DevOps is speeding towards the IT world like a freight train and the hype around it is deafening. There is no reason to be afraid of this change as it is the natural reaction to the agile movement that revolutionized development just a few years ago. By definition, DevOps is the natural alignment of IT performance to business profitability. The relevance of this has yet to be quantified but it has been suggested that the route to the CEO's chair will come from the IT leaders that successfully make the transition to a DevOps model. If this still seems foreign to you, I recommend reading up on DevOps Blog from IT Revolution, the OpsCode Blog, and check out The Phoenix Project. Despite all the talk around simple monitoring tools, breaking through the walls between Dev and Ops still poses a real challenge. This is because of a misunderstanding around Operations real pu... (more)

Cloud Computing, Big Data & Smart Mobile Apps to Drive IT Spending in 2014

Big bucks continue to be spent on hardware and software, with a marked increase in cloud services, according to a new report. Forrester released the data of its annual survey on IT spending worldwide and detected areas with higher spending, including apps and tablets. Forrester Research's annual report on worldwide IT spending split the amount of $2.06 trillion spent this year from businesses and governments between hardware, software and services related to the IT world. CIOs and IT decision-makers plan their biggest software spending increases in mobile applications and middleware, analytics, security, and collaboration software, according to an article on CloudTimes.org. Software registered the largest share of tech spending in 2013 and companies will continue to spend in this segment particularly on smart and cloud computing in 2014. While investment in legacy a... (more)

Doing VDI, Only Better

There are three core vendors and protocols supporting VDI today. Microsoft with RDP, Citrix with ICA, and VMware with PCoIP. For most organizations a single vendor approach has been necessary, primarily because the costs associated with the supporting network and application delivery network infrastructure required to deliver VDI with the appropriate levels of security while meeting performance expectations of users and the need to maintain high availability. It’s a tall order that’s getting taller with every mobile client introduced, especially when you toss in a liberal dose of enforcing policies regarding access to virtual desktops. Most folks are well aware of F5’s long history of deep integration with its partners Microsoft and VMware. Whether it’s integrating with management systems or designing, testing, and documenting the often times complex joint archite... (more)

F-Secure Pioneers "Virus Maps"

'The world virus map is an excellent resource for quickly understanding the virus situation at any given time,' said Mikko Hypponen, Chief Research Officer at F-Secure said, as his company introduced the concept of 'virus maps' - a visual representations of virus infections worldwide. 'For anybody interested in understanding the 'bigger picture' behind a virus in the news and charting its course, this is a good place to start.'  "With a virus map we can plot viruses in real-time or see an elapsed history," added Hypponene, who explained how, after blogging about this system, he had gotten requests from our users to make a version that would be available for everyone online. "So just what we've done with F-Secure World Map," he said. The resource, he continued, is now available to the general public in four languages: English, French, German and Finnish. Visito... (more)

Virtualization Player Citrix Buys VMware's Open Source Rival for $500M

The day after the great VMware IPO Tuesday, supposedly the hottest thing since Google went public, Citrix, a Microsoft camp follower with the scars to prove it, said it's acquiring VMware's open source commercial competitor, XenSource Inc, the company that developed Xen's chi-chi hypervisor. It's paying about $500 million in cash and stock (60-40), a pricey number not all that different from the $635 million that EMC paid for VMware early in '04. But considering it's for an open source start-up not yet three-years-old with 80 people and under $5 million in annual revenues, it's rich. The price includes the assumption of about $107 million in unvested stock options to hold people and the deal will result in an $8 million-$10 million write-off for in-process R&D.; Obviously Citrix expects the merger to move it and its thin client-style software, which reflects applicatio... (more)

SAP's Director of Virtualization Speaking This Week at SYS-CON's 4th International Virtualization Conference & Expo in Silicon Valley

'Virtualization is one of the most interesting IT topics these days,' says Roland Wartenberg, SAP's Director of Virtualization. 'Whereas one can find a lot of concepts and high level content provided by various vendors, it's sometimes a challenge to find detailed technical information on how to use it in SAP landscapes,' he adds. Wartenberg will be putting that right at SYS-CON's 4th International Virtualization Conference & Expo in San Jose, CA, this week, where he will be giving a technical breakout session in a speaker lineup that includes some of the best known virtualization executives in the entire IT industry. Wartenberg joins a heavy-hitting Speaker Faculty due to speak in three parallel tracks during the event, which is being held at The Fairmont Hotel, San Jose. The faculty includes: Mike Neil - General Manager of Virtualization Strategy at Microsoft (Keynote) ... (more)

NPR Asks: Will Cloud Computing Work in the White House?

