Most energy efficient (home) setup

Wed Feb 22 23:00:06 UTC 2012

> On 22 Feb 2012, at 22:04, "Stefan Bethke" <stb at lassitu.de> wrote:
> > Am 22.02.2012 um 22:48 schrieb Joe Greco:
> >=20
> >> You also don't have to
> >> buy a MMS; the lower end Mac mini's are also plenty powerful, can be
> >> upgraded similarly, but lack OS X Server and the quad core CPU.
> >=20
> > With 10.7, Server is now a $50 add-on download from the Mac App Store, n=
> o special hardware required.
> >=20
> 
> You dudes need to get with the times and put all this stuff in the cloud.

We are.  I'm just putting it in *our* cloud, not some random other
company's.

> Ok so I joke a little.. But I did move a load of stuff from a couple of ho=
> me servers to some VMs and it works fine. Less to mess around with and pro=
> b cheaper too.=20
> 
> The only thing I keep at home now is storage.

If you're keeping the storage, run some VM's alongside.  

Quite frankly, it's a little horrifying how quickly people have embraced
not owning their own resources.  On one hand, sure, it's great not to have
to worry about some aspects of it all, but on the other hand...

The web sites that we entrust our data to can, and do, vanish:

MySpace.  GeoCities.  Friendster.  Google Videos.  Which of those did
you predict would eventually fail?

The companies we pay to provide us with services screw up:

T-Mobile (Microsoft?) Sidekick.  Lala.  Megaupload.  RIM/Blackberry.

Arbitrary changes in terms of service:

Facebook.  Dropbox.  Google.

You know where I never have to worry about any of that?  On gear we own
and control.

"Cloud" is a crock of hooey buzzword.  There's no "cloud."  For the
average end user, it is the realization that we've farmed out tasks to 
unknowable servers across the Internet.  For the technical user, it's
setting up instances of servers in some large hosting company's big
data centers.  The "cloud" people refer to today is nothing more than
the continued evolution of virtualized hosting.

There's nothing magic about it.  You're trusting your data, your 
processes, or (most likely) both, to arbitrary other companies whose
responsibilities are to their shareholders and whose motives are
profits.  You have no control over the actual management, must trust
that they'll let you know if their security has been breached, and
you may never find out if someone's gone snooping.

It isn't somehow magic and new because someone calls it "cloud."
All this "cloud" stuff?  It runs on actual hardware, not up in the sky.
And as long as it runs on actual hardware, it'll run faster and better
and more responsively on equipment that's less-loaded, better-specced,
and much-closer.

Sun had it right all those years ago: "The network is the computer."
But it doesn't have to be Amazon's network, or Google's network.
We *are* the North American Network Operators' Group.  The people
here are more than just a little clued about this stuff.

I'm fine with running Netflix out of the cloud.  I can tolerate their
occasional outages and problems.  I'm fine with running other
unimportant stuff out of the cloud.  But it looks like it is going to 
be a long time before I have any real interest in running anything of
value out of someone else's "cloud."

... JG
-- 
Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net
"We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I
won't contact you again." - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN)
With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples.