AWS is undeniably the big kahuna in cloud services, however Microsoft has emerged as a strong number two with the Azure IaaS/PaaS combination, which it is now extending into private clouds via Azure Stack, a packaged version of Azure services that can be deployed in private data centers. The goal is to deliver a completely consistent hybrid cloud platform… Read More »
A version of this column was originally published on Diginomica as EMC-VMware, Nutanix Battle For Enterprise Virtualization Platform Supremacy Vendors and analysis regularly wax enthusiastic about the cloud, and for good reason when you consider the phenomenal growth rates at AWS and Microsoft Azure. Yet most enterprise workloads still run on internal systems. Indeed, spending on public cloud… Read More »
A version of this article originally appeared on TechTarget SearchDataCenter as These IaaS examples show data centers can share the load You might not be ready to go all in on AWS like GE and Netflix, however it’s both feasible and advisable to start moving some applications online The emergence of rentable, online software and infrastructure, aka The Cloud,… Read More »
Coming a couple days before Christmas, the timing of Nutanix’s IPO filing, a document that’s undoubtedly been in preparation for months, was more than a little suspect. What was the company trying to hide while everyone else was distracted by holiday festivities? As I detail in this column, a thorough analysis doesn’t uncover any smoking guns or even… Read More »
VMworld is a multifaceted experience, particularly for those of us where it may be the one time of the year where we can visit with far-flung friends and colleagues in the flesh. Indeed, the opportunity to have deep, stimulating discussions with other very smart people is perhaps the highlight of VMworld. Yet there were plenty of vendor announcements, technical… Read More »
Applications used to be so simple, some self-contained code linked with a few system libraries that accessed local data: a distinct bundle where everything required was on a single machine. Client-server software complicated things a bit, but the demarcation was clean and the hub-spoke design pattern straightforward. No longer. Apps are now composite mashups, often mixing custom and… Read More »
Never underestimate a buzzword’s power to frame the discussion. As I recently discussed, the term bimodal IT has captured the imagination and polemical energy of technology commentators and like many IT discussions in the age of 140-character commentary, it often degenerates into polarized, all-or-nothing positions. Using a variant of the classic reductio ad absurdum strategy, critiques of bimodal IT… Read More »
With last week’s big Altera acquisition Intel made an expensive bet on a future of data center hardware that uses significantly more customized designs than today’s monolithic racks of commodity x86 servers. As I wrote at the time, “The only justification for Intel’s move can be its perception of a secular technology shift from commodity processors to custom… Read More »
Intel isn’t a company known for being a spendthrift, but it just spent more on Altera than the combined total for all previous acquisitions. Intel isn’t know for placing big bets on anything other than its own R&D and fabs. It’s acquisition strategy has been more like Apple’s, surgical buys and acqui-hires designed to fill defined technology gaps. Unlike HP,… Read More »
A juxtaposition of events last week saw several major technology companies reveal key strategies and product updates that collectively served to illustrate the ongoing struggles of old tech blue bloods from the client-server era striving for relevance in the world of mobile devices, social software, cloud services and big data analytics. Together, this amalgam of technologies are the… Read More »