Waffle House: Cloud Computing Pioneers?

For those of you not familiar with the pervasiveness of Waffle Houses in the Southern United States, you would be hard pressed not to find one just when you have a craving for a late night waffle. I probably have more knowledge of Waffle Houses than most and was recently struck by how much their business model resembles the new application architecture in cloud computing.

All Waffle Houses are nearly identical in layout and capacity; wouldn’t know if you were in Jacksonville or Atlanta from the inside of a Waffle House. They are placed with careful study based on capacity demands. You may find two at a single exit and great clusters of them where the need exists. Waffle House scales demand not by building different sized restaurants, but simply by adding another block of capacity.

We hear the term “horizontal scaling” when it comes to both the underlying cloud infrastructure and applications that run in the cloud. Application writers will scale to meet client demand via applications that can simply add another block of exact functionality instead of trying to scale internally. This is where the power of elasticity comes into play. I don’t suppose Waffle House knows how to quickly spin down a restaurant, though.

Cloud computing is the natural evolution of many technologies that have been around for years. And with Waffle House, we can see how even the non-technical world acts like a cloud.

Along with cloud computing, online video seems likely to go down in history as one of the most important transformational technologies of the 21st century – overhauling long-standing business models as well as consumer (and employee) behaviors. A new study from research firm In-Stat shows that 45% of U.S. broadband households now prefer to obtain at least some of their digital entertainment from online video services. And the recent rumors that online, free content provider Hulu might shift its own model to become an online cable provider, offering various “Internet channels” for a fee, is a shocking testament to how dynamic this market still is.

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I was thinking recently about the President’s stated goal to bring mobile broadband to 98% of Americans in five years – not just from the standpoint of network coverage, but also the detailed level of how Americans could benefit from it in terms of applications for healthcare, public safety and other uses.
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It seems every consumer electronic device is going app crazy, from smartphones to Internet-connected TVs, but it looks like the next target of app store envy is likely parked in your driveway – or will be in a few years. A Gartner analyst is forecasting that more than half of all new premium cars in the U.S. will support apps by 2013 and mass market cars will reach that level by 2016.

Connected cars was a big theme at CES that I mentioned in my blog, Bandwidth Tsunami from CES, including some Ford executives talking about how their goal isn’t to create the apps or the connectivity for them – simply to improve the integration and user interface for existing smartphones or other devices within the car itself, which makes total sense.
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Voxel is expanding one of our two main New York datacenters with an additional cage. In less than two weeks, we’ll be bringing our first “MicroPod” online at 111 8th Avenue. This expansion space supports almost 1000 servers and can’t come soon enough – we’re really low on inventory!

We’re using the latest and greatest hardware platforms from both Supermicro and Dell, with the smoking Intel Nehalem processors. This will give our clients the ultimate in performance and flexibility. Mixing and matching VoxCLOUD and VoxSERVER, they can grow from a virtual machine with a single core, all the way to a bare metal dedicated server with 12 cores, DDR3 ECC RAM with 144GB of memory, and next generation solid state disks. After we’re done, we leave the rest to our software. Building out a new space like this takes months of planning, and hundreds of hours of hard work. Our software takes just a few hours for every server to be automatically powered on, stress tested, and put into inventory. To quote Hannibal from the A-Team:  “I love it when a plan comes together!”.