I realize I'm dating myself, but the first computer I ever owned didn't have a hard drive. It had two drive bays that held 5.25 inch floppies. Later, I bought a then revolutionary machine, an 8086 I think, with a 40 MB hard drive, and I wondered how anyone could ever fill it up. And the last time I moved, I discovered a box filled with floppies and 250 MB Zip drives.
A couple of weeks ago I was asked to moderate an HP-sponsored meeting on the subject of virtualization. Predictably, most of the discussion (attended by press and vendors including Citrix, Microsoft, Red Hat, and VMware) focused on cloud computing. It was a pretty lively session, but what I want to address here is an HP product portfolio called "IT Financial Management" that was discussed, along with its implications for cloud computing. As you might guess, the product focuses on financial analysis of IT operations, which is extremely relevant to the adoption of cloud computing.
The former CTO of Unisys shares his thoughts on data centre consolidation, virtualisation and "hybrid clouds".
You've probably seen a hundred-or even a thousand-articles criticizing cloud computing Service Level Agreements (SLAs). A common example in those articles is the putatively low Amazon Web Services SLA. Typically authors of these kind of articles go on to cite recent outages by cloud providers, implying (or stating directly) that cloud computing falls woefully short of the true SLA requirements of enterprises, often described as "five nines," i.e., 99.999 per cent availability.
Despite its great promise, CIOs' concerns about cloud computing perist. . .
Cloud service providers can make compelling and simple sales pitches in terms of cost of individual services-$100 per user per year sounds pretty good. But "hidden" expenses can alter a company's outlook. Costs related to people, processes, and architecture associated with both the transition and the operations require analysis and planning before signing up for a business case based on a move to the cloud. CIOs and other IT professionals are already well acquainted with such expenses, but the challenge will lie in uncovering them in the relatively unfamiliar cloud model and determining accountability for each.
In case you’ve been too busy dealing with rogue iPhones, October 2009 was a big month for operating systems. Do CIOs care about operating systems? Probably not as much as they used to, but with Windows 7 and Ubuntu 9.10 "Karmic Koala" (from here on abbreviated to simply "Karmic" for sanity purposes) being released within days of each other, CIOs at least have a reason to be excited about the future of the desktop. Here are five things about Karmic that senior IT executives should consider before disregarding Linux as an option for their desktop and server fleets.
In last week's post, I discussed why dev/test can be a good first use of cloud computing. Without rehashing the entire post, it's clear that dev/test is often hampered in its activities by the difficulty of getting enough computing resources to its job.
Experienced CIOs have learned the hard way that achieving tangible benefits early in the technology lifecycle is no easy matter--whether its OO, CMMI, ITIL or SOA. Cloud computing shows promise and demands attention, but the related hoopla needs to be tempered with a good dose of business sense. The cloud, regardless of its variety, should never be considered an all-or-nothing proposition.
It seems as if every CIO comes back from a conference cocktail party demanding IT move to the cloud. While this can mean many things, including using software-as-a-service (SaaS), managed hosting, or application service providers (ASP), the demand often centers on moving applications out of your own budget-sucking data center and up to an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud platform.
When Microsoft's storage service for Sidekick users broke down, cloud computing questions sprang up -- both fair and unfair.
Did you think all those legacy apps would just float up into someone else's cloud infrastructure? Management, licensing and migration concerns highlight the list of troubles that vendors are now trying to address.
Both tech vendors are aiming to change the rules of game for enterprise software. And while they're going about it with two different business models, the companies share some things in common.
Credit reporting giant TransUnion replaced custom-developed services with cloud computer capabilities for its customers.
Security researchers are warning that Web-based applications are increasing the risk of identity theft or losing personal data more than ever before.