Large enterprises and government agencies are drowning in data. IT teams deploy a myriad of data warehouse-centric solutions – BI, predictive analytics, data and content mining, portals and dashboards – to harness and deliver data for intelligent decision-making. Yet, large enterprises...

As a preface to the series of articles I will be writing on the Value Proposition and Business Cases for Cloud Computing, I wanted to discuss the layers below and within the cloud. It is important to understand what each of the layers is composed of, what the intended function of that ...

The three perpetual business demands of better, faster and cheaper may just be three of the best reasons to consider infrastructure virtualization. Today’s virtualization technologies, properly architected and deployed, can provide significant benefit to organizations working to evolve...

I’m willing to make this little bet with you: Most people of a certain age are more than willing to bet folding green that IBM ‘invented’ virtualization. Gen-any-letters will bet VMware with confidence. You will win either way. Today’s burgeoning virtualization market is a differen...

Here’s my premise: high impact, culture-bending technological innovations – however different they may be one from another – conform to a predictable template of evolution. It goes something like this... Break-thru - The point of entry at which a technology breaks onto the market scen...

Recently I asked a question on twitter, one I figured would stir up some debate. (Which was the point) The question was "Does the CTO matter any more with the rise of Cloud Computing or is it all about the CIO with data reigning supreme?"

We are in the midst of the virtualization era. In fact, VMWare reports that all Fortune 100 companies are using their virtualized data network products, as well as more than 90 percent of Fortune 1000 companies, and Yankee Group’s 2008-2009 Global Virtualization Deployment and Usage Su...

Doing more with less is a familiar refrain for IT professionals, and today’s challenging business environment has only increased the pressure on managers to achieve efficiencies, maximize performance and improve responsiveness of the data center. More and more frequently, IT is turning...

As Cisco, HP, Juniper, F5, Amazon, Microsoft, Google and others circle the data center field of battle, one strategic ridge of high ground is in network automation, or the ability to move (or adjust/provision) IT assets at the push of a button without the need for extensive manual inte...

As the IT operations continue to evolve and transform the business towards agility and adaptability to ever changing rules of marketplace, the efficiency of any IT operation is of paramount significance. The phrase ‘time to market' has a completely new meaning in today's dynamic busine...

As enterprises evaluate if and how cloud computing fits into their core IT services, they must consider how they will manage cloud services as part of their day-to-day operations. This article examines how operational management of cloud computing differs from traditional methods, and ...

In 1998, a little-known company called VMware had just opened the doors of its Palo Alto office. Ever since computing moved from the mainframe to the desktop, the push had been bigger, faster, and more – more CPUs, more servers, more power, more cooling – and ultimately more complexity...

On-demand software distribution and retail e-commerce are key growth strategies for software manufacturers to enhance their online revenues and increase market share. The online store presents unlimited opportunity for expansion – across the globe – to reach out to end consumers dire...

Virtualization has brought us another step closer to the world of Star Trek. Think back to episodes of The Next Generation where Geordi was able to control the functions of the entire ship through a single touch-screen interface. He was able to reconfigure electrical, mechanical and pr...

I’ve always found that the obvious things in life are easy to understand once you see them. I’ve got a good one for you. The obvious thing here is ISVs should reduce POC installation and configuration time to near zero. It is obvious, isn’t it? And easy to understand. As it turns out, ...

Small and medium businesses (SMBs) that have previously considered virtualization in the cloud but decided that it is too expensive or simply not viable should think again. Virtualization and cloud computing enables SMBs to green their operations and build IT infrastructures that are a...

Virtualization and fault-tolerant technology are like the would-be ideal couple, a match made in heaven, but who never meet, even though they’re constantly in the same place at the same time. That can be a funny conundrum in romantic comedies, but in the real IT world, virtualization a...

It’s no secret what’s driving the move to virtualization in data centers. The demand for new and expanded software systems is growing, but the geographic and carbon footprint required for scaling underutilized dedicated servers is too costly on many levels. This issue has led to the ma...

For anyone interested, VMware has launched their Vcloud API specification. They describe their new "open" vCloud API as an interface for providing and consuming virtual resources from the cloud. It enables deploying and managing virtualized workloads in internal and external clouds. Th...

One of the main concerns among IT architects planning an implementation of an enterprise data virtualization layer in their service-oriented architecture (SOA) or overall information system is the performance of the participating data services. Performance becomes particularly importan...

