Notes from the Consultant's Jungle

Our regular readers will understand that we do not routinely report on vendor-specific industry events, but because of the increasing presence of virtualization as a foundational component in enterprise IT architecture, this week’s VMWorld in San Francisco is hard to ignore. In a press release, VMware revealed a roadmap that is focused on IT services [...]

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Undoubtedly you’ve heard by now that Intel has a bid on the table to buy McAfee (for $7.7B). ¬†We’ve written before about the collaboration that’s been going on between the two companies for almost two years now, which we suspect is a leveraging of features at both ends of the stack to improve security of [...]

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We are working on a book about one of our favorite topics: Data center tier models, availability, and the alignment of business with availability requirements.  We plan to cover the models that enjoy the most mind-share, as well as models that are not talked about nearly as much, but yet are very relevant to the [...]

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We’ve written quite a bit in this forum about containerized data centers, and our hope that in addition to providing great utility in current high density data processing implementations, they would also pave the way for a more pragmatic, modular approach to building data center space.¬† We still feel that there are improvements to be [...]

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This week, I had the pleasure of touring a data center developed and operated by a provider that has sites in only two cities in the US so far.  I’m intentionally not mentioning the name of the provider, but would like to share some of the things they’re doing that impressed me.  I was impressed [...]

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As someone with a strong operational ethic, one of my pet peeves is the colo site that resembles a monthly self-storage facility.¬† I’m referring here, to allowing (or tolerating) tenants storing boxes, material, and debris in their cages. A colocation facility that has cardboard and other such material in customer cages shows very poorly.¬† That [...]

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In my classes at the university, I sometimes give students a project to create a malware pet shop or malware zoo.¬† The purpose is to make the students more aware of the “biodiversity” that really exists out there in the malware world.¬† We also often talk about the increasing use of malware and other network-based [...]

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By Bob Landstrom This month I had the pleasure of moderating a panel discussion at the monthly meeting of the Association of Telecom Professionals (ATP). ¬†The event was titled, “Atlanta: Global Network Gateway to the Cloud.” ¬†The ATP did a wonderful job of assembling thought leaders from nearly all dimensions of the Cloud Ecosystem. Representing [...]

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The Uptime Institute recently released new guidance regarding operational behaviors supporting data center Tier levels.  In several other articles, we’ve discussed the notion that The Uptime Institute’s tier models for mission critical facilities are centered upon the topology of MEP infrastructure for increasing levels of site availability, but that these models do not significantly take [...]

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