The hidden tale of genuine disaster recovery

Friday, April 8th, 2011

The morning of the Japanese Earthquake, I was in the PC Pro office. While watching the giant waves and the chaos unfolding, I began to wonder: could I do anything to dig up proper war stories? Real disaster recovery, performed by real people in the middle of a real disaster.

I have to say, there were barriers to this concept, not the least of which is that I don’t speak or read a word of Japanese. Aside from that, past sizeable disasters such as 9/11 and indeed Buncefield have revealed the unsurprising fact that when things are going about as wrong as possible, the last thing anyone wants is a journalist asking questions.

It may seem like an aside to point out at this stage that pretty much all of us in the Real World Computing section of PC Pro are, technically, “columnists” not “journalists” – we’re in the business we write about and we present the insider’s view, which is markedly different from the outlook of a tabloid hack, desperately synthesising hysterical emotional stories from the lives of real people.

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Behind the scenes of a cloud conversation

Wednesday, March 23rd, 2011

Eagle-eyed surfers will already have spotted my bumbling efforts as part of the Cloud Power initiative, and those who didn’t can now go and have a bit of a giggle, come back, and say whatever comes to their mind in reaction to the footage.

I thought I’d do a bit of a behind-the-scenes account here for interested parties, and also explain why I’m happy to take the risk of being an idiot in a video that exists purely because a single vendor – Microsoft – wanted to make it.

First off: Tim and I didn’t rehearse. I believe I get worse with each rehearsal, starting from a pretty low base in the first place. We had a set of basic questions but we didn’t have any set conclusions we were expected to work towards. Given the breadth of the questions being asked, this was something of a relief.

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A letter on behalf of the world’s PC fixers

Tuesday, March 8th, 2011

I was going to contribute to Stewart Mitchell’s request for horror stories about computer repair people; then I was completely diverted by a panic phone call from an old friend, which helped me to realise that I was far more of a repairer than a customer of repairers.

That 72 hours of raw-edged panic was quite enough for me to focus on the sins of those who come and ask for help, which can be every bit as difficult as the sins of the fixers. So pardon me while I abuse the Pro blogs to let my friend know how I felt about her approach to the whole sorry matter.

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Can Parallels get noticed in the cloud?

Thursday, February 24th, 2011

One of the many reasons that I like the whole topic of cloud computing is that it suits my way of thinking: I tend to grab a series of themes out of a “cloud” of topics and see if a concept pops out of the randomness — and if you are trying to work out what to buy and who to buy it from, the one strong similarilty between “the cloud” and buying services is that it looks pretty random.

All the potential suppliers look like a random collection of logos to the consumer: dipping into the attendee list at Parallels Summit here in Orlando this week we have MigrationWiz, R1Soft, Smarsh, Tilera, Apptix, BobCares, Comodo (that last one is an old friend to PC Pro, so maybe they’re not quite as random as the others).

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Wanted: IT orchestrator for private cloud deployment

Monday, February 7th, 2011

Reza Malekzadeh is a trooper. I don’t mean he’s in the military or anything: I mean, he fought his way through a rotten cold in the depths of winter, to talk to me a few weeks ago about Nimbula.

Take a look at the site if you want to but I’m about to gloss fairly rapidly over what it does in pursuit of a couple of points that dropped out of the conversation. Here’s that rapid gloss: this is the dev team who built Amazon EC2, and it wants you to have your own EC2-alike (a whole lot alike, even though it is not Amazon) cloud, inside your organisation.

That’s a short sentence that tends to leave Cloud sceptics and fanatics alike a bit like a goldfish. It takes time to sink in, during which you can see the cogs moving: I ‘m sure Reza could see mine doing that because when I asked him for a case in point, he dived back into the example-giver’s favourite territory of banking.

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When water-cooled PCs go wrong

Thursday, February 3rd, 2011

Who remembers water-cooled PCs? From that period when it was the clock speed, not the core count or the cache size, that defined performance.

They were a bodger’s delight, because water picks up heat far more efficiently than air does and plenty of early-era websites and blogs filled up with low-res pictures of processors sprouting splodges of silicone sealant, old Pentium III heatsinks inside bits of Tupperware, cruelly stolen from the kitchen and butchered in the name of overclocking.

Eventually, a few of the more adventurous manufacturers even got into this game themselves, either selling kits or whole machines with properly engineered water radiators, pumps, pipes and fans.

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The real cost of Martha Lane Fox’s £98 PCs

Tuesday, January 18th, 2011

It seems that the current strategy for getting the country 100% online includes disabled employment charity Remploy, digital guru Martha Lane Fox, and nine million old computers, which can be pumped out at 98 quid a box to those unable to buy a machine for themselves.

I’m almost totally conflicted by this news. On the one hand, I’m a huge fan of the idea that work for those with disabilities should never look or feel like make-work, and I’m an even bigger fan of the concept of recycling PCs, the closer to home the better.

You can see the “but” staggering into view, even though I’m striving for a tone of polite respect, can’t you?

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How not to secure your data, or 12 Angry Men

Tuesday, January 4th, 2011

Funny thing, trust.

Trust isn’t something that computer people are used to working with. It does not fit into an equation. While it’s easy to say that you do — or don’t – trust someone, the decision that lies behind those two states is far from logical, as I was all too forcefully reminded over this festive break (an ambiguous word: could mean “break” as in holiday or “break” as in psychotic episode).

My mailbox (which strictly speaking I should not have been checking) suddenly spiked with a series of messages from an old acquaintance whose major source of income these days is a single-interest website.

I’m sure you know the type: news pages, a forum, a blog… not unlike PC Pro, in fact, only with a much narrower topic scope. His site was down, he said, and he couldn’t find his webmaster. Could be in Milan; could be in Dubrovnik. Server is in Hannover. Nobody answering at the hosting centre…

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Counting the cost of cloudy jargon

Friday, December 10th, 2010

You know that kid in class who would always have the answer to the question? The one who dislocates his shoulder to get his hand up, waves it frantically and puffs his cheeks up, bursting to belt out the answer? That’s how I felt, reading Davey’s blog about the cost of cloud computing.

If you go back to EMC’s linked page on the brief they gave the economic worthies of the CEBR, then I can see exactly why he would be bedazzled, confused and frustrated. It can seem completely impossible to go from an estimate for the whole of the European Union, right down to someone’s choice to rely on Gmail, much less make sense of the basis of the research. (more…)

Farewell to Sir Maurice Wilkes: the UK’s father of computing

Tuesday, November 30th, 2010

Sir Maurice Wilkes, the British forefather of the Stored Program computer, has died at the age of 97.

I attended one of his last speeches (read about my mind-blowing evening with £2.5bn worth of British computing talent) and was spellbound. Here was someone who looked carefully at what the Americans were doing in the 1940s and turned their largely military development efforts into a scientific and business tool, laying the ground for the development undertaken by such unlikely private-sector pioneers as Lyon’s Tea Houses.

Very few people can legitimately deliver a verdict on our entire industry, from digital watches through to Google Earth, the way that Wilkes can – when I met him in 2008, he thought it had “all turned out rather well”. He reminded us just how important the British are in an industry which can seem vast, indifferent and unstoppable.

The kind of philosophical chutzpah that Wilkes and his team showed in building their machine, in post-war Britain, is a very long way from the passive consumer approach found in today’s population of Tweeting, Facebooking trivia-junkies. I can’t help wondering where the next game-changing pioneer will come from, and if they see as much progress as Wilkes, what they will think of this business come the year 2071.

(Photo: Copyright Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge. Reproduced by permission.)