Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols: It's 2016, and Chrome OS is ascendant
The fat client desktop system has ruled computing for 30 years. Could Google Chrome OS and other cloud-based, thin-client systems dominate the next 30?
The fat client desktop system has ruled computing for 30 years. Could Google Chrome OS and other cloud-based, thin-client systems dominate the next 30?
It's clear that U.S. businesses and infrastructure operators haven't even begun to prepare to defend against cyber-espionage and sabotage.
When researchers uncovered a back door in a MILSPEC chip, the reports all seemed to imply that it was no big deal.
Apple CEO Tim Cook, along with a few friends, Monday performed the annual Apple Worldwide Developers Conference keynote. The show must go on, even without Steve Jobs, and it sure did go on -- two well-packed hours of Apple mantra and mania. They did not talk about what I was watching for, but it turned out OK anyway.
Like Larry Ellison's yacht, the RDBMS is sailing into the sunset. But if NoSQL is to take its place, a standard query language and APIs must emerge soon
A flood of mobile devices into the enterprise is exhausting available licenses for mobile-device security. But there are great options available today that didn't exist two years ago.
It's really not all that difficult to do a little self-vetting of the apps you install on your mobile devices.
Last year, IT budgets declined by 10 per cent to 20 per cent, depending on who you believe. Jobs were lost. And the pool of vendors is constantly shrinking, given the tsunami of bankruptcies and mergers over the past few years. (Adios, Nortel.)
The term "cloudbursting" was coined by Amazon Web Services evangelist Jeff Barr to describe the use of cloud computing to deal with overflow requests, such as those that occur during seasonal rushes to online retail sites.
Looming on the horizon are the nimbus, cirrus, stratus and cumulus that threaten to deliver us cloud computing imminently. Promising an end to most of the challenges and frustrations of IT systems as we know them, the concept of cloud computing is thundering through the business community to become one of the most talked about and revered subjects of the day.
Although it may seem like your computing life is all e-mail and browsing, computer users still create files, documents, spreadsheets, boring presentations and all manner of other stored information. Which brings me to the question: Where do you store your data? And are you ready to store your data online in a service hosted by a third party provider?
Cloud computing is at its peak of hype. In fact