EMCworld Announcements

There were quite a number of interesting announcements at EMCworld this year. The most important is that the Dell-EMC merger is on track to complete its reorganization as Dell Technologies. Dell Technologies will join the ranks of the largest hardware and software vendors worldwide. EMC also announced several new hardware options and software services, and …

The New OpenStack: Collaboration

At this year’s OpenStack Summit in Austin, Texas, the message was clear. OpenStack needs to pivot from a science experiment to a production system. Even though this is happening, it has been happening slowly. Some would argue that it has been achieved for the likes of PayPal and other extremely large institutions, such as AT&T. However, running, configuring, and …

Getting to OpenStack

In the industry, OpenStack is seen as very hard to implement. Considering this, I began to think that most people who deploy OpenStack try to bite off too a large chunk of OpenStack at one go, to implement it all instead of just what they need. OpenStack is a cloud management platform, not the hypervisor, so …

The Upgrade Cycle

As we move through the year, there are often monthly and quarterly upgrade cycles to our virtual and cloud environments. These are caused by security issues, natural upgrades to hardware, software, or even application updates. Application updates are now continuous, using continuous integration and deployment strategies, while hardware and other upgrades come more slowly. Cloud …

Inventing Complexity

Recently, a number of marketing campaigns have seemed to be inventing complexity to try to give products the appearance of having some sort of competitive advantage. The invented complexity involves real-world items that many folks just do not use, or even care about, in order to make products look like something different. We have spoken about in-kernel vs. VSA in …