Tools of the 21st Century Data Centers

Tools of the 21st Century Data Centers. For this post, I wanted to continue with my thoughts on what helps make up 21st Century Data Centers. In my last post, I focused on the automation aspect of the modern day data center and since I brought it up, let me take another moment to express my main point from that post. There is no right or wrong answer when it comes to choosing which automation engine you will use in your environment. There are plenty of options available and you should make your decision based on which solution will make the most sense for your environment and the systems that are running on it. You should also take advantage of other automation tools or engines that may be provided as part of another solution. In my humble opinion, taking advantage of the native functionality that is vender provided is a gift that should be opened and taken advantage of.

Cloud Foundry and OpenShift Comparison

I plan to spend an afternoon getting an ISV application to run on the public PaaS version of OpenShift—to allow direct comparison with a fruitless afternoon spent on the public PaaS version of Cloud Foundry. In this post, I explain the radical difference in approaches I am taking in the two environments to deal with …

AppFog – Extending the scope of Cloud Foundry

There is now a huge amount of movement in the area of what we have called “Diverse” Platform as a Service i.e. PaaS that delivers a number of different application infrastructure technologies on a mix-and-match basis and where there is no proprietary technology layer at any point in the platform stack. Amongst these we would include OpenShift, Cumulogic and CloudFoundry from our recent set of posts. AppFog sits in this category, and the fact that it has been recently renamed from PHPFog highlights a major trend in the space, the vendors typically start by developing a single technology, build an initial business plan and gain some market traction within that niche, and then move on to supporting a broader range of platforms.