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Who Ought To Be Running Cyberspace? The Humans Or The Machines?

DPS is a new Internet-delivered service that does for computing what electric generating plants did for the power utilities nearly 120 years ago. DPS computing is a low cost, professionally managed service that combines economies of scale, professional management, reliable architecture,  autonomic oversight and management, military standard infrastructure, enterprise grade equipment and burstable resource allocation.

Cyberspace

On July 1, 2011, Newsroom Magazine relocated its server facilities from a large scale data center to YourColo, a data power station situated little more than a stone’s throw from the Ohio Statehouse in Columbus. This article shares what we learned along the way.

First off,the era of small computers is coming to an end — for there is a new way of producing and distributing computing power that’s 100% reliable, scalable, self-monitoring, actively defended, professionally maintained, standards compliant, always on line and cheap. If you think this sounds like a public utility, you’re right on.

Absent a clear name or explanation, we dubbed what promise to become computing utilities of the future Data Power Stations. We came up with this name because what were once known as  grid computing facilities are going virtual — which forever ends the bond between functionality and hardware.

Vitalization brings infrastructure sharing and time domain instantiation to grid computing in the same ways electric utilities benefited from advantages of scale and large numbers over the last 100 years.

So, what’s been common place in electric power generation is now possible in computing power sharing. While the technologies are new, and their underlying hardware implementations still in their infancy, there is good reason to believe that the advent of Data Power Stations may dwarf all prior advances in computing power production and delivery.

Power Utility Comparisons
Feature	Data Power Station	Electric Power Station
Shared Infrastructure	Large, scalable computing power production	Large, scalable electric power production
Reliability	effectively 100%	virtually 100%
Scalability	Unlimited, automated, allocatable, time domain	Limited, non allocatable, time-domain
Monitoring	Automated, ongoing, self reporting	Manual, ongoing, remote reporting
Threat Defense Systems	Complex, event capable, hardware level	Fences and guards
Operational Supervision	Online, real-time, policy driven	Human, ongoing, decision driven
Standards Compliance	Strict, platform, hardware, software	Strict, infrastructure, energy quality
Output cost comparison	1% to 10% of small scale production	Less than 5% of small scale production
Resource Sharing Model	Virtual, time-domain, metered	Real, time-domain, metered
Practical Delivery Range	Worldwide	500 miles
Maintainability	Real-time, semi-automated, no interruption of service	Off-line, manual

No More Hardware

Newsroom Publishing no longer owns or rents any physical servers. In their place YourColo provides us with virtual servers managed under VMware control and powered by one or more clusters of processing devices, optimized storage systems, defensive firewalls, and redundant power sources. Both the data center and the DPS facilities at YourColo, and John Tourloukis’ Fast PC Networks in Houston, are fully automated and overseen by a team of trained professionals.

Skip The Techno-Jargon

Newsroom Publishing’s technical group learned a great deal from our relocation and deployment experience — much of  it from one of the new technology’s visionary implementers, Todd Blank, who runs YourColo. While our technical team is composed of seasoned and experienced computing specialists, and consultants, we found the cloud computing terminology commonly tossed around to describe virtualized computing systems obtuse. Even the techno-jargon intended to be specific and clear fell far short of describing what’s really going on. Fortunately,  John Tourloukis’s narratives and Todd Blank’s explanations proved helpful in translating buzz words into meaningful information.

Telling Our Story

As we came to understand the extraordinary potential for DPS services as yet untapped, we came to know that what we learned — and will continue to learn from men like Blank and Tourloukis — would be equally valuable to others.

Newsroom Publishing has no beneficial interest in YourColo, or Fast PC Networks. Mr. Blank’s father, Harley Blank, is one of Newsroom-Magazine’s original contributors and ( science ) authors.

Lastly, this article, and its accompanying definitions and follow-up materials, are the product of Newsroom Magazine’s contributor expertise in computer systems, networks, software, support and SaaS, Mr. Blaisdell’s area of expertise, as well as our collective capabilities to write about complex subjects in largely comprehendable language.

Todd Blank, Jeffry Slee, Harley Blank, John Tourloukis And Mikael Blaisdell Contributed To This Article.

