Free network management tool.  I hear good things.

http://www.spiceworks.com/

“Tuesday, in a much anticipated joint public announcement, VMware and Salesforce.com leveraged their enterprise expertise and came to market with VMforce, a platform-as-a service offering designed to enable Java developers to create and deploy new enterprise applications in the cloud with the ease, flexibility, security and scalability that is needed in today's enterprise environment. What does it mean to IT?”

A Java app development platform in the cloud.  Does it make you jump for joy?  Meh.

Link here.

“Google's top energy executive has offered some simple steps for making data centers more energy-efficient, including raising the thermostat to 80 degrees Fahrenheit -- or 27 degrees Celsius -- to cut down on cooling costs.”

Link here.

“The U.S. economy produced more upbeat news with its 3.2% GDP growth in the first quarter, making it three straight quarters of expansion, the U.S. Commerce Department announced Friday. Strong business investment and consumer spending led the increase.

Economists surveyed by Bloomberg News had expected a 3.4% rise, after increases of 5.6% and 2.2% in the third and fourth quarters of 2009, respectively.”

Link here.

“1.We’ve updated our support mutual positions – for the first time explicitly calling out on the VMware HCL and the EMC eLab Matrix that Oracle 11g (single instance for now, RAC via RPQ) is officially supported.   Also, we’ve setup a specific Virtual Escalation Team process for Oracle on vSphere on EMC.  

2.We’ve completed and documented a TON of solutions validation work to show how, across all EMC platforms and protocols (ASM and dNFS use cases), a simple solution can be designed to enable instant VtoP if absolutely needed – think of this as a “get out of jail free” card.”

Link here.

“First, there's ‘Open’.”

Link here.

“The diverse needs of enterprises suggest that there is no single IT approach that could possibly resolve all IT pain points within a company. While IT executives are in the stage of combining their operational practices with innovation, they realize that any new technology deployment involves a change in business process and management. And IT transformation could be a costly endeavor if it isn't done right from day one. As a result, many CIOs are taking a pragmatic approach, embracing new technologies that would enable them to keep ahead of technological obsolescence without disrupting the existing business process and management imperatives. This sort of operational balance is well received by a lot of enterprises that are looking for technology extension, not replacement.

Peak 10's hybrid cloud strategy

In the context of cloud computing, not surprisingly, the notion of deploying a hybrid cloud that connects traditional enterprise IT infrastructure with the next generation cloud computing platform (both public and private) is growing in popularity in the marketplace. Peak 10, a managed services provider that offers managed hosting services in both physical and virtual environments for SMBs and mid-sized enterprises, has made noticeable efforts to bring the hybrid approach into fruition. Aside from adding a multi-tenant enterprise cloud service to complement its existing private cloud offering, Peak 10 has focused on demonstrating the unique capability of its 'Cloud Plus' platform. As its name suggested, the 'plus' component is to emphasize Peak 10's ability to support a hybrid approach that many customers are asking for. Thus, using 'Cloud Plus' offerings (both multi-tenant enterprise cloud and private cloud), customers are able to seamlessly interconnect existing IT infrastructures hosted in Peak 10's datacenter facilities with Peak 10's clouds.

Tier 1 believes this is a sensible approach to increase the stickiness of enterprise customers while driving cloud migration based on individual requirements and timetables. Pure Fishing is a textbook example of how existing managed hosting customers embrace Peak 10's Cloud Plus offering as part of the company's IT transformation initiatives. However, this approach does rely heavily on technology partners and consultants to bridge the gaps in extending business functionalities across multiple operational environments. Not surprisingly, Peak 10's product team is deeply involved in the service provisioning for the initial cloud deployment and manages seamless integration between cloud services and managed services.

What is in Enterprise Cloud Plus?

Enterprise Cloud Plus service is a multi-tenant offering that delivers cloud computing with dynamic load sharing and seamless scaling. It also supports cloud bursting for demand spikes while running specific workloads. The enterprise cloud is being supported by multi-datacenter clusters out of Peak 10's 19 datacenter facilities and it is accessible via the public Internet and private network (both VPN/IP Sec VPN and private line connectivity). In terms of pricing, Peak 10's enterprise cloud is not the typical 'pay as you go' utility-based consumption model, although it is moving customers from a capex to opex model. The contract-based pricing with minimum commitment suggests that Peak 10 is putting its bet on niche enterprise segments where customers are familiar with usage patterns of their existing workloads and are willing to outsource specific workloads (typically non mission-critical workloads) to a cloud partner for operational efficiency. Peak 10's cloud service customers include companies in the health care, gaming and technology verticals. With more managed hosting customers coming to the end of their business lifecycle, Peak 10 expects to see a surge in demand from existing managed hosting clients.