Exponential growth of data storage requirements has been reported every year since the commercial emergence of the World Wide Web and rich media content. Organizations of all sizes have had to invest in ever larger and more complex storage systems. Storage Area Networks (SANs) and Netw...

The fact that virtualization can have a positive impact on total cost of ownership is not new to those familiar with designing and managing IT environments. Many of the contributors to these cost savings, such as reduction in physical hardware and the corresponding savings in power and...

VMWare’s purchase of SpringSource came as quite a shock to many in the industry. Why? Because, with this purchase, the Gorilla of Virtualization jumped from below the OS right smack up into application development and the runtime stack. Now they can deliver a Platform as a Service (P...

A primary element of SaaS and cloud computing is the virtual datacenter or Virtual Platform Infrastructure (VPI). VPI refers to virtual machines and virtual platforms that rely on many additional physical and virtual infrastructure elements. Over the past few years, new infrastructure ...

I recently asked a CIO of a large Fortune 100 company how hard would it be for a person to pull the plug on a backbone switch in his datacenter. His answer was "Very difficult. We have lots of controls in place to ensure that level of access is protected." I then probed further and ask...

In late May, Gary Koelling and Steve Bendt came to Enomaly looking for our help to realize their latest brainchild, called "Connect". We'd previously worked with Best Buy to develop an internal social networking site called "Blueshirt Nation" and we were eager for an another opportunit...

For fifty years we've been moving data to where the computing power is. With intercloud computing, the world is going to look quite different, with the computing power moving to where the data is. The intercloud turns computing inside out. With traditional IT, we move the data to where...

The perceived security risk of granting access from untrusted PCs such as airport kiosks,hotels or even home computers has outweighed the benefits of broad remote access for many enterprises. As a result, those companies typically have IT security policies that dictate only a corporate...

CIOs and IT managers agree that memory is emerging as a critical resource constraint in the data center for both economic and operational reasons. Regardless of density, memory is not a shareable resource across the data center. In fact, new servers are often purchased to increase memo...

A couple of patterns that could cause Java heap exhaustion were identified from years of research at IBM. One interesting scenarios was observed when Java applications generate excessive amount of finalizable objects whose classes have non-trivial Java finalizers. A Java finalizer perf...

It is increasingly clear that the economy has forced enterprises to rethink their traditional cost models and minimize their capital expenditures in favor of pay-as-you-go models; accordingly cloud computing, in any of its forms (internal, external, hybrid) is here to stay.

Virtualization promises significant dollar savings. Since reducing cost is perhaps the biggest goal in today’s corporate data centers, it’s no wonder that virtualization efforts are accelerating. So far it’s been easy to virtualize commodity servers that host less-critical utility appl...

In IT terms, virtualization is cool. The rewards include cost savings, agility, and flexibility. Enterprises reap the benefits of virtualization through a much more efficient use of IT personnel and resources, faster delivery time of applications, higher availability/service levels, an...

Just when it seems that you’ve finally met and solved your data backup and recovery challenges, along comes another kink to complicate the problem. While server virtualization provides many benefits, it may create a conundrum when determining an organization’s best backup and restore s...

Cloud computing platforms, such as Microsoft Azure, offer compelling advantages for building new scalable .NET applications. But can the Cloud be used for developing existing .NET applications? In this article, I’ll explain how we’ve made the leap to Cloud-based development for our int...

As the title of this article is The Economics of Cloud Computing and we need to talk dollars and cents. There are three ways to look at this. When I was a student at The Ohio State University, I learned an important lesson about money. There is the way that the business owners view it,...

In 1969 Edward Lorenz, the famed meteorologist and Chaos Theory proponent, introduced the concept now known as the “Butterfly Effect” when he posed the famous question: “Does the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas?” The Butterfly Effect theory describes th...

In the mid-nineties, new directions in managerial accounting made cost center bookkeeping popular in large organizations. In this model, departments within an organization traded almost like a miniature economy, with some departments earning a net gain for the company and some departme...

Making software is easy. You just collect the market data, generate a high-level technical specification, build the product, and test it. All marketing needs to do is put together some screenshots and sales can just kick back and wait for the orders to start flooding in. Right? Unfortu...

Ever get one of those random phone calls in the midst of your work day that makes you think, huh -- interesting idea? Well earlier today I had one from a guy looking to learn more about cloud computing platforms. Although it ended up he wasn't specifically looking for an elastic comput...