0 applications or services, security must still be considered. Web 2.0 apps are more difficult to secure than traditional apps.

Information security considerations

Content governance: much Web 2.0 content is unstructured. Content moves freely between the web, email, IM, P2P, FTP, RSS. This moves outside normal security tools.
Data security and control
Identity management
Archiving and retention
Compliance
Privacy and Intellectual Property: IP is owned by the web 2.0 site. Businesses should understand IP ramifications of using Web 2.0 sites. For example, content posted to Facebook is owned by Facebook and not the author.

Procter & Gamble's IT Organization

2008-05-21T12:26:00.000-07:00

I just wrapped up this morning's last keynote at Forrester's IT Forum. Marta Foster discussed the transformation of Procter & Gamble's IT organization at her keynote entitled "Bringing IT from the Back Office to the Boardroom."

Procter & Gamble was founded in 1837 with headquarters in Cincinnati and $76.5 Billion annual sales. P&G has 23 billion-dollar brands. Between 1985 and 1999, P&G expanded from a US-focused company to and international company, entering 55 new markets and increasing operations to 86 countries.

During these 15 years, P&G expanded IT capabilities around the world, resulting in duplication and inefficiency. In 1999, P&G underwent a major re-organization to address some of the inefficiencies from the period of growth. P&G created global business units (e.g., Laundry) with global P&L, market development organizations, and Global Business Services.

At the time, most of the business leaders considered IT to be a cost, but the IT group wanted to become an innovation agent for the company. At a company level, P&G commits to 4%-6% annual growth to its shareholders. IT wanted to find ways to contribute to this top-line growth.

P&G’s Approach

Unite IT and core Business Services. Current Global Business Services consists of 8500 employees, of which 4000 are IT.
Drive shared services across Business services.
Shift thinking from “technologies” to “solutions.”
Change the back office to become a business driver.

P&G organization: Global Business Units, Market Development Organization, Global Business Services, Corporate Functions. IT was renamed to Information & Decision Solutions (IDS) to reinforce the change in mission and vision.

Three structural drivers: global organization (3 data centers), think holistically across business processes, orgs, and technologies), grow the partnerships. (HP, IBM, Jones Land LaSalle for facilities). Narrowed down from dozens of partners to 11 global partners.

Three core strategies for how they work

Run as a business: changed approach from being a cost center (focused only on cost reduction) to (cost, service levels, value creation, service management, “total user experience”) aligned to P&G approach (P/L, market share, sales volume, brand management, consumer benefits).
New IT strategy aligned to business needs: virtualization (replace physical product mock-ups with virtual reality applications), personalization, and real-time decision-making. (decision cockpits that can be personalized by employees – 20,000 cockpits now, growing to 35,000. Goal is for employee not in manufacturing to have their own cockpit – about 70,000 in total.). Virtual Solutions are now used on 79% of all P&G initiatives. Personalization: pampers.com began as support for one site. 49 countries, 26 million visitors/year.
Measure for success. For every service, measure client satisfaction, service levels, user sensing, employee survey, scorecards, top-to-top connections with a 10-point scale for each category. Over past 3-4 years, $600M cost savings to date, 16% increase in user satisfaction, client sat at 8.7 (highest ever).

The IDS (IT) team has adopted a “Flow to Work” Design that attempts to breakdown traditional organizational "silos." People are encouraged to work across the organization and take a top-level business view on projects instead of focusing on their functional area or place on the org chart.

The acquisition of Gillette demonstrated some of the recent changes. P&G integrated Gillette and achieved all synergies in 15 months, whereas previous acquisitions of that size have taken 3 years. Marta’s org has 2000 people. Normally, people are on 2-year assignments. With 1/3 of organization, she’s trying to change so that folks have 6-month assignments.

Lessons learned

Maintain top-to-bottom focus on mission
Top management support is essential.
Communicate, communicate, communicate.
Commercialization is critical. All new technologies must find a home/purpose in delivering a product to market.
New models need new skills and capabilities.

P&G's green initiatives

Reduction of daily paper printing, focus on reducing consumption in facilities.
P&G has started measuring and reporting on carbon footprint for the company.
P&G is also involved in green initiatives with key customers (Walmart, Target) with a focus on the reduction of product packaging.
Reduction in travel: P&G is Cisco’s largest installation of tele-presence rooms. Global travel budgets reduced by 15%, IDS reduced travel by 40%, used a portion of the travel savings to fund video conferencing.

Now, I'm off to lunch. Late this afternoon, I'll be back on-line to blog about the afternoon sessions.

Forrester IT Forum - Day 2

2008-05-21T12:06:00.000-07:00

Welcome back to the Forrester IT Forum in Las Vegas. I started my day at 7am on a conference call with folks back in the office to discuss one of our key customers. After getting caught up on my e-mail, I was back at the Venetian for the day's sessions and analyst meetings-- the first one with Evelyn Hubbert, Senior Analyst at Forrester. Jay Fry, Evelyn, and I had a very productive chat about data center automation, ITIL, process automation, and the current state of tools. I'm now finishing up a keynote session by Marta Foster from Proctor & Gamble. (Stay tuned for that post.)

On a side note, today was a more balmy day in Las Vegas. Yesterday, the high was a blistering 104 degrees (yes, but it was a dry heat!). Today, I was greeted by cool breezes and 76-degree weather, with an expected high of 86.

Simon Yates Talks about IT Infrastructure and Operations at the Forrester IT Forum

2008-05-20T23:57:00.000-07:00

The clock has almost struck 12 (literally) on the first day of the Forrester IT Forum, but Vegas is still hoppin'. After a long day of sessions and 1-1's with Galen Schreck and Simon Yates, Jay and I decided to have some nice Venetian cuisine at one of the cafe-style restaurants in the faux Piazzo St. Marco at the Venetian Hotel. (I've been to the real Piazzo in Venice, and let's just say the replica is "close, but no cigar." Okay, maybe not even close, but there was one pigeon in the Venetian's replica.)

Earlier in the afternoon, I attended a session by Simon Yates, a Forrester VP analyst. The session was entitled "IT Infrastructure and Operations: The Road Ahead."

Yates covered many different topics during his session.

Success imperatives for IT that he is seeing from Forrester's clients (mostly large enterprises):

Stay ahead of next-generation data center technologies.
Consolidate IT for cost, efficiency, and simplification. Yates seeing a lot of interest in consolidation from their clients—very high demand over a short period of time (6 months).
Deliver always-on, always-available infrastructure within an ever-tightening budgetary envelope. One interesting quote: “Every year is a recession in IT operations.”
Enable user productivity through mobility.
Automated and simplify IT processes. ITIL, Forrester is developing research around IT management and automation.
Maintain and optimize core IT systems.

Technology change

Virtualization everywhere: servers, storage, networks, and clients. Improving server manageability and server flexibility is the number one reason for virtualization (41% consider very important and 46% consider important). Reducing hardware costs is the next reason (43% very important, 39% important) CIO's are “talking about virtualization at cocktail parties like it’s their favorite martini.”
Next-generation data center technologies could fundamentally. Change the economics of IT. Cloud computing has burst onto the scene. This could have a profound impact on how people build data centers.
Mobility requirements are driving investments in infrastructure to support a changing workplace.

Gaps in the virtualization portfolio

Management tools: need management that is common across silos. Most management tools from the “Big Four” are designed for physical things.
Sercurity tools can’t see into or protect virtual instances.
Licensing: still a black art that gets even more complicated. MSFT licensing is even more complicated in a virtualized environment.
Organization challenges: ownership and responsibility as virtualization bridges traditional functional domains (e.g., storage management).

Cloud computing is on the horizon. Yates urged attendees to get ready for the onslaught of cloud-computing products and initiatives from systems vendors. Most enterprises are not ready, and most cloud-computing providers are not ready yet either.

Organizational change

87% of CIO’s plan to restructure IT operations, and 60% have already started. Basically looking at traditional silos, such as storage, and looking at realigning to business imperatives and changing technologies.
Consolidation of everything- data centers, storage, applications, and IT staff. Automation will drive the consolidation of IT staff.
New requirements drive IT ops professions to develop new business and technology skills. CEO’s and CIO’s want to invest in the personnel they have.

Changes that will happen in IT:

Distributed authority will give way to centralized oversight. Instead of many mini-CIO’s, control will be centralized under the CIO.
Bottom-up projects will be replaced by top-down initiatives from the CIO.
Tech silos will be broken down and replaced by tech interdependency. There’s a push for IT service management instead of functional silos. There will be ITIL projects in the coming 6 months.
Technology specialists will transform into personnel with cross-technology skills. These individuals will be required to “see beyond their silos” and understand how IT affects (and can improve) the business.
Traditional tech metrics will give way to business-centered metrics. IT performance will be measured at a business level.

IT skills requirements are changing: technical versatility, business knowledge, interpersonal skills.

Process change

IT departments are shifting from the management of things to the automation of process and services.
Increasing interest in ITIL and increasing adoption in tools for automation. After consolidating hardware, companies are turning to ITIL (to consolidate process after they’ve consolidated everything physical.

Well, that wraps up day 1 at the Forrester IT Forum. And if you're still wondering, there were no cookies during the afternoon break between sessions. There was a selection of fresh fruit and granola bars. So, no cookie for me, but I did have gelato after dinner. So good things do come to those who wait! Check back on Wednesday for updates on day 2. Ciao.

Cloud Computing at the Forrester IT Forum

2008-05-20T14:44:00.000-07:00

I'm posting this blog entry during the afternoon break at the Forrester IT Forum. Okay, so I'm probably missing out on some chocolate chip cookies, but I really don't need them anyway. The third keynote I attended this morning was from Rick Lechner, VP Enterprise Systems at IBM. His talk was entitled "The New Enterprise Data Center: Enabling Business Innovation." As with any vendor talk, it was part annecdotal and part product pitch.

Here are some highlights from his keynote.
IBM sees three business drivers that are impacting IT today:

The changing face of globalization (transformation from exporting to multi-nationals to truly distributed global enterprise).
The rising tide of information (more devices, need for real-time analytics).
New business models that are evolving as new technology arrives (B2B, B2C, new uses of the Internet, rise of social networking).

IBM has developed and deployed a cloud that is used internally by Researchers. From an internal portal, Researchers request a set of compute resources, they’re provisioned in minutes, and then provided to the Researchers. When done, the resources are returned to the cloud. (As an aside, one of our Cassatt customers is developing such an internal cloud using Cassatt Active Response and our programmatic interfaces.)

Lechner spoke about several cloud-computing efforts in industry, academia, and government:

Google, Univ of Washington, and 6 other universities are working on how to design apps for the cloud.
Vietnam has deployed some clouds to foster collaboration between the government and university.
China has deployed some clouds to provide compute resources to software start-ups.

Well, I'm done posting for now. I'm off to find that chocolate chip cookie now...

