Sidhuisms pinch me hard

I am sure I am not the only one who is profusely annoyed with Sidhuisms and his cricket commentary on TV - specially the "Extra Innings T20" in the on-going DLF IPL T20.

He does appear in non-cricket TV shows too. Whenever he guffaws his way to silliness in the many reality TV comedy shows that he appears in as judge — and he does — I do not reach a heightened state of paroxysm. I just switch to another channel. I do. I have a choice. But I do not have luxury when I am watching Cricket :(

My cricket viewing commences with the pre-match analysis, the pitch report, expert’s views on team composition, the toss, the respective team captains’ reading of the pitch and their comments on team composition. My viewing experience then moves through the game and into the mid-point review of the game situation and ends with the end-game analysis. There are many like me in India that suffer the need to be continually engaged with the game (You must read the colloquiums in Bakargang during ICC World Cup 2011 - damn impressive!!!). It is also quite likely that not every cricket fan is like me and that I am in a substantial minority.

The match commentary is as important as the match itself. You cannot mute the TV, sit back and assume what must be going on. You need the crowd noise; you need to open your eyes to explore which is not obvious- via anecdotes and personal experiences of the commentators. I need additional insights that can be derived from listening to perspectives from experts who have either played the game or who understand the game differently, if not better, than me. I do not wish to explore and expose Navjot Sidhu’s limitations — and I can fill many pages writing just about his limitations. He has many! To ridicule these limitations in a medium like this would be inappropriate. 

Having said that, I wish someone would tell him that it is not necessary to start every sentence of his with “Goodness Gracious Me” or “Good Lord”! Further, I wish his producers will request him to stop using phrases like “my friend” or “you knowwwweee” in every sentence. I either know or I do not know. If he is not stating the obvious, it is likely that I might not “know”! The alternative, of course, is that I already “know”. In which case, he states nothing more than the obvious!

I do not have a choice of another channel that shows me my cricket in the way I wish to see it! 

Enter the broadcaster.....

My issue is with the broadcaster who lures me with the scholastics of Harsha Bhogle and Ian Chappell, only to leave me at the mercy of a lunatic screaming around

Hence I plead with the broadcaster: Please have two parallel programs. After all, you have several channels on which you can pipe parallel pre-show programs. Please have one for people like me and one more for the more interesting people of this world who need their testosterone levels (re)charged by a man who thumps tables and shouts!

References:

http://www.dnaindia.com/sport/column_the-good-the-bad-and-the-sidhu_1521692

Private Cloud - Needed or not!!!!

With this post I am going to stay technology agnostic. I’m also going to stay clear of marketing terms.

Let’s get something clear. A private cloud does not equal server virtualisation. A private cloud is an extension of server virtualisation. It provides a complex self-service mechanism where non infrastructure administrators can deploy services. In this context and using the ITIL view of things, a service is a business application comprised of things like IIS/Apache, SQL/MySQL, virtual machines with operating systems, application components (Perl/.NET, database schemas, and web content), and additional fabric configurations like load balancers and storage. In other words, a person from the department that manages business applications can deploy the virtual infrastructure that they need to meet a business need without any effort/time required from the IT department that manages the infrastructure.

This accomplishes a bunch of things that the business will care about. But the key piece here is that non infrastructure people are doing the deployment.

Server virtualisation is a subset of the private cloud. You can do server virtualisation without deploying a private cloud.  But you cannot do private cloud without server virtualisation.

Taking all into account (up to now, and this might change) I have one rule to answer the central question of this blog post.

Question: Do I need a private cloud
Answer: Who deploys and manages your applications?

I know, I know. I’ve answered a question with a question. Go read how I briefly described a private cloud. The think you noticed was that the infrastructure administrators were delegating deployment tasks to people who manage applications. That’s the crux. Do those people exist in your organisation?

In a small and some medium organisations, there are a few IT infrastructure administrators who do everything. They manage the firewalls, the run the domain, they do server virtualisation, they run the CRM application (I’m picking on CRM today!), they manage the SQL databases, and so on. There is no one to delegate service deployment tasks to. So what is the point in deploying all the additional infrastructure of a private cloud? There is no valid business reason that I can envision (at the moment). All that small team really needs is their virtualisation management tools, preferably joined by a set of systems management tools (no brands – I said I’d be agnostic).

On the other hand some medium and large organisations do have various different departments that manage various aspects of the business application portfolio. There will also be branch offices where servers have been centralised in a virtual farm. Here there absolutely is a reason to deploy a private cloud. The central IT infrastructure department could employ people to deploy VMs and install things like IIS/Apache or SQL/MySQL all day long. And that still wouldn’t meet the deadlines of their internal customers. Deploying a private cloud would allow those internal customers, who are IT savvy, to deploy their own services in a timely and controlled manner, using policies and quotas that are defined centrally by the business.

The rule of thumb here (at the moment) is that:
If the IT infrastructure team is doing all application deployment/management then thereshould not be a private cloud.
If there are other departments or teams that are doing application deployment/management then there should be a private cloud.

