Technology Update from the Field

There have been a spate of press releases and news in and around the industry over the last few weeks that bear further consideration. They could actually solve some of your current cloud and virtual environment issues while opening new doors for future expansion. As an architect and analyst I find these technology very interesting for their possible impact of the future of virtual and cloud environment not to mention data center designs.

Caching throughout the Stack

One sure way to improve performance is to cache the non-dynamic data of any application. We did this to improve the overall performance of The Virtualization Practice website. However, there are many places within the stack to improve overall performance by caching, and this got me to thinking of all the different types. At the last Austin VMUG, there were at least three vendors selling caching solutions that were designed to improve overall performance by as little as 2x to upwards of 50x improvements. That is quite a lot of improvement in application performance. Where do all these caching products fit into the stack?

SDDC and the Ever Expanding Control Plane

The software defined data center has the potential to expand the control plane well outside of anyone’s control by the simple fact that we do not yet have a unified control mechanism for disparate hardware (networking, storage, and compute), for disparate hypervisors (vSphere, KVM, Xen, Hyper-V), new types of hypervisors (storage and networking), and new ideas at managing SDDC at scale.

Training and More Training for EUC Security

End User Computing security seems to be in the hands of the users not actually the IT Security department. At least not yet. So what can we do about this? IT security can be draconian and not allow EUC devices into the office, but the users will be up in arms. They use their smart …

The Growing Divide between Security and Virtualization (Cloud)

I asked @MrsYisWhy to join the podcast as she is from the other side of the world from virtualization and cloud security folks and has quite a different view. The rent we saw being sewn up is now a vast divide as we jump feet first into Cloud deployments, virtualization business critical workloads, and generally using more and more virtualization and cloud in our daily lives.

Public Cloud Reality: Support Responsibility

The Public Cloud Reality around support responsibility is not something often considered, instead we are looking at SLAs, legal documents, compliance documents, and many other items. Do we consider who is ultimately responsible when something goes wrong within the cloud? Is your Cloud provider a full partner or do they limit themselves to a small subset of the implementation? Do they have 24/7 support will be covered by the SLA, but what type of support? How qualified are the clouds support teams to help you with your application’s problems? Who is responsible?