Bobby Cameron's Keynote at the Forrester IT Forum

2008-05-20T14:35:00.000-07:00

This morning, Bobby Cameron, a VP analyst at Forrester, delivered a keynoted entitled “Don’t Wait to Innovate." During the keynote, I found myself sitting next to 3 guys who should have been at a pub instead of at the keynote. Despite a gentle warning, they continued to e-mail pictures to each other and play with some of the show give-aways.

Well, here are some highlights from Bobby's talk:

Business model innovation is a top priority, but most companies invest in new product/service invention.
IT leaders miss innovation by focusing on cost & quality.
On-going investments vs game-changing ideas: there is an “innovation continuum” in between the 2 extremes. Companies find it more difficult to fund projects in the middle.
P&G sources new products from “innovation networks.” Half of inventions are sourced from outside of the firm. They have identified individuals who play different roles in the process: Financiers (fund the projects), Transformers, Brokers (coordination of the network), Inventors.
P &G has a website for their partners and customers. With 53 people, they generated $3Billion in new revenue from products invented outside of P&G.O
Cameron suggests that companies should have dedicated funds for innovative projects that are separate from “business as usual” projects. Verizon has a separate fund of $2-3 Million/year for innovation.
Cameron discussed some companies that have created innovation pipelines. Idea generation is everywhere, running on its own funding, governed by innovation team. Iterative/agile delivery to develop an early prototype before commercialization. This pipeline for innovative projects runs parallel to the regular process.
Take tactical steps now: People – build an innovation culture. (IT: senior managers spend 2 weeks / year out in the Field / business) Process: have a portfolio management process in place. Review the portfolio to show funded/unfunded. Technology – use tools to capture ideas from employees & outside, make the portfolio visible.
Technologists must know the cost to the business. At Fidelity, IT knows about the cost of each trade. IT asks “how do I knock $0.25 off the cost of a trade?”

Mike Gilpin and Eric Brown's Keynote on Business Innovation

2008-05-20T14:31:00.000-07:00

Mike Gilpin and Eric Brown, both Forrester VP analysts, delivered the first keynote entitled: “Setting the Stage: Your Role in Business Innovation." A few interesting highlights:

Increasing innovation remains one of top 3 goals for most CEO’s. today. (survey of 1400 CEO’s by Forrester)
Singapore has created a Biopolis (technology park) that houses 2000 scientists in 2 million square feet of R&D space.
Kimberley Clark has created a 3-D usability lab for shopping and understanding buyer behavior. This virtual “lab” is located in Wisconsin and consists of three walls with projected displays. As shoppers walk with a shopping cart, the displays change. Kimberly Clark tracks the subject's retina to see where people are focusing. The goal is to try out new packaging, products, marketing, etc. in a virtual environment and see how people respond to new products before they appear physically on shelves.

Greetings from Forrester's IT Forum 2008

2008-05-20T14:23:00.000-07:00

This morning, I hopped a short flight from San Francisco to Las Vegas to attend Forrester's IT Forum 2008. Jay Fry and I are here to talk with analysts about the new Active Response 5.1 product launch (read more about it). During the day, I'll post my notes from the various keynotes. So check back over the next few days for more details.

M & A's Back, and in a Big (HP) Way

2008-05-13T08:35:00.001-07:00

Today, HP announced that it will purchase EDS for $13.9 billion, and in the process HP will have a professional services arm that can go head-to-head with IBM Global Services. With HP's recent purchases of Opsware, HP's returned to the software business. With the upcoming purchase of EDS, HP will have complete portfolio of hardware, software, and services to compete with Big Blue.

A long, long time ago, in a state far, far away, I was an EDS employee in Plano, Texas. I was a Research Systems Engineer back then, developing an in-house CASE tool that was used to generate form-driven DB applications. That was 1991, shortly after Ross Perot had departed, and Dick Brown was CEO. EDS had "relaxed" its dress code back then: double-breasted suits were allowed, and striped shirts were also acceptable. The employee manual did stipulate that the stripes could be no wider than 1/4", and shoes with metal buckles were still verboten. Employees had to wear their suit jacket whenever they travelled to another floor, another building on campus, or the cafeteria. And you had to wear a tie 24x7, even at midnight in the office. (But you could loosen our ties then.)

I'd imagine that EDS has relaxed its dress code since the 90's, but it's corporate culture is vastly different from the "HP Way." It will be interesting to see how this merger pans out.

Dev/Test Environments in the Garden State

2008-04-15T16:27:00.000-07:00

Last week, I spent a couple of days in New Jersey talking with some customers about their dev/test environments. One customer has a very large dev/test environment (1000's of servers) covering every UNIX platform that has been shipped this decade. You name, they got it. They even have some of those high-end, fault-tolerant systems that you only associate with the trading floor of a stock exchange.

Even though this customer was located in rural New Jersey (and I mean rural), they're experiencing some of the same things our West Coast customers are seeing:

They have a large dev/test environment with servers that are used for QA, performance testing, build systems, and replicating typical customer environments.
On average, their systems can be idle 30%-50% during non-business hours, but their utilization is much higher during business hours.
They have negotiated a pretty good discount with their local utility, but electricity is still $0.12/kWh. In another month, their rate is increasing to $0.14/kWh.
During the summer, the price will increase due to increased seasonal demand from all those air conditioners.

During our meeting, I spoke with the CIO, their facilities guy, and management from IT infrastructure and IT applications. This customer was interested in using Cassatt Active Response product to manage their operating costs by power-manging their dev/test environment. Our policy-based solutions for power management resonated with the CIO and her management. The applications folks were happy that we provide different levels of user access so that each team can manage the policies for their hardware resources. The facilities guy was quite pleased with our reports that show the cost savings and power usage in their environment. At the end of the meeting, he said "This is a beautiful thing for us." (And I kid you not, those were his exact words.)

"Earth Hour" in Your Data Center?

2008-03-29T18:44:00.000-07:00

On March 29, nearly 60 million people worldwide switched off their lights for one hour in order to show their concern for global warming. (Complete story) From Sydney to San Francisco, people manually turned off lights in office buildings, street signs, and homes. This symbolic gesture was intended to focus attention on rising carbon emissions from human sources, such as office buildings.

I'm sure there were plenty of idle servers on Saturday that could have participated in "Earth Hour." There are probably some idle servers right now in your data center (or engineering lab) that could be powered down. Most data centers are sized for peak traffic/workload that is generally 5-10 times the average traffic/workload. And once you get outside the production environment, there are even more servers in dev/test environments and engineering labs. And you know that those servers aren't being used 24x7.

What if you could power off those idle servers when they're not needed? Better yet, what if your data center or engineering lab could power down idle servers and then power on additional servers as they're needed? The solution is here today and easy to implement. (Read more)

Building a New Data Center Ain't Easy (or Cheap)

2008-03-12T15:16:00.000-07:00

Recently, InformationWeek published photos from Google's newest data center that is being constructed in Iowa. (Yes, Iowa.) The two-year project started last year and will cost $600 million. Now that's a lot of click-throughs to cover the construction cost!

I've been involved in some discussions with a customer who's also maxed out their data-center capacity. They still have floor space in the data center, but they've run out of power. And they're in one of those states where electricity is cheap and plentiful. However, the cost of pulling power into the data center will still cost into the high 6-figures (and that's dollars not Yen).

So they're exploring ways to use their data center resources more efficiently. As they deploy new applications, they deploy more servers. (Sound familiar?) However, not all those apps are needed at the same time. Some apps are provisioned to support the maximum traffic. Other apps are cyclical ones that are only during certain time periods.

So this customer has realized that they can still deploy more applications (and servers) by powering off servers that are not needed. This is an easy step that can be done without changing any of their infrastructure or changing the way they deploy their applications. So, they're able to get more headroom out of their existing data center without having to build a new one. Remember, not everyone has a $400 stock!

Introducing a New Social Networking Site

2008-01-09T06:18:00.001-08:00

Social networks are all the rage these days. Sites like LinkedIn and Facebook are great ways to stay in touch with friends and colleagues. And you can turn to your network for answers to questions or referrals.

Yesterday, some friends of mine just went live with MyPetStreet, a new social network for pet owners. MyPetStreet provides some unique features for pet owners:

Aggregated content and news feeds related to pet health, news, and product information.
An repository of pet service providers and resources from the local community.
A forum where users can find expert opinions, share pet owner insights, and ask questions to other pet owners.
A unique lost-pet service that uses a combination of Web 2.0 technologies and old-fashioned plastic tags.

From a technology perspective, MyPetStreet is implemented with some pretty cool technologies. (Sorry, the inner geek takes over.)

Searching for service providers is implemented using AJAX and Google maps. You simply put in your zip code, search criteria, and voila! The service providers pop up on a map. (Check it out)
Content management is provided using Drupal, an open-source content-management framework.
The site is implemented using LAMP: Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP.

As an owner of four parakeets, I've already checked out MyPetStreet. The directory of service providers in the BayArea is pretty comprehensive, and there's already a pretty sizeable base of content. And, the site is pretty nice implementation as well. Very cool. You should check it out for yourself.

Server Marketshare from Enck and Claunch at Gartner

2007-12-09T19:45:00.000-08:00

At the Gartner Conference, John Enck and Carl Claunch (both Gartner analysts) presented some interesting trends in server operating systems. Based on worldwide server shipment revenue, two operating systems are growing in marketshare:

Windows: $19 billion in 2007
Linux: $8.6 billion

UNIX marketshare is declining, but was still $16 billion in 2007. The total server shipment revenue in 2007 was $54 billion. Among mainframes, IBM z-Series is growing, while other vendors are decreasing.

Based on a poll of the audience (~300 members),

40% were reducing the number of server operating systems at their enterprise.
19% were increasing
41% were remaining steady

Based on another audience poll for use of blade architectures in the data center:

13% are researching blades
13% are testing blades
54% have deployed blades
20% have no plans for blades

Some other interesting highlights from this presentation:

Itanium is viable for only the HP-UX platform but not for other operating systems.
80% of all x86 servers deployed in data centers run Windows.
Solaris, AIX and HP-UX are stable UNIX platforms. Other UNIX platforms are dying.
Gartner sees a resurgence of physical appliances. Appliances must integrate with existing monitoring and management tools.

Leadership Lessons from Commander Mike Abrashoff

2007-12-07T13:52:00.000-08:00

At the Gartner Conference, one of the keynotes was from Mike Abrashoff, a former Navy Commander. During his talk, which was titled "It's Your Ship!," he focused on leadership and how you can change the performance of an organization. He used anecdotes from his command of the USS Benfold.

When he took command of the ship, he found that performance suffered from:

Infighting among the 5 deparments on the ship
Training was cut, due to budget reasons
People would complain about things not under their control
Tradition: Things were done as they had always been done

Abrashoff worked for William Perry, whom he described as "excellent without being arrogant." He modeled his own leadership after the way Perry treated people.

He spoke about how to instill a sense of urgency. Each month, a different division would "be in the spotlight."

Abrashoff would routinely walk around the ship and talk with sailors. He would ask:

What do you like most?
What do you like the least?
What can we improve, within budget?

