No April Fools' Day joke: Data center managers don't know what their servers are doing

Given the arrival of my favorite Silicon Valley holiday, I'd like to brush aside some of the content in this post as a big April Fools' Day ruse. Unfortunately, it's not.Here are the facts: according to a couple folks who should know, data centers are buying new equipment before making good use of what they already have. OK, maybe that's not new news, but we've just added another couple scary

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Virtualization complexity is not going away, so plan for reality

Earlier this year, Cassatt ran our second annual Data Center Survey, getting responses from several hundred data center-related people in our database. Last year's survey (register to download it here) focused mainly on data center energy efficiency. This year, we asked those same questions again -- and then some. Since the issues in the data center have shifted, so have our questions. We hit a

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Webcast: Using what you already have to create a cloud

If there's one thing customers hate, it's a great idea that comes with a caveat. Especially a caveat that says something like: "In order to benefit from said great idea, you are required to tear everything out and start all over." That sort of behavior usually gets you kicked out of data center and IT operations meetings. Data centers don’t operate that way. Data center operators don’t operate

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Internal clouds and a better way to do recovery to a back-up datacenter

Last post, we talked about a variety of failures within a datacenter and how an internal cloud infrastructure would help you provide a better level of service to your customers at a lower cost. In this post, we're on to the final use case for our discussion of recovery capabilities enabled by using an internal cloud infrastructure -- and I think we've left the best for last. In the wake of 9/11

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A snapshot: actual customer questions about internal cloud computing

After my recent post covering Nicholas Carr's presentation at the IDC conference, I received a comment from Jon Collins voicing extreme skepticism that the transformation Carr talked about (and I agreed with) was, in fact, underway.One of the fun parts of being on the front lines of what's going on in the data centers these days is having a pretty interesting set of data points that a lot of

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Like the Big Dig, ex-IDC analyst John Humphreys believes cloud computing will 'take time'

In the last post, I interviewed John Humphreys, formerly the resident virtualization guru at IDC, now with the virtualization and management group within Citrix. John characterized Citrix as moving beyond criticism that they aren't doing enough with their XenSource acquisition and, in fact, taking the bull by the horns -- offering XenServer for free and focusing on aspects of heterogeneous

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John Humphreys, now at Citrix, sees virtualization competition shifting to management

I'm sure when John Humphreys left IDC and joined Citrix last year he had to endure lots of barbs about joining "the dark side" from his analyst compatriots. Of course, his new vendor friends were probably saying the exact opposite, yet much the same thing: no more ivory tower, John; it's time to actually apply some of your insights to a real business -- after all, he now had a bunch of real, live

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Nicholas Carr: IT and economy are cloudy, but the Big Switch is on

For those at IDC's Directions conference this week in San Jose (my highlights are posted here) who hadn't yet read his book, The Big Switch, Nicholas Carr used his keynote to walk through his "IT-is-going-to-be-like-the-electrical-utility" metaphor, and his reasoning behind it. Many, I'm sure, had heard it before (some even complained about it a bit on Twitter). But that doesn't make it any less

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IDC: Downward Directions for IT in 2009 leave room for cloud computing uptick

IDC's 44th annual Directions conference in San Jose this week may be the longest running IT conference in the world, but it didn't pull any punches on the economy. From John Gantz's opening keynote through every track session I attended, the analysts recounted what anyone running a data center knows all too well: IT spending is pulling way back. IDC wisely did a mid-year course-correction on

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Will cloud computing be the innovation from this downturn?

Entrepreneur Magazine recently ran a list of significant innovations that appeared during previous times of economic duress.From the Great Depression came Scotch tape. Miracle Whip. Campbell's Chicken Noodle soup. The fluorescent light bulb. From the stagflation/oil crisis/Vietnam era, the scanable supermarket bar code. From the dot-com bust and 9/11, the iPod and the Blackberry. It's a cool list

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