Monthly Archives: March 2009

Opening Clouds

Posted on by

Where is your cloud and how do you manage it? I toss that question at an occasional CIO and get borderline lucid answers. Most don’t yet use clouds but lust after them. Others leverage public clouds for non-privileged and mission-uncritical work. A scant few have cobbled together their own private clouds (p-clouds). P-clouds and rentable clouds are as similar to Sherman tanks and kangaroos. The promise of agile clouds is that you would be able to establish your own internal p-cloud and extended it ad hoc to external, rented cloud resources. Currently this requires either a significant amount of home grown engineering or adherence to one or another public clouds tools and management protocols. Either approach is anathema to IT. All radical growth spurts in IT technologies have occurred when open standards were popularized. UNIX killed MPE, VMS and other also-rans. Likewise Linux is slowly killing proprietary UNIX and blocking … Continue reading →

Blue Sunrise

Posted on by

I openly speculated last January about who might buy Sun Microsystems since investors were trading shares for Sun’s cash value and little more. This morning Internet cables were buzzing over IBM’s alleged discussions to buy Sun for about double the current share price. If the rumors are true this will go down in the annals of the technology market as one of the great milestones, and perhaps not a good one. IBM is if nothing a shrewd entity. Outside of Congress, making a $6B investment is not trivial for anyone and IBM will certainly invest more wisely than the set of currently elected simpletons. Yet doubling the going price for all shares of Sun is a seemingly extravagant gambit and indicates that IBM sees something of value that the market does not, and they want to keep competitors away. What does IBM want to acquire? When walking down Sun’s product … Continue reading →

Virtual Position

Posted on by

When I read rumors that Oracle is buying one of our former clients I wonder what we did right. Long ago and in the earliest phase of their interesting existence, we consulted to Virtual Iron. We helped with event management, presentations and removing kinks from their messaging when Virtual Iron was vending a lost cause. In those long ago days, Virtual Iron was selling sophisticated virtualization systems that not only let you divide one big server into many smaller servers (what most buyers perceive as virtualization) but they could glue several servers together via Infiniband switches and thus make many small servers look like one huge box. They were a few tiny steps away from private cloud computing, though they did not know it nor was there an industry buzz word to propel their value proposition. Virtual Iron was in what I call the ‘bottleneck bypass business’, which is always … Continue reading →