Category: CIO

New Cloud Reference Architecture From NIST

So, here is something interesting I discovered today, courtesy of a tweet from Christian Reilly (@ReillyUSA) – the US federal agency, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), today released Version 1 of their Cloud Computing Reference Architecture (PDF).…

CIOZone.com Virtualization Video Discussion – Moving Past Virtual Stall

At VMworld 2010, I had the great pleasure to record a video interview with Roger Green, Executive Editor at CIOZone.com. We chatted for about 20 minutes in total (in 2 parts) about virtualization, the issues of virtual stall (including both…

Risk and Reward in the Cloud

Another day, another public cloud failure. Sometime on Friday December 10, 2010, claims content delivery network (CDN) provider SimpleCDN, two of its major upstream infrastructure providers, SoftLayer and Hosting Services, summarily terminated service for much of SimpleCDN’s infrastructure in Dallas,…

Public Cloud Computing is NOT For Everyone

Without pointing any fingers, there seems to be a persistent refrain from some public cloud computing proponents that says, ‘If you are running your own IT, then you are doing it wrong’. This attitude fails to account for the magnitude…

The Cost of Innovation in Virtualization and Cloud?

I was pointed the other day to a chart on the Business Insider ‘Chart of the Day’ (@chartoftheday) showing the R&D expenditures for a handful of tech companies, evidence of Apple’s supposedly superior ‘innovation’ compared to four apparently randomly chosen…

Cloud Computing in the Public Sector

If there was still any doubt about the real world use cases for cloud computing, the US Federal Government last week published a 38-page report  entitled “State of Public Sector Cloud Computing” (link to PDF at CIO.gov). Attributed to the…

Is ‘VM Stall’ the Next Big Virtualization Challenge?

There appears to be a challenger to ‘VM sprawl’ as the scourge of virtualization success – a problem I call ‘VM stall’.

We know about ‘VM sprawl’ – because new virtual machines are so easy to deploy, organizations can end up with more VMs that they can handle, or even use. This has the potential to cause severe problems to availability, performance, compliance, costs, security, and more.

However, I am seeing more and more evidence of this new phenomenon I think of as ‘VM stall’ – the tendency for virtualization deployments to stall once the ‘low-hanging fruit’ has been converted (typically around 20-30% of servers).

I think it happens more or less like this…

Does Virtualization Security Really Matter?

Whatever happened to virtualization security? Back in the day, everyone was talking about blue pills and red pills, about sideways attacks and DOM-0 threats, about security profiles and isolation policies, about perimeter defense and security embedded in the hypervisor. Then,…