Abrashoff instilled a culture where anyone on the ship, regardless of rank, could make a suggestion. Here are some of the suggestions that he implemented:

Change the bolts on the ship from iron to stainless steel. Instead of painting the ship every 2 months, the ship could be painted every 10 months. This best-practice was then implemented throughout the US Navy.
Thursday evenings, the crew would gather on the flight deck and listen to jazz and watch the sun set. This improved morale and was relatively cheap to implement.

Abrashoff believes in setting limits and letting people take action within those limits. He also believes in recruiting people everyday even they're already on-board. During his command, the Benfold became one of the top ships in the US Navy based on different performance and productivity criteria. It all starts with leadership!

Gartner's Infrastructure Operations Maturity Model

2007-12-07T12:21:00.000-08:00

At Gartner's Data Center Conference, Donna Scott and Jay Pultz, both Gartner VP Analysts,

announced the new Gartner Infrastructure and Operations Maturity Model. There are 6 levels for an organization:

0: Survival
1: Awareness
2: Committed: sufficient resources available (people, capital)
3: Proactive
4: Service-Aligned (SLA’s defined as IT services)
5: Business Partner

From a poll of the audience (~2000 attendees), 60% are at levels 1 and 2, 7% are at level 0 (survival), 19% are level 3 (proactive) and only 1% are level 5 (business partner).

Level 2: focuses on customer satisfaction. Organizations invest in project management, incident management and service support.

There are three components to the IO Maturity Model: People, process and technology. Technology changes are the easiest to implement, followed by process changes and finally followed by people changes (e.g., training and having the appropriate staff).

Technology changes needed for the different levels:

1: Asset management system in place
2: Consolidation, standards in place
3: Automated failover and architecture in place
4: End-to-end service levels
5: Dynamically change the infrastructure

Levels 2 and below are not sustainable levels. By the end of 2012,

35% of large enterprises will be at level 3 (proactive), compared with 25% in 2007.
14% will be at service-aligned, compared with 9% today

Bittman Talks about Data Center Sprawl

2007-12-07T12:11:00.000-08:00

Okay, this post is a little late, but hey, it was hard to get work done after hours in Vegas. We had booth duty until 8:30pm at the show, followed by a long dinner. I'm not much of a gambler, but I did drop $40 in slot machines, hoping for the big payout. So I didn't break the bank, and I'm back to blogging.

Here are some highlights from Tom Bittman's opening keynote at the Gartner Conference:

Data center sprawl (physical and virtual) can be managed by creating pools of resources. Automation of the Real Time Infrastructure will be the trend if 2010-2016. Virtualization is becoming a commodity. By the end of 2008, the hypervisor will become free. By the end of 2009, there will be 4 million x86 VM’s. Managing those VM's will be the challenge, and where most vendors should focus their efforts.

Real Time Infrastructure

Resources are shared.
The interface is business policy and SLA’s.
Provides agility to applications and services.
Inputs are service requirements, servers and storage. The outputs are IT services.

CMDB’s must be used with well-defined process. Organizations must make changes to culture and process for CMDB’s to be effective.

Run Book Automation: workflow of operations and process. This is not really technology.

Virtualization enables alternative delivery models:

Cloud computing / grid
Software appliances
Containers
Infrastructure as a service

Power and cooling are problems. Demand drives an increase in energy requirements. Virtualization solves a short-term, tactical problem. However, virtualization increases the long-term demand for energy, since the barrier to entry for deploying new servers (as VM’s) is reduced.

Over the next few days, I'll try to post about the other sessions I attended. Stay tuned.

Tuesday at the Gartner Data Center Conference

2007-11-27T17:14:00.000-08:00

I just survived day one at the Gartner Data Center Conference, and I'm taking a small break before booth duty at the Cassatt booth. This is my first year at the conference, and I'm joining a veteran crew of Cassatt folks-- or alumni as Gartner calls them. This year, the conference is held in the MGM Grand Conference Center, which is a 10-minute walk from the MGM Grand hotel. There are nearly 2,000 attendees at the event, but the crowd is quite different from the Java One crowd I used to hang with. There are quite a few "suits" in the audience, and the sessions are quite different from Java One sessions and BOF's (Birds of a Feather-- an informal tech talk usually held in the evening).

I attended several sessions today:

Keynote: The Future of Infrastructure and Operations by Tom Bittman (VP Distinguished Analyst, Gartner)
Keynote: The Gartner Infrastructure and Operations Maturity Model by Donna Scott and Jay Pultz (both are VP Distinguished Analysts, Gartner)
Keynote: It's Your Ship! by Michael Abrashoff (author and former Navy Commander)
Certain and Uncertain Futures of Server Technology by Carl Claunch (VP Distinguished Analyst, Gartner) and John Enck (Research VP, Gartner)
A vendor session by Greg Ratcliff, Manager, Liebert Monitoring)
Two vendor sessions by Ivan Passos (Director of Product Management, Avocent): one on their new VM support in DS View 3 and the other on their MergePoint appliance

Later tonight, I'll post some entries with my notes from these different talks. I've got to don my green Cassatt bowling shirt and get ready for booth duty. There will be a small contingent of us in the booth, flanking an MCC that has the latest Cassatt Active Response software. Let's hope we wow the crowd! It is Vegas after all.

Come and Get It! Standard Edition is Here

2007-11-17T12:43:00.000-08:00

On Nov 16, 2007 at 8:59pm PT, we had our GA build of Cassatt Active Response, Standard Edition. That's when I got the final e-mail from Sudhrity Mondal, the new QE manager, that he and Chuck Brunson had finished their testing of Standard Edition. Build 9352 is now our GA build for the new Policy Manager, and we now have our GA release of the Standard Edition-- on Nov 16, as planned. (In all three US time zones, no less.) Whoo, hoo!

Standard Edition introduces several new components:

The Policy Manager, a new UI for entering policies for power-managing your servers.

The Scheduler, which schedules these policies and graphically shows which policy is in effect.

The Report Manager, which provides different reports for showing how much your different teams are spending on power. Yes, it's a charge-back report on operating costs for your server usage.

Looking back on the past few months, it's definitely been a pretty intense effort getting to this point. And here are the folks who made it all possible: Alan McClellan, Barbara McKercher, Bill Minto, Bob Hendrich, Chuck Brunson, Craig Vosburgh, Dave Resch, Dorothy Vernon, Jim Engquist, Jason Haugland, James Urquhart, Jo Pelkey, Jon Nordby, Ken Oestreich, Kevin Werner, Kirk Fjeldheim, Linda Finnegan, Lynn Still, Mark Emeis, Martha Dumler, MaryAnn Zhang, Melinda Sorber, Spencer Smith and Sudhrity Mondal. I hope everyone's taking the weekend off!

From Capitol Hill to Sand Hill (Road)

2007-11-14T09:54:00.000-08:00

The latest Silicon Valley development revolves around our newest Venture Capitalist-- Vice President Al Gore. Earlier this week, Kleiner Perkins announced that Al Gore has joined the VC firm as their newest partner. Gore will focus on new clean-technology investments, continuing Kleiner's new investments in green technology.

I guess you could see this coming. When Gore accepted his Nobel Peace Prize, he accepted in downtown Palo Alto. As a Palo Alto resident, I remember the crowds lining up to see the Vice President. School was out that day (for other reasons), and many students even ventured downtown to see Mr. Green.

Managing VM's Is No Easy Task

2007-11-11T16:07:00.000-08:00

A recent cover story in Network World magazine talks about the difficulty in managing virtualized environments. Virtualization is everywhere-- especially in dev/test environments. VM's are easy to create and setup, but that rapid proliferation of VM's introduces new challenges in managing these virtualized environments.

Now, don't get me wrong. I like VM's. They're cool, and the learning curve is not steep. If you can set up a development environment on a physical server, there's almost nothing else you need to do with a VM. However, what happens when you have 100's or 1000's of VM's running around?

According to Network World, there are several things to watch for:

Consistency and standardization (patch-levels on your apps and O/S) become a bigger issue when managing VM's alongside physical machines.
Since VM's are easy to deploy (just create 'em as you need 'em), there is a tendency to have too many VM's. Controlling virtual server sprawl requires the same processes and auditing that would be used to control deployments of physical servers.
The standard management tools that ship with VmWare or Xen are not sufficient to manage large-scale VM deployments.
The problems of the managing physical servers don't disappear in the virtual world-- they multiply and become obscured by the intangible boundaries between systems.

It was a long article, but a very interesting read. You should check it out for yourself.

If you've been following my blog, you'll know that I've posted often about creating VM environments. Back in January, I wrote about provisioning 400 VM's in an afternoon with Collage and XVM. Our new product line, Cassatt Active Response, integrates the Collage and XVM products.

Cassatt Active Response Premium Edition provides the ability to create and manage VM environments from VmWare and Xen. Active Response will provision the hypervisor, create the VM's and then deploy applications to those VM's. With Linux applications, you can create a heterogeneous environment with applications deployed to VM's and physical machines. You can also migrate a Linux app running on a VM to a physical machine, in case you realize that you need the additional horsepower from a dedicated, physical server.

Cassatt Active Response allows you to manage physical machines and virtual machines, by integrating the features of the former XVM product. We've also reduced the price point with Premium Edition. Check it out for yourself, and get those VM's under control!

Say Hello to My Little Friend, Cassatt Active Response

2007-11-05T05:22:00.000-08:00

My recent blog entries have all focused on power management and some of the inefficiencies in today's engineering labs and departmental server rooms. During the past few weeks, I've been talking with customers, and a recurring theme has been the desire to get control of the power and cooling costs.

One customer in Arizona has maxed out their data center, and they're not allowed to pull any more power into their facility. Even though electricity is inexpensive in Arizona, this customer has a power problem. They would like to reduce electrical consumption by 20% so that they can deploy new applications. However, they're not in a position to change out their servers or their infrastructure. They just want an easy way to power down one set of servers (and applications) so they can deploy another set of new applications (and their corresponding servers). Many of these servers are needed for cyclical applications, such as batch and ERP, that need more capacity at the end of the month. So managing which servers are powered on/off can allow this customer to deploy new applications without building a new data center.

In Silicon Valley, a large product-development company has hundreds of engineering labs and departmental server rooms. These labs are teaming with the devices they need to develop and test their product. These labs are used primarily for weekly builds and occasional patches for customer escalations. And after you count all the devices in these "little labs," the grand total is more than 200,000 devices. Now that's a large electric bill!

Cassatt's new product line, Cassatt Active Response, provides some solutions that are easy to implement in these engineering environments. The new product line consists of four product editions packaged for different audiences.

Standard Edition provides energy efficiency by allowing you to manage power consumption and set policies in your environment.
Premium Edition provides increased energy efficiency and application resiliency by allowing you to pool resources and manage application workloads.
Data Center Edition provides increased energy efficiency, high application availability,
and server workload management in production environments.
Enterprise Edition will allow you to manage all data center resources across your enterprise.

Premium Edition and Data Center Edition map to the previous Collage & XVM products. (details). Both of these editions are available today. Enterprise Edition is a new product that we are still developing, and it will be available in late 2008.

