Archive for September, 2006
Forbes Covers The Mesh
The “Cheap Revolutionaries” cover story on the current Forbes magazine is a must read. Here are two gems:
Why buy computers when you can use Amazon’s instead?
Rent-a-Disk - Forbes.com
No commentsCirpack, a unit of Thomson in France, generates $30 million a year selling Linux-based switches. Starting with a single four-processor IBM Linux server that costs only $10,000, Cirpack adds its own software and charges up to $2 million for a switch that can handle 250,000 phone calls simultaneously. (Traditional switches with equivalent power cost $10 million and take up 500 square meters of floor space.) Carriers in Europe are using Cirpack’s cheap switches to offer “triple play” service–phone, Internet and TV–for $40 a month.
Open Source Networking
Riding The River Rapids In A Mesh Jungle
A couple of months ago in A Meshed-up Jungle Is Born, I predicted that “things will happen quickly” when meshes interconnect. Well forget about Web 2.0 or Web x.x for that matter, Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud is about to open the floodgates on a new era of what I’ve been calling the Mesh Jungle.
No commentsFor newer, “Web 2.0″ companies, providing APIs to allow third parties to “mash up” data from multiple sources is becoming commonplace.Amazon, however, is offering more than just programmatic access to its product catalog. The e-commerce giant boasts one of the most battle-tested computing infrastructures on the Internet, which it is opening up to outsiders.
“A fundamental premise behind what we are trying to do at Amazon Web Services is provide external developers all the benefits of scale that Amazon enjoys as a large Web site and large consumer and producer of Web infrastructure,” said Adam Selipsky, vice president of product management and developer relations at Amazon Web Services.
Rather than contract with a hosting company, buy hardware and hire staff, a customer could tap Amazon for computing power, storage and other general-purpose computing services.
Selipsky argued that outsiders can tap into the performance, reliability and security that the engineers of Amazon.com created over the years, which includes a total technology investment of more than $1.5 billion.