From the category archives:

Cloud

While you wait

by Michael Krupa on December 28, 2009

Apologies on the delay in moving my blog to Wordpress. I could bore you with all the reasons for the delay (work, work, work, bad cold, holiday gatherings, learning the Thesis Wordpress theme etc…) but I know you could care less. You just want some new content to chew on. Especially that darn @thehrmaven who has been snapping her fingers at me. So how about a compromise? Let’s turn back the clock and remind of you some of my earlier work while you wait.

In my very first post, I told you to SaaS your SaaS. Now that was one sassy post. How about this beaut from last February when asked if you Twitter in the bathroom? In April I showed you how to convert filing cabinets into a ping pong table. Finally for all my new readers, this gem of a video from August entitled What I do (Wednesday edition) will give you the low down on my work and my passion for rescued greyhounds.

Now run along and don’t come back until I tell you I am ready.

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Cloud computing is not in a cloud

by Michael Krupa on September 9, 2009

I have been dismayed recently at all the articles and blog posts I read these days that seem to indicate that we won’t need data centers anymore with Cloud Computing. That somehow Cloud Computing runs, well, in the cloud! Now I know you all are smarter than that. Right? You know that somewhere, someplace way back behind all those wonderful fluffy clouds are big huge datacenters with hundreds and thousands of servers.

Here in our little state of Oregon, Google has built a computing center “as big as two football fields”.

Google-the-dalles

and Amazon is building a 116,770 square-foot data center near Boardman.

When you use Google, Amazon, Yahoo or any number of SaaS applications such as Salesforce.com or Workday there are servers in a data center somewhere serving up the data and application logic. Now to be fair, some of the more sophisticated cloud computing companies have stitched together servers in data centers spread all over to provide you with true 27×7 access. The “cloud” provides virtual access to your data or application so that it can be spread across multiple data centers. In certain cases (such as Google) you probably don’t have any need to know how this works. For SaaS applications (such as Workday), it is a good idea to understand exactly where the data centers are located and how the application is load balanced, backed up and configured for disaster recovery.

But at the end of the day, there are still physical data centers behind all those fluffy clouds. But you knew that anyway.

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