How one editor cuts through the cloud computing hype

Earlier in the week, I posted the first part of an interview I did with Derrick Harris, editor of the late On-Demand Enterprise site. He offered a few thoughts of his own about the state of cloud computing before heading off to his new gig with GigaOM.Highlights from Derrick's interview so far: he thinks the table is set in 2009 for some major strides in cloud computing, despite the economic

Read More

Derrick Harris interview: Cloud computing 'blows away' grid's value prop

For those who watch the cloud space, you probably noticed that the bad economy took down one of the more rational voices in the conversation a few weeks back. On Dec. 19, On-Demand Enterprise (once known as GRIDtoday) froze its content and sent its editorial staff packing. Their depressing blurb saying as much is atop all of their site’s pages now.Derrick Harris, the editor of that publication,

Read More

Public/private 'hybrid' cloud computing: Sooner or later?

It's good to know that amid bank and technology stock prices cratering, and joblessness hitting 15-year highs here in California, and the feel-good sobriety of Barack Obama's inauguration, the tech industry is still up for a good debate. The debate on the legitimacy of internal clouds (called private clouds by many) raged on last week in the blogosphere, Twitter, and even on the official sites of

Read More

The last of the year-end Top 10 lists

This year I sent most of my holiday cards out with a January postmark on them. Maybe it's only fitting, then, that I waited until today to post a year-end list of sorts here at Data Center Dialog. I figured I'd let everyone else have fun pontificating first, and then, after the, um, clouds had cleared, I'd publish a 2009 List of Lists for the data center/IT ops crowd.So, here are some of the

Read More

Business Agility : Using internal cloud computing to create a computer animation render farm in less than a day

As I mentioned in my last post, cloud computing is all about the "-ilities" of computing environments and I wanted to spend some time in this post talking about internal cloud computing and how it can dramatically enhance a company's business and IT agility.Many of the customers that I speak with have the same problem with their IT infrastructure. Specifically, they believe they have plenty of

Read More

Are internal clouds bogus?

Two articles in the past week have questioned the legitimacy of one of the industry's favorite new terms: internal cloud computing. I thought it was a good time to weigh in on whether or not internal clouds are legit or just a bunch of vendor marketing hype that data center managers should ignore.Andrew Conry-Murray at InformationWeek wrote that "there's no such thing as a private cloud."

Read More

The 'Bio Data Center': working with Bull on data center efficiency in Europe

Back in November, I mentioned that we had been working with some big customers to improve the way they run many of the largest data centers in North America. With Tuesday's partnership announcement with Bull, Cassatt is expanding that focus to Europe as well.If you didn't see the announcement, here's a very short recap: Bull has been working on a strategy to help its European customer base

Read More

'Bottle the magic': 451 Group suggests clouds to beat the recession

The 451 Group is brimming with personality. I know, that's kind of a weird commentary about an IT analyst firm, but they, of all the groups I interact with in the IT operations space, don't check their quirks, sense of humor, and appreciation for irony at the door. And that's a good thing.In reading their recently published year-end analyses and predictions about cloud computing, eco-efficient IT

Read More

IDC's Al Gillen: Is a bad economy good for cloud computing?

Today's post is Part 2 of our recent interview with Al Gillen, program vice president of system software at IDC.In the first part of our interview with Al that I posted yesterday, Al noted that virtualization is still on the rise, but more because of use cases like HA and DR than the traditional drive to simply consolidate servers. He saw systems management taking a much more important role, and

Read More

Interview with IDC's Al Gillen: in 2009, virtualization will help bridge to the cloud

When I first started this blog a few months back, I told you we'd do our best to bring you a cogent collection of useful ideas, opinions, and other relevant tidbits from those steeped in the world of running data centers. So far, that's generally taken the form of blogging from industry events (like my posts from the Gartner Data Center Conference in Vegas in early December) or commentary on IT

Read More