IT Expert Voice

For private cloud computing to be more than an exercise in glomming on to the latest buzzwords, technology managers need to dodge pitfalls – starting with making sure that they are truly doing something new and useful.

As a market niche, private clouds capitalize on interest in on-demand pools of computing and storage resources, like those offered by Amazon.com, or application and platform technologies like those offered by Salesforce.com. But that interest is tempered by the conservatism of some technology managers reluctant to trust applications and data to external service providers. Software and hardware vendors are quick to suggest enterprises can achieve some of the same flexibility with internal implementations of similar technology. READ MORE

Novell and Microsoft are more than happy to help you bridge the gap between Linux and Windows.

Once upon a time, bridging the gap between Windows and Linux in the server room or the office was… difficult. Today, while no one’s going to call it easy, Novell and Microsoft have worked hard on ensuring interoperability doesn’t require either a Linux wizard or a Windows expert. READ MORE

Today’s CPUs, motherboards, even BIOS are improving virtualization performance.

Computer virtualization involves one or more virtual machines (VMs) emulating a hardware environment under a virtual machine monitor (VMM), a.k.a. hypervisor. It’s compute-intensive, to say the least. Modern computer virtualization began as software, but hardware is getting into the act – and, in the process, improving performance, including the number of VMs a host machine can run concurrently, and the effective cost per VM.

Faster, multi-core processors make a difference, of course. So does more RAM. But these aren’t enough. READ MORE

Fast, stable and inexpensive Linux appliances are gaining popularity in the enterprise, and SUSE Studio is a great tool for building them. Here’s how.

Several approaches to putting together appliances are available now, from the bare-bones approach used by rPath’s rBuilder tool to a more robust solution offered by the team behind two of the more popular Linux distributions, openSUSE and SUSE Linux Enterprise. READ MORE

Your company has to keep exploring new markets and introducing new products because existing products become obsolete so fast and profits get squeezed. Since all new products need systems support to bring them to market, you will be an indispensable player on your company’s senior management team if you can quickly deploy flexible and scalable systems without spending a lot of money up front to get started. READ MORE

You can provision and deploy entire cloud-based Windows Server images in just minutes with services like Amazon, GoGrid, and BlueLock. That’s nice enough if you need one or two images. But what if you’re a burgeoning data center cluster?

Although it was born of the need to relocate existing resources seamlessly, the category of cloud computing services called Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) manages on its own to change the characteristics and texture of an enterprise network. Businesses now have both the means and the incentive to subdivide their server functionality into discrete roles rather than physical boxes. They can then deploy, using IaaS, roles that can reliably be managed remotely — for instance, the customer-facing Web server and the SharePoint server. That’s a fundamental architectural difference from the days when businesses had 16 or so processors here, and 10 or so there, distributed the functions among them as evenly as possible, and used load balancing techniques to make sure none of the servers were overworked.

As a result, the emerging image of the server image — that virtual, entirely digital, construct that’s the principal agent of cloud-based functionality — looks altogether different from the server that once resided on premises, even after the server started becoming virtualized. Unlike a typical virtual processing cluster in data centers today, an IaaS cluster of server images is apportioned and managed entirely differently, with the objective being to enable the customer to administer the business function assigned to the server image, rather than the server itself. READ MORE

Standardizing your virtual machines with templates saves time, effort, and money in both deployment and management.

Virtualization aims to maximize savings through consolidation and standardization. Although the largest savings come from consolidating many virtual machines (VMs) onto fewer physical servers, standardizing your installations can save significant costs in provisioning and managing virtual machines. READ MORE