Mike Vizard

One of the primary motivations for adopting cloud computing is to reduce IT infrastructure costs. But that’s an exceedingly difficult goal to accomplish in a world where IT organizations routinely support multiple types of storage systems. With that issue in mind, it’s worth noting what DreamHost is up to relating to the emerging OpenStack cloud […]

As more IT organizations start to get comfortable with the concept of cloud computing, there seems to be a lot more interest these days in the various ways IT organizations can connect to the cloud. As is often the case with IT, there are multiple approaches to consider. First up is the type of switch […]

In not-too-distant future, the vast majority of enterprise applications is going to be composite in nature. We already see this on the Web where the concept of borderless applicationsis already generally well understood. Of course, there’s nothing especially new about the concept of composite applications, but building them has been something of a challenge for most […]

When it comes to the future of enterprise computing, it’s always instructive to look to see what is being developed in the realm of high-performance computing (HPC). As cloud computing in the enterprise evolves, many of the private cloud computing platforms of tomorrow are going to look a lot like the HPC environments of today. […]

As server virtualization continues to evolve, it’s becoming pretty clear that storage management is having a tough time keeping pace with all the innovation. For instance, application workloads and the virtual servers they run on are highly mobile, which is the key to delivering the IT agility that is seen as one of the key […]

Disaster recovery tasks today are still based on the same basic replication technologies that have been a hallmark of backup and recovery for more years than anyone cares to remember. The good news is that in this age of virtualization, it’s a lot easier to manage the distribution of application images, but the act of […]

The trouble with data is that not all of it is of equal value. From a storage management perspective, there are basically two types of data. There is the data in the production system and then there is everything else, which depending on what backup medium is used is generally referred to as Tier 2 […]

Everyone should be aware of the concept that an innovation in one area can have unexpected consequences much farther down the line. Case in point is virtualization, which after initially being deployed in the server realm, is the hot new technology in the security and network appliance space. Just about everywhere you turn these days […]

With each passing day, the line between application development and IT operations gets more blurry. Case in point is the release today of VMware vFabric 5, which beyond adding support for elastic memory usage for Java applications, is, according to David McJannet, director of product marketing for VMware, now being licensed on each instance of virtual machine […]

When it comes to virtualization, there always seems to be a chicken-and-egg problem. No one seems to be quite sure if the reason we’re seeing IT organizations stall at around the 40 percent mark when it comes to deploying virtual servers is because of the nature of the application workloads or simply the fact that […]

As interpretations of what defines cloud computing continue to expand, a lot of IT organizations are saying that with the deployment of virtual machine software, they now have in place what amounts to a private cloud. After all, multiple applications are leveraging those virtual machines to share a common base on IT infrastructure. Of course, […]

Fortunately for most, IT organizations don’t go about building a new data center every day, which is a good thing because not many have the core competency required to do so. But interest in new data centers, despite the state of the economy, is rising because of two core issues. The first is that many […]