And I was not disappointed in this year’s show, 26 – 29 April 2010!  I met quite a few people there, and we discussed future trends, revisited last year prognosis with today’s achievements. 

Smart phones with their ever emerging new product lines, sporting exciting features and capabilities — and you still can place a simple telephone call!   Wonders never cease…  

Then 3D technology, Internet enabled TVs, fully digitally equipped recording equipment, computerized and completely automated studios, and what not. 

Robot technologies finding their ways in modern appliances and cars.  Smart grid is the next hot thing. 

Hardware with software kits are available for literally just a few dollars to build your own embedded systems.  Micro-chips are becoming smaller and smaller, more powerful and less expensive; the possibilities are endless!

Without going into the details of the all the various Hot Topics and solutions displayed— see eetimes.com, embedded.com, hackaday.com, etc., etc. — I just want to add a few of my favorite highlights:

• Display of the original German (WW-II era) ENIGMA, a sophisticated coding machine, fully functional, and not under glass.  Thank you, cryptography.com!
• The “SpeedCuber” — built from a LEGO Mindstorms Robot kit and the program logic and camera of the Motorola Droid, communicating via Blue Tooth — that solved the Rubik’s Cube in just a few minutes.  Demos at the ARM pavilion, arm.com.
• Badges now sporting RFID; quite a common trend now.
• EE Times coordinated the treasure hunts: you’d follow in TWITTER @esc_blast, and the tweets (forwarded as SMS to your mobile phone) included instructions what to do and where and how, with the first person to win the prize.

Well, I won a few prices (only a handful folks seem to use TWITTER?); one of my favorites as broadcast by EE Times:

“esc_blast: Jurgen Menge scores LEGO MINDSTORMS Robot Kit @EET Scavenger Hunt.  Thx NI–Robots Rock!  More goodies Thurs @ #esc_events http://ow.ly/i/1ibX“

Next year we will see more solutions in the nano and DNA-like technology, further miniaturizing system and computer components.  The (customized) chip will be in the size of a fingernail and more powerful than a PC eight years ago. 

Blue Tooth and  RFID gaining momentum.  Fiber-Channel and fiber-optics are becoming essential for high-speed data communication.  Wireless USB, USB 3.0, SATA 6 then SATA 12, SAS 6 are available now or are in the process to be finalized, respectively.

Smart phones and touch screen systems will provide applications currently not thought off.  BTW, as to smart phones: Yes, you’d still be able to place and receive telephone calls!

The technological avalanche has only begun…

I plan to visit the next ESC in San José as well: 2 – 5 May 2010.  CU!

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© May 2010 Jürgen Menge, San José

New Technology

Overall, analog audio and video is a thing of the past, everything is now fully digital, high resolution, high quality, high performance and real-time thanks to vast and inexpensive processing power, high-speed network, and storage.

Online and intelligent playlists or scripts accessing the contents though databases support the full automation of radio and TV stations.

And yes, HD and 3D were the highlights at the show:  While the CES (see one of my earlier blogs) demonstrated 3D TV (front-end), the NAB more emphasized on the back-end.

Full HD cameras, even 3D, with set of microphones, recording on stamp-size memory chips, wireless transmission to audio and video processing studio, anchors or actors in green (formerly blue) rooms mixed-in the content or the virtual world, broadcast live and stored on clusters and arrays of hard drives.

Lighting is moving away from the former candescent bulbs with their tremendous (and unwanted) heat to power-efficient and ultra-bright LEDs.  The advantage of the letter: light is on and off immediately, no additional high-speed shutters required, no warm-up and cool-down.

Camera and microphone arms following the object, fully computer controlled in a steady move and focus.

The Web

Internet is becoming more and more the broadcasting medium of the future: All the content available — on demand — with a simple mouse click.  No waiting and arranging your life to fit specific broadcast schedule; no frustration when you then had to find out the show was a rerun or got cancelled because some sports event overran.

