The problem with being a perfectionist is that one doesn’t want to mention anything until the pie is completely cooked, taste tested, and absolutely ready for presentation. The problem with Internet technology is that it’s never finished . . . But after years of refusing to announce anything until its actually running, I’ve agreed to put out this bulletin of what we’ve got coming down the line, just before it actually goes live.
I created GoPC in 1995 and we are now many generations of GoPC technology further down the path. The complexity in each new release grows exponentially. What becomes simpler and more useful for the customer requires a massive effort, discipline and very deep structured thinking on the part of the developers. I want to say that the GoPC team is the most intelligent, committed and brilliant team of people that I’ve ever worked with. It’s these guys and gals who have created the most incredible advances in GoPC for this upcoming release.
A special acknowledgement is also due to the remarkable people who create and contribute to Open Source, the thousands of developers who are responsible for the applications we’re able to provide via GoPC’s supercomputing framework at no cost to our customers. It’s our goal to add value to the work of these peoples by making their products much more available to a much broader audience.
The upgrade we’re about to undertake is a Major rework of the whole supercomputer. It’s new hardware and systems (approximately 100 separate servers not counting the expandable front-end nodes which carry the bulk of our processing load), new network infrastructure, the latest application versions on the desktop and a host of new very cool technologies. We have always made extensive use of virtualisation, and there is far more fail-over capability than ever before.
One of the most exciting advances from the new system is our ability now to fragment the supercomputer into separate pieces and distribute these geographically. This upcoming version of GoPC will become a distributed supercomputer with a footprint on each continent, all managed centrally. Changes and upgrades are automatically reflected across the entire infrastructure - thus effectively creating one global footprint. For customers who currently experience high levels of latency to the GoPC supercomputer in Australia (particularly users in Europe, Africa and Middle East where Internet routes go via the USA and can often exceed 400ms) this will have a dramatic improvement on screen responsiveness. We are currently negotiating with interested parties for financing and partnership involvement to achieve this quickly. Technically it is now about 10x easier than it was last year.
The new GoPC will give more granular control allowing us to tailor solutions for specific customer groups. Our premium enterprise customers and perhaps others will have the power to tailor their own solutions. For example they may choose from a simple pick list which applications their organisation will have; select another layer of data encryption technology on disk, add and remove users daily, select more server side storage, or recover a selected file from a last months backup straight from a window on the desktop. Godrive (GoPC’s online Drive) will seamlessly integrate with local PC desktop and you’ll be amazed at how fast this operates.
We have had countless requests since first going live in Dec 2004 with our open source version of GoPC, for a command prompt, for shell access and for the ability for people to install their own applications. This will soon become available and we will also allow customers to operate a complete virtual Linux desktop instance in their own virtual data centre.
This major upgrade crystallizes about 16 months of Research and Development by our team. Because of the scale of it, it has taken several months to migrate customers data and prepare everything for the big bang cutover. GoPC has run at 99.999% uptime since going live in Dec 2004, the only complete outages we’ve had was when we physically moved the data centre. At each upgrade we’ve only ever taken down part of the system at a time. We’re anxious about the change over because there are likely to be teething issues in areas which we could not have foreseen. But we have to move forward and we will be doing everything we can to ensure that any issues that surface are resolved as speedily as possible. Once we’ve switched over to the new system we plan to wait a few weeks to ensure things have stabilise and then start rolling out these new solutions which we’ve been wanting to bring to the customers.
Oh, I almost forgot to say, that everything will be running a lot faster. New customer sign-ups which currently are taking up 4-5 minutes, should reduce to around 30-40 seconds. The new GoPC works like lightning. We hope you’ll like it.
The ETA is any day now.
Graeme Speak
CEO / Founder