Archive for the ‘Trends’ Category

P2P is the Future

Tuesday, May 5th, 2009

P2P technology is everywhere. From data to video - almost any data medium can be delivered via P2P. With 10 gigabit ethernet becoming commonplace in ISPs, there’s no stopping P2P from becoming the next big thing on the Internet.

What I forsee in the near future:
* ISPs no longer maintain large server farms for caches and e-mails
* Our computers automatically participates in a large P2P network sharing compute, memory and storage for a single application (e.g. e-mail)
* Our home appliances (game consoles, TV) runs P2P
* IPv6 will start to prevail with the need for public IP addresses

Posted in Networks, Trends, Web 2.0 | No Comments »

The Cost of High Availablity

Saturday, March 28th, 2009

So here I am once again sitting in a meeting room of an ISP with some 4 or 5 executives, salesguys , product guys and a bunch of other engineers discussing how we should set up HA. The entire project’s network was drawn up on a white board and three engineers stood by the sides. They were pointing at every link and node in the diagram and asking, “is this HA?”

You’d be surprised how long these discussions can take. It went on for about two hours and one dude finally broke the tension and stood up, and we thought he was headed for the washroom but he said instead, “what’s the point of all these? With all these costs, will the service even sell?”

He hit the nail. The room was quiet for a moment.

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Posted in High Availability, Linux, Networks, Service Level Agreements, Trends, Virtualization | No Comments »

VMware ESX 3i, VMware Server 2.0, Citrix XenServer or Sun xVM VirtualBox?

Wednesday, March 18th, 2009

With our growing customer base and usage, Securlogic just purchased another Sun Fire X2100. The shipment arrived on Monday and I have been running around town trying to loan a USB keyboard and struggling to get the box to boot off a USB disk. ESX 3i simply refuses to boot so I got it running with a copy of CentOS 5 (LiveCD) using the Fedora Live USB Creator. Lesson learnt - keep a USB keyboard or a USB to PS/2 converter near you and don’t buy a server without a DVD drive.

Meanwhile, the virtualization infrastructure is due for an upgrade (we’re still on VMware Server 1.x). I’m evaluating VMware ESX 3i, VMware Server 2.0 (on CentOS 5.2), Citrix XenServer and Sun xVM VirtualBox and I’ll just drop a few quick pointers for those who are going though the same process as I am.

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Posted in Networks, Solaris, Trends, Virtualization | 5 Comments »

Recycling The Internet’s Bandwidth

Tuesday, March 3rd, 2009

I was chatting with a guest from US the other day and he brought up an interesting point. In many countries like Singapore, the Internet is the only common household utility that charges a flat fee and we could use as much as we wanted. Pretty much all around the globe people still pay a unit price for power, water, gas, TV and phone.

So what makes the Internet different?

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Posted in Networks, Trends, Web 2.0 | No Comments »