And on a private note:  Do cable and satellite companies really think that consumers want a selection of hundreds of channels?  Just to learn that the four or five programmes you were really, really interested in were not offered?  And in the end you start recording the shows because of scheduling conflicts and what not!  And to not waste your time staring at boring if not stupid and often deceiving commercials.  (What is the rocket science that companies have such a hard time providing entertaining and truthful advertisement???)

… else

During the NAB Show quite a few sessions were offered.  You could learn about (possible) trends; what will be the broadcast of the future; the demand that is seen coming and growing.

The consumers will more and more take an interactive role, will become participants.  Online-games already demonstrate that quite lively!  TV stations building fan communities, have their viewers respond with a live broadcast (e.g., “who done it”, or, “what will evolve from there”, etc.).

Innovative ways need to be explored, to attract sponsors, to help pay for the broadcast.  I would see that in the very near future not the number of viewers are the only determining factor anymore (broadcasts for the masses), but content bringing in most revenue (broadcasts for smaller audience paying higher premiums).

To some extend this trend is seen when comparing commercial Radio & TV to public Radio & TV to subscription Radio & TV.

And I hope the educational potential of Radio and TV together with the internet is being embraced much more.  Offer and help the citizens to learn — and without ideology, please!  To become informed.  Which TV station wants their viewers become “couch potatoes”, if not zombies…  

Note: Broadcasters have a responsibility to their consumers.  And quite a few realize that that is not a contradiction to making money.

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© April 2010 Jürgen Menge, San José

There is not much difference there between a (becoming) Start-Up or an established company: You will make a determination whether the new product makes sense pursuing; or, looking from the other angle, can we allow not to bring out the new product.

The  “Idea” will be analyzed and its potential for success examined; and important questions such as “what does it take” and “what does it cost” need answers.

Business Plan

The feasibility of said idea will be outlined, and the three basic areas addressed:

• Who is your customer?
• What appeals them?
• How will they get the product?

A Business Plan would includes an Overview of the industry of the company and Trends with Market and Competitive analysis; a Mission Statement; then Management, Marketing, Finance, Operating plans.

Once the “go ahead” is achieved, the next step follows.

Market or Product Requirements Document

Product marketing provides the description of the new product, its purpose, the features, the target market and the customers,and the opportunities, comparing against older versions (if any) and competing products, pricing and position, strengths and weaknesses.

The product may be part of a roadmap, embracing trends and new technologies as they will become available.  The MRD or PRD will  specify goals, delivery dates, system and technical requirements, compliance, documentation, quality and testing, support, and perhaps planned life-cycle.

Following the holistic approach, development teams (hardware engineering, software engineering, technical publications, quality, etc.) perhaps key suppliers and partners, and customer sales and service, are included in the very early stages to ensure the document is sound and specifications and goals and contingencies clearly understood and agreed upon in one pass.

Project Plan

Depending on the type and complexity of the product, whether it is a brand-new product or one that just got a bit revised, will determine the amount of preparations involved until start of the project.

A detail plan is then drafted to list the efforts required and the resources needed, the anticipated costs involved and the complete time line.  A variety of tasks and subtasks are then identified with specific owners, priorities, efforts and resources and duration, inter-dependencies to other tasks highlighted, and such.

There can be also situations or events that will need to be included as well:  Availability of certain rooms, machinery or equipment, awaiting Compliance Certifications, etc.   Engineers working on various products may be “over-booked”; so conscious decisions re priority and affected tasks to coordinate  among various products or projects are necessary.

Once the various pieces are compiled together, all or at least most of the resource requirements and prerequisites known, cost estimates are calculated.  Questions to answer are:

• Can we do it?
• Everyone on board?
• Does it still makes sense?

If the answers are satisfactory, and the price tag is below the, well, “walk away” limit, the product development can continue.

Design Document

Each task requires a clear scope, precise specifications, a functional design where applicable, interfaces need to be listed and defined.  Where one task is dependent of others, the hand-off parameters and the expectations have to be exactly spelled out.