Shut Down The Boxes, Fire Up The Data Power Stations

The personal computer era is over.  It was fun while it lasted, but owning one’s own computer has always been more costly and far more demanding of energy, space and time than we realized. Since the first Altair 8-bit home computer was introduced nearly 40 years ago, anyone who wanted the benefits of a home, personal, or office computer had to pay the price. A price measured in the financial investment in equipment as well as the time investment to acquire largely unwanted skills required to set-up and operate the equipment. Then there was the personal cost — frustration when things didn’t work as expected, or failed. And countless hours lost to reboots, recoveries, re-installations and never-ending updates.

What Killed The PC?

Our thirst for personal computing capability wastes an immense amount of energy. By some estimates as much as 99% of PC power consumption is converted to heat. Worse, the heat our PCs produce requires even more energy to cool.

Then there is the up front investment and maintenance costs associated with PC ownership. If you purchased your workstation or mobile computer you made a substantial investment in hardware and software.You had to purchase software regardless of how little it might be used because it had to be resident on your PC.

PCs designed for low cost were never reliable in their operation.Troubleshooting, updating and other tekkie functions attendant to PC ownership added to PC ownership costs, consternation, frustration and lost productivity.

Waiting for reboots, some have opined, has cost hundreds of millions of PC users billions of man-hours.

While we bought PCs by the millions to serve our needs, every one of them made us subservient to their needs for backup, maintenance, and their never-ending demand for updates.

Most of those who depended on their PC for email, bank account management, or major applications ranging from word processing to image management and enhancement, enjoyed the benefits.

We’ve never focused on the PC’s many negatives in our lives because there was no other choice.

Now there is. It’s time to shut down our boxes and open a data power account.

Consider this:  Today’s personal computers are blamed for consuming as much as 3% to 10% of electrical energy output. Whichever it is, PC power consumption constitutes an immense waste.

So the first good news is that the PC era is coming to an end. None too soon, either.

The second good news is even better. Everything we’ve come to hate about computers is going away — permanently — thanks to the roll-out of always on, reachable from anywhere, cost-effective, usage metered data power stations.

DPS is a new Internet-delivered service that does for computing what electric generating plants did for the power utilities nearly 120 years ago. DPS computing is a low cost, professionally managed service that combines economies of scale, professional management, reliable architecture,  autonomic oversight and management, military standard infrastructure, enterprise grade equipment and burstable resource allocation.

And there’s far more to come. From now on, you can leave all the technical aspects of computing to professionals and concentrate on what you want and how you wish to use computing energy. And from now on, you’ll be able to do it from any device, at any time, and from anywhere in the world.

Best of all, the era of computing utilities is already here. This article was retrieved, assembled, coded and sent to your browser by one one of them even as the images were cached and delivered from a completely different and independent virtual service.

Computing Utilities

There is a new era unfolding in data centers large and small.

Large scale, centralized, standardized and interconnected computing facilities are not new — for there are massive data centers all over the world that host millions of business applications and Internet server farms. What’s new — and what makes computing utility services possible are strategic architectural and time domain capabilities that merge traditional data center redundancy, power assurance, defense and hardware management with virtualization.

Words And Meanings

Autonomic Computing

Client-Server

Enterprise Grade

Virtualization

Virtual Server

Virtual Software

Virtual Appliance

In July 2011, Newsroom magazine relocated its online server facilities to YourColo, a Data Power Station with light-pipe connections to enterprise grade Internet bandwidth providers. To put it mildly, Data Power Stations ( DPS ) do for computing what the power grid did for electric power generation and distribution. Just as you wouldn’t build a power plant in your back yard to power your home, there is no longer good reason, economically or operationally, to have your own PC.

During roll-out of Newsroom Magazine’s new facilities, YourColo’s Todd Blank assured me, “Virtualization and reliability means that our customers are free to think about the important issues in their businesses. Besides,” he added, “If people focus on the result they want to achieve, it is not necessary for them to understand the nuts, bolts, bits, or bytes.  Tell your readers to free their minds to think about results and leave the details to people like me and John Tourloukis.”

Blank’s bottom line is clear and to the point.  “We can make the IT function as reliable and ubiquitous as electricity.” Then, with a twinkle, he assured me, ” . . . actually more reliable.”

So now you know. There is an exciting and immensely powerful technological revolution underway at reliable and professionally managed data-centers that promise to dramatically lower the cost of personal and business computing even as it achieves performance and reliability far beyond anything possible with personal computer technology.  Some people call it cloud computing, some call it grid computing, we like to call them Data Power Stations  — but whatever they are called DPS technology is revolutionizing the data processing world.