I’m a sucker for blockbuster movies, and one among my all-time favorites is Fight Club starring Brad Pitt and Edward Norton. For those of you unfamiliar with this gritty film, it is the story of an insomniac office worker who meets a soap salesman and together they form an underground fight club. The fight club is a brutal affair, but founded on a group of spoken and indisputable rules. This got me considering the significance of rules and the struggle IT professionals have day by day attempting to explain to their business counterparts the cost of latest disruptive technologies — and the way like within the Fight Club, the winners might be people who stick with the guidelines. Webcasts More >> White Papers More >> Reports More >> Rule #1: You don’t speak about disruptive technologies. Mention DevOps, cloud or perhaps mobility and watch the eyes of what you are promoting colleagues glaze over. We’ve all made this error normally before, throwing acronyms like ITIL,... Read More »

7 Vendors To observe At Cloud Connect Chicago 2013 (click image for larger view) On Wednesday, Oct. 23, i will have the risk to debate the present cloud stack wars with proponents of 3 different stacks at Cloud Connect Chicago. While many carriers and providers mix virtualization and orchestration tools, these three organizations are aligned with three distinct technology stacks: — HP has embraced OpenStack strongly, and i will be joined by Monty Taylor. Webcasts More >> White Papers More >> Reports More >> — Verizon Terremark has a big role in CloudStack deployments, and Jim Anthony may be participating. — VMware has its own suite of virtualization and cloud tools for both private and non-private environments, which Mathew Lodge could be ready to speak to. a number of weeks ago, I postulated that today’s cloud platforms are in a race corresponding to that of operating systems a number of decades ago. Greg DeKoenigsberg of Eucalyptus posted a super rebuttal, wherein he speculated that, if... Read More »

Many virtual machines are being spun up within the cloud to run a single application. Often, the resources consumed by that application are dwarfed by the dimensions of the operating system on the subject of memory, disk space and CPU utilization. So why run a whole OS simply to run one application? It truly is one problem virtual containers were created to unravel. Containers-as-a-service is a kind of infrastructure-as-a-service specifically aimed toward efficiently running a single application. A container is a kind of operating system virtualization that’s more efficient than typical hardware virtualization. It provides the mandatory computing resources to run an application as though it’s the only application running within the operating system — in other words, with a guarantee of no conflicts with other application containers running at the same machine. For agencies and enterprises moving applications to the cloud, the containers represent a wiser and less expensive technique to move to the cloud. Webcasts More >> White Papers More >> Reports More... Read More »

In my last column we discussed a few of the limitations of cloud-based backup and why more cloud providers should provide some variety of external, portable storage to beat those challenges. I used tape technology for instance. The second one and potentially larger problem with tapeless cloud backup is the recovery process. Vendors’ claims concerning the loss of tape value have become out of hand. In case you lose a whole server, the info deduplication that helps you in backup will not prevent from a longer period of downtime while this information trickles in the course of the Internet. There isn’t a baseline to match it to and, even supposing there has been, most software solutions can’t do a deduplicated recovery. Webcasts More >> White Papers More >> Reports More >> In almost every case, having the provider create a tape and overnight it to you’d be faster. Incidentally, in the event that they gave you the flexibility to create your individual local tape as... Read More »

Some are shocked by the revelation last week that Dropbox is indeed opening files which might be stored in its cloud-based file service. It’s now clear that there has been a very good explanation for this — Dropbox was processing a word processing file in an automatic manner to be able to provide an extra feature to users. Those people who are shocked simply haven’t thought through what the use case is. From the time that cloud technology hit the streets, responsible cloud proponents were cautioning that not every use case for cloud was the best one. Must you put your city government emails in Google mail? Previously, the la CIO said, “Yes.” But must you put law enforcement emails into that very same Gmail store? Prior to now, the LAPD chief said, “No.” Which you could debate these particular instances endlessly, however the point is that this: Not individuals are happy with every use case. Webcasts More >> White Papers More >> Reports More... Read More »