The more detail (and thought!) is going into the design, the less problems will arise during development.  A simple misunderstanding or a potential situation not considered early on and caught in initial stages, can have severe consequences if detected only very late and the repair turns out to be rather complex.

Of course, the design is a “living thing”, it may have inaccuracies, or requirements were revised due to economic or technological changes, or a detail may become more time consumptive than planned.  There is consequently continuous feedback from development to design (and product marketing) teams.

Quality & Test and other teams (documentation, training, service) are involved in early stages so that they prepare appropriately and are ready for the new product to come.  An elaborate test plan will be authored to spell out the tasks and procedures that are run to ensure the developed product is in fact the one described in the design.  Manufacturing and sales and support teams (and the customers) will require product manuals and training courses.  Perhaps an older products is being phased out, so migration plans to the next product have to be outlined.

Development Stage

To shorten the overall cycle time, bigger tasks (say, those taking longer than two or three months) are carefully split into smaller, ideally independent tasks.  That way, the various teams (documentation, development, quality & test, operations, etc.) can work in parallel, rather awaiting full completion of the bigger tasks in their individual phases.  Potential problems may arise where smaller, already completed tasks need to be revisited or perhaps even redone, due to discoveries or findings from subsequent tasks…

In each hand-off (from one team to the other), a checklist of the planned / accomplished (sub)tasks, with a updated action items chart.  Program management drives the product development, monitors and communicates status of each task with the teams and stakeholders, ensures deliverables are fulfilled and milestones achieved — in time and on budget.

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(to be continued)

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© March 2010 Jürgen Menge, San José

I must confess, I have a more academic interest there, still looking for the solution that kept me nagging when working for Mobile Information Systems (Offering real-time solutions for the time-sensitive, same-day transportation industry) — now an entity of Oracle — in year 2000.  Something that I was so used to when I had worked with Unisys in the System Software development in one of my former lives…

Software Releases

As products evolve over time new versions are designed and developed and will become available to the market.  These can be (labeled) completely new software products and customers can choose to pay for the upgrade.  And new revisions or support packages are provided to the user to update their existing software to the most recent level.

Companies release new software products to provide new functionality (aka, features)  to their users, to support new hardware components and devices, to improve usability, to tighten security, and — naturally — make use of the ever increasing resources in processor, memory, disk space, etc.

Using the software you may encounter incidents where the product does not do what it is supposed to do.  That can be a subtlety where, say, the output is not properly aligned.  Or more drastically, where the input is not processed correctly.  And that can range to more serious problems of security leaks or data loss, if not the abort of the application or even the underlying operating system.  Software releases are, therefore, also the vehicle to distribute a list of bug fixes or corrections to said problems.

As nature of things go — after all, computers are only human, too! —, a new release may not only be the latest and greatest thing, it can also introduce new problems.  Perhaps some hardware component or software function not supported anymore.  Or new bugs frustrating the user.

There are a variety of reasons a user does not want to move to a new main release and expects that recent releases still to be supported.  Consequently, companies maintain several main and support releases, replicating development and addressing incidents and providing patches to the given “dot” release.  Eventually, older releases are phased out and their support will cease.

Release Streams

Main releases, as mentioned before, introduce new functionality and are intended to advance the company in a competitive market, increase share and revenue stream.  Likewise, said company needs to ensure their products are “bug free”; even if it means to continuously provide resources and fix incidents over the life of the product.

A company will, therefore, enjoy a variety of software releases.  A few main releases with various support or patch releases.  A software product usually consists of a variety of individual pieces, programs, drivers, user interfaces, messages, reports, libraries, third party components, and what not.  All these parts comprise — are controlled through — the release stream.  And perhaps there are also special software packages with different set of features, supporting specific hardware components, etc.

