Docker Has Quietly Crossed the Chasm

Docker is one of those technologies that, without any great fuss and without anyone noticing, is now everywhere. My experience with Docker is fairly recent and fairly limited, but like many people, I had enough knowledge of it that when something complex came up in a project, I thought about Docker, went and investigated it, …

Finding Atlantis USX—The Move to the Ocean from the Sea

Most will know Atlantis from the days of ILIO Persistent VDI and ILIO Diskless VDI. I would expect that most even consider it a niche product with the single goal of accelerating desktops. I have to admit, I was shocked to find that this is no longer the case. It is well known that I …

Death to Active Directory? Is the Windows Domain Still Relevant in the Modern IT World?

In a meeting recently, I was quite taken aback to hear a reason given for not moving to 2012 R2 forest functional level—a reason to which I hadn’t previously been privy. The stated reason was, “in a few years, the Windows domain won’t be relevant anymore.” As someone who cut his IT teeth on Windows …

Is SDDC a Product or a Mindset?

My response to Stephen Foskett’s tweet of a post about the Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC) Symposium led to an interesting conversation about the nature of the SDDC—what it is, what it is not, and why we should care. The software-defined data center is considered by some to be an instrument of vendor lock-in, vaporware, or …

Extending the Cloud Outside of the Data Center

VMware has been aggressively building and executing its hybrid cloud vision, extending the cloud outside of the data center. In line with this vision, VMware recently announced an expansion of its VMware vCloud Hybrid Service by adding disaster recovery as one of its offered services. This expansion will put VMware in direct competition with companies …