Tech Blog

In WWII, my father was trained in bomb disposal in the Army. When he was drafted, he was a mechanic, and that’s what he did at first. But, they needed soldiers with mechanical aptitude and a reasonably calm demeanor, and my dad just happened to be there and be suited for the job. It worked out well for him – he spent much of his enlistment working on munitions disposal in Oahu, and I got to hear stories about how one would go about disarming a beached torpedo if one happened to come across such an item.

I’ve written in the past about the battle for the hearts and minds of IT organization in terms of the adoption of virtualization technology. Here is an interesting read from Computerworld “Big vendors look to challenge VMware with open source”

IT cannot simply be viewed as a cost center; rather it needs to show value and its contribution to the bottom line. This is quite the challenge because when it is all said and done IT’s control over its own destiny is limited as its primary task is to recommend, deliver and maintain the appropriate technology and IT infrastructure so their organization can function properly and maintain a competitive edge.

So how does one quantify and show IT’s value to “management”? There are actually a few options:

A survey of the marketplace reveals that one of the biggest challenges that IT personnel have is that of lack of time. So what we’ve done in Longitude V7.0 is to streamline the whole IT monitoring process so that a user can quickly and effortlessly monitor their IT infrastructure, the goal is to be operational in a literally a matter of minutes.

Obviously the world is a small place, especially from an IT perspective as geographic boundaries are non-existent. In the past I’ve blogged about the virtues of public clouds and the different factors one must take under consideration. It is not uncommon for those evaluating the use of the public cloud to have reservations due to the fundamental lack of control associated with the model. Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) are tasked with storing, maintaining and securing the data, as well as providing a robust network and server infrastructure.

OK so we all know that IT budgets have been constrained (although things are admittedly getting better), with hardware/software refreshes and the strong push to virtualization there is only some much budget available. One solution had been to simply find software that is no cost/low cost. It is an easy decision right? No budget, no problem, just use technology that doesn’t require any capital outlay.

IT organizations most concerned about security as well as maintaining command and control are the best candidates for private cloud implementations.

Predictions.. predictions for the new year what are we in for? Followers of this blog are well versed with virtualization and the momentum behind it. Interestingly enough if you look at what’s happening in the industry you can see that there is more attention being given towards the performance of the IT infrastructure delivering the applications rather than performance of the applications themselves.

VMware ESX 4 vs MS Windows Hyper-V? Well, the battle rages on between the two hypervisor titans. While VMWare has the lion’s share of the market now, Hyper-V is certainly starting to get some traction. The increased pressure for server consolidation as well as Microsoft’s aggressive pricing and bundling of technology has resulted in many conversations where we are asked to provide advice as to which hypervisor is the best choice. In the past the decision was simple as VMware was the de facto standard.

If you’re reading this blog it means there is a good chance that you have some sort of application performance monitoring in place or are giving close consideration to enhancing, augmenting or even changing out. The adoption of cloud computing certainly has given IT some cause for concern as IT organizations now are subject to more potentials outages due to elements beyond their control. APM has been around in some form for many years; the nature of the technology has evolved through various phases, from the old days of “time-sharing”, to client/server computing, to the cloud.