And while plans are executed to phase out older releases, there are already the future releases and schedules on the drawing board: specifications are laid-out and defined for the new product to be.  Functional and detail design are written, and eventual resources are planned and assigned for the development, documentation, test, etc.

Good strategy is to introduce new (major) functionality only in main releases = new products, whereas support or patch releases (branched off from the underlying main release) are more the vehicle to further stabilize the release with well-defined sets of software or product fixes.  (L10N and I18N also comes to mind.)

Software Development Suites record each individual modification to the software components, Software Life-Cycle and Change Management tools help to keep overall track.  The Task database on the other hand is the repository containing incidents reported and feature requests against given releases, severity and priority, detail description or specification, current task status and updates, department and engineer assigned, etc.

While certain problems can be more readily detected during the normal use of the product (the goal of the quality assurance team, naturally, should be to find said problems before the user installs the product!), others, however, may not be obvious to the end-user.  Either, the problem does not occur in the specific environment of the user; or, it may be some security exploit, the user would not even notice.  Whatever the nature, chances are that the incident could occur not just in one but in other releases as well.

Consequently, each software release stream is then reviewed and determination made, whether a fix will need to be replicated — or perhaps newly developed —, based on the problem at hand and the prerequisites and requirements of the given release stream.

Software Quality

While the software developer working on a new feature or creating a fix for a reported incident is doing the due-diligent to ensure the software change is doing what it is supposed to do (and there may also additional code reviews), based on the design or the description of the incident, it is later the software quality team’s task to put the final stamp of “passed!”.

Of course, the patches are not tested as soon they become available, rather, the defined collection of such software features and fixes are included in a formal release cut-off process and then handed over to the software quality team.  The interval of such cut-off can be weekly, monthly, daily; whatever makes most sense in the current situation.

The software quality takes the handed-off release stream and deploys the product on their prepared environment, what can be a fresh install or an update.  Part of the hand-off are release notes, updates of the task database linking the features and fixes to one or more changes in software and/or documentation.

A set of test runs are started (automated or manual) confirming the working of the feature or fix (Conformance testing) while assuring that no new incidents were introduced (Regression testing).  The tests and the results are carefully documented following the key principles: a test shall be repeatable, the results reproducible, and the test environment reliable.

There may be situation that a patch or a series of patches need to be pulled (and updating the task database, hopefully, setting task status appropriately), perhaps due to product stability concerns.  Software engineering is then addressing concerns based on the documentation provided.  Once software quality puts there “QA stamp” on the given release, that release is then ready to proceed to the next phase; e.g., handing over to professional services to customer deployment, publishing on web site for download, etc.

Release Readiness

Closing in on the scheduled release date, the software team re-evaluates the planned and prioritized features and fixes against those that are available and have passed testing.  Questions to answer are: Is the release process on target?  If not, what is missing and what would it take?  Are the missing pieces requirement for the target release?  What are the consequences if the schedule were to slip?  Would it make sense to get the product out as it and publish a revision soon after?

There can be different approaches to tackle these problems (and I may elaborate further in a separate blog).

Whatever the outcome, eventually the product is signed off and ready to go.  Let’s celebrate!  

And the next releases are already in the making…

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(to be continued)

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©  March 2010 Jürgen Menge, San José

To ensure the configured system is up to the task it makes sense to design and run specific jobs and monitor the system under load. Those jobs should reflect the profile usual anticipated during the day-to-day operation, especially during peak demand.

Questions usually are:

1. How much can the system take, i.e., how many jobs can be run concurrently without major impact to system response.
2. What is the overall system utilization, any bottlenecks.
3. Where can system performance be improved?

We distinguish between batch and dialog jobs.

Batch and Dialog

Batch jobs are those that are started, running in background and will not need any user interaction. Batch jobs (e.g., a report generation) is expected to complete within a certain time (several minutes at least), and, when rather complex, may be run during off-peak hours.