"The Internet IS cloud computing," according to a holiday-time broadcast on National Public Radio. The program, called 'Will Cloud Computing Work in the White House' aired December 21 on NPR's All Things Considered and involved NPR's Andrea Seabrook discussing with security and technology experts how the White House computers should run under incoming President Barack Obama. The program focused on how cloud computing technology can potentially be used to improve government services - a much discussed topic as the new administration moves into the White House. Experts consulted included Google's Vint Cerf (a.k.a.'The Father of the Internet') and Dataline's expert on Cloud Computing Security, Kevin Jackson. Jackson discussed how cloud computing can make data and computing more secure than traditional systems. Cloud computing would also improve collaboration, an area that... (more)

Sun to Keynote on "A World of Many Clouds" at Cloud Computing Expo in New York

Sun is joining Amazon and IBM in the top industry keynote lineup for SYS-CON's 2nd International Cloud Computing Conference & Expo in New York, March 30-April 1, co-located with the 5th International Virtualization Conference & Expo. Sun's Sr. VP of Cloud Computing, David Douglas, will be joining Amazon's CTO Dr Werner Vogels and IBM's Cloud Computing CTO Kristof Kloeckner. Between them these three industry thought leaders represent extremely well the steadily growing importance of Cloud Computing in the world of Enterprise IT. Douglas's keynote will be entitled "A World of Many Clouds." Sun is committed to making cloud computing a pervasive reality. Sun's open source philosophy and Java principles form the core of a strategy to provide interoperability for large-scale computing resources through open and transparent cloud platforms that minimize lock-in. Sun envisio... (more)

VDI and UEM Help Level the Playing Field for Rich UI Developers

It's an old headache that seemed to be going away, when most everyone in the enterprise was running Internet Explorer 6 on Wintel XP.   The good thing about the Microsoft desktop monopoly was that UI developers could count on a predictable "easel", or foundation on which to deploy fat clients or web apps.  Back when I was at Oracle and we had one monolithic suite of web e-business applications, we could get away with testing solely on IE, at least until a growing set of customers insisted we support those rogue Mac users. But if you're building rich UI apps and trying to leverage the goodies available for PHP, Flex, Silverlight et al, that headache has become a full-on migraine.   Enterprises can't dictate desktops anymore, nor is it cost-effective to try. Now the landscape consists of: XP, Vista and cowboys running pre-releases of Windows, with all kinds of memo... (more)

VMware Still Limping from the Virtual Nail in its Reeboks

VMware on Ulitzer VMware picked up a nail in its sneakers in Q1 and was still limping in Q2 but now thinks things might get a little bit better the rest of the year. It said Wednesday that its earnings in Q2 came to $33 million, or eight cents a share, down 36.5% year-over-year, on flat revenues of $456 million. Wall Street only had it down for revenues of $453 million. It liked the results and pushed the stock up 8% to $33.81 after-hours. Blaming the challenging macro economic environment, the virtualization maven said Q2 license revenues declined 20% year-over-year to $228 million while services revenues, which include software maintenance and professional services, were up 32% to $228 million. Q1 was the first time VMware license revenue ever fell and the company worried that the market's newfound cash-preserving impulses would force its Q2 revenues to be down or at... (more)

Amazon's VPC Opens the Door for Innovation and Enterprise Cloud Adoption

Cloud Computing Journal The recent announcement from Amazon of the Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) represents the next big advance in the evolution chain for cloud computing. Enterprises can now integrate their IT infrastructure with Amazon's vast computing and storage resources, using a VPN connection from their data center to their own virtual private cloud which then looks like part of their internal network. Until the release of VPC, companies were left to build applications and utilize the cloud as a separate and somewhat siloed portion of their computing environment. In addition to the VPN connection, VPC allows cloud users to control their IP addressing within the Amazon cloud (previously IT addresses were assigned randomly). This may sound trivial, but it solves some tricky problems that made it hard to integrate cloud and internal resources. Prior to VPC, eve... (more)