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.) š¦
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!
SmugMug's Don MacAskill 
What kind of crazy conditions could make you cancel a talk? They wanted you to pay?
I didn’t cancel it intentionally – it was canceled on me because I let some emails from the conference people slip through the cracks. š¦
Then you should probably change the wording of the entry, because it reads like you didn’t want to sign the contract.
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!
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.
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.
@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. š
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.
@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 š
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?
Love it! You got me so excited to get one and start shooting video!
Emails are a dime a dozen in this day and age, and easily missed. Something this important should have been followed up with a simple phone call, or even a snail mail. I've missed some important emails myself and it doesn't seem to occur to the sender to try another method anymore. Hope it works out better next time.