Dialog jobs are usually in continuous interaction with the user. Dialog jobs (e.g., order entry, status inquiry, etc.) are also be run during peak hours. System response is key and should be very short (a second or two).

Typical there is a certain mix, a profile of dialog jobs and batch jobs; those are usually different for peak and off-peak times.

Using appropriate tools batch jobs and dialog jobs can be designed. A set of batch jobs, generating specific reports. And recording dialog sessions that will be then used to simulate dialog jobs. Part of said tools are also schedulers to start and monitor the jobs, concurrently up to a maximum count, in sequence to ensure continuous load, etc. And in particular ensuring the dialog job with simulated user interaction is closely resembling a real dialog session.

What is needed

Once the prepared jobs are designed and in place, each jobs is run individually on the idle system to determine the resource requirements of each job:

• elapsed time, measured from begin to end of the job
• system time used to begin and end the job
• processor time recorded for the job
• main memory and pagefile usage
• disk I/O and network I/O utilization
• plot of all system resources before, during, and after the job.

When we run several batch jobs concurrently, we could certainly expect the elapsed time to eventually increase for the given job, while the system resource consumption (processor and I/O time, memory usage) should stay the same. Until we reach the threshold of a high system load.

In addition to the overall elapsed time a dialog job requires more measure points, to observe (from the user) the responsiveness of the system. Each individual pair of (simulated) user input and resulting system reply is to be looked at. To be as realistic as possible, appropriate think times are incorporated.

Think time is the time the user usually needs to prepare the input into the system (e.g., listening to the request, moving the mouse to a specific field, typing the data, etc.); i.e., after each system response, there is a certain delay or pause until the next user input is transmitted to the system.

Consequently, the following additional data is recorded:

• elapsed time between user input and system response
• deviation of the programmed think-time.

Then setting a few goals. What would be a feasible increase in elapsed time (batch) during load.  What are acceptable response times (dialog).

Then let’s run the prepared profile of batch and dialog jobs, increase the load, monitor the system utilization, and determine where and when we would reach a point of, well, “unbareablilty”…

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(to be continued)

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© March 2010 Jürgen Menge, San José

The other day I thought how a dispensing machine would work and challenges at hand.  Here a very brief summary.  (And surely, there are patents available describing a variety solutions. )

Certainly, there are subtleties about the objects to be taken into account.  While, say, a one-Dollar coin is firm and cannot be easily bent or broken, that will not hold true for a pill of aspirin or a piece of smarties.

The objects can scrap against each other, tilt, and may block passage.

Let us assume that humidity and temperature are within specs, otherwise the objects could change form and shape, would become sticky and perhaps even “melt” together.

One solution for a dispenser would be a container with an opening in the bottom.  A problem could arise when the mass of objects could become too heavy so that the individual objects cannot move against each other and basically would not come out.  Shaking the container could cause temporary relief, but there is danger of damaging the objects, in particular those at the bottom.

Another type of solution would take the objects from the top.  I would see there

a)  an uplifting conveyor belt and

b)  the Archimedes’ screw.

With these methods the individual object is more gently worked.  Disadvantage could be the leaving out the last objects when the container is getting empty.

The most sophisticated solution would include a set of cameras, and a robot controlled arm would select the individual object and carefully “spoon” it out.

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© February 2010 Jürgen Menge, San José

Well, I survived and recovered after just a few weeks.     And I only visited the show, I was not an exhibitor and running demos, answering questions, holding business conferences, and what not during my time with Fuze3.

These were the highlights at the CES:

Your new TV Experience

1. 3D-TV — A new trend, and as 3D movies are now a wee bit cheaper to produce, you notice more and more 3D movies offered in the cinemas.  While 3D movies were not so popular in the video and TV market, that is going to change!
   The former solution separating the, well, visual channels using card-board spectacles with green/red or purple/yellow colored lenses left much to be desired.

   The new solutions demonstrated at the CES are using polarized glasses.I saw products (more for video games) displaying right and left simultaneously on a monitor with two video inputs, (card-board) spectacles with (fixed) polarized lenses suffice.

   The more high-end solution for the 3D-TVs use polarized shutter-glasses, turning the LCD lenses black alternating between left and right with 120 Hz.  The synchronization between the spectacles and the displayed video is done with an IR transmitter at the TV or 3D BluRay player and the IR receiver in the glasses (replace its coin cell battery frequently).

2. IP-TV and TV widgets — OK, using a BluRay player with BD-live the link TV to internet is already a given.  (Remember just 10 years ago the set-top boxes to display internet content on the TV?  Reading text on the analog TVs was a bit of a pain…)The new TVs will come with direct internet connectivity to provide streaming video, be it video-on-demand from providers such as NetFlix or Vudu, Hulu, and others, reruns available from the various TV broadcasters’ web sites, or content from social media such as MyVideo, YouTube, etc. , etc.

Smart Phones, Touch Screens, Gesture Controls

1. Resolutions on screens of today’s smart phones or handhelds are incredible; reading books or web content with crisp letters, sharp pictures is a fun exercise.  Sporting high-end graphics and fast processors, equipped with large storage space, WiFi capable, a photo/video camera, and what not, those little gadgets have a performance easily surpassing what was considered a fast PC just few years ago.A variety of applications (aka, Apps) is readily available for download and use.  Put in a SIM card, and you can even use your device to place and receive calls; when you are not watching TV. 

   Would have Johann Phillip Reis ever imagined what his telephone would become 150 years later?

2. The evolution of the smart phones really took off with use of touch screens.  Just point your finger(s), select and start the app, scroll or resize the image; much easier than – after successfully locating it somewhere on your screen, first — to move the mouse pointer to the desired spot there and perhaps press a few control keys in the process.Touch screens are more and more becoming every day use.  Automated Teller Machines at your local bank, self-checkout terminals in stores, navigation and multimedia center displays in your car, monitors in hospitals, oscilloscopes and waveform monitors and analyzers, the thermostat to control A/C and heater in your home, and the list goes on and on.

   Solutions are available to even allow several users to control apps simultaneously on the same (larger) screen.  Say, select the photos and arrange them to build and print an album; review a catalog and place orders; or just play games together.

3. There can be cases where you cannot touch the screen, it may be out of reach, there may be hygienic reasons.
   What now?

   In the 60-ies Disneyland had prepared displays showing mannequins that basically where remotely controlled robots.  Scenes were prepared showing episodes from favorite feature films with said robots as actors.

   In reality, behind the scenes human actors were strapped in some sort of armor sporting large arrays of sensors, to capture each and every movement of the human, from the whole body, to the head with the eyes and lips, the arms and individual fingers, and so on. All that data was then transmitted in hundreds of cables  and controlled said robot, following its, well, master like a puppet on an electronic string. In real-time.

   That technology soon evolved into capturing and storing all the movements on a special tape recorder.  And the robots were now operated by just playing back those tapes.

   Over time the manual process was then automated using (then a room full of) powerful computers  to controlling more sophisticating machines.  Quite spectacularly shown when the first Star Wars movies came out.

   Today, that idea of Walt Disney’s is as live as ever.  Instead of a truck-load of sensors and over-sized trunks of cables, a simple camera or a set of cameras suffices: The capturing and the control through gestures!

   A computer “sees”, i.e., recognizes eyes, fingers, and what not, analyzes their movements.  That then is translated into the corresponding action.

   You select a 3D image just by pointing, wiggling a finger to zoom in or out, rotate to the desired viewing angle.
   Or you operate devices in a clean room, located perhaps thousands of miles away; just move your hands and pretend you are touching controls.

