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 …

Oracle Expands Its Cloud into Indian Subcontinent

As we have stated before on The Virtualization Practice, Oracle has woken up to the cloud in a very large way. Acquisitions such as Ravello Systems, StackEngine, and Datalogix have the potential to turn this leviathan into a dominant cloud player. Oracle has started to move from a position of catch-up, though acquisitions, into an active development phase. …

From Mainframes to Containers

A few days ago, Stevie Chambers tweeted about the evolution from mainframe to container: “Why is it a surprise that VMs will decline as things miniaturise? Mainframes → Intel → VMs → Containers, etc. Normal, I’d say.” By “Intel” here, I’m going to take Stevie to mean “rackmount servers.” I’m also going to assume that by …

How Much Private Cloud Do You Need?

How much private cloud do you really need? A private cloud is all about the IT department getting out of the way of its internal customers, enabling business units and individual developers to provision their own VMs and get on with doing their jobs. But building and operating a private cloud is a complex, and therefore …

Brocade Continues the WLAN Mobile Consolidation Purchase of Ruckus

The WLAN, or wireless LAN, sector is pretty hot at the moment, as user endpoints break free from their previously wired existence. A wireless LAN links devices together over a spread-spectrum or OFDM (orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing) network within a limited area: your home, school, or office building, for example. From their humble beginnings, when they were not very stable, …

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 …