Standard Edition is a new product that is combines new technologies, such as Active Power Management, with Collage technologies, such as policy management and a rules engine. Standard Edition introduces a new policy manager that allows different teams to set up power-management policies for the servers that they use. Standard Edition is easy to deploy in engineering environments, since you don't need to change the applications or O/S on the servers that will be power-managed. And you can see immediate savings. To calculate the savings in your environment, check out the ROI calculator.

And yes, we fly our own airplane within Cassatt. (I prefer that to "eating your own dog food.") We have three engineering labs with close to 500 servers. The servers in these labs are all managed with Cassatt Active Response. Servers are powered on only when they're part of a dev/test cycle. And our instantaneous power consumption is well below our rated capacity in each lab.

Should You Plant a Tree for Every Server in Your Lab?

2007-10-12T06:21:00.000-07:00

Last week, I had traveled to Colorado Springs to spend some time with my team. There were several things I noticed during my visit. The clean, Colorado air was far less polluted than familiar Silicon Valley. There were no brown "smog rings" around Pike's Peak, unlike those I see around Mt. Hamilton from my office window. I heard from Spen that the local electric utility is planning to roll-out a demand-curtailment program, even though electricity is pretty cheap in Colorado. (By the way, that's my Colorado team in the picture. We're in Garden of the Gods, and that's Pike's Peak in the background.)

In Silicon Valley, the local utility, Pacific Gas & Electric, has several demand-curtailment programs to help combat the excess demand on the electric grid during warm summer months. If your data center participates in this program, PG&E will (1) provide lower rates for electricity during peak periods (2) provide rebates and (3) most importantly guarantee that your data center will remain operational (i.e., no brown-outs). In September, Cassatt had announced the Active Power Management technology. Watch this space for some exciting product announcements in the very near future.

This morning, I was reading a recent interview with Gartner's Rakesh Kumar. Some interesting highlights:

Data centers account for 25% of global carbon emissions from IT and communications technology.
40% of the emissions are from PC's and monitors.
The data-center emissions are rising more rapidly than other sources.
Gartner released a research advisory Monday in which "Green IT" tops their list of industry issues.

In the past few weeks, I've been talking with several customers in Silicon Valley, and they all have expressed similar concerns. One company has three engineering sites in Silicon Valley, Massachusetts and India. All three are located in geographies with expensive electricity, but that's also where they get engineering talent. Their engineering labs are spending $1 million / year in electricity. We're talking with them about Active Power Management and how we can provide some quick savings by powering off unneeded servers and networking devices according to schedule-based policies. Customers are very receptive, since several are planning to roll-out new conservation programs in the coming months.

So there are some easy ways to manage the electric bill in your organization by starting with the development and test environments you have. You don't need to buy carbon offsets or plant a tree. You can address the source of the problem with a low-cost solution that's also simple-to-implement.

Yes, It's Still Safe to Power Off and Power On That Server

2007-09-03T21:15:00.000-07:00

After my previous post on the reliability of power supplies, I decided to see what our Cassatt experiences can tell us about server reliability. Within my department, I have engineering labs located in three locations-- Colorado Springs, Minneapolis and San Jose-- and about 500 servers in total.

Mukund and I decided to look at the data from 123 servers located in San Jose. These servers are used by Mukund's team for System Test activities. His team has developed over 700 automated tests that are used to qualify our Cassatt product suite. As part of the test run, servers are routinely power-cycled. We physically pull power from the servers at the start of each test run. All the nodes are on managed Power Distribution Units (APC's and Baytechs), and the automated tests power down the outlets from the PDU before running the tests. This has been in place since 2004.

For the 123 servers that were analyzed, not a single power-supply or disk drive failed during the past two years.

Here are the server counts in the study:

26 IBM HS-20 blades
8 HP DL380 G4
45 HP DL360 G4
8 HP DL360 G3
6 HP DL140
3 HP DL385
5 Sun SPARC
1 IBM x345
15 Dell 1850
6 Dell 2650

During the past 5 months, the power supplies on these 23 servers were power-cycled 18,826 times. That's an average of once per day per server. As part of the system testing, these servers were power-cycled repeatedly by using their power controller. The power operations from the power controller generate stress on the server's internal comments, such as the motherboard and disk drives, but the power supply remains connected to A/C power. These power operations from the power controller are not counted in the 18,826 figure cited earlier.

In a future posting, Mukund and I will provide more details on these additional power operations. We will also provide data from the servers in our other engineering labs.

So if you're still afraid to power down that server, don't worry! Power supplies and hard drives are very reliable these days. From several different studies, we've seen that power supplies hold up quite well from (and are even designed for) power cycling.

Don't Worry, It's Safe to Power off that Server and Power It on Again

2007-08-28T09:16:00.000-07:00

There's lot of superstition out there regarding data center best practices, and there is some amount of voodoo when it comes to powering down servers. Will the server come up when you power it on? Will the power supply fail?

This morning, I spoke with Mukesh Khattar who has studied the failure rates for the 30,000 servers in his data center. During the past three years, only 1 power supply failed. That's a failure rate of 0.001% / year. (Yeah, that's five-nines, baby!)

Mukesh is also looking at reliability rates for servers with dual power supplies and single power supplies. A power supply is designed to run at 80%-90% load, which is the case in a server with a single power supply. When you have dual power supplies in a server, each supply only runs at 40%-50% load. Since these power supplies are running below their optimum load level, they consequently generate more heat.

In our conversation, I started thinking about what you're spending for that additional reliability. With a Dell 2950, that second power supply costs $299. For 1000 servers, you've just spent $299k for those second power supplies. I'm not even counting the additional operating expense for the eletricity and cooling costs. During the 3-year depreciation for those servers, only 0.06 power supplies will fail. That's right, not even 1 sever out of that 1000 is expected to fail in 3 years due to a power-supply failure.

So, a few take-aways:

Don't over-provision your server hardware for failures that are extremely unlikely. You're going to drive up your capital expenses and your operating expense for a failure that's unlikely to ever occur.
Power off those unused servers. When you power them back on, they will come back on. Throw away your garlic cloves and salt shakers. It will be okay. Look at the data, it will set you free.
Take a different approach to high availability. Instead of trying to bullet-proof your hardware to prevent a failure, think about a graceful way to recover from a hardware failure.

What's Your Carbon Footprint?

2007-08-27T16:55:00.000-07:00

Today's Mercury News had a great (and simple) worksheet that allows you to measure how you are personally contributing to global warming. There are a total of 5 inputs:

miles driven per year
gas mileage of your vehicle
average electric usage per month (in KWh)
average natural gas usage per month (in therms)
miles flown each year

I used the worksheet and calculated my family's carbon footprint and came up with the following. My family's carbon footprint is 50,156 lbs of CO2 per year-- or 12,539 lbs of CO2/year per person.

The averages provided by the Mercury News are:

Bay Area: 25,102 lbs of CO2/year
California: 26,301
Nationwide: 35,967

I don't know if comparing my family's per-individual amortization to the averages provided is fair. However, I included both cars and the family vacations instead of just my personal transportation and travels. Hmm, I wonder if I should purchase CO2 offset credits? (And I'm actually serious) One thing that I have done at home is to replace all my incandescent light bulbs with Compact Fluorescent Lights (CFL's).

Anyway, take a look at the Mercury News and their nifty calculator for yourself.

What Did Your Organization Do This Summer?

2007-08-23T16:28:00.001-07:00

With the dog days of summer winding down, most kids will be starting (or have already started) the new school year. As part of the traditional back-to-school ritual, there's always a "what did you do during summer vacation?" session during the first week of class. Kids get to brag about all the new and cool things they did during the past several weeks. One of my son's classmates is the son of a famous CEO, and this kid always has the best stories for the summer. My son and I play golf at the local muni, whereas my son's friend plays Sharon Heights, Stanford and Pebble. (sigh)

I was attending a vendor's seminar the other day, and the speaker was asking the audience of IT personnel about new initiatives at their companies. There's lots of press out there about new trends in the industry: virtualization, server consolidation, power management, data center management...

With summer coming to a close, take a moment to reflect back on what your organization did this summer? What initiatives do you have in your organization? How are you advancing your data-center management practices? What are you doing to help top-line revenue growth or improve operating expenses? Are there simple things you can address in short order? (The famous CEO I alluded to earlier has a favorite expression: "low-hanging watermelon.")

Maybe you've already got one or two initiatives in place that are staffed and budgeted. Great! And if not, maybe it's a good time to go after some low-hanging watermelon...

Back to Virtual Reality

2007-08-23T16:14:00.000-07:00

After a 1-week vacation in Houston, I'm back to Silicon Valley. I was briefly back in the Central time zone last week during my 3-day visit to our Minneapolis office. Earlier today, I had lunch with a former colleague from Sun Microsystems, and we were catching up on old times. Arun is now a technology evangelist in the Java group at Sun, and we were chatting about various Web 2.0 development technologies and the growth of these new communities. We eventually got around to talking blogs and comparing blog statistics. (Hey, if you blog, you know you track your blog statistics, even if you don't admit it.) Anyway, Arun's daily blog traffic is 10x my monthly blog traffic, which is pretty impressive. If you're a hardcore developer, you should check out his blog. My hats off to you, Arun!

Welcome to the Boomtown

2007-08-05T20:55:00.000-07:00

This week, I'm literally and figuratively thousands of miles away from Silicon Valley. I'm visiting my parents in Houston, Texas, which is also my old hometown (at least from sixth grade onwards). Houston has been-- and still is-- the oil capital of the world. They even say oil differently in Houston. It's pronounced ahwl-- and there's plenty of it here. Gas is much cheaper (by almost $0.90/gallon) than in the San Francisco Bay Area. Even my kids noticed the difference at the pump! And I haven't seen a single Prius in two days. I bet Toyota's best-selling car in Texas is their Tundra Crew Cab. In Texas, the Prius might do as a golf cart, but not as your vehicle for getting around town. After all, it was already 80 degrees at the crack of dawn, and it warmed up to a balmy 94 degrees by noon. I wonder how long the air conditioner in a Prius runs from the battery? So, no surprise that the Bay Area's best-selling car is practically a no-show in Houston.

Although I'm the canonical Silicon Valley geek who lives on the leading edge of technology, my parents tend to be a little more towards the center of the bell curve when it comes to technology adoption. (Well, actually, they're somewhere in the trailing edge of the bell curve, but they do read my blog.) Earlier this year, they converted to broadband (DSL) from a dial-up Internet connection. My Dad even set up the DSL modem himself! They also have an HDTV and Dish network (satellite). And my Dad doesn't subscribe to a print newspaper. He gets his news from a variety of news sources on the Internet. This is pretty cool! This was a nice data point reaffirming my own beliefs in broadband, the Web and how technology is transforming everyday lives. Now, I just need to see when my Dad starts blogging...