   Or you are the puppeteer of an avatar in an adventure movie… 

else…

1. New smart phones with a plentiful of features.  And yes, you can still place and receive a telephone call!  
2. eye.fi — I found their products since quite some time, a WiFi capable SD card; i.e., while taking a picture, your photo will not only be stored on the SD card but also transmitted over your local wireless network or even the internet to a host.
3. Smart Meters, Smart (WiFi) Plugs, etc.  All to become very useful for the emerging Smart (electrical) Grid.  More products to watch out soon!
4. Wireless Displays — get away of video cables; send the HD stream to your TV or monitor using your WiFi network.
5. BluRay players with built-in HDD, to store or buffer your video-on-demand stream, to store your multimedia files there to playback your songs, your photos, etc.
6. …

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Coming up:  The NAB Show hosted in Las Vegas (10–15 April).
Shall I go?

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© February 2010 Jürgen Menge, San José

Cloud Computing:

“Cloud” = the network (the internet / intranet / extranet) as the connectivity platform of an any-to-any communication.  Add to that devices with computing power inter-connected through said cloud that providing or using services.

Telecom:

The backbone of today’s telecommunication network is the (digital) Intelligent Network (IN), digital, that has replaced the older trunks of zillion of point-to-point telephone lines connecting one subscriber to another through a variety of central offices, switchboards, and the like.  In the 60-ies UNIX computers were interconnected and identified the most economical and least congested (analog telephone) lines to connect calling party A to B.  Now high-speed data lines carry packets of information that contain voice, video, data, and control information across the so-called “Information Autobahn”, a network of now mostly fiber-optic cables with speeds in excess of tens of Gigabits/sec.  Specific mechanisms (detailed in standards such as Signaling Service No. 7, or SS7) ensure the packets that may have travelled through different routes over various (computer) nodes within said IN are then put together at the receiving side.  Certain protocols describe what to do in case of a lost or corrupted packet.

Two main principles:  Is it data, then the receiver transmits request to resend the packet and waits until successful — data integrity is key.  Is it voice, then the packet is simply ignored, to allow continuous flow of the live communication.  Some static may do where the attempt to reconstruct failed — real-time is the key.

Software @ Network:

In the early days, dumb terminals were connected to a mainframe, then X-terminals to UNIX servers.  The hosts providing storage and computing services, the clients executing programs remotely on the host.  Now PCs connected to service providers on the internet will run applications on those servers…

Heard of the SETI project?  Fragments of collected (extraterrestrial) data sent to subscribed PC to number-crunch in their “spare time” (i.e., when the screen saver kicked in), search specific patterns, and sending results back.  Cloud computing at its best! 

History Highlights:

2009:  40 years UNIX; 35 years TCP/IP; 30 years Usenet; 25 years Domain Name system, SETI Institute founded; 20 years C.E.R.N. proposed the Mesh what then became the World Wide Web; 14 years SSL, eBay, Amazon, Geocities, Java; 11 years Google, Napster; 10 years SETI@home; 8 years Wikipedia; 6 years VoIP, MySpace; …    (source:  The History of the Internet in a Nutshell)
So, where are we?

Hunger for More:

Since about ten years the storage industry experiences an exponential growth rate.  Even a perhaps modest 5% growth year to year may be misleading.  For one, the prices (and profit margins) are falling, say, over 10% in the last year what I have seen.  And then the capacity of the hard disk drives are ever increasing.  From 500GB and 750GB last year to now 1TB and 1.5TB and now 2TB.  What would mean, much fewer storage racks needed to offer several PB or Peta-Byte, i.e., one million million byte of storage!

And storage providers already celebrating the next milestone achieved: shipping a total of more than one Exa-Byte (equivalent to, say, 1 million 1TB hard drives) within a year!

With prices falling the demand for larger storage capacity is more and more growing.  Who is offloading data to tape, when for just a fraction of the price the data can be kept available online?  Then replicate your data storage arrays to another city / state / country to ensure data is not lost when (heaven forbid!) disaster strikes.  Companies are not thinking in GB or TB anymore; rather, they add-on as they move along.

