Peter Coffee

If Web services will be the model for a majority of new applications in the next few years, as Gartner research released this fall projects, then it would be good if we could build those services on the lessons of the past instead of repeating past learning processes. What seems to work least well, when […]

Using hardware furnished by Sun Microsystems Inc. and the open-source Rocks Cluster Management software, a research team at last months Supercomputing conference in Phoenix assembled one of the worlds fastest computers in less than 2 hours. RockStar, a 128-node Sun Fire V60x configuration, achieved the rank of 201 on the list of the Top 500 […]

Over the course of this year, the biggest change in my IT environment has been more frequent updates to system software. Not only have there been a larger number of critical software updates, but Ive also been much more inclined to find and apply them quickly. My growing acceptance of these patches is driven by […]

Call me a mistrustful pessimist, but the question that best defines my relationship with technology is, “How do I know its working?” When I divide products and services into the sheep and the goats, to borrow a biblical metaphor, the biggest difference between one and the other is whether they tell me promptly and correctly […]

Glimpsed on a test bench at Sun Microsystems San Diego development lab, this rack units label suggests imminent release of the “Jaguar” UltraSPARC IV processors that the company has promised for shipment in the first half of next year. The 1,200MHz label confirms previous speculation that the new chip, built by Texas Instruments on a […]

People in technology industries talk about exponential growth the way teenagers talk about sex. Everyone pretends to be having it, everyone wishes they knew how to get it and none of them fully understands the implications. The result, when either process does take place, is that bad decisions at the beginning are drastically magnified along […]

Its easy to spend a lot of money chasing the wrong definition of system availability. If I were selling processors, Id tell you that uptime comes from clusters and CPU failover mechanisms. If I were selling storage, Id tell you that consistent response depends on storage area networks and speedy switching. In customer-facing applications, however, […]

Traveling through Russia last month, a BBC reporter was challenged by police after being observed taking pictures of a river. Asking why he should have sought permission to film at that location, he was told, “There was a bridge nearby.” He asked how he could have known. A bridge guard replied, “There used to be […]

I knew that someone had made a mistake when I read this headline last week, “Survey: 31 Percent of U.S. Tech-Savvy.” “Nonsense,” was my reaction, although that was not precisely the word that came to mind. The Associated Press article puts the phrase, “highly tech-savvy,” in quotation marks but does not attribute a source. It […]

No, I did not get an advance copy of the Interim Report of the U.S.-Canada Power System Outage Task Force, released last week. Any resemblance between its conclusions and my column of two weeks ago is pure coincidence—and Im more worried than gratified by this prompt confirmation of the problem that I described. The task […]