Appliances in the Data Center

2007-08-01T21:48:00.000-07:00

Recently, Google has been generating some new buzz with its search appliances. Google offers a shrink-wrapped version of its search engine in two different packages-- a 1-U rack-mounted server or a 2-U rack-mounted server. The Google Mini starts at $1,995 for a 50,000-document version and scales up to $8,995 for a version that searches up to 300,000 documents. Once you cross above the 300,000 document limit of the Mini, you step up to the pricier Google Search Appliance, which starts at $30k.

The appliances are manufactured by Dell and are distributed by Ingram. Dell touts the multi-colored Google appliance in its print ads and on its website. From the look of Google's appliance, I'm guessing it's a Dell 1950 under the hood of the mini and a Dell 2950 under the hood of the larger version. Dell's new 1900 series are much better than the their 1800 series. We have four generations of Dell hardware in our lab. From our experience, the 1800 series had some quality and reliability issues not found in their previous generations. From our recent experiences, Dell appears to have corrected these problems with their latest generation of servers.

By controlling the hardware environment, installation is greatly simplified, and the application's performance and reliability becomes more predictable. It will be interesting to see how the Google appliance fares.

Rob's Most Excellent Tape

2007-07-29T08:07:00.000-07:00

In 2006, we were discussing ways to distribute small software add-ons that complement our current products. Rob Gingell, our CTO, talked about the "utility tape" that accompanied Solaris and other UNIX operating systems. The top utility was never part of the operating system by default, but it was found on "the tape." However, everyone used top, and top eventually found its way into the standard operating system distro.

So, the RMET, or Rob's Most Excellent Tape, was born! Now, we don't actually use a tape to distribute it, but the name was kinda catchy. (And I think Rob liked it.)

One of the first things that found its way to the tape was the Scripting SDK (SSDK). We needed a way to extend Collage functionality with small scripts written in a UNIX shell or Windows batch program. So, one day Mukund wrote the SSDK. It hid the complexities of the Collage Web Services interface and exposed a small and simple set of commands. The SSDK is now a standard product offering and even has its own documentation on InfoCentral.

The Java dashboard is another item that is found its way into the SSDK. Last year, we were giving a demonstration to the executive staff of a large company, and we decided that we needed a high-level dashboard rather than the detailed web UI. So, Mukund developed a Java Swing app that used the Collage Web Services interface to expose a high-level dashboard that showed how servers were allocated to different application tiers. His dashboard also showed servers powering up and down. Recently, the Java dashboard found a new audience with our Sales Engineers, and its now installed in a partner's executive briefing center in New York.

And a few months ago, Jason became a new contributor to the RMET. He developed a Reporting application that extracts data from the Collage database into an external data warehouse. Jason then used Active Grid to develop a reporting application that allows you to track server usage by cost centers. The reporting tool allows you to track depreciation and operating costs (e.g., electricity) by the cost centers you define. Since Collage allows you to allocate servers to applications on a dynamic basis, you can adjust the capacity allocated to each application. So, now you can have a centrally managed IT pool and charge back to different groups for their actual usage.

The RMET provides a convenient way to introduce these add-on functionalities. And one day some of these add-ons might find their way into the standard product suite-- just like the top you know and love!

Introducing My New Blog

2007-07-08T10:32:00.000-07:00

With this blog, I've focused primarily on technology topics, with a particular emphasis on data-center issues. Well, I continue to keep this same focus in this blog. However, I've started a new blog that will focus on one of my hobbies. Most of my colleagues and friends know about my interest in the game of golf. (Okay, it's probably more than just an interest.) Well, along the way, I've managed to teach both of my kids the game, and my 8-year old is my regular playing partner.

My new blog, "Golf with Your Kids," will be a collection of experiences, resources and tips for enjoying the game of golf with your kids. Take a look at my introductory posting. And if you're a golfer, please check back on a regular basis. Fore!

What's in Your Head (of Tree)?

2007-07-03T22:37:00.000-07:00

Head of Tree. Tip of Tree. It's your source code repository, where you check in your latest and greatest source code. Could you ship it to a customer at a moment's notice? Actually, would you ship it to a customer? I understand your hesitation. The latest code still needs to be tested. You have to shake out the bugs, and then beat the release into shape. And then after a stabilization period, you're ready to release-- probably weeks to months later, right?

At Cassatt, we switched to a new development process in PD at the start of the year. Head of Tree, or HoT as we affectionately call it, is always shippable. Asynchronous projects are used as the vehicle for developing new functionality or fixing bugs. Each project has a well-defined scope and is completely self-contained for completeness. When a project is launched, its completion criteria-- the required functionality, expected quality criteria, associated application payloads and documentation-- are all defined up-front. Only when the project meets all of its completion criteria, can it integrate to head of tree.

In this new model, a project can not integrate if it introduces new bugs or regressions. So, all projects must integrate with zero bugs. So as new functionality is introduced, the overall quality level of the head of tree is maintained. Since many projects introduce new automated tests in addition to new functionality, the overall quality of head of tree can increase over time.

Transitioning to this new process was a significant cultural change for the Product Development organization-- and it wasn't easy. Starting in the last quarter of 2006, the PD management team defined the new process and worked through the details. We flattened the organization and centralized decision-making to one Product Team. And there were many small bumps and hiccups along the way. At times, we were still working "the old way" in the new model, and we had to make a conscious effort to change. At times it felt like we were working more slowly in the new model, but we found that there were fewer missteps and almost no "steps backward" to move forward. And by slowing down, we took the time to review architectural changes to the system and understand their impacts. With each new project, we got better and more efficient at defining requirements, planning, developing and testing. Along the way, we developed new metrics and reporting tools to monitor the projects and the head of tree.

It's now been six months since we transitioned to the new model, and we have seen several tangible benefits.

New functionality can be developed and released to customers quickly. There is no need to "wait for the rest of the release" to complete.
Projects can be sized accordingly to complexity and/or effort involved. A "large" project can complete in 3-4 months, and a "small" projects can complete in 1-2 months. Simple bug fixes can be handled in a lightweight manner, requiring only a few days.
Requirements are defined and understood before starting development. We have even decided to not proceed with some projects because the scope was not appropriate or the ROI was not sufficient.
Development has become more predictable. We maintain an integration schedule for the next several months and let our Field know when to expect new functionality. The upcoming integration schedule is reviewed weekly with Sales and Professional Services.

In a future posting, I'll provide more details about the process and also talk about some of the metrics we use to monitor progress. Until then, have a happy Fourth of July, and stay safe!

To DHCP, or not to DHCP: That is the Question.

2007-06-11T13:42:00.000-07:00

My apologies in advance (or belated in this case) to William Shakespeare. This morning, I met with a customer and had a rather in-depth whiteboard session with two of their senior architects. We were discussing how to use Collage in a production deployment. I usually start with our standard technical presentation (gotta love PowerPoint), but I quickly find myself drawn to the whiteboard (or "grease board" as one of our Sales reps is fond of saying).

All technical environments (with IT as no exception) have their own systems of best practices, dogmas and religious beliefs. DHCP versus fixed IP addressing for servers falls somewhere in between dogma and religion. However, as you start moving towards utility computing, your data center can take on a more dynamic persona. For example, applications (and servers) could be provisioned as they are needed to respond to increasing workloads. Servers can also be re-purposed during the day, as your data center takes on different application profiles. A given server could be an e-mail server in the morning, a web server in the afternoon and a business intelligence server at night.

Cassatt Collage allows you to manage more static, traditional data centers and also allows you to manage a more dynamic, utility-computing environment. In order to repurpose a server, Collage takes advantage of DHCP. A server's IP address is assigned by Collage's DHCP service. However, Collage allows you to control precisely what IP addresses are allocated to your applications.

Let's take the following example of a typical three-tier application:

Web tier: up to 20 servers with IP addresses 10.20.120.40 - 10.20.120.59
App server tier: up to 10 servers with IP addresses 10.20.120.60 - 10.20.120.69
Database tier: up to 5 servers with IP addresses 10.20.120.70 - 120.20.120.74

When you create these tiers in Collage, you can specify the IP addresses available to each tier. In this manner, you have precise control over your IP address space and how different applications map to your network topology. The Collage Network Virtualization Service (NVS) also allows you to specify a VLAN or network segment for each application tier.

When servers are allocated to an application tier at run time, each server is given an IP address by the Collage DHCP service. Even though these servers take advantage of dynamic IP addressing, their IP address can be constrained ahead of time. If you are taking advantage of NVS, Collage will can create a new VLAN for you and will automatically program the layer-2 switches in your data center. This allows you precise control of how servers are mapped into your environment. A particular server's application stack and network identification, however, are determined dynamically when that server is allocated to an application tier.

Some Fun in the Sun

2007-06-03T15:50:00.001-07:00

Despite scattered thunderstorms (or more appropriately, scattered sunshine) during my three-day visit to Minneapolis, I did manage to get some sunshine during my visit. I was pleasantly surprised to find a brand new Toyota Solara convertible waiting for me at the Hertz gold canopy. I had reserved an intermediate car, but there was a shiny, red Solara (with only 7 miles on the odometer) waiting for me.

On Thursday evening, Martha, Linda, Jason, Luis and I hopped into the Solara and ventured to Babalu, a new dining hot spot in downtown Minneapolis. The food was great, and the drive was great too. We managed to avoid downpours, and the weather was a pleasant 70 degrees. On the way back, we took the scenic route through St. Paul and checked out the Cathedral of St. Paul. The cathedral marked its 100th anniversary this weekend, and there was a historic lighting of the exterior during my visit. A local doctor arranged for a lighting company to light the exterior for two days, and he footed the bill for this event. Pretty neat!

After winding our way along the Mississippi River, we finally arrived back at the Cassatt office in Mendota Heights. It was a nice evening-- with good company, good food and a nice drive in the cool evening air.

It's 11:30 PM. Do You Know What Your Servers Are Doing?

2007-05-31T21:29:00.000-07:00

My guess is that your servers are still powered on, but probably not doing anything. I'm writing this post from my hotel room, after a nice dinner in downtown Minneapolis with my engineering team. After a relaxing, long weekend, I hopped a short flight up to the land of 10,000 lakes to spend some time with my engineering team in our Cassatt office in Mendota Heights, Minnesota.

Earlier in the afternoon, Jason showed me his latest updates to the Collage Reporting application. The Collage Reporting application collects statistics on how your managed servers and services are used and builds a data warehouse with this information. The Reporting application provides metering capabilities by delivering reports that detail:

Which resources (e.g., servers) are allocated to different applications or departments.
Utilization of these resources in CPU-hours.

These reports allow your IT department to charge the different lines of business for their actual usage of data center resources. Jason and I talked about some enhancements. What if you could enter the depreciation and operating cost (i.e., power and HVAC) of each server? Now, you get an actual operating cost for your business applications!

I'll provide more details (and a screen shot) in a future post. It's almost midnight in Central Time, and I think I'm going to call it a night...

