Cloud Computing

Interesting concept! We are lauded for our open space, vast resources, and peaceful democracy. I could think of several ways that we should be using these strengths to enhance our country, but cloud servers were not one that immediately popped in to my head.

I would not, however, say that the lower temperatures would drive cooling costs down. Although it seems obvious to the contrary, having a bunch of servers in a weather protected room is going to get hot no matter where you leave it. The external temperature won't have much effect, as any weather proofing is bound to have an insulating affect.

Rather, I would think our large borders would be the biggest resource to establishing cloud servers in our country. We have the space and the proximity to asia, america, and europe, the three most populous users of the internet.

Now, if only we can find a way to do it without involving Telus, Shaw, or Bell....

turns out weather does count

Mathieu Y suggests that insulated server rooms will get hot regardless of external temperatures. That's an entirely reasonable assumption, but it turns out that Canadian weather may actually be the bonus Mr. Geist suggests.

Google for instance is highly sensitive to the climates they locate their data farms in. For example, a while back the Goog made waves when they opened a data server in Belgium with no chillers at all. Their rational was that Belgium is cool enough except for a few days every year, and on those days they just shift load to other (colder) data servers.

http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2009/07/15/googles-chiller-less-data-center/

Assuming we can keep the road salt out of the clean rooms, Canada may well have a weather advantage for large-scale digital hosting.

Support - tech and otherwise

And the cloud support is especially noteworthy when you consider that supporters of Wikileaks have the ability to punish within the cloud - note the DOS attacks yesterday on Mastercard etc. for the arrest of Assange.

I have to admit, I'm rather enjoying watching this scenario playing out....

cloud = marketing term for "internet"

Richard Stallman said that cloud computing was simply a trap aimed at forcing more people to buy into locked, proprietary systems that would cost them more and more over time. "It's stupidity. It's worse than stupidity: it's a marketing hype campaign"

Type "alternative dns servers" in The Google.

I think that what is more disturbing is that DNS is now broken. ICANN is no longer reliable.

http://dot-p2p.org/

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20101129/01445312034/with-domain-name-seizures-increasing-its-time-decentralized-dns-system.shtml

http://213.251.145.96/

"Series of tubes" containing a series of cables...

http://wikileaks.ch/

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/the-us-embassy-cables

Gone faster than money!

What the story actually demonstrates is that cloud computing customers can transfer themselves to another cloud almost as fast as electronics funds transfer.

Clouds will migrate to the next cheapest/more private/lower labour cost cloud in a heartbeat.

I would not like to see public monney spend to create clouds.

canadian pri

the powers given to police for real-time snooping, demanding a security specialist be present 24/7, AND records being kept will keep ANY corp from cloud settling here.

guareenteed non-secure, with the world's BIGGEST selloff of encrypted data streams.

Montreal TRIED to set up cloud stream services for animation in the 90's.

packrat

A very interesting idea

Dr Geist has it pretty much nailed in that Canada can be a major player in the "cloud" market if we play our cards right.

Unlike jwstewart I don't see that the physical location of the data centres needs to be moved from Canada simply because, outside of Northern Europe there isn't a more logical place to put them as it's vital to keep server farms cool and if it can be done without a large investment in HVAC that cuts costs tremendously. Russia and China are out of the market because of corruption in the case of Russia and the paranoia of the Chinese Communist Party in China's case.

Remember that HVAC is the largest cost of building and maintaining a server farm as a running entity. Almost all actualy program maintenance can and is done remotely which essentially removes labour costs from the equation with respect to the server farm and, for the life of me, outside of, perhaps Finland and the far north of Norway, I can't imagine a more secure and stable location for these things.

Contrary to Mathieu Y's assertion you can cool and heat based on outside temperatures even in a weather protected building. Weather protection does not equal totally sealed. If it was green buildings wouldn't be possible.

I'll just say this about the DNS problems is that both Google and Amazon run their farms using IPv6 not the generally used IPv4 and run private DNS servers for commuication between the farms. This sort of arrangement is hardly new, incidentally. There are all kinds of "private" networks running all over the Internet. The only time they hit the ICANN controlled DNS clouds is when a call comes from a client using the public Internet. All processing is done behind and out of the ICANN area and the data is returned to the requester. Exactly how the system works now.

As for Stallman's point it's well taken but pretty much irrelvant in that, yes, clouds ARE the Internet but so what? These cloud operators are merely massive hosting companies in the end.

I don't see what Stallman is worried about because, in the end, only Linux and NetBSD can easily scale up to running these places no matter what Microsoft might say about their server technology.

As for secutity, as now, its up to people using the space to lock it down. It's far from impossible and, in fact, relatively easy to do using PGP and other technologies existing now.

And, oh, you can easily cloud animation render farms these days. Montreal's problem was their server/render farm was too small.