Kevin Houston, Founder of Blades Made Simple and all around server and blade rocket surgeon, posted an excellent thought provoking article titled ‘Why Blade Servers Will Be the Core of Future Data Centers ( http://bladesmadesimple.com/2011/10/why-blade-servers-will-be-the-core-of-future-data-centers/.) The article is his predictions and thoughts on the way in which the server industry…
Category: Concepts
Cloud Success Factor: Rethink Application Development
You’ve been driving a perfectly suitable family sedan for the last ten years. It’s highly rated by all the gurus who rate such things; it’s safe, reliable and gets acceptable gas mileage. You’ve never loved it in anyway, although you did have a moment of pure capitalist joy when you…
Hypervisors are not the Droids You Seek
Long ago, in a data center far, far away, we as an industry moved away from big iron and onto commodity hardware. That move brought with it many advantages, such as cost and flexibility. The change also brought along with it higher hardware and operating system software failure rates. This…
Choosing The Right Private Cloud Storage
One of the key decisions in architecting an infrastructure for private cloud is selecting a storage platform for the deployment. Storage is a key component of the infrastructure and will play a major role in the overall performance of the private cloud. The storage decision carries additional weight due to…
Build For IT Nirvana
In many data centers large and small there is a history of making short-term decisions that affect long-term design. These may be based on putting out immediate fires, such as rolling out a new application, expanding an old one, or replacing failed hardware. They may also be made by short-sighted…
Private Cloud: It’s Not About ROI
Most private cloud discussions revolve around the return on investment of the architecture. Many discussions begin and quickly end with ROI. The reason is that ROI is very difficult to show in real numbers for any IT investment, but more so when the majority of the costs are soft costs….
Why FCoE Standards Matter
Mike Fratto at Network Computing recently wrote an article titled ‘FCoE: Standards Don’t Matter; Vendor Choice Does’ (http://www.networkcomputing.com/storage-networking-management/231002706.) I definitely differ from Mike’s opinion on the subject. While I’m no fan of the process of making standards (puts sausage making to shame), or the idea of slowing progress to wait…
Flexpod Discussion with Vaughn Stewart and Abhinav Joshi
I enjoyed a great conversation with Netapp’s Vaughn Stewart and Cisco’s Abhinav Joshi about FlexPod last week during Cisco Live 2011. Check out the video below. Related posts: CloudStack Graduates to Top-Level Apache Project The Difference Between Private Cloud and Converged Infrastructure Private Cloud: It’s Not About ROI Thought Experiment…
VDI, the Next Generation or the Final Frontier?
After sitting through a virtualization sales pitch focused around Virtual Desktop Infrastructures (VDI) this afternoon I had several thoughts on the topic I thought may be blog worthy. VDI has been a constant buzzword for a few years now, riding the coattails of server virtualization. For the majority of those…
Server/Desktop Virtualization–A Best of Breed Band-Aid
Virtualization is a buzzword that has moved beyond into mainstream use and enterprise deployment. A few years back vendors were ‘virtualization-washing’ their products and services the way many ‘cloud-wash’ the same today. Now a good majority of enterprises are well into their server virtualization efforts and moving into Virtual Desktop…