Archive for July, 2011

How to Get Ham and Eggs

If you want scrambled eggs, you can get them at McDonald’s (one choice) or at a restaurant (four choices). You can call that Eggs-as-a-Service (EaaS). It is cheap but the choices are limited. You can also rent an apartment.  You can cook the eggs anyway you wish. You can call that Eggs-as-a-Platform (EaaP). Costs more, [...]

Wednesday, July 20th, 2011

Optical Fiber or Wireless?

I have just returned from an Australian lecture tour, which included meetings with government officials in Canberra. I discovered that Australia is engaged in a vigorous debate about a greater than $36 billion investment in broadband optical fiber. A new, state owned network monopoly, would deliver to every home at least 1 GB of bandwidth [...]

Monday, July 4th, 2011

Software-as-a-Service as Ultimate Goal of Cloud Computing

A recent example of fracturing of systems into smaller components is found in a March 2011 U.S. Government Accountability Office report on the U.S. Navy’s Next Generation Enterprise Network program. To increase the number of bidders for a major system, the acquisition executives expanded it from the existing three contractual relationships to 21. Instead of [...]

Saturday, July 2nd, 2011

Legislative History: The Brooks and Clinger-Cohen Acts

The roots of the current Defense Department information technology culture can be traced to the Brooks Act of 1965. This legislation reflected a mainframe view of computing. Its purpose was to limit the growth of data centers to constrain costs. The Brooks Act was based on the assumption that if the General Services Administration would [...]

Saturday, July 2nd, 2011

Cultural, not Technological Obstacles for DoD

PIA-based hybrid networks differ from the client-server environment and even more from the mainframe data center environment. For example, in the client-server environment, there are multiple links from desktops to the servers. An estimated 15,000 networks are in place in the Defense Department providing such connectivity. In the hybrid cloud environment, there is only a [...]

Saturday, July 2nd, 2011