ReadWriteWeb

If you are using a spreadsheet to track your data center equipment inventory, then take a moment and read this post. You might want to consider using something else that can actually track your assets. From where I sit, many IT managers grossly underestimate the efforts in this process.

Imagine your staff is ordering equipment for your data center and it's going right to the storeroom, not just without being deployed, but also without being inventoried. Then it sits there, depreciating in value and collecting dust. This is just one of the horror stories I've heard in the field. The company this happened to ultimately discovered that, in just a six week period, it had accumulated more than $700,000 in depreciation costs for assets that were not being used.

Tim Berners-Lee, to his credit, did not invent the Internet. He did have one good idea. He was not the first person or even the twelfth with the same idea, but he did make it work. Yet most of the underlying work - the bringing together of dozens of communications systems with slightly or wildly varying protocols - was done before him. He just plugged it in, and for that, he gets most of the credit.

What made the Internet, and thus the Web, possible - the thing that, without which, Tim Berners-Lee would still be watching reruns of "Eastenders" - was a decision. The major carriers of electronic mail, whose business it had become to route messages to each other's members, collectively reached a truce. They decided that the long, endless fight over who has the biggest volume, the longest distance, the fastest network, so that one could charge the others more postage than it was being charged, was too expensive and was stifling progress. They decided to call off the war. I know. I was on the phone with them the moment it happened.

For any kind of provider of network service, every five years or so, the infrastructure procurement problem becomes a long-term guessing game. Where will we be in six years' time? And can we afford today the bandwidth that we'll need in six years, because it takes time to build out and deploy this infrastructure, as well as recoup the costs?

This is where Brocade Networks - for years the up-and-comer in the enterprise switch and router market - aims to differentiate itself. Today the company is announcing an alternative revenue model for providers seeking to build bandwidth for their own services. Rather than make them procure enough infrastructure to hold them for the next six years, Brocade will begin offering a subscription model that it calls "cloud-optimized." With this alternate model, customers can pay for the infrastructure they need on a pay-as-you-go system, by the month.

Your startup's early infrastructure decisions are probably the most painstaking and time-consuming ones you'll have to make, for both the technologists and the businesspeople on your team.

It is hard to know what your company and product will need (and be) 6, 9 or even 12 months down the line - especially today, in the era of the pivot, and the lean startup. Get it wrong, and you're going to spend a lot of money later fixing the problem - just ask Twitter or Facebook.

This morning Citrix announced its acquisition of Cloud.com, a company that sells virtualization infrastructure for building private clouds. Cloud.com brings with it a number of high profile customers such as Bechtel, GoDaddy, Tata Communications and Zynga.

The announcement follows Citrix's announcement of its private cloud infrastructure play called Project Olympus, which is based on OpenStack. Citrix will continue to support OpenStack and will integrate Cloud.com's technology into its offerings.

Oracle recently published details of the Oracle Optimized Solution for Enterprise Cloud Infrastructure, a set of recommendations and best practices for building Oracle certified private cloud infrastructure stacks. It includes optimized configurations for applications and virtual machine templates.

The stacks consist of Sun Blade servers, Oracle Solaris or Oracle Linux, Oracle VM Server, Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center, Oracle/Sun ZFS storage solutions and Sun networking technology.

Yesterday former Google Wave engineer Dhanji R. Prasanna wrote on his blog about why he is leaving the company. It's an interesting look at Google's company culture, but there's also an interesting technical nugget in there. "Google's vaunted scalable software infrastructure is obsolete," Prasanna wrote. He emphasizes that the hardware infrastructure is still state of the art, "But the software stack on top of it is 10 years old, aging and designed for building search engines and crawlers."

Prasanna says software like BigTable and MapReduce are "ancient, creaking dinosaurs" compared to open source alternatives like Apache Hadoop.

It's really about speed these days. And data. And the right infrastructure so the data can all flow and keep the business running smoothly.

The Critical Importance of the New Data Infrastructure by John Titllow of ReadWriteweb is a brief that explores the impacts that can have when it comes to your organization.

Questions covered in the report include:

Update: A spokesperson for Citrix has clarified that what Citrix is releasing is not actually an IaaS: "The company is launching a product that public and private clouds can build their IaaS services on (they won't competing with established IaaS providers)."

Today Citrix announced that it will launch a new infrastructure-as-a-service based on the OpenStack platform. The new service is called Project Olympus and will be available for as both a public cloud and as a platform for private clouds. The first offering, which will include a "cloud-optimized" version of Xen Server, should be ready later this year.

Following SendGrid's price adjustments yesterday, Tropo today announced that it's lowering its cost for sending SMS messages to 1 cent per message.

What do SendGrid, a mass e-mail sending service, and Tropo, an API for telecommunications, have in common? Both are part of a growing software category called infrastructure apps.