data center

How well did the press conference stack up against the five initiatives I suggested?

A contractor is doing some construction work in this data center, and keeping everything safe is a priority.

We are surrounded by buzz about security in the cloud, and James Niccolai at CW gets the story right - the cloud might be better than your data center.

Whether you're a service provider, an application architect, or an end user, the cloud is still pretty cloudy. But we've already moved on to talking about standards. Is it too early, an impossible goal, or a productive conversation? The thing is, the cloud is changing how we do business. The cloud will change how we do standardization as well.

When it comes to migrating those really big enterprise Unix systems to Linux, big data centers are talking the talk but few walk the walk.

In response to a comment - can the cloud ever provide you with enough security? I anticipate it will eventually have more security, and more in other capabilities, than any infrastructure you've built for yourself today.

Sometimes the decision as to whether to insource or outsource an IT task can hinge on a single job function.

There's a brilliant article on how it is mother nature that bringing down many data centers rather than our more familiar types of disaster.

It goes on to look at some other types of problem that you may be more familiar with, but the non-human, and particularly animal interventions make for some interesting reading.

A nice white paper on the differences between different large scale computing technology is available over at GridBus, The Grid Computing and Distributed Systems (GRIDS) Laboratory at the University of Melbourne.

The white paper provides a lot of information, including some more detailed information on the differences between the different massively-scalable computing systems, and how the current IT climate is ultimately proceeding towards the cloud computing infrastructure.

There are lots of discussions going on right now about cloud computing is, I even touched on at least some aspects of that last week. This story at Slashdot touched on the issue, and the Cloud Computing GoogleGroup is full of the discussion. But I feel there isn't enough definition of what it isn't. So here's a list of what I think:

I'm late following up on my previous X4150 thoughts - I can blame conferences for that at least - but I shouldn't shirk my responsibilities.

It is very difficult, from a buyers perspective, to decide what that sweet spot is in terms of buying hardware. The current computer market, and more importantly the current computer climate, has completely changed the way that we look at buying computers.

It's mid-February, and the server that contains all the year-end processing data and reports for this company goes down -- irretrievably.

...and how blade servers evolved to use proprietary backplanes

It's 1977, and this network analyst pilot fish is working at a newly constructed data center -- one with a big fence. But when the task at hand is setting up a communications line at 4:30 a.m., that's a problem.

Sounds like a big win for IBM's Blue Cloud. 6 months since announcement bears fruit on the cloud computing front... But what does Cloud Computing mean for the enterprise? I think it suggests good things to come, namely easier infrastructure management.