Morning Thoughts 22

• The Patterns & Practices Team has started posting guidance on Visual Studio Team System. They have some interesting articles and videos to help users optimize the benefits from the product. If you use VSTS this site is an excellent resource.
• Rackable Systems introduced their fully portable data center named Concentro. Some of the key  features of the data center are:
  • 1200U of rackable space
  • Up to 9600 processing cores
  • 3.5 petabytes of storage
  • Self-contained UPS technology
  • Contained in a 40′ x 8′ container
  • A GPS tracking unit

OK, so what we learned from this is that I can have this in my backyard with enough computing power to run my installation of Vista (just kidding) and it comes equipped with a LoJack system if it gets stolen. The best though is a picture from the company website. If I enter the trailer and a voice says, "Good morning Dave" I am heading for the hills.

 

 

• Joe McKendrick writes an interesting article on how SOA is really going within many organizations. He calls what is happening an AOS (Agglomeration Of Services). While I agree this is what is happening I am not sure it is a bad step. Once companies get services created, even if they aren’t following the tenants of SOA it seems like getting to SOA is a much smaller step than going from monolithic legacy systems.
• What if we used the term webware instead of SAAS (Software as a Service) when describing vendor software delivered over the internet? That is the basis of an article by Phil Wainwright. I have to admit that I like that term much better since service is such an overutilized word. Additionally, since all that is different with SAAS is how it is delivered it breaks the connection that people seem to have between SAAS and SOA. This is a positive since the fact that a vendor is delivering a SAAS or webware product has nothing to do with if that product was designed using SOA. Harry addressed this a few days ago in his blog.