The People behind Virtualization Technologies

As technologists, we tend to focus on a product’s technology itself. How does the software, hardware, appliance, widget, or whatever work? While this is certainly an important consideration, the people who design, build, sell, and support the product may have the greatest impact on the product’s usability.

OpenShift, Why Won’t You Do What I Want?

I recently spent a fruitless afternoon on the public PaaS version of Cloud Foundry. In this post, I document an equally fruitless afternoon spent on Red Hat’s OpenShift. It think it is fair to say that OpenShift has some advantages over Cloud Foundry for public PaaS. OpenShift feels more comfortable, its integration of a build …

Installing/Packaging Applications: The Unexpected Bottleneck

Virtualizing applications is simple, right? After all, Microsoft Office can be installed or packaged in a matter of minutes, so all apps must be this easy. And via a tool like Citrix App Orchestration, the application can be published, secured, and presented to users auto“magic”ally. Thus, application virtualization professionals must have easy jobs, right? 

Dell Fluid Cache for SAN

Back in mid-2011, Dell acquired RNA Networks, a small startup out of Portland, Oregon. At the time Dell purchased it, RNA had a product, MVX, that employed three different ways to pool memory across multiple servers in order to accelerate workloads. One was a way to pool memory as a storage cache in order to …

4 Reasons The Calxeda Shutdown Isn’t Surprising

The board of Calxeda, the company trying to bring low-power ARM CPUs to the server market, has voted to cease operations in the wake of a failed round of financing. This is completely unsurprising to me, for a few different reasons. Virtualization is more suited to the needs of IT Calxeda’s view of the world …

Expand Your Thinking When Architecting in the Cloud

I have been building solutions on AWS since 2008, and even though that sounds like a long time, I have still only scratched the surface of what is possible in the cloud. Every few weeks I get another “Aha” moment when I see problems solved with cloud architectures that would be either too hard, not …