Two of the biggest arguments against VDI have been (1) it’s too complicated, and (2) it costs more to buy and implement than just buying traditional desktops.

Link here.

As we seek leadership roles in our organizations, this line of thought is critical.  Also, as organizations reassess the functions of their team leaders, the value proposition of each position has to morph with the changing tide of the organization.

Just as companies seek to re-engineer the value propositions of their products, managers should consider doing the same. Companies do it by adjusting the features, benefits and pricing of their offerings; managers do it by re-evaluating the services they offer their employees.

Link here.

Maybe not tech-related, but this is on everyone's horizon.  This is the real kicker to the US mortgage crisis.

The $3.4 trillion in commercial debt currently outstanding in the U.S. By 2014, $1.4 trillion of that will reach maturity, and as much as half is owed to small banks which are decidedly not too big to fail. In February, the Congressional Oversight Panel concluded that a "significant wave of commercial mortgage defaults would trigger economic damage that could the touch the lives of nearly every American."

Link here.

At the end of the day, a CIO's #1 job is to be a business person, with specialty in technology.

The story of my life. :)

Link here.

This week Vizioncore released the first major update for its backup/recovery product vRanger Pro since the 4.0 version made available in July 2009.

With this release, still part of the Data Protection Platform effort, Vizioncore is clearly going after PHD Virtual, as two key new features are part of competing products or have been announced to be part of them.

 Link here.

Wow.  And there you have it.

At the close of Wednesday's stock trading session, Apple's market capitalization stood at $222 billion, surpassing Microsoft, which had a value of $219 billion. Tech watchers hailed Apple's feat as the end of an era, changing of the guard, pick your metaphor.

 Link here.

It is coming... :)

The Internet as we know it is reaching its limits.
Within 18 months it is estimated that the number of new devices able to connect to the world wide web will plummet as we run out of "IP addresses" -- the unique codes that provide access to the Internet for everything from PCs to smart phones.

Link here.

A major announcement at the conference was EMC’s introduction of V-Plex. As VMware’s vMotion has done with virtual machines (VMs), V-Plex enables vMotion over distance, allowing for "active-active" storage (I/O on both the local and remote site sides) and the ability to begin accessing storage immediately as soon as the VM appears on the host, in a matter of minutes. The needs for this can be many: natural disasters such as Hurricane Katrina highlighted the need to have a solid backup and recovery plan in place. In other instances, efficiencies are key: perhaps when an organization is looking to keep certain data/resources in one data center for a certain period of time, but may move to another when the data is no longer needed, and can be stored.

 Link here.

The word is that Google will be taking advantage of the Google I/O conference--Google's largest developer event of 2010--to unveil Google Storage for Developers. The cloud-based data storage service pits Google against similar services such as Amazon's S3, but with a specific focus on developers.

Link here.

With more applications being built for the Web, performance testing is critical to determining the proper approach to scaling both applications and infrastructure. But for many years performance testing was largely a rich-man's game, primarily because of the expense of setting and maintaining a large server infrastructure that can simulate real-world traffic.

Hosted testing solutions make a lot of sense from both the user and provider perspective. Considering the vast computing power available at your fingertips there are few reasons why you would want to own the infrastructure, or not take advantage of the latest offerings from providers both large and small.

To that end, Hewlett-Packard is slated on Wednesday to announce LoadRunner in the Cloud, a new application performance testing suite running on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).

Link here.

The U.S. House of Representatives has cut its electricity bill by about US$2,000 a day, thanks to efforts in virtualization and server consolidation.

The project came about as part of a House initiative to cut the amount of power used by this branch of Congress by 50 percent, said Jack Nichols, the director for enterprise operations at the U.S. House of Representatives Office of the Chief Administrative Officer. He talked about the two-year effort of consolidating the House's data centers at the Uptime Institute Symposium 2010, being held this week in New York.

Link here.

Engineers have long dreamed of using DNA as the backbone for the next generation of computer circuits. New research shows just how it might be done.

Link here.