tsmith

Why not start a few days (at least) before you start coding?

"Sell before you build" is my new mantra.

It was the same talk, but re-given yesterday at Toronto DemoCamp #27. Fred mentioned that he had given it a few months back in NYC.

I wonder how long this took to set up? And why they don't run their production servers as VMs as well?

Edit: I think it's an awesome idea, btw, and something we try to push to web service shops at GridCentric.

Go low-tech: stand outside a waterslide park.

Supply and demand.

er, Asch experiment rather.

Good point - OpenVZ is quite good for userspace virtualization.

One thing Copper (what this demo is running on - http://www.gridcentriclabs.com/copper) can do that OpenVZ can't do is VM clone / page sharing across multiple physical servers. For example, if you wanted to clone thousands of desktops across a rack or two of servers.

Also of possible interest - things we've done with the current (1.1) version of our platform:

Howto: Build and scale a Cassandra cluster in five minutes - http://blog.gridcentriclabs.com/2010/08/howto-build-and-scal...

Howto: Build a Hadoop cluster in five minutes - http://blog.gridcentriclabs.com/2010/07/howto-build-hadoop-c...

Howto: Build a ten node memcached cluster in five minutes - http://blog.gridcentriclabs.com/2010/07/how-to-build-10-core...

You may notice an interesting trend :)

[edit: formatting]

This is such a great idea - I find that it's very easy to rationalize myself out of the goals I set, but as soon as another person is involved it makes it 10x harder to back out... it's sort of like the inverse of the Milgram experiment.

Thanks! Tell your friends! We're giving away fully-functional 60-day trial licenses and there are a growing number of interesting use cases for VM clone: http://blog.gridcentriclabs.com/search/label/recipes

This is an elaboration on Dave's earlier post here: http://blog.gridcentriclabs.com/2010/07/elastic-build-system...

Thanks! The low-effort VM clone (essentially fork() for Xen VMs, and only takes 1-2 seconds even for dozens of clones) makes deploying a bunch of almost-identical machines extremely easy.

We've also toyed around with other cluster-scale platforms (see my earlier post) and have a MySQL Cluster HOWTO in the works, but the clustered SQL databases are decidedly more heavyweight - MySQL Cluster doesn't even allow removal of cluster nodes once they're added (without dropping all the clustered tables). Not sure if Oracle RAC has that capability - if so, we might be able to put together a fun demo.

Part of a series:

memcached - http://blog.gridcentriclabs.com/2010/07/how-to-build-10-core...

Hadoop - http://blog.gridcentriclabs.com/2010/07/howto-build-hadoop-c...

An early take on Hudson / Continuous Integration - http://blog.gridcentriclabs.com/2010/07/elastic-build-system...

As always, we'd love any feedback the HN community might have!

""Scott has got to find somebody who knows someone," the grandfather said, "someone who can get him to the head of the line."

Is this Russia?"

Hah. Best quote from the article. Between the baby boom, rising life expectancies, and the 30-60% drop in boomers' retirement funds, people of Scott's age are facing a completely different scenario than the two generations before his. No shame in slacking by while society sorts itself out.

Thanks! Yeah, the "VM fork" thing is something we have trouble getting across to the general population. That probably should have been the title of this post though.

Hi all,

We were inspired by our friends at AeroFS to do a little show-and-tell and solicit some feedback. Specifically, we'd like to know:

- Is it apparent what we are actually selling?

- Is it apparent how it is different from other cloud / virtualization stacks?

- What are some key things we should focus on to increase conversions (i.e. to get more people to sign up for trials etc)?

Any feedback/advice on who we should be targeting both for our current compute farm product as well as customer development for our upcoming enterprise product is also much appreciated.

Of course, any other feedback/advice is also appreciated!

Thanks in advance, Tim

Way cool guys, and way to represent the Toronto startup scene!

BTW, loved the reference to HN karma in the screenshot!

Having spent the last two years cutting my teeth in the Toronto tech entrepreneur scene, I've come to experience a lot of what I call a "if it isn't broken, don't fix it" mentality, which tends to discount visionary thinking.

Specifically, the standard form for a Toronto tech start-up pitch is to identify "the bleeding neck wound" that some large group of customers have (usually enterprises - bonus points if they are a bank!), and then explain how your solution will come in and save the day for them. This is what Weissman refers to as a "Problem/Solution" story in "Presenting to Win".

This is all well and good, as a hammer without a nail is not much use to anybody, but someone with an actual bleeding neck wound will tell you (if they had the mental clarity) that they are not too concerned about tomorrow, next week, or next year - all consciousness is wrapped up around solving the (admittedly very important!) problem at hand.

The issue is that the scene fixates on this form of storytelling to the exclusion of all others. I was trying to make this point to a member of the Toronto business community the other day by rhetorically asking what bleeding neck wound the iPad solved; the person told me with a straight face that mobile device screens were too small and that laptops were too heavy.

The "build it and they will come" visionary thinking that brought about order-of-magnitude improvements in the way things are done (the automobile, the personal computer, the Internet) is simply, and sorely, lacking in Toronto.