tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-120747522010-01-29T10:49:30.082+01:00What is cooking on the net? <br> <small>Digital infrastructures: money, performance, functionality and risk</small>pvehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08966586301980201453noreply@blogger.comBlogger103125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12074752.post-49554527816705059552010-01-29T10:48:00.000+01:002010-01-29T10:48:23.222+01:00

At the 35th annual international meeting of the Computer Measurement Group (see link), I presented our measurements of the cloud. Bits of an earlier analysis were posted on petersgriddle over a year ago (see cloud tag). This presentation is now available with audio and Q&A on slideshare (follow link). I was rather pleased with the process of putting it on slideshare. The online tool at

pvehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08966586301980201453noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12074752.post-26823229290397548062010-01-13T08:58:00.000+01:002010-01-13T08:58:32.932+01:00

Interesting development and background info. Is your gmail account safe? Will Google pull out of China? Cybersecurity and warfare has just gone to the next level. More on this on http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/new-approach-to-china.html See also the very detailed examination of cyber espionage on http://www.scribd.com/doc/13731776/

pvehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08966586301980201453noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12074752.post-77119255127208191262010-01-12T18:32:00.000+01:002010-01-12T18:32:11.905+01:00

IPv6 traffic as a percentage of total traffic at isc.sans.org almost tripled from 0.5% to 1.3% of all users of the website. Isc.sans.org is a security institute. The report analyses the provenance of this traffic (lots of tunnels!) and the security implications of this.

pvehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08966586301980201453noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12074752.post-11238720694395185642009-12-18T09:22:00.002+01:002009-12-18T09:55:19.652+01:00

If you want to know what’s cooking on the net, you will at times have to process a lot of measurements. Examples are logs of webservers, and measurements of network activity. You need this ‘network business intelligence’ in order to figure out what the users are doing, where the capacity is going, where the delays are, and where the ‘funny’stuff’ is .I used to do that processing with Excel, or

pvehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08966586301980201453noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12074752.post-30082997398217458112009-12-11T01:45:00.003+01:002009-12-18T23:53:31.301+01:00

At the 35th annual international meeting of the Computer Measurement Group (see link), a group of professionals dedicated to performance management and capacity planning, the hot topics were (surprise!) virtualization and clouds. We were presented with stories of companies with hundreds and even thousands of servers. Some of these have utilizations as low as 7%. Clearly, a lot of opportunity to

pvehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08966586301980201453noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12074752.post-1180370559014310592009-12-08T00:01:00.003+01:002010-01-29T10:49:30.088+01:00

At the recent Supernova conference (link), thought leaders discussed the network age, and what happens when “control moves to the edge”. But does it move to the edge? At Supernova, Harvard Law School professor Jonathan Zittrain dissected the ‘computing cloud”. His ‘tale of three clouds’ presents a critical view of these ephemeral structures. The most prevailing cloud notion is the computing

pvehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08966586301980201453noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12074752.post-82425373006614562842009-12-02T15:45:00.004+01:002009-12-02T15:56:48.979+01:00

This week at the SuperNova conference (link) an impressive set of business and technology leaders meets in what organizer Kevin Warbach calls: the executive forum for the network age. What new opportunities and threats appear with new network technology? Technology allows new good things to happen, like online video sharing. It also allows misuse of that technology, like copyright infringement (

pvehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08966586301980201453noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12074752.post-41868720969666750132009-11-19T23:27:00.001+01:002009-11-19T23:30:34.908+01:00

According to WatchMouse, around 40% of the hosters they do business with will support IPv6 native within 6 months, up from almost 0 two years ago. See the full story

pvehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08966586301980201453noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12074752.post-26361466304500299772009-11-19T14:27:00.002+01:002009-11-19T14:37:57.421+01:00

The Dutch IPv6 taskforce is running a contest for best contribution to IPv6.29 submissions have been received for 6 categories. There are some interesting contestants, amongst them WatchMouse, on which I reported earlier. See the full press release (in dutch).

pvehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08966586301980201453noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12074752.post-8870358953356451912009-10-30T17:05:00.003+01:002009-10-30T17:17:40.789+01:00

Operations versus development. In a lot of IT organisations these could not be more divided. I have written about that elsewhere (in Dutch though). Operations typically considers every change request as a disruption. Change are the root cause of most problems and outages.A friend of mine sent me this presentation, from Velocity 09. This describes how Flickr runs its operations and devevelopment

pvehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08966586301980201453noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12074752.post-41569120009289425942009-10-23T11:37:00.003+02:002009-10-28T10:55:34.495+01:00

Slowly, but steadily, we see progress on the IPv6 front.Finally, I found a reasonable provider of Virtual Private Server hosting with native IPv6 access (XLS Hosting). Still a few minor issues, but no showstoppers. I have moved a nummber of websites, including this blog to it. So far very few hits (grep "^2...:" /var/www/vhosts/*/statistics/logs/access_log) but that may change after this post :-)

pvehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08966586301980201453noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12074752.post-8638129795931767622009-09-15T16:19:00.006+02:002009-10-28T09:57:29.945+01:00

A couple of weeks ago, I organised a workshop on IPv6 at Hacking at Random.The on-site network had native IPv6 and sflow monitoring, so we could see what was going on.The workshop ran from 10:00 to 11:00 GMT on saturday.As you can see from the graph, IPv6 traffic increased sharply after the workshop. So I guess education helps.

pvehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08966586301980201453noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12074752.post-15282297533522519672009-09-02T07:59:00.002+02:002009-09-02T08:06:09.723+02:00

Gmail was down a while. Google describes how it happened.In essence, a mechanism designed to throttle load on heavily used parts of the infrastructure reduced total capacity. If demand is then not reduced this leads to congestion, similar to what happens in a traffic jam. One way for gmail to reduce demand is to signal to the webbrowser to decrease the frequency with which it polls the gmail

pvehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08966586301980201453noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12074752.post-53850239466364915072009-07-07T15:00:00.003+02:002009-07-07T15:03:31.223+02:00

In August I will be visiting HAR2009. My focus will be on setting up IPv6 stuff. In the works is a 'Village' for that. See the wiki. If you are going, or are interested in IPv6, please contribute.

pvehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08966586301980201453noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12074752.post-44387049165800486612009-04-03T09:01:00.002+02:002009-04-03T09:03:40.323+02:00

The guys over at Jfoobar were so kind as to translate one of my dutch columns, about buying open source. You can find it at Jfoobar. I wrote a bunch of them, so stay tuned for more on Jfoobar.

pvehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08966586301980201453noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12074752.post-42449793650151080872009-02-27T17:37:00.000+01:002009-02-27T17:39:07.124+01:00

Google executives recently claimed that YouTube users submit 13-15 hours of video material every minute. Downloads are ten times that. Although these numbers are impressive, they translate into an average viewer population of 90.000. The Super Bowl typically attracts close to 100 million viewers. American Tv networks measure their audience by the million. Popular programs attract 10-20 million

pvehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08966586301980201453noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12074752.post-6143975243369639542008-12-24T11:00:00.015+01:002009-01-14T17:03:35.181+01:00

The ‘cloud’ stands for a worldwide infrastructure of computers that can deliver applications and content to any place on the Internet. Early examples of clouds are content distribution networks (CDN), which can serve web content from a worldwide distributed network of servers. Because the servers are closer to the user the user will see quicker response. Because there are multiple servers, larger

pvehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08966586301980201453noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12074752.post-32706915866243110952008-11-27T15:07:00.002+01:002008-11-27T15:10:44.465+01:00

In the future, the dominant traffic on the internet will be video. However, it will not look like TV. Instead it will be more like video on demand, for everybody.The early internet was mainly used for interactive terminal traffic, but that soon gave way to file transfer. In the late nineties, web traffic took over. In the past year, peer to peer (i.e. file sharing) has become dominant, within

pvehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08966586301980201453noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12074752.post-43194660185210627722008-11-22T15:21:00.008+01:002009-01-14T17:04:26.927+01:00

Google App Engine is an infrastructure to deliver applications through Google’s cloud. You can drop applications written in Python in it, and let Google do the hosting. I am setting up a business based on this (GriddleJuiz).So the first obvious questions are: where is the cloud, and does it perform? With the help of my friends from Watchmouse I ran a test on one of my Google App Engine sites and

pvehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08966586301980201453noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12074752.post-71947958775874829282008-10-24T11:35:00.007+02:002009-05-22T10:14:03.132+02:00

The world is running out of IPv4 Internet addresses, which is why we should work on the deployment of IPv6. Or so the reasoning goes. The address space exhaustion is well documented and real, see also my earlier post. But how much of these addresses are really in use, and how do countries differ in that respect? Is there any chance we can recycle a lot of unused addresses? It would be interesting

pvehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08966586301980201453noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12074752.post-6901230479724440002008-09-08T09:13:00.004+02:002009-04-03T08:39:57.293+02:00

In my previous post I discussed the technical qualities of Google's new browser, Chrome. On a strategic business level, Chrome is the kick-off for a new battle for platform dominance. How can substituting one piece of free software (the browser) for another have such business impact? To understand that, you will have to look at the business model of Microsoft, and how it is affected by the

pvehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08966586301980201453noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12074752.post-1417843769758077642008-09-08T08:56:00.002+02:002008-09-08T09:11:09.363+02:00

Google's new browser, Chrome, appears to be a major improvement not so much for its functionality but for its stability.In software land, version 2 of something indicates the first serious incorporation of user feedback. In this way, Web 2.0 addressed user needs for more interactivity and multi-user, multi-site collaboration. In software land, version 2.0 brings the new functionality, but you

pvehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08966586301980201453noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12074752.post-71591801325041871692008-07-02T16:02:00.003+02:002008-07-02T16:13:33.380+02:00

Computers are terribly reliable, in general. Today's computers execute millions of instructions each second, with an error rate that is inconceivable in other technologies. Yet, if you have hundreds of thousands of machines, you do need to take care of failures. A Cnet article elaborates on the Google situation (a Google cluster has several thousands of machines):In each cluster's first year,

pvehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08966586301980201453noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12074752.post-88998561174789706152008-04-22T08:46:00.003+02:002008-04-22T09:08:31.031+02:00

At the Westminster eForum on Web 2.0 last week in London, Jim Cicconi, chief lobbyist at AT&T warned that the Internet will be fully clogged by 2010.When I worked at AT&T Bell Labs around 20 years ago, the phrase "imminent death of the net predicted" was already a running joke, so something else must be going on.In the past 20 years network bandwidth has grown by something like a factor of 1

pvehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08966586301980201453noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12074752.post-68892355639767495512008-03-21T17:36:00.007+01:002008-04-18T17:51:19.411+02:00

Websites can go down. But there is a lot more that can go wrong with all your digital assets online. Have you ever heard about site-defamations, spoofing, identity theft, plagiarism, and software vulnerabilies?How much revenue will you lose, or damage will you suffer, if any of these happen? If so, do you know how to protect your assets against these risks, without paying an arm and a leg?I am

pvehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08966586301980201453noreply@blogger.com3