T1R take

Peak 10 fares well in its cloud offerings by being able to demonstrate a high degree of service flexibility and manageability. To try and differ from many of its peers in the managed hosting space, Peak 10 implements a high-touch approach to grow contract value from existing enterprise customers. Although the uptake is picking up, Peak 10 has plenty of room for growth. Going forward, Peak 10 needs to be cognizant when implementing its high-touch service approach as the barriers to entry in this arena are relatively low and an adroit newcomer can offer just the right mix of price, quality and service component to entice business customers. The notion of delivering 'consulting as-a-service' with no strings attached is coming of age in the industry. And the unspoken truth is that service value lies in the eyes of the beholders. For SMBs, the availability of procurement options could be convincing enough to get buy-in.

Boosting IT innovation is more an operational challenge than a technology barrier. Many of the IT projects fail to deliver on their promise because enterprise users are reluctant to make a change based on both rational and irrational factors such as insufficient training and the workplace complacency syndrome. The human factor is hard to ignore. And cloud players must play a proactive role in facilitating innovation efforts that can benefit all parties within the company's IT ecosystem.”

“The security standard used to protect credit cards isn't up to the task and upgrades that are planned for this fall do virtually nothing to improve it, a security expert told Interop attendees this week.”

Link here.

“When you're comparing cloud computing service providers, traditional IT product selection skills may not cut it. Consider these 8 questions for your working checklist.”

Link here.

6 million java developers now have a place to hang out:

www.force.com

A PaaS environment for Java developers? 

Do we need that?

“It's a battle IT leaders have been waging for years: At some companies, CEOs still think IT should report to the head bean counter. A debate among CIOs on this topic has created some valuable food for thought.”

Link here.

“In January VMware released the first public draft of its vSphere 4.0 Hardening Guide.”

Link here.

The security question as it relates to virtualization is a growing topic. VMware is forward-looking on this one.

“At the Cloud Computing Expo held this week in New York, executives from Microsoft (MSFT) and Oracle (ORCL) shared how they see cloud computing working its way into the enterprise.

The companies offered disparate visions, however, with Microsoft emphasizing its public cloud offerings and Oracle touting tools for building out internal clouds.”

Link here.

“Every hot trend needs an icebreaker. When it comes to green data centers, a key pioneer was the Fannie Mae Technology Center in Urbana, Md., which in 2005 became the first data center to earn certification under the LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) program, a voluntary energy efficiency rating for commercial buildings.”

Link here.

<sarcasm>Clearly, Fannie’s priorities are in the right place.</sarcasm>

1.       VCP

2.       MCTS

3.       CCA

4.       CompTIA Strata Green IT (wha?)

5.       ITIL v3 Foundations

Link here.

“Standard cloud computing contracts are one-sided documents that impose responsibility for security and data protection on the customer, disclaim all liability, offer no warranties, and give the vendor the right to suspend service at will. So why would you bother to sign on the dotted line?”

This statement identifies the differentiation metric for Cloud services: Service Level Agreements.  No person, no department, no business functions without them.  We do best when they are explicit and negotiated at the start of service delivery, but rest assured you are responsible for a certain service level whether you’ve been told it explicitly or not.

Link here.

“An engine nozzle turns a dramatic array of colors during a recent hot-fire test at NASA's White Sands Test Facility near Las Cruces, N.M. A team of engineers from Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio, Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., and Johnson Space Center in Houston conducted tests on a cryogenic liquid oxygen and liquid methane engine to measure the engine’s performance for future use with in-space vehicles.

Last month, eight altitude chamber tests were performed using an Aerojet workhorse engine to gather design data for future lander and in-space engines. Using the altitude chamber, which simulates the space-type vacuum environment, engineers were able to attach a larger nozzle and vary the propellant mixture ratios to test the engine's overall operating capability. This technology could be selected for future use with vehicles designed for transport, descent, or ascent to another planetary body or asteroid.”

Why do we test?  In the words of a good engineer, “it makes us look kind of professional.”

Link here.

“For 25 years, the NAS Division has been dedicated to providing scientists and engineers with the supercomputing resources and simulation tools needed to carry out critical NASA missions and make new scientific discoveries for the benefit of humankind.”

Wow.

Link here.

“Seagate today announced it has tightly integrated its EVault backup software and cloud storage service with Microsoft's Data Proteciton Manager disk-based backup appliance to offer multi-vendor application backup managed through a single dashboard.”

More tech to support the cloud.  Remember: virtualization is predicated on storage and Cloud Computing seems to be, thus far, predicated on hardware abstraction (ie virtualization), so Seagate’s foray into making cloud computing easier for the regular joe is a true sign of the times.

Link here.

