Dan Griffin's Blog

Comments on security, PKI, smart cards, cryptography, and entrepreneurship.

Interesting article in this month’s Bio-IT World magazine (available online - http://www.bio-itworld.com/issues/2006/dec-jan/inside-the-box/) entitled "Top Ten BioIT Trends for 2007". Some of the trends really resonate, both as common pain points and as potential business opportunities in the IT field overall.

  • "Power and Cooling Costs" - what high-tech firm doesn’t see this, even on a small scale? The more computer equipment you plugin, the greater the electricity bill! The article says that running a typical 42 unit rack for a year, including power + air-conditioning costs, costs $30K per year in electricity. One industry trend, developing partly in response to this: increases in the number of CPU cores per board. The technical terminology for that trend: FLOPS per Watt.

Although the article lists it separately, I’d group another IT trend here as well: virtualization, which I find to be a fascinating technology for a variety of reasons.

Back in the olden days, I used to do all of my software testing on separate workstations, primarily because we were testing operating system-level changes and VM technology wasn’t ready for primetime. The latter has certainly changed. In fact - I’ll cite a specific product here - VMware cuts our overall development costs dramatically, since the inevitable setup and configuration costs in software testing can now be amortized across multiple engineers and projects, and we’ve found the technology to be reliable even when mixing and matching host/guest architectures and operating systems.

Returning to the initial point, virtualization will also have an impact a power consumption, since compromises in shared hardware can now be made that weren’t previously feasible. From a reliability perspective, server software is rarely designed to allow multiple instances to coexist on a single host, previously restricting deployments to a single instance per machine. With virtualization, that’s no longer the case. The same case can be made for security considerations - previously, some trust boundaries could only safely be enforced on a per-machine basis (e.g. who has administrator-level login privileges). Via virtualization, access can safely be granted to each instance piecemeal.

  • "Unified Identity Management" - this one doesn’t strike me as a ubiquitous need, but the point is made that providing reliable, convenient, and secure single sign-on capability across Windows, Mac, and Unix hosts is still quite difficult. It’s a major pain point for certain industries (bio apparently being one of them) where research computing networks have traditionally been separate from production/enterprise networks, but where those boundaries are now by necessity eroding.
  • "10 Gigabit Ethernet" - this is a cool concept, although I’m not quite clear on what role it will play in solving the industry’s data management problems, which are after all worsening exponentially. If my job is to build computational models based on terabytes of data, what good is 10 Gb ethernet? Won’t it still take two hours to copy 10 TB of data?

 

 

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