Well, right about now was the time when I expected to be speaking in tongues to the Oracle Open World. Unfortunately, my proposal didn't get a bite. It was high faluting sounding, but I think they saw through me. It was about Essbase in the Hybrid Cloud, and what it was basically about was using cloud-based storage to inch oh so gingerly into the cloud arena. Now that I've had a bit more time to think about it, I think I know better.
You have to jump in with both feet. At least, that's my attitude.
But first some geekery updates.
I'm backing off of S3 for my own personal use. Yes I have nice fat FIOS bandwidth pipes but I have determined that offsite storage is basically only good for backup & disaster recovery, not file sharing large media libraries with Samba or Windows file shares. So I'm coming down off my Jungle Disk high and transferring all my big stuff back to the new generation of Seagate external hard drives. Now there may still be a chance that I'll experiment with a PogoPlug at some point, but really, what do I want that for? I want it for music when I'm on the road. It's cheaper to buy the drive, or just use the damned iPhone. (or Orb, or Last.fm)
What has turned out to be much more useful than I ever imagined was Dropbox. It has basically put all of my flash drives out of commission. And all I ever really needed was 2GB. Whoda thunk?
I let my Carbonite subscription lapse although I hadn't intended it to. I gave my old machine over to my wife and it just wasn't worth keeping all that stuff there. I moved it over to my new big 1.5TB external and I'll back it up from there. How? It just turns out that I like Backblaze and they allow you to do just that, whereas I seem to recall that Carbonite didn't like mounted drives very much. For 5 bucks a month per computer, I'm digging the pricing model and I like the fact that they're open source.
In other geekery, I finally went the next step and cranked up an EC2 over at Amazon. It was fairly easy to do, but a lot more expensive than I thought it would be. But I'm starting to see the possibilities, which is why now more than ever I think that some of us service providers *are* the new next big thing. Which is to say, the first guys to master the art of hosting enterprise apps and demonstrate super scalability and truly rapid RAD wins big.
Suddenly, I feel like I just might become a hot commodity again because of what I did back in 2005 on that 32 way 64bit Superdome with 500 concurrent ASO cubes. However... I think between that and the 'cloud' are some very significant virtualization issues. Figuring those out is the next step.
You see, even though AWS was telling me my virtual box was 'Large' it certainly wasn't 'Fast'. Getting my favorite marketing database up into SQL 2005 took a lot longer than I expected it to, as in I seem to recall things moving faster on my laptop. So there is an I/O bottleneck getting things into the cloud if you're way down the pipe, as I am most of the time. There's got to be a better way - which is why I'm thinking about the trickly stuff that's built into the Carbonite and Backblaze products, made more transparent by Jungle Disk, and very likely available at a low level with Nirvanix (which I haven't been using at all).
So uptime is costly on EC2, whether or not your box is processing anything. It's the availability of the instance that you pay for. So my next trick is to learn how to park a big old virtual server image so it actually becomes something of an on-demand machine in the way I thought it was. There's a great big financial step from LAMP infrastructure providers like Dreamhost, whom I've been using for about 7 years, to Amazon's EC2.
I'm also becoming convinced that a trickle server is necessary - just a dedicated machine to Jungle Disk or Nirvanix the required data up to S3 and then trigger something when that job is done. When I use it on a regular working PC, it just gets all bogged down, but part of my problem was that I was doing backups and file transfers intermittently, and I'd have the thing shutting down, sleeping or timing out. What you need, I think, is a machine that just never times out and does nothing but fill your pipe with upstream. An upload server. It shouldn't be so difficult, I should think, to link your S3 to your EC2 and then voila. That is an exercise for me.
--
In other news, I'm becoming basically competent in Planning after many years of barbed remarks. The thing actually works as advertised in 9.3.1. Of course it stands to reason that I'm pushed to the bleeding edge of the very latest feature set and as such will be getting a long luxuriating look at 11.1.1.3. Obviously there are little things that I'm discovering that people are saying 'Duh' to me. But I swear to God I have not had any customers that bothered with Smartview in X years, and I never got to be an expert. Now I see that it does all the things Joe Cajic said it would do back in 2004. Yay.
Naturally, I jumped at the chance to play around with the OutlineLoader and dropped various parts of that into my Cubegeek's Toolkit. So I'll soon have scripts that generate scripts. And I suspect that I'll try to find ways to automate the dread parts of EMPA as well, time allowing.
Sometime next spring, and certainly by KScope next, I'll have mastered some small portion of the latest Planning scripty bits and present my modest results, board willing. It would be awfully nice to have one of those big ER diagram posters of the Planning repository somewhere wouldn't it? Heh. Listen to me, thinking I might do that HAB kind of development. Is that product still around?
--
Well that's all for now. I'm energized and optimistic.