A Whale of a Weekend

2007-05-28T10:49:00.000-07:00

Unless you've been living under a rock for the past three weeks, you've probably heard of Delta and Dawn-- the mother and daughter humpback whale who have been swimming in the Sacramento River. On Saturday, I decided to go see the whales for myself. So, the wife, kids and I piled into the car and let the trusty navigation system guide us to Rio Vista, home of the Rio Vista Bridge that you've been seeing on TV. The 90 mile drive from Palo Alto to Rio Vista was quite scenic. However, once you passed the furthest edge of the Bay Area, the scenery and towns started to look more like east Texas than California-- flat plains, small towns, old pick-up trucks and two-lane roads.

We finally ended up at Rio Vista and found a small landing at the base of the bridge, where an NBC-11 news van had been parked since morning. There was also a small crowd of 40 people, trying to catch a glimpse of the whales. As it turns out, we had missed the whales. They had swum north past the bridge in the morning. So we headed north along the west bank of the river to the ferry crossing and joined a small gathering of 50 or so families, all trying to catch a glimpse of the whales. It was a warm, sunny day and the perfect weather for a whale sighting. The local Cal Trans employee informed us that the whales were 30 miles north, close to Sacramento.

Once again, we headed north along the river, towards Sacramento. At times, the river got quite narrow, and we wondered how these whales ever got this far inland. After 20 miles or so, we gave up our on our whale-watching quest, and we decided to head back home to Bay Area.

Today's news, however, was quite encouraging. The whales have turned south, crossed under the Rio Vista bridge, and are headed towards the open Ocean. Hurray for Delta and Dawn!

SaaS Making Inroads in the Consumer Space

2007-05-19T13:43:00.000-07:00

Software as a Service (SaaS) is the latest trend in the software development industry. Everyone wants to deliver their software as a hosted service that you rent rather than purchase and install on your own servers. The high-flying Salesforce.com is the poster-child of SaaS. Even SAP is wrapping itself in SaaS clothing these days. (See my previous posts).

There are some interesting trends taking place in the consumer space. This year, tax season has been rather good to Intuit, despite a few hiccups in last-minute online filings. Intuit just released their quarterly earnings, and they had their first $1 billion quarter-- $1.15 billion to be exact. GAAP net income came in at $367 million, which is not too shabby. (Details)

Apart from the nice revenue, there are some interesting trends in Intuit's Turbo Tax unit sales for this tax year:

Intuit sold 6,942,000 copies of its shrink-wrapped Turbo Tax software that you install on your desktop. This was a 2% drop from last year's sales of shrink-wrapped Turbo Tax.
Unit sales of Turbo Tax for the web increased by 16% to 6,042,000.
Another 1,422,000 users filed for free with Turbo Tax for the web, a 3% increase over last year's numbers.
Altogether, more people (51.8%) filed with the hosted (web-based) version of Turbo Tax rather than the version installed on your desktop.

For years, most people have been using a hosted e-mail provider (e.g., Yahoo, Google or Hotmail) for their personal e-mail. The latest sales figures from Turbo Tax show that consumers are comfortable with using hosted applications for their financial data. It will be interesting to see how Google does with its Google documents-- a suite of hosted office applications.

City Hall Is Going Green

2007-05-18T10:47:00.001-07:00

Sixteen cities around the world will receive financing from major banks to make their government buildings more energy efficient. Citi, Deutsche Bank, JP Morgan Chase, UBS and ABN Amro have each committed $1 billion to finance upgrades in lighting, cooling, heating, rooting and other environmental improvements. This initiative was announced Wednesday at the C40 Large Cities Climate Summit in New York. Houston, New York, Chicago and London are among the cities participating.

What's interesting is how these cities will pay for the improvements. The banks are providing loans to finance the improvements. The city governments believe that the energy savings will exceed the financing costs. In other words, the energy improvements will pay for themselves, which is pretty cool. (Pun sort-of intended)

Check out all the details in the article in Wired magazine.

Hasso Plattner Speaks about SAP's A1S Software

2007-05-15T18:37:00.000-07:00

To continue a theme from my recent posting, I found some more details about SAP's A1S product from a recent article in Sand Hill. You've probably seen the SAP TV commercial commercials-- the yellow ones with customers who are pleasantly surprised to learn about SAP's offerings in the small-to-medium-sized business (SMB) customers. SAP's A1S product, which has been under development for the past 3 years, aims to deliver solutions for the SMB space.

Some additional insight into their product:

3,000 SAP employees are working on A1S.
A1S is a split from their previous source base and delivers a new user interface. (I've worked with the current SAP client, which is a locally installed, fat client.) The new user interface (UI) is web-based and makes extensive use of Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA).
In a departure from their rigid past, the new UI can be customized to the different industry verticals.
A1S will emphasize a hosted deployment model. In fact, Hasso references successes from Google and Salesforce.com with a hosted deployment model. Customers wary of a hosted model will still be able to install the software on their on-site servers.

SAP Talks about Its New A1S Software

2007-05-09T12:31:00.000-07:00

Today's Mercury News has a very timely article about SAP's A1S Software. Hasso Plattner, their chairman, talked about A1S at the Software 2007 conference that's taking place this week in Santa Clara, just a few miles from our Cassatt headquarters.

Some highlights on A1S:

A1S will be a hosted, web-based offering of SAP's famous (or infamous depending on your point-of-view) ERP software
A1S has been under development for the past 3 years and is expected to release in 2008.
Hasso touts the "Software as a Service" (SaaS) model and how A1S will be SAP's foray into this space.
A1S was announced and discussed last month at SAP's Sapphire conference for its key customer and partners.

Very interesting article. Take a read for yourself.

Dispelling Myths in the Data Center

2007-05-04T12:20:00.000-07:00

To manage a data center, you need security policies, operating procedures, best practices and run books. Unfortunately, there's also a collection of myths and superstitions that tend to accumulate over time. One of these concerns the impact of powering a server up/down on that server's failure rate. It's time to dispell that myth.

The reality: servers and their internal components are designed to be resilient to power operations. Powering servers on and off does not increase their failure rate. Most server hardware released in the past 4 years has been designed for power operations. Servers from HP, Dell, IBM and Sun all ship with power controllers that allow you to power them on/off remotely. All the internal components are designed wtih power management in mind: solid-state power supplies, small-diameter hard drives that can spin up/down very quickly, efficient use of VLSI and custom ASIC's, redundant on-board network interface cards.

Think about your own laptop. Do you power it off or suspend it at night when you're not using it? Do you have power-management enabled on your laptop so the hard drive spins down after a period of inactivity?

Guess what, servers are also designed to be powered off when they're not needed and powered on only when you need them. It's just that most data center applications are not designed with power management in mind. Data centers are provisioned for peak load, whereas the average load is significantly lower.

What if you could power on servers only as they are needed to respond to increasing load? Cassatt has power management solutions for your data center where we can provide that missing power-management capability. These same power management solutions also allow to you to reduce power consumption based on time of day or demand-reduction events from your power company.

We Believe!

2007-05-04T08:21:00.000-07:00

I realize this is a bit off topic from my normal postings, but last night's Warriors game was just amazing! The Golden State Warriors trounced the Dallas Mavericks 111-86! The Warriors took over in the third quarter, and the game was never close after that. It was a great game to watch, that is if you're from the Bay Area. So, the eighth-seeded Warriors close out the series 4-2 and advance to the second round. For more details on the game, check out the Mercury News.

Insights from Bill Janeway at Warburg Pincus

2007-04-30T13:04:00.000-07:00

Here's an interesting article in Sandhill.com from Bill Janeway at Warburg Pincus. Bill is one of our board members at Cassatt, and he previously led the investment in BEA Systems. The article gives you a 40-year perspective on the Venture Capital community and how it's changed over the years.

Some interesting points on what it takes these days to put together a start-up that is seeking venture capital:

Begin with a first-class, seasoned management team
Find a market undergoing demand growth where some form of disruption is creating a space for a new business
Buy the components of the business – technology, distribution, customer base - that you can; only build what you have to (which usually does include building innovative technology)

Bill also talks about what's required these days to IPO. For those of us at Cassatt, we've heard these same principles from our CEO, Bill Coleman, in various town halls. The article makes for an interesting read. Take a look for yourself.

Do You Fly Your Own Airplane?

2007-04-29T10:39:00.001-07:00

One of the best tests for a software product is using it for your own needs-- in other words, flying your own airplane. By using your product in an internal production environment, you can shake out bugs and reliability issues and make a better product for your paying customers. Running in a real environment helps you find issues that wouldn't turn up in test scenarios.

In Cassatt, we started using Collage to run our IT systems and development build systems in early 2005. We have three development sites, and the IT systems in each site are run on Collage. A common set of application images are developed in San Jose and pushed out to the other sites, which have no local IT staff.

Product builds, however, are the at core of a development organization. If you can't check-in code and build your product, everything comes to a screeching halt. In Product Development, we use Cruise Control (builds), Bit Keeper (source-code management) and Bugzilla (defect tracking). All three applications are managed in a Collage environment. Spencer Smith, one of our developers in Colorado, wears a second hat-- release engineer or buildmeister.

In 2007, we changed our development process in PD so that we now have about a dozen projects proceeding in parallel. Each project requires its own repository and build. The build system was revamped to include a web application that allows project leads to configure new projects and to set up their own build schedules.

This new Unified Build Service (UBS) is a LAMP application that simply runs as an application tier within a Collage environment. This same Collage environment includes other application tiers for the builder nodes, which are part of the CruiseControl system. CruiseControl also runs as another application within this Collage environment. Spen just finished UBS last week, and now all project builds have transitioned to UBS. So, Collage is built using Collage. Pretty neat, huh?

Out of Capacity on Tax Day

2007-04-18T14:07:00.000-07:00

Like many tax payers, I waited until the last weekend to finish my taxes, but I filed one day early, on April 16. I used Intuit's Turbo Tax, but I still filed the old-fashioned way-- by mail. As it turns out, many procrastinators filing electronically on April 17 were in for a nasty surprise. Intuit ran out of server capacity, and many people's returns could not be processed in time. Luckily, the IRS extended the deadline to April 19 for folks who had trouble filing electronically. Read the details in today's Mercury News.

Some highlights:

Intuit processed more than 1 million transactions on April 17. This was double the number of electronic filings from the previous year.
Once the system reached capacity, many filers were simply turned away.

I bet Intuit had other servers sitting idle, dedicated to other applications while their tax-processing servers were maxed out. Unfortunately, there was no way to tap into that excess capacity. These types of workload spikes happen in many industries, and sometimes the traffic patterns are very predictable-- news properties during the week, music and sports properties during the weekend.

What if you could shift capacity around your data center as the demand is needed? What if you could tap into those lower-priority applications and harvest the capacity to higher-priority applications? How much would that be worth to your business' top-line revenue?

How to Optimize Power Consumption of Your Data Center

2007-04-11T16:49:00.000-07:00

There's a lot of talk these days about "green data centers" and reducing power consumption. Cassatt Collage has several features that can be used to optimize the power consumption of your data center.

Collage dynamically allocates servers to applications as they are needed. So, if you have a farm of web servers, you can allocate capacity as demand increases rather than provisioning all the servers at once. Servers that are unused remain in a free pool, and Collage powers them off. (Check out an older post for more details.)

Collage includes a pretty powerful rules engine, sometimes called the brain, and sometimes called Jerry's brain (named after its inventor). The rules engine allocates servers using a least-cost algorithm so that servers are optimally allocated based on application needs. For example, you might have a database tier that need dual-CPU, 4 GB servers, and an Apache tier that can use any old server. Collage will allocate your heavy-duty servers to the database tier and the lightweight servers to the Apache tier.

Using the Collage rules engine and power management technologies, you can have servers allocated based on their power consumption. For example, virtual machines could be allocated first-- since they don't require additional power-- followed by 1-U servers, then 2-U servers and then finally those power-hungry 4-U servers. For each class of server, you simply add additional attributes to the hardware inventory maintained by Collage. Add one attribute for your 1-U servers, two attributes for your 2-U servers and four attributes for your 4-U servers.

When servers are allocated to an application tier, Collage will automatically allocate the most power-efficient server that is available. And when that application no longer requires the same service capacity, extra servers are automatically returned to the free pool and powered off. Voila! Your data center now optimizes its own power consumption based on application needs. Pretty cool, huh?

Interesting Silicon Valley News

2007-04-08T10:28:00.000-07:00

Today's Mercury News has two interesting articles about the tech rebound that has been occurring in Silicon Valley. The headline, "The Tech Rebound," talks about the rebound of the economy in Silicon Valley after the painful dot-com bust. Some interesting stats for the % change from 2005 to 2006:

Household income is up 6.2%, compared to a nationwide average of 4.9%.
50,000 new jobs were created in the past two years-- not quite the 200,000 jobs lost in the dot-com crash. Employment is still up 2.9% (1.8% nationwide).
Home prices are up 4% (1.4% nationwide). The median home price in Santa Clara County rose to $749,000.
Auto sales are up 2.6%, whereas they're down 2.6% nationwide.

We locals use the traffic on the major freeways as a gut-check for the economy. The good news is that traffic has increased, which means the economy has definitely picked up!

Another article talks about Google's impending brain-drain as their earliest employees approach the fourth year of vesting for their pre-IPO stock. Now that's a nice problem to have as an employee!

Check out both articles in the Merc for an interesting read!

Avez-Vous Un Blog?

2007-04-06T18:04:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago, Alan McClellan had set up a Google analytics profile for my blog. (Thanks, Alan!) Recently, I hit a personal milestone with my blog. I now have readers from every continent, which is pretty cool. So, welcome to my new international audience. I'll try to keep this space current and informative. Maybe I'll be brave and try to set up automatic translation of my blog (traduction en francais). Yes, I did live in Paris for three years during an international assignment, and I did love the experience.

SAP Uses Second Life As Well

2007-03-30T09:36:00.000-07:00

The other night, while I was trying to find Cory's blog, I ran across an interesting blog from a guy at SAP. Turns out we were both at the same talk in Palo Alto. (See my previous post for more info). SAP is using Second Life for online training and demos. For details, read Mario's blog. Pretty neat.

Virtual Worlds Hosted in Data Centers

2007-03-28T22:42:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago, I went to a talk by Linden Labs CTO, Cory Ondrejka. His background leading up to Second Life is quite interesting. He started off developing simulators for the military, then moved to writing arcade games, and then finally ended up creating Second Life. Pretty interesting fellow, and a good speaker as well. For those of you not at the talk, here's an interesting article in Information Week about Second Life (SL).

SL runs on dual-cpu x86 servers with Linux and MySQL. A 16 acre "plot" in SL runs on a single core on one of these servers. A human (or company) in the real world can purchase a 16-acre plot for an initial cost of US$1900 and a monthly payment of US$300. SL is essentially a hosting company for virtual real estate and virtual goods that are traded in the real world. As an example, the SL city of Amsterdam sold for US$50,000 on eBay. (Check it out)

Here's some metrics on SL:

Bandwidth: 10 GB/second outbound
Storage: 40 TB of user data
Scalability: 100,000,000 SQL queries/day (using MySQL)

Cory also claims that SL is one of the largest (or the largest) deployment of MySQL. And SL is adding 1-2 racks of servers each week to keep up with demand. Now those are some pretty impressive stats.

Welcome, Connie Weiss!

2007-03-28T22:39:00.000-07:00

One of my friends, Connie Weiss, joined the blogosphere. Check out her blog for a welcome change of pace. Although I don't have the variety of pets that Connie does, I do have four parakeets at home!

Data Centers are Hot Again, Thanks to Web 2.0

2007-03-28T08:42:00.000-07:00

Yesterday's San Jose Mercury News describes how data centers are "hot again" due to traffic from the growing popularity of social networking Web sites, such as YouTube and Facebook. Demand for data centers is increasing, as companies such as Apple, Yahoo and Kaiser are purchasing or leasing new data centers to keep up with demand for their applications.

Some interesting excerpts from the article:

While prime office space in downtown San Jose costs about $2 a square foot per month, space in a data center rents from $15 to $30 a square foot per month.
In the past two years, one million square feet of space in Silicon Valley data centers was purchased or leased, more than all the space taken off the market from 2001 through 2004.

The article mentions Apple's 2006 purchase of a data center in Newark, California. I wonder if that's the location that serves my daughter's iTunes purchases-- just a short hop across the Dumbarton bridge.

The Most Energy-Efficient Server Is One That's Powered Off

2007-03-26T16:31:00.000-07:00

"Green data centers" and energy-efficient servers are the latest buzz in IT and government, as it turns out. Information Week's March 12 features green data center technologies as the cover storr. The online version doesn't have the same catchy Gordon Gecko-esque "Green is Good" title, but it's still a good read.

Today's data centers are built like offshore platforms from the oil and gas industry. Every 100 years, there's a monster wave, usually 50 feet high, from a massive hurricane or storm. So, offshore platforms are built to withstand this 100-year wave. The platform is taller than the wave's crest, and the platform is built to withstand the force of the wave.

Data centers are typically provisioned to meet peak demand, much the same way as oil platforms are engineered for that 100-year wave. Servers are provisioned to handle peak applications loads or traffic from major events, such as the quarterly sales promotion or special news event. On a typical day, however, utilization is much lower, but you still have all of those servers humming away, using electricity and generating heat.

What if you could power off all of those unused servers? Not only would you save electricity, you would also reduce your cooling costs. Could you determine which servers are idle and then those shut down? And could you do this automatically? How fast could you respond to changes in your environment? If load increases, could you power on the additional servers you need?

These are tough demands for your data center, but these changes can reduce your energy costs. The local utility, PG&E, is providing rebates to companies who can reduce their overall energy consumption or reduce their energy consumption on-demand in order to prevent rolling black-outs. We're participating in a new initiative by the Silicon Valley Leadership Group for energy-efficient data centers. As part of this initiative, we're showing how Cassatt Collage can be used to implement these use cases to reduce your overall power costs.

Back on the home front, we have several hundred servers in our system test lab. Since they're managed by Collage, only a third of the servers are usually powered on at a given time. When we do large scale-out tests, Collage fires up most of the servers in the lab. However, we usually schedule those scale-out tests for the weekends. Our lab A/C consists of three different units, each of which turn on when there is demand. One unit is constantly running; the second one kicks in during parts of the day; the third one only kicks in during heat waves or scale-out tests. Pretty cool, huh? (Pun sort-of intended)

Getting "Out There"

2007-03-25T20:48:00.000-07:00

A friend of a friend (funny how that works) gave me some pointers to get my blog plugged into the broader "blogosphere." I just created a profile on technorati.com and am "posting claim" to my blog there.
Technorati Profile

Would You Please Get Those VM’s Under Control!

2007-03-22T22:16:00.000-07:00

With all the recent controversy in financial markets and politics, it’s time for us geeks to stir up a little controversy of our own. A recent article in the Register talks about the challenges in managing Virtual Machines and licensing issues associated with the ability to deploy new (virtual) servers at will. A recent blog at Server Virtualization captured some of the opinions regarding the topic of how closely you should control the VM’s in your environment and whether or not developers can/should “hide a VM under their desk.”

Instead of finding new ways to circumvent your IT department, what if your IT department could provide you access to the VM’s you need, when you need them? When you’re done with your VM’s, you could give them back so that others can use them. Since there’s no physical asset, borrowing a VM should be easy. What if your IT department could go one step further and provide your VM’s freshly installed with the O/S and applications you need. This is a win-win situation. The IT department can still keep tabs on server resources and software licenses. And developers get access to the environments they need in their dev/test cycles. Cassatt Collage can help you set up this dynamic VM environment. (Read more)

At Cassatt, our IT director, Kirk, is the one who’s on the hook for Sarbanes-Oxley compliance. I really don’t want to see Kirk go to jail for failure to comply with software licenses-- one of the possible consequences of not getting a handle on how many VM's you have in your enterprise. After all, Kirk is a nice guy, and he does bring farm-fresh eggs for Karen, our CFO. So even though I’m a developer at heart, I do my part to make sure that Kirk stays out of the slammer, Karen gets her eggs, and I get my paychecks. So don't you think it might be worthwhile to get those VM's under control?

What Can You Do with a Web Services Interface?

2007-03-16T09:39:00.000-07:00

Last year, we were working with a large software company and using Collage to provision and manage this company’s application suite. We presented our results to the VP sponsoring our project. We showed several use cases for provisioning new server instances within minutes and automatically responding to server failure. He was impressed with the functionality, but he requested that we provide a high-level “dashboard” application that could integrate with his company’s application suite. The VP designed this new User Interface (UI) on the whiteboard at the end of the meeting, and the UI looked nothing like our current UI (of course).

After returning to our office, I tapped Mukund, who wears many hats at Cassatt. I needed him to write a new UI, drawing on his prior experiences as a Java Swing developer. He used the Collage Web Services interface to build a Java Swing app that provided a high-level view of the application domain. He also included controls to increase service levels of the managed application.

A week-and-a-half later, we went back to the VP and showed him the new app that he had designed on the whiteboard. The VP was quite pleased-- surprised, in fact-- that we were able to turn this around so quickly. Later, we had a chance to present our results (and the Swing app) to their executive management team. We’re still working with that customer, and we’re still using the Web Services interface to provide custom functionality in their environment.

What Should You Do if a Server Fails? Absolutely Nothing.

2007-03-12T09:19:00.000-07:00

A server failure can be disruptive to your business and your personal life. Servers tend to fail at the worst times— late at night, over the weekend, or in the middle of an important demo. Disk drives fail, motherboards burn out and software crashes; these things happen. To fix the problem, someone could reboot a server or reinstall software on a new server. What if your data center could automatically recover by performing these actions for you?

Cassatt Collage goes beyond provisioning. Collage constantly monitors the applications and servers in your data center. Collage polls for a heartbeat from each server—using standard OS-level and application-level monitors available in Linux, Windows and Solaris. You can also introduce your own custom monitors, such as a customized agent or a script running inside a database, and have Collage monitor that as well. When a server has failed, Collage will replace the server with a new one from the free pool and boot the same application/service on the new server—all of this within minutes and without losing any data.

For each application, you specify the monitoring parameters. You can define which monitors to use, the polling interval, and how many retries you should allow. In a smaller configuration with less than 100 servers, I like to monitor SNMP at 30-second intervals with 3 retries. For larger configurations with ~400 servers, I would increase the monitoring interval to 60 seconds. For Apache servers, I add an HTTP monitor on a system URL embedded in my web app so that I can ensure that the Apache service is running.

As part of our standard customer demo, I like to pull a blade server that’s running an application and watch Collage respond to the failure. I’ll let the customer pull the blade out of the chassis in the lab; blinking lights, fan noise and 10 racks of servers always adds a little extra to the demo. By the time we return to the conference room (with the failed blade in hand), Collage has quarantined the failed blade in a maintenance pool, allocated a new server from the free pool and booted this server to the same application. All of this takes only 3 minutes from bare metal to a running application on a new server. This demo is always very memorable and illustrates High Availability in a very simple manner. (Seeing is believing.) I had given this demo to some visiting executives from TCS. A year later, I had met them again in San Jose, and they still remembered the demo.

Business Lessons from “Buff Bill”

2007-03-07T16:56:00.000-08:00

Two years ago, I had put together a fun video for our Sales kick-off event. I wanted to illustrate several use cases and the derived benefits from using Cassatt Collage to manage your data center. The video featured Cassatt employees and Bill Coleman, our CEO, as “Buff Bill,” head of Buff Bill’s Boards and Bikes. The video was definitely fun to make and somewhat funny (as in, “don’t quit your day job” kind of funny). In the video, Buff Bill used Collage to:

Quickly integrate the IT systems of a recent acquisition.
Shift the distribution of computing resources between different web portals based on seasonal demand.
Respond quickly to increased workload by ramping up capacity as needed and in advance of new sales promotions.

The video featured Mukund as the poor sys admin who had to miss a Blink182 concert to bring new systems online-- but that was before he started managing his data center with Collage. After Mukund started managing his systems with Collage, he had way more free time—enough time to party with his friends and even take in a Linkin Park concert with Buff Bill.

Although we didn’t win any awards in the Sundance Film Festival (no surprises there), Buff Bill tackled some of the same challenges facing our customers today. One of our recent customers has achieved the top spot in their industry, and their only means to grow top-line revenue is through acquisitions. Their biggest headache has been integrating the IT systems of the acquired company. They are planning to use Cassatt Collage to manage all their IT systems so that they can quickly integrate newly acquired companies.

Another large customer faces predictable traffic spikes at different times during the week. Certain web properties are accessed almost exclusively on the weekend, whereas other business-related web properties are most active during the weekdays. We’re talking with them about using Collage to shift resources dynamically between their different web properties so that they can reduce their CapEx and OpEx.

One of these days I might post the Buff Bill video on YouTube. (I’ve been forbidden by our CFO, Karen. That almost sounds like a challenge to me, but I do like my paychecks.) In the meantime, you should check out Bill's thoughts on utility computing and what data centers may look like in the future. Recently, Bill was interviewed by Laurianne McLaughlin , the technical editor of CIO Magazine. Bill talked about a future where phone companies will run your data center. You can read about it in Laurianne’s blog. It’s a very interesting read, even though it's not as funny as my video.

Blog Tag

2007-03-01T16:16:00.000-08:00

Okay, so I just got tagged a few days ago by Ken Oestreich. It’s taken me a while to post a list of five things about me that you probably don’t know, but here goes:

When I was in high school, I sold my first computer program and accompanying article to an Apple II enthusiast magazine—Nibble Magazine. I sold them 3 articles and programs in total, but they only published one of them. It was assembly code and an accompanying bitmapped font set to display text with high-resolution graphics on the Apple II+.
In 1989, I started my own three-person software company (Victory Software) to write role-playing games for the Apple IIgs. We managed to sell a few thousand copies of three different games. However, we shut down the company a few years later after Apple killed the IIgs line in favor of the color Macs. All of this was in the pre-Internet era, but it’s amazing what historical references you can find on the web these days.
I don’t write game software anymore, but I have taken up golf. A few years ago, my daughter and I were playing at Blackberry Farm in Cupertino. The pro shop told us that Julie Inkster was playing two holes ahead of us. We did manage to see Julie and her kids from across the lake, but we never did close enough for an autograph. My golf swing and short game are nothing to write about (even in a blog), but I have been a pretty good swing coach for my kids. My kids and I never saw anyone else famous on the golf course, but my son is a big Tiger fan. He wears Tiger’s Sunday red-and-black combination when we play on Sundays.
When I worked in Rochester, Minnesota in the 80’s, I actually placed fifth in a city road-race. I ran just under 11 minutes for a two-mile road race— nothing great, but good enough for a small town of 60,000. I still have my plaque somewhere in the garage. The race was in early May, but it was 30 degrees outside and snowing! During the last 100 yards, I got passed by a teenager, which was a little disheartening. Back in my youth, I never did manage to break the 5-minute-mile barrier, but I did get within 5 seconds. I still run these days, but it’s more like 7:30 miles. :-)
I have a US patent. It’s patent #6,683,553. I got it when I worked in the Java Web Services group at Sun. The patent belongs to Sun, but I still have the plaque on my desk.

Okay, so now it’s my turn to tag 5 folks. Unfortunately, I’m a relatively new blogger, and I don’t have a bunch of blogging friends. So, I’ll tag Floyd Strimling and Rob Gingell. And I’ll put out 3 requests to folks who would be good bloggers. (I’ll just nudge them privately.)

Sometimes an API is the Right UI

2007-02-06T09:31:00.000-08:00

Graphical User Interfaces (GUI’s) are great for client-side applications. Everyone has their favorite software application or consumer device, and the usability of the GUI usually makes a huge difference in user satisfaction. Well what’s the right user interface for data center infrastructure? What if you want to embed platform functionality into your own application?

There’s a funny ad from IBM, where a poor sys admin has to monitor dozens of monitors—one monitoring console per data center application. The ad talks about “silo’ed applications” and not being able to tap into data.

My company’s product, Cassatt Collage, delivers a platform for provisioning and managing a host of data center resources—servers, virtual machines and networks. Collage monitors applications and maintains service levels, so you don’t need to watch a monitor. Under the covers, Collage is a J2EE application. The Collage UI is a web-based UI that is built with JSP and Servlets. Collage also provides several programmatic interfaces so that you can respond to events and drive Collage functionality from the command line or your own applications.

Collage provides a Web Services interface (affectionately— but incorrectly— dubbed the WSDL interface) that gives you access to all the same functionality available from the GUI. You can create new application tiers, allocate resources (servers) to those application tiers, respond to events, increase or decrease service levels— basically anything you could do by clicking through the UI.

Remember Mukund? (Mr. 465 VM’s from my last posting). About a year ago, Mukund had created a Scripting SDK (SSDK) that used the Collage web services interface but provided a much simpler interface for use in scripting languages. The SSDK is intended to allow our professional services folks to integrate Collage with a customer’s applications. Since Mukund developed the SSDK in Java, I decided to poke under the covers and use the underlying Java functionality. (I’m not much of a script guy, but I do like simple API’s that I can call from Java.)

As part of the system test effort for the last Collage release, we developed several reliability and performance tests that measure Collage performance at extreme scale and over long time intervals with thousands of user actions. In order to automate these performance tests, I used the Java internals of the SSDK to create application tiers, allocate servers, activate servers, deactivate servers, deallocate tiers and delete tiers. We call this a “tier life cycle.” I also used JWebUnit to measure UI performance at different times and different deployment sizes. We use these tests as part of the standard system test cycle to characterize Collage performance at scale and ensure that performance levels are sustained over time—simulating how Collage will perform in your data center after a year’s worth of activity. I also wrote some reliability tests that create dozens of threads that basically pound a Collage system with different tier actions.

The SSDK has also proven useful in customer scenarios. Martha is the director for the Applications Engineering team, and she is on the “front lines” with many customer engagements. Martha is a super-star in pretty much any application domain— whether it’s J2EE, ETL, ERP, CRM, BI, DB. Whenever there’s a tough customer problem, Martha’s the one we call. In January, Martha used Collage’s image management capabilities and SSDK to automate the deployment and configuration of a customer’s complex application environment. The customer needs to deploy hundreds of independent Collage environments and wants to do this without any human setup. Each environment can be deployed and configured in only 37 minutes, and the process is completely automated! This is a perfect fit for Collage and the SSDK.

In a future posting, I’ll talk about more about the web services interface and my adventures with the Eclipse Web Tools Platform, which works very well with our web services interface BTW. If you want to find out more about the SSDK, check out Cassatt InfoCentral.

Can One Person Provision and Manage 400 Servers in an Afternoon?

2007-01-31T23:03:00.000-08:00

With the latest release of Collage, affectionately codenamed “Starbuck,” we have significantly increased the scalability of Collage. With this release, Collage can now manage 400+ servers under a single control node. As part of the standard system test effort for Collage, we routinely scale to ~450 app nodes being managed by a single Collage control node. And this control node is run-of-the-mill pizza box server, typically with 2 CPU’s and 4 GB of RAM. You can get one of these from CDW for less than $4000, sometimes as cheap as $2500.

Just the other day, I had to give a demo to our EVP of Sales, Jim Flatley, to show him the new product’s capabilities. So I decided to set up a system with 400 app nodes, just to show off our new stuff. BTW, app node is short for “application node,” which for us means a physical machine or virtual machine (VM) under Collage management. My System Test team normally scales to 400+ app nodes under management as part of the dev-test environment. (In fact, Mukund likes to show off a system he’s been running with 465 app nodes—kind of chest-thumping, but it’s still pretty cool.)

So I started off with a system with 40 physical servers, all bare metal. I imported 3 different VmWare ESX images, one with 24 VM’s per host, one with 18 VM’s per host and another with 12 VM’s per host. I created three tiers, one tier for each image, and let Collage allocate servers for VM hosts so that each VM would have 500 MB RAM. (This is easy to do, just set up each tier’s attributes to specify memory requirements.) I also used the NetInstall feature, which is new in the latest Collage release. The application image for the ESX host is locally installed on the app node.

Once the ESX hosts were activated, all the VM’s were discovered and inventoried by Collage. So I had 400 VM’s in the free pool. I then imported some application images— a combination of ELAS 4 and Windows images— and created tiers with these. Some were set up as Web farms, others as computational tiers. I then activated tiers—first a 50-node tier, then another 50-node tier. Then I activated a 100-node tier. I also created some tiers that used physical machines, just for fun. At one point, I was simultaneously activating 200 app nodes. Collage automatically throttles the activations so that app nodes activate in batches.

Three hours later, I had configured an environment with 400 servers under management, all provisioned from bare metal by Collage. I had a mixture of physical machines, virtual machines, Linux applications and Windows applications. And by the way, I’m not a sys admin. I’m an engineering director at Cassatt. I don’t set up servers for a living. But with our product, I can set up and manage my own data center.

And BTW, the demo was a success. I’m pretty sure Jim was impressed. He was smiling at the end of the meeting.