I’m *not* speaking at Cloud Computing Expo 2008
Just a quick update, I was invited to speak at Sys-Con’s Cloud Computing Expo 2008 West (how’s that for a mouthful?) and accepted, planning on talking about SkyNet, S3, and our future use of cloud computing. Alas, my Inbox is so crazy, I failed to see the handful of emails the conference sent me asking me to sign a contract of some type. So I missed the deadline and they canceled my spot. (BTW, I can’t recall a conference ever asking me to sign something to speak, but this one does and I was full of FAIL.) 
So, I’m sorry, despite being listed on the program, I’m *not* speaking there this week. It was my bad – I just missed the emails (as I miss so many emails these days). But still, a phone call from them wouldn’t have hurt, would it?
Who knows if I’ll be on their invitation list next year, but the conference will be great anyway, so have a great time without me!
Tags: cloud computing, cloud computing expo, conference, s3, skynet, smugmug, speaking, sys-con
November 17th, 2008 at 7:47 pm
What kind of crazy conditions could make you cancel a talk? They wanted you to pay?
November 17th, 2008 at 11:31 pm
I didn’t cancel it intentionally – it was canceled on me because I let some emails from the conference people slip through the cracks.
November 18th, 2008 at 9:17 am
Then you should probably change the wording of the entry, because it reads like you didn’t want to sign the contract.
November 18th, 2008 at 3:02 pm
If you had presentation slides all ready to go or anything else cloud related that’s not already in your blog I’d love to see it!
November 19th, 2008 at 7:29 am
That’s incredibly lame on the part of the organizers. I can’t imagine what sort of ridiculousness could cause them to cancel one of the best speakers they could get. They couldn’t just have you sign the contract when you get there? Some people just don’t get it.
November 21st, 2008 at 10:47 am
Don, I’ve been looking at alot of Sun’s new products in both software and hardware. Have you investigated or at least played with the idea of virtualizing your infrastructure? Like for instance, with the big movement to virtualized environments, the underlying hardware doesn’t play AS MUCH of a role anymore. So an interesting example may be, have you thought of maybe utilizing a different hardware platform like SPARC based ones that have higher performance density and lower power consumption while running linux OSs on top of it? I’m currently playing with the idea myself. I supposed for your industry the primary determinant would be any overhead caused by the virtualization. But then again, perhaps the performance gains by using a different hardware subset will more than offset any additional overhead.
I’m just spouting stuff off the top of my head. Just wondered if you’d given it any thought like I am.
November 21st, 2008 at 11:16 am
@Robert D:
We basically fully utilize the hardware on each of our systems, so there aren’t any gains to be had with virtualization (instead, there’d be losses – virtualization comes with performance overhead in addition to operational overhead). Partly that’s just because we’re not an enormous organization – we don’t have 10,000 servers, so we can’t/don’t need to load shift.
Secondly, our tests with SPARC proved to be pretty bad. We got both lower performance and higher power consumption with the CMT chips (T1000) than AMD Opteron systems, so that quickly turned into a no-go.
November 21st, 2008 at 11:17 am
@Chris Mulligan: Thanks for the kind words! Seemed bizarre to me too – I can’t imagine every busy speaker gets every email, so a phone call or something would have been nice. Oh well, I was trying to them a favor. I’m happy to have my week back
November 21st, 2008 at 2:28 pm
I’m curious Don, what went wrong with the SPARC implementation? Just piss poor performance with mysql and php? Did you take measurements on the actual power usage as well? If so, how did that portion stack up?
November 6th, 2009 at 3:55 pm
Love it! You got me so excited to get one and start shooting video!