Microsoft released System Center 2012 last week and it set the twitter feeds and blogosphere into frenzy. Is this the year that Microsoft steps forward and raises the stakes in the cloud market, aiming for cloud domination among the masses?
In 2011, the big hype for many companies was “cloud.” However, how to define cloud differed for many , but in 2012, that is expected to change. IT administrators and management will begin to agree on what the term “cloud” means to them, which will result in a clearer view of the business benefits for transitioning to the cloud.
Here’s a question you might be hearing from your IT leaders, or perhaps from the little voice in your own head: “How can I optimize my environment without cobbling together a bunch of different management solutions?”
Most virtual infrastructure admins are fully aware of the many benefits of snapshots. They’re a marvelous way to test out new software releases and patches, since the ability to back out is just one click away. I’ve seen them used in development this way, or also when capturing with memory, they can provide an excellent mechanism to try and reproduce a problem.
We’ve been attending a lot of VMware User Group (VMUG) meetings lately, and some interesting trends are becoming apparent among the attendees and what they’re facing in their data centers. Their places on the virtualization adoption spectrum vary widely, but VMUG participants all seem to be in search of technology that can help them manage the virtualization environments they have right now and grow with them into the future.
I recently had the opportunity catch up on some industry research, and ran across Lian-James blog – “Collective Capitalism is at the Heart of Cloud Computing”. Lian talks about how some organizations are struggling to think of deploying mission critical systems in a cloud, as they believe it is not suitable or industrial strength for the job. He argues that the cloud has a great deal to teach these naysayers and that the cloud’s “greatest lesson is how
I recently came across an InformationWeek article that discussed “Private Clouds: Tough to Build with Today’s Tech”, where InformationWeek discussed the results of their Virtualization Management Survey of 396 business technology pros. Their findings were interesting, especially when you consider the buzz around private cloud automation these days.
As virtual data centers continue to scale out, companies must transform the way they track, monitor, manage, and ‘charge’ for IT resources. IT costing and chargeback is not a new discipline by any means, but what is new is the agility and rate of speed in which resources can be provisioned, decommissioned, or reallocated in a virtual data center. While most organizations have some level of monitoring resource utilization, this approach rarely effects how resources are actually used or consumed. Why? If I am not paying for it, I probably don’t understand the real cost of deploying it, ma
In our last blog on cloud adoption in mid-sized companies, we highlighted a survey that said “58 percent of executives and IT staff surveyed reported a significant increase in their understanding of the cloud.” This is great news, right?
Today, midmarket companies have access to many of the technological bells and whistles of their larger competitors, and at prices that don’t break their businesses. Cloud computing lets these organizations go big on service without maxing out their resources, and a recent survey highlighted on SearchCIO-Midmarket points not only to expanding cloud adoption, but growing understanding of the technologies involved in the cloud.
