I.T. as we know it...

2011-06-22T18:59:00.001-07:00

Cloud’s Strategic Importance: The View from Europe « Data Center Knowledge

To file or not to file

2011-06-04T04:56:00.001-07:00

We traditionalists tend to file our email. Many advocate leaving it in one big pot and relying on search to retrieve relevant information. I'm in the former camp (or more accurately, I use a hybrid approach). That is probably due to a combination of my age and well-established email habits along with my tendency to want to organize and put structure to things. The latter tendency has served me well and continues to serve me well in my career and personal life.

IBM recently did a study on email organization techniques and their effectiveness in retrieval. The result indicates that filing email does not improve retrieval time. Read it here.

Craig Roth from Gartner had a thing or two to say in defense of filing email. He gives some use cases that go beyond improving retrieval time.

Craig later posted some additional thoughts from unnamed colleagues on the topic here.

I find it unlikely that the research will change anyone's email organizational practices. The preference seems to be as highly personal as Mac vs. Windows, Google vs. Microsoft, or Coke vs. Pepsi. But it is certainly an interesting discussion and fun to watch.

SaaS Translation: What your Service Provider REALLY Means

2011-06-04T04:13:00.000-07:00

Well...I won't be sleeping tonight.

SaaS Translation: What your Service Provider REALLY Means

Gartner Suggests Ways to Migrate Applications to Cloud

2011-05-21T07:28:00.001-07:00

Gartner Suggests Ways to Migrate Applications to Cloud | CloudTweaks.com - Cloud Computing Community

Sungard AS trying to shed it's old-school DR image?

2011-05-14T07:26:00.001-07:00

It will take more than a new technology. They will need to deploy more agile business and customer service models as well.

SunGard IaaS Cloud Services Overview

Microsoft to buy Skype?

2011-05-10T03:04:00.001-07:00

Curious if they would merge technologies with Lync or keep the enterprise and personal sectors separate. Also curious how long Skype will keep working on my Android phone after this happens.

Microsoft Nears $7 Billion-Plus Deal for Skype

Rack Hygiene

2011-05-08T05:50:00.001-07:00

Make racks an integral part of airflow rather than just an inert target.

Rack Hygiene - Brand Republic

Forrester Predicts SaaS Will Own All Other Cloud Segments

2011-05-01T03:57:00.000-07:00

Forrester Predicts SaaS Will Own All Other Cloud Segments

Dell gets award for virtualizing Oracle

2011-04-30T13:40:00.001-07:00

Are you getting this, Oracle? Your own user group gave an innovation award to a company that developed an automated process to virtualize your software. Is there any more direct message your users can send you about the need to embrace industry-leading virtualization platforms? Why did Dell have to do this? Why didn't you build this yourself?

Dell Community

Netflix: Poster child for proper cloud deployment

2011-04-29T11:32:00.000-07:00

http://tinyurl.com/3prs9zs

I've seen Netflix referenced several times as the organization that did cloud right and rode out The Great Amazon Cloud Failure of 2011. Problem is, their availability model works for applications with tens or hundreds of nodes (or more) and where there is strong business incentive to survive a catastrophic infrastructure failure. It doesn't work for smaller organizations with many applications, all under 10 nodes. The resources and integration required to maintain hosts and images in two different clouds for just a few servers is simply not worth any potential savings or benefit the cloud has to offer.

So how should, and why should smaller enterprises take advantage of IaaS when the value doesn't offset the level of effort required to ride out a cloud provider outage?

2011-04-29T09:04:00.001-07:00

Lessons from the Amazon Cloud Outage | CloudTweaks.com - Cloud Computing Community