Personal computing today is a rich ecosystem encompassing massive PC-based data centers, notebook and Tablet PCs, handheld devices, and smart cell phones. It has expanded from the desktop and the data center to wherever people need it - at their desks, in a meeting, on the road or even in the air.
We believe we're moving out of the Ice Age, the Iron Age, the Industrial Age, the Information Age, to the participation age. You get on the Net and you do stuff. You IM (instant message), you blog, you take pictures, you publish, you podcast, you transact, you distance learn, you telemedicine. You are participating on the Internet, not just viewing stuff. We build the infrastructure that goes in the data center that facilitates the participation age. We build that big friggin' Webtone switch. It has security, directory, identity, privacy, storage, compute, the whole Web services stack.
A technology becomes truly disruptive when it drives the marginal cost of something that used to be scarce and expensive to approach zero. Thus, it used to be to deploy software at scale, you had to fund a data center, buy a set of servers, storage, and networking gear, build an in-house IT management capability, and buy an expensive stack of enabling software before you could even get started. Now you can get all that from Amazon or Microsoft on a pay-as-you-grow model.
Wikipedia was offline after an overheating problem at one of its data centers. It was pretty bad. For a while there, people had nowhere to go for phony, inaccurate information.
Microsoft is in a court battle with the Department of Justice. The DOJ is saying, "We want information from your data center in Ireland. It's not about a US citizen, but we want it." Microsoft said, "OK, fine. Go to a judge in Ireland. Ask them for a warrant. We have a mutual legal-assistance treaty. They'll do it. Give that to us, and we'll provide the information to you in accordance with Irish laws."
[Sovereignty] would break the American monopoly, but it would also break Internet business, because you'd have to have a data center in every country. And data centers are tremendously expensive, a big capital investment.
A different [Ronald] Reagan-era authority: EO 12333, an executive order for foreign-intelligence collection, as opposed to the ones we now use domestically. So this one isn't even authorized by law. It's just an old-ass piece of paper with Reagan's signature on it, which has been updated a couple times since then. So what happened was that all of a sudden these massive, behemoth companies realized their data centers - sending hundreds of millions of people's communications back and forth every day - were completely unprotected, electronically naked.
Cloud storage in data centers will utilize the latest developments in physical storage virtualization, deduplication and other methods to make the most effective use of physical storage assets. Software defined storage could allow a further level of abstraction and cost effectiveness. The vast bulk of content stored "in the cloud" will reside on large SATA interface HDDs with some on magnetic (mostly LTO) tape (particularly for "archives.")
I think Unix is a great system - especially for running data centers - because it is very mature, very reliable, very scalable. But when I want to go out and populate small devices, I think Java.
Tape with LTFS has several advantages over the other external storage devices it would typically be compared to. First, tape has been designed from Day 1 to be an offline device and to sit on a shelf. An LTFS-formatted LTO-6 tape can store 2.5 TB of uncompressed data and almost 6 TB with compression. That means many data centers could fit their entire data set into a small FedEx box. With LTFS the sending and receiving data centers no longer need to be running the same application to access the data on the tape.
Our collaboration with Datapipe on a managed hybrid cloud solution for AWS removes many of the common barriers to cloud adoption. It offers customers the best of both worlds by providing Equinix's secure data center platform, including private access to AWS, along with Datapipe's expertise in designing and managing an optimal IT architecture for enterprises.
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