“Bob Lutz, the 77-year old veteran car executive, said that when he joined General Motors in 2002, the company’s culture was “inwardly focused not customer focused.” As Lutz who will retire next month explained in an interview on NPR’s Morning Edition, metrics in manufacturing, purchasing, and operations were allowed to trump the business of serving customers needs for new and different vehicles. Lutz’s words echo those of another former auto executive whom I recall speaking similarly about his company more than a decade ago.  That company was Ford Motor.”

That’s not the Bob Lutz I know.

Link here.

“Salesforce.com, a leader in cloud computing, has agreed to pay $142 million for Jigsaw, which operates a wiki-style business contact database. The deal also has an incentive element, which increases the price tag by 10% if certain milestones are met.”

Looks like Salesforce.com is on the move yet again.

Link here.

“Users who turned to cloud computing for some of its obvious benefits, such as the ability to rapidly expand and provision systems, are starting to shift their focus to finding ways to fix some early weaknesses.”

Link here.

“The hype around cloud computing would make you think mass adoption will happen tomorrow. But recent studies by a number of sources have shown that security is the biggest barrier to cloud adoption. The reality is cloud computing is simply another step in technology evolution following the path of mainframe, client server and Web applications, all of which had — and still have — their own security issues.”

Link here.

“A live test environment for companies engaging in cloud computing as well as a forum to share innovation and thought leadership…”

Participants include Eucalyptus, NASA,  and Red Peak Solutions.

“The Virtual Computing Environment coalition (VCE) represents an unprecedented level of collaboration in development, services, and partner enablement that reduces risk in the infrastructure virtualization journey to the private cloud.

VCE's Vblock Infrastructure Packages deliver a complete IT infrastructure that integrates best-of-breed virtualization, networking, compute, storage, security, and management technologies. The three companies have invested in industry-first collaborative delivery of seamless customer support with end-to-end vendor accountability.”

http://www.emc.com/campaign/global/vce/index.htm

“This is why you pay taxes, for the authorities are God's servants, who give their full time to governing. Give everyone what you owe him. If you owe taxes, pay taxes; if revenue, then revenue; if respect, then respect; if honor, then honor.”

Romans 13:6-7

“Not everyone's pleased with NASA's future, as defined by the Obama-led new fiscal plans for the space agency...and three particularly significant chaps would just assume tell him to shove it up Uranus. They're names are Armstrong, Lovell, and Cernan. Ring any bells?”

http://www.fastcompany.com/1616120/nasa-obama-astronauts-budget-constellation-armstrong-lovell-cernan

Xen.org, http://www.xen.org/

Oracle Virtualization, http://www.oracle.com/us/technologies/virtualization/index.html

Big patches this go ‘round.  Make sure you’re up-to-date.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-27080_3-20002385-245.html?tag=mncol;title

“The European Commission will ask the public for their thoughts on net neutrality this spring, digital agenda commissioner Neelie Kroes has announced.

Speaking at a conference held by French telecoms regulator Arcep on Tuesday, Kroes said the internet was "not an inherently neutral platform". This means that European regulators have to make choices about whether to allow ISPs to prioritise certain types of online traffic, she added.”

http://www.zdnet.co.uk/news/regulation/2010/04/14/internet-is-not-inherently-neutral-says-eus-kroes-40088635/?tag=mncol;txt

Reportedly, a component to the vmforce offering will be CloudShare.

According to www.cloudshare.com,

“CloudShare enables technology vendors  and enterprises to conduct evaluations, proofs-of-concept, demos, training and certification without shipping machines or traveling to customers, using an on-demand cloud-based service.”

Well, sort of.

http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2010/04/14/sarah-palin-talks-data-center-monitoring/

“…Salesforce may launch a VMware-powered Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud computing facility, turning into a competitor for companies like Amazon and Rackspace…”

http://www.virtualization.info/2010/04/what-vmware-and-salesforce-partnership.html

“NASA and General Motors announced on Tuesday that they planned to send a robot to the International Space Station, with the eventual goal of having it help the astronauts there.”

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/04/14/nasa-and-gm-robot-heading-to-space-station/?partner=rss&emc=rss

“President Obama will announce his administration's vision for America's space program during a visit to Florida on Thursday, according to documents provided to CNN by a White House official.”

http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/space/04/14/us.space.program/index.html?hpt=C1

“Eric Sloof at NTPRO.NL yesterday revealed that VMware is about to launch a new classroom course dubbed vSphere 4: Automation.”

http://www.virtualization.info/2010/04/vmware-to-launch-new-training-course.html

“The potential benefits of public clouds are obvious to most IT execs, but so are the pitfalls – outages, security concerns, compliance issues, and questions about performance, management, service-level agreements and billing. At this point, it's fair to say that most IT execs are wary of entrusting sensitive data or important applications to the public cloud.”

http://www.networkworld.com/reviews/2010/040510-cloud-computing-test.html

Nobody really knows what this is, yet, but it will be interesting to learn:

Join industry leaders Marc Benioff, chairman & CEO of salesforce.com, and Paul Maritz, president & CEO of VMware, for a live Webcast where they will make an exciting joint product announcement on the future of cloud computing.

