Muthu's Weblog

Without getting into the larger debate of private cloud vs public cloud for the organization as a whole, this document tries to give the numbers that let us make a fair comparison in terms of performance - and performance alone between AWS and Private Cloud through Openstack. The initial benchmarking and preparing these numbers stemmed out of the proposed DC migration to a west coast co-located DC at my current employer. The migration did not happen, but it gave us the opportunity to study the performance impact of having our own cloud. One of the gripes that I've had about our colo infra is that we never seem to have gotten grade-A processors. Almost all of the ones were hand-me-down servers or mid-level Intel Xeons, sometime with absurdly low clock speed. The storage side wasn't very brilliant either. This was solved when we obtained a test bed from Dell with the latest and greatest hardware in their lab that we could setup and run benchmarks on. The machine we got w...

Interesting numbers will be a section on my blog where I point out statistics that I find are interesting, mildly amusing and provides a new, different perspective. 25% TamilNadu is a key market for Education loans in India, accounting for 25% of all education loans disbursed across the country, amounting to around Rs.20,650 Crores. 1.5Million No. of hectares of forest diverted for non-forest purposes through Forest Conservation Act 1.8Million No. of tribals to be evacuated under a recent supreme court order, under the pretext of preventing protecting forests.

Being a mentor is a not an easy thing. There are a lot of things that a mentor has to do, beyond imparting knowledge. To mentor is to mould and sculpt - to recognize there is a permanence to the teaching for better or worse. One of those things is choosing when to intervene as a mentor, and to fix the mess created by your student. My favorite description of the importance of this intervention is captured in a novel by Arthur Hailey, titled Airport. One of the pages has a story about an air traffic controller training a new recruit - "George Wallace nodded and edged closer to the radarscope. He was in his mid-twenties, had been a trainee for almost two years; before that, he had served an enlistment in the U. S. Air Force. Wallace had already shown himself to have an alert, quick mind, plus the ability not to become rattled under tension. In one more week he would be a qualified controller, though for practical purposes he was fully trained now. Deliberately, Keith allowed the...