That’s my view on the “Should I deploy a private cloud?” question. I’ll be interested in other opinions. This is early days for this stuff and I figure many of the questions and answers for the private cloud will evolve over the coming years.

Are clouds on your horizon?

Cloud computing has been a hot topic in the IT industry for several years and every time you read a newsletter or industry publication, “cloud” is big in the headlines.Major industry players are now offering mature cloud computing services and products to help enterprise customers implement cloud strategies that can move IT services forward.


Those cloud strategies can vary widely. For example, many enterprises are on a declared trajectory toward an internal (or private) cloud, and many more already use external (public) clouds in some way — from software as a service (SaaS) from providers such as Google or Salesforce.com to infrastructure and platform as a service (IaaS, PaaS) from providers such as Amazon, Rackspace, Microsoft, or Strato. Whatever the approach, an enterprise cloud strategy should be as flexible as the cloud itself. It should leverage public clouds when it makes sense to do so, such as for email, office productivity tools, or CRM tools, and could move sensitive applications and data to private or hybrid clouds when these options are more cost effective.

Public Cloud Benefits

Public clouds — off-premises infrastructures that deliver IT services using Internet standards — are attractive to many organizations for a variety of reasons.
• Rapid time to value: With public clouds, businesses can quickly realize the flexibility and savings of cloud
computing because the infrastructure is already up and running.
• Risk transfer: Businesses that use public clouds transfer the risk and expense of managing the infrastructure to the cloud service provider. Service level agreements become the provider’s responsibility rather than the IT department’s, freeing IT professionals to focus on value-add initiatives.
• Capital savings: Public clouds allow organizations to achieve the benefits of cloud computing without
the capital costs associated with building a private cloud.


Private Cloud Benefits
Many businesses look to private clouds to remedy the real or perceived shortcomings of public clouds.
Benefits of private clouds include the following:
• Greater control: Because the hardware and software that make up a private cloud are on premises,
organizations can more fully control and customize the environment.
• Greater peace of mind: A private cloud often may provide greater peace of mind regarding sensitive
applications and data in part because the hardware is on premises.
• New returns on existing investments: Many organizations look to private clouds as a way to further
utilize current server assets.

Hybrid Cloud Benefits

Organizations can take advantage of the benefits of both public and private clouds when they use a hybrid cloud. With this approach, enterprises keep some data, applications, and services in house while outsourcing others to public clouds — all of which are managed through a common framework in the best implementations.

Start your Cloud journey today!!!!

Cranky Naming conventions at Microsoft

If Microsoft had invented the iPod, it would have been called the Microsoft I-Pod Pro 2005 Human Ear Professional Edition :D The proof for this is the hit video created by Microsoft themselves. It might have been a joke from the company but surely it evoked my interest in revisiting some unconventional and lamentable names that Microsoft has given to its products - the world's largest software company isn't very good in naming stuff.

1. Microsoft Word - Looking at the history of Microsoft Word,  Word for Windows 1.0 was followed by Word 2.0 in 1991 and Word 6.0 in 1993 - why did they skip Word 3.0 and so on and leaped to Word 6.0? The official explanation for this hop was that it brought the Windows edition's version number in line with older DOS incarnation of Word.

Whatever be the rationale, the move rendered the practical purpose of version numbers meaningless and set a bad example for companies like Netscape, which later went from Netscape Navigator v4.0 to v6.0

2. Handheld Devices - At first, they were called Handheld PCs and ran on Windows CE, then they called it Palm PC which enraged 3Com to file a lawsuit for infringing their trademark. Microsoft settled this matter by renaming it to Palm-size PCs. Soon, Microsoft wanted us to call them Pocket PCs which ran on Windows Mobile OS. This name stuck around when the OS migrated from PDAs to phones, although it bifurcated into two editions: Windows Mobile Pocket PC and Windows Mobile Smartphone. Then Microsoft declared that there were three Windows Mobile variants--Windows Mobile Classic, Windows Mobile Professional, and Windows Mobile Standard.. phew!!!!
Eventually, Microsoft felt that they should just scratch off the word "Mobile" and just call them Windows Phones :)

However, they could have named it Arihant as long as it doesn't keep changing :) ;)

3. .NET - In the mid-1990s, critics accused Microsoft was accused by many of being slow to jump on the Internet bandwagon. By the dawn of the new millennium, however, it was firmly on board--and in June 2000, it unveiled a vision for online services it called .NET. As originally articulated, .NET addressed consumers, businesses, and developers, and it involved everything from programming languages to an online version of Microsoft Office to calendaring and communications services to a small-business portal to stuff for PDAs, cell phones, and gaming consoles. It was so wildly ambitious, so all-encompassing, and so buzzword-laden that it pretty much defied comprehension. Which the company seemed to realize--it quickly stopped pushing the concept to consumers, instead restricting it to programming tools.

Some Microsoft names sound clunky; some are confusing; some are undignified or overambitious. More than any other company in technology, this company loves to change product names--often replacing one lackluster label with an equally uninspired one. Microsoft has also been known to mess up some names that are actually perfectly good, such as Windows and Word, by needlessly tampering with them.

P.S. I am reading about Microsoft Bob, Microsoft Office and Messenger products now