Date: April 27, 2010

Time: 10:30 a.m. PDT

Location: www.vmforce.com

http://www.vmforce.com/

”What would the Founding Fathers think about Internet-based “cloud” computing?

Would James Madison, for example, agree with some current interpretations of the Fourth Amendment, which hold that old-fashioned letters stored in a dresser drawer enjoy stronger legal protection against search and seizure than an e-mail stored on the Web or a private post left for a friend on Facebook?”

http://redtape.msnbc.com/2010/04/the-constitutional-issues-raised-by-cloud-computing.html#posts

“When the market closes Tuesday, all eyes will be on the world's largest chip maker, and investors are hoping for some good news.”

http://www.dailyfinance.com/story/company-news/investors-to-eye-intels-earnings-for-signs-of-a-recovery/19437311/

“Why all private clouds being promoted these days are just Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) clouds?

Why we have several vendors that offer hardware virtualization platforms for on-premises IaaS clouds and nobody that offers something similar for private PaaS and SaaS clouds?”

http://www.virtualization.info/2010/04/lack-of-paassaas-private-clouds-and.html

“Wal-Mart Stores pushed forward with a risky sustainability initiative at a time when its public image was suffering. But ultimately the company's rationale for "going green" was purely economic, according to former CEO Lee Scott.”

http://news.cnet.com/8301-11128_3-20002313-54.html?tag=newsEditorsPicksArea.0

“It’s been a busy news week for Rackspace Hosting (RAX). Here’s a look at three news items from the San Antonio-based provider of managed hosting and cloud computing services…”

http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2010/04/07/rackspace-news-ipad-app-nimsoft-leed-gold/

“During the weekend Xen.org finally released Xen 4.0.

It includes a number of very interesting features, even if they are definitively less than the ones listed in the proposed roadmap appeared in August 2009:

·         Fault Tolerance (live transactional synchronization of VM state between hosts)

·         Memory Overcommit (page sharing through the Transcendent Memory feature)

·         Support for live snapshots and clones through the new VHD implementation called Blktap2

·         Support for new Smart NICs with multi-queue and SR-IOV functionality through the network channel implementation called Netchannel2

·         Support for Para-virtualized USB and VGA pass-through

·         Support for Paravirt-ops in the Dom0 (with Linux kernel 2.6.31)

·         Support for up to 64 vCPUs per virtual machine

·         Support for up to 1TB RAM per host”

http://www.virtualization.info/2010/04/release-xen-40.html

“Multi-controller System Establishes New Industry Leading Benchmarks for Enterprise Backup Storage Performance”

http://www.emc.com/about/news/press/2010/20100412-01.htm

Oracle continues to release updates to their virtualization platform.  Oracle released 3.1.6 on 3/25/10.  When will they address licensing so we can start virtualizing Oracle boxes in VMware/Xen/Hyper-V?

http://www.virtualbox.org/

“At just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly. Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous man, though for a good man someone might possibly dare to die. But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”

“Almost one year after the general availability of Nexus 1000V, the company seems to have slightly changed its mind about being all virtual.”

http://www.virtualization.info/2010/04/cisco-moves-nexus-1000v-outside-vsphere.html

Here’s the place to get it:

http://www.microsoft.com/business/thenewefficiency/product/windows-server-2008.aspx#m=kNTCiPAzmJi

”NASA's new space plan, unveiled in February as part of President Obama's 2011 budget proposal, calls for the cancellation of the agency's Constellation program in charge of building new rockets and spaceships to replace the aging space shuttle fleet. NASA plans just four more shuttle missions – one of which is under way now – before the fleet is retired in the fall.”

http://www.space.com/news/nasa-centers-new-assignments-100408.html

I feel crushed by the weight of the combined marketing departments.

http://www.microsoftandcitrix.com/

“With the release of Office 2010 on May 12, Microsoft will complete an effort to move its long portfolio of applications to the Cloud, offering its business and government customers a new way to deliver services to users.”

http://www.idgconnect.com/index.cfm?cid=116&pk=25643&event=showarticle

Viable longdistance vmotion with 40ms latency over an OC-12…

http://www.f5.com/pdf/deployment-guides/vmware-vmotion-dg.pdf

“If you're basing your existing disaster recovery plans around tapes that you're shipping back and forth between your local sites and one or more offsite storage facilities, then you already know that using tapes for recovery leads to days' worth of data loss, recovery times that can take from days to weeks, and recovery reliability issues that (for whatever reason) mean you can't always get back the data you need.”

Interesting product.  I wonder if it works.  I’ll do some more investigation..

http://www.inmage.com/solutions/disaster-recovery-and-data-availability.html