On the Internet:

And more and more services are offered — with the backbone of the internet providing the infrastructure of the super-fast transfer even of very large files.  We are not only up- and downloading text emails and photos anymore, we are since quite a few years exchanging music and video files, now in HD quality, over the internet.  And we enjoy video on demand, streaming or full download.

And we do not order a CD or, rather, DVD with software!  We download complete packages with several GB right there and then!  And we if we do not want to buy and download and install the complete software product, we could just “hire” it for specific one-time use — without download and install.  Run the application on the internet and do your taxes online, your design work, publish your brochures, perform complex mathematical calculations, etc., etc.  (Software as a Service, or SaaS for short.)

…

(to be continued)

©  October 2009 Jürgen Menge, San José

Disk storage was an expensive commodity back then, and data frequently got offloaded to somewhat cheaper magnetic tapes.  (With fingers crossed that that data could be retrieved OK later-on!)

About 15 years ago then as PCs (evolved from game consoles and the Commodores and Ataris connected to a TV and using compact audio cassettes as storage, then to the so-called MC or Micro-Computer with 5¼” floppies) became more and more common, a hard disk drive with some 2 GB capacity had a price tag of $1000.

BTW, I came across an early version of a Winchester hard disk drive with incredible 80 MB capacity and 2 PC slots = 2U high!  (1U = 1¾”)

Tape cartridges (QIC or Quarter-Inch-Cartridge with 150 MB / 300 MB then 650 MB; later 4mm DAT or Digital Audio Tape cartridges with 2 GB / 4 GB capacity) for data backup, CD-ROMs (650 and 700 MB) were also a viable alternative.

Prices were falling rapidly:  Less than five years later, a 20 GB hard disk drive came down to $200.  Backup tapes had further evolved to store 20 GB/ 40 GB on a single cartridge.

One troubling trend, though, became apparent:  While tape cartridges were said to keep the data for 20 or more years (in an environment with ideal temperature and humidity, of course, and given you were using them only a very few times), that did not necessarily hold true for the actual tape cartridge drives!  I.e., if you had one or a couple of those quite expensive drives, and they became worn if not kaput, then you found it next to impossible to acquire a — now obsolete — replacement drive!  Thus, you ended up having a stock pile of backup tape cartridges with often irreplaceable data, but no means to read and extract said data!  (Unless, of course, you took care transferring your data periodically from one generation of tape cartridges to the next, every other year or so…)

1999 high-speed internet (DSL) became broadly available to the public; ISPs expanding their services, providing not only free email but also disk storage to allow publishing your pictures on the internet, and numerous web sites were offering photos (e.g., NASA) and music (e.g., House of Blues), online banking, news and research, software downloads, and what not.

(I see as the actual begin of what we now define “Cloud Computing” when internet service providers in larger scale made data accessible over the internet — revenue model included.  And that would include the pre-DSL times,  through dial-in modems sporting speeds of 9600 / 14400 / 19200 bps, and eventually 56 kbps.)

As the hard disk drive provided more and more storage capacity for a lesser price, so increased the, well, “hunger” for more.   When I think of what I stored on my hard disk drive with the now oh so few GB back then: mainly emails, important documents, pictures, and such.  And a couple years later, hard disk drives now in ten-fold capacities allowed me to store my CD collection as readily accessible MP3 files.  More software downloads.  Scans of paper documents into digital format.  Video on demand.   Data backup and drive images to (external) disk drives.

And there is always a scaling up — not down.  Software patches are now regularly distributed that are in the hundreds of MB.  Installing Microsoft Vista or Windows 7 with a bunch of applications easily occupies 20 to 30 GB  of disk space on your hard disk drive — just the Program and Windows folders alone!  But then, who cares, when hard disk drives with 1.5 TB (or, rather 1.5 x million x million byte) are available for $105?   :-)

As storage demand for the end-user increases, so most certainly is it seen for the enterprise market.

…

(to be continued)

©  September 2009 Jürgen Menge, San José