Rational Survivability

By my own admission, this is a stream-of-consciousness, wacky, caffeine-inspired rant that came about while I was listening to a conference call.   It’s my ode to paleoanthropology and how we, the knuckledraggers of IT/Security, evolve.

My apologies to anyone who actually knows anything about or makes an honest living from science; I’ve quite possibly offended all of you with this post…

I came across this interesting article posted today on the ScienceDaily website which discusses a hypothesis by a University of Arizona professor, David Raichlen, who suggests that bipedalism, or walking on two legs, evolved simply because it used less energy than quad knuckle-walking.  If one looks at the force impact expended whilst quad-knuckle walking, it is comparably 4 times that of a bipedal footprint!  That’s huge.

I’m always looking for good tangential analogs for points I want to reinforce within the context of my line of work, and I found this fantastic fodder for such an exercise.

So without a lot of work on my part, I’m going to post some salient points from the article and leave it up to you to determine how, if at all, the "energetic" evolution of virtualization draws interesting parallels to this very interesting hypothesis; that the heretofore theorized complexity associated with this crucial element of human evolution was, in fact, simply an issue derived from energy efficiency which ultimately led to sustainable survivability and not necessarily because of ecological, behavioral or purely anatomical reasons:

From Here:

The origin of bipedalism, a defining feature of hominids, has been 
attributed to several
competing hypothesis. The postural feeding hypothesis
(Hunt 1996) is an ecological model.
The behavioral model (Lovejoy 1981) attributes bipedality to the social, sexual and
reproductive conduct
of early hominids. The thermoregulatory model (Wheeler 1991) views
the
increased heat loss, increased cooling, reduced heat gain and reduced water requirements conferred by a bipedal stance in a hot, tropical
climate as the selective pressure leading to bipedalism.

At its core, server virtualization might be described as a manifestation of how we rationalize and deal with the sliding-window impacts of time and the operational costs associated with keeping pace with the transformation and adaptation of technology in compressed footprints.  One might describe this as the "energy" (figuratively and literally) that it takes to operate our IT infrastructure.

It’s about doing more with less and being more efficient such that the "energy" used to produce and deliver services is small in comparison to the output mechanics of what is consumed.  One could suggest that once the efficiency gains (or savings?) are realized, the energy can be allocated to other more enabling abilities.  Using the ape to human bipedalism analog, one could suggest that bipedalism lead to bigger brains, better hunting/gathering skills, fashioning tools, etc.  Basically the initial step of efficiency gains leads to exponential capabilities over the long term.

So that’s my Captain Obvious declaration relating bipedalism with virtualization.  Ta Da!

From the article as sliced & diced by the fine folks at ScienceDaily:

Raichlen and his colleagues will publish the article, "Chimpanzee
locomotor energetics and the origin of human bipedalism" in the online
early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
(PNAS) during the week of July 16. The print issue will be published on
July 24.

Bipedalism marks a critical divergence between humans
and other apes and is considered a defining characteristic of human
ancestors. It has been hypothesized that the reduced energy cost of
walking upright would have provided evolutionary advantages by
decreasing the cost of foraging.

"For decades now researchers
have debated the role of energetics and the evolution of bipedalism,"
said Raichlen. "The big problem in the study of bipedalism was that
there was little data out there."

The researches collected
metabolic, kinematic and kenetic data from five chimpanzees and four
adult humans walking on a treadmill. The chimpanzees were trained to
walk quadrupedally and bipedally on the treadmill.

Humans
walking on two legs only used one-quarter of the energy that
chimpanzees who knuckle-walked on four legs did. On average, the
chimpanzees used the same amount of energy using two legs as they did
when they used four legs. However, there was variability among
chimpanzees in how much energy they used, and this difference
corresponded to their different gaits and anatomy.

"We were
able to tie the energetic cost in chimps to their anatomy," said
Raichlen. "We were able to show exactly why certain individuals were
able to walk bipedally more cheaply than others, and we did that with
biomechanical modeling."

The biomechanical modeling revealed
that more energy is used with shorter steps or more active muscle mass.
Indeed, the chimpanzee with the longest stride was the most efficient
walking upright.

"What those results allowed us to do was to
look at the fossil record and see whether fossil hominins show
adaptations that would have reduced bipedal energy expenditures," said
Raichlen. "We and many others have found these adaptations [such as
slight increases in hindlimb extension or length] in early hominins,
which tells us that energetics played a pretty large role in the
evolution of bipedalism."

The point here is not that I’m trying to be especially witty, but rather to illustrate that when we cut through the FUD and marketing surrounding server virtualization and focus on evolution versus revolution, some very interesting discussion points emerge regarding why folks choose to virtualize their server infrastructure.

After I attended the InterOp Data Center Summit, I walked away with a very different view of the benefits and costs of virtualization than I had before.  I think that as folks approach this topic, the realities of how the game changes once we start "walking upright" will provide a profound impact to how we view infrastructure and what the next step might bring.

Server virtualization at its most basic is about economic efficiency (read: energy == power + cooling…) plain and simple.  However, if we look beyond this as the first "step," we’ll see grid and utility computing paired with Web2.0/SaaS take us to a whole different level.  It’s going to push security to its absolute breaking point.

I liked the framing of the problem set with the bipedal analog.  I can’t wait until we come full circle, grow wings and start using mainframes again 😉

Did that make any bloody sense at all?

/Hoff

P.S. I liked Jeremiah’s evolution picture, too: