Richard Rendell's Blog

Cloud Computing and Commercial Risk

richardrendell — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 03:47:03 +0000

Most discussions I encounter on Cloud services or SaaS are about the products or technology. Can I suggest he primary issue is not the technology. It’s the commercial arrangements.

Have you been involved in negotiating contracts with Cloud/SaaS providers? How are you addressing commercial risk? Have you attempted to include things like liquidated damages in your agreements? What reactions have you encountered to protecting your commercial interests?

If you have moved your infrastructure to a cloud based implementation, have you notified your business insurer? How has the insurer reacted to the changed risk conditions? Has this resulted in higher insurance premiums?

For those developing proprietary intellectual property and storing your work on cloud services eg. hosted office applications, wiki’s, Platform-as-a-Service etc. what measures are you taking to ensure your IP is protected? What does your investor think given they probably have a fixed and floating charge over the IP assets of your company? If you are a company director what kind of due diligence have you undertaken in moving your company infrastructure to a Cloud/SaaS provider?

I suggest we should all be asking these questions first when considering Cloud/SaaS services especially if you are in fact one of those providers. How exposed are you as a Cloud/SaaS service provider to the commercial foibles of your own supply chain?

I would be very interested in any good or bad experiences or interesting solutions to the above issues and questions. I look forward to hearing from you.

Best..

Richard.

Virtualisation and Business Value

richardrendell — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 10:53:25 +0000

Several big virtualisation vendors (or their business parters) are contacting me to sell their wares. They have come from just about every angle, Green IT, cost, ease of use, scalability, supportability and the list goes on. Recently one vendor invited me to use their own online calculator to estimate the cost savings using their virtualisation platform. After entering a myriad of details it spat back an answer showing a -32% cost saving for our current non-virtualised infrastructure. That’s right, an increase in cost of 32% to adopt virtualisation. It’s either an error or they value honesty. Note their sales guy was in earlier extolling the benefits of virtualisation across the business though. The reality is, if I choose to virtualise any part of my infrastructue with these vendors I am up for a cost. I have consulted to several companies recently where the executive management has been convinced that virtualisation will save signficant amounts of money on their current infrastructure and their current IT costs will immediately drop. Nothing could be further from the truth. Whether it is subscription/license fees, consulting, or the significant time required internally on deploying and reconfiguring systems, the full cost will be measured in tens of thousands of dollars. In this current economic environment I would perhaps choose to spend that money on revenue earning opportunities. If you are at the initial build or update of your systems, virtualisation may well have cost savings over a period but not immediately.

Something for nothing

Many virtualisation sales consultants have used the “something for nothing” pitch, that generally all servers are under utilised and CPU usage should be at least 80% with at least two systems working on a single box. Well 80% doesn’t give me much wiggle room for peak loads but something else bothers me. If you have ever worked on a machine where the CPU usage is a sustained 80% or so the performance drop is very noticeable and sometimes unusable. Depending on the application before we get to 80% CPU usage we will probably hit an i/o limit and impact all virtual instances on the box. Hardly something for nothing. With this in mind I would have a significant effort on my hands to stage, test and tune production applications before implementing a virtualised approach. The work and cost is adding up. What happens if my two virtualised instances unexpectedly hit peak demand together? I know of one instance where this occurred and the virtualisation vendor almost flippantly suggested to purchase a new server.

I’m not buying a drill, I’m buying a hole

As a business, I don’t want virtualisation, I want the benefits it is supposed to deliver. I need to consider those benefits in the full context of the business and the financial position of the company given the economic times. You will probably find that unless you are starting from scratch with your production servers or at an upgrade point it might be wiser to use the money on a revenue-earning investment elsewhere in the business.

Anyone with thoughts or experiences on this topic, I’d love to hear from you.

Ruling on evidence of website visits in libel cases

richardrendell — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 12:43:02 +0000

Interesting article from Inam Ali at lawdit.co.uk last year. I was talking to a few lawyers recently who felt the litigation over information published on social media sites was increasing. Regardless of the burden of proof issues it does highlight the need for care in public communications. A seemingly innocuous post can have unintended consequences and litigation is costly whether it’s your private or professional life. It doesn’t have to end in litigation of course but often the damage is already done as in this example from David Henderson. We have heard it before.. “think before you post”.

Been a while..

richardrendell — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 05:03:50 +0000

I suspect one or two people will remember me from my time driving the Oracle PHP strategy c.2003-2006 and I even made a few blog entries in those days over on http://richardrendell.blogspot.com/ which I am not using anymore. In 2007 after 18 years, I moved on from Oracle and pursued a few business opportunities of my own. I caught up with Christopher Jones late last year on his return visit to Melbourne (Australia). Chris worked with me for 16 years in the Melbourne development center mostly on SQL*Plus and later forming Oracle’s PHP strategy. Chris moved to the US in Sep 2006 to work more closely on PHP and open source initiatives at Oracle and I think his professionalism, skills and dedication continue to add great value in these areas. We traveled the world learning from the PHP community and listening to our own customers needs regarding Oracle and PHP. I mentioned to Chris that I missed those times, he said he had just got back from Brazil and it was one of the best places he had visited then proceeded to recount all the highlights which were going into his blog. So much for a sentimental moment. It was that catch up with Chris that remided me (again) that I had not resurrected my own blog. So, I hope in my ongoing business endeavors that I have something meaningful to contribute and of course learn from the worldwide community .. welcome to Richard Rendell’s Blog 2.0.

richardrendell — Tue, 20 Sep 2005 07:29:00 +0000

A great night at the OTN installfest for Linux and PHP. Todd Trichler took everyone through a 10g database install on Red Hat and Suse followed by the kernel team doing OCFS2 and ASMlib installs. Note that OCFS2 is a general purpose filesystem you can use like ext3 – more info is available on oss.oracle.com a great resource for Oracle’s open source projects. The installfest was popular with around 100 people and 20 or so doing actual installs on their laptops. The free software is always a hit as the people you see here queued to get copies of RedHat EL4, Suse SLES 9 and Oracle 10g Release 2. I went through an install of Zend Core for Oracle and people walked away with a fully functional enterprise PHP stack. Zend Core for Oracle Beta is available from the OTN PHP tech center which is also a great resource for PHP and Oracle developers: http://www.oracle.com/technology/tech/php

richardrendell — Mon, 19 Sep 2005 17:23:00 +0000

Oracle Openworld – Day 1
With so many people at OOW the keynotes are being video broadcast in other rooms – I’m in room 104 right now watching the Intel part of the keynote. There are about 1,000 people in the foyer of Mosone North watching a video screen there. Many are sitting on the floor and on beanbags pounding away on their laptops or scribbling notes. Many people standing also. Chuck Phillips focused on Fusion and announced Oracle Applications will in the future also work on WebSphere. We are a happy to compete he said. The underlying message of his keynote was that via our midtier we can interoperate with anything that has a standard services interface. People were gathered around monitors setup throughout the Moscone complexes as I walked here. There were queues just to get a coffee. Time to check out the exhibition and drop by the OTN lounge in Moscone West to recheck my PHP session for the OTN nite this evening. Drop by the OTN lounge today at 4pm if you are at the conference it’s my slot at the Meet the Expert sessions.

richardrendell — Mon, 08 Aug 2005 07:15:00 +0000

After OSCON waiting for a flight the next day…

I was reading the Oregonian newspaper and came across a list of dumb things people have said and done during job intereviews, the paper said these were sourced from the internet – I wrote them out, I just had to share with my friends, hope you get a chuckle.

DUMB THINGS PEOPLE ACTUALLY DID OR SAID DURING A JOB INTERVIEW
—————————————————————————————————————————-

1. The applicant challenged the interviewer to an arm wrestle

2. Candidate explained that he never finished high-school because he was kidnapped and kept in a closet in Mexico

3. Balding candidate excused himself and returned to the office a few minutes later wearing a hairpiece

4. Applicant interrupted an interview to phone her therapist for advice on how to answer specific questions

5. Interviewee wore a Walkman explaining that she could listen to the interviewer and music at the same time.

6. Candidate had gotten his underpants suck in this pants zipper and spent the whole interview with his underpants sticking out his fly.

7. Candidate asked to bring a photo of himself for a security card, came with a picture of himself covered in oil and wearing only a thong.

ACTUAL STUPID QUESTIONS ASKED BY JOB CANDIDATES
—————————————————————————————————

1. “What is it that you people do at this company?”

2. “I know this is off the subject but will you marry me?”

3. “Does your company have a policy regarding concealed weapons?”

4. “Would it be a problem if I’m angry most of the time?”

5. “What are the zodiac signs of the board members?”

OTHER STUPID THINGS ACTUALLY SAID DURING JOB INTERVIEWS
—————————————————————————————————————–

1. “Sometimes I feel like smashing things.”

2. “I feel uneasy indoors.”

3. “I am fascinated by fire.”

4. “I would have been more successful if nobody would have snitched on me.”

5. “My legs are really hairy.”

6. “I think I’m going to throw up.”

richardrendell — Mon, 08 Aug 2005 05:35:00 +0000

I thoroughly enjoyed the OSCON conference in Portland Oregon last week. As a first time attendee and representing Oracle as a sponsor I was very glad to have been part of this event. Todd Trichler, Chris Jones and myself were expecting to talk about Oracle’s ongoing activities around PHP and helping those who are developing systems with PHP and Oracle, but we found ourselves answering questions on a diverse range of Oracle related topics and enjoying many discussions. Thanks to those who dropped by the stand to share their viewpoints on Open Source, Oracle and PHP. I would also like to thank those to dropped by to my session on Oracle’s activities and direction with PHP. Thanks for the feedback to those who did so. I also had the pleasure of meeting Wez Furlong for the first time and we chatted about the work he is doing on improvements (more like a partial rewrite) of the PHP OCI8 extension. It will be included in our upcomming Zend Core for Oracle product in collaboration with Zend – look for a beta around the end of August 2005 on the PHP Dev Center at OTN. Wez also did an excellent presentation on PDO which is shaping up well and included in PHP 5.1. Caught up with Andi Gutmans and did some fine-tuning of plans for Zend Core for Oracle and attended his talk on PHP. The open source community is a pleasure to be involved with and I look forward to returning to OSCON next year.

A couple of pics:

Well, now for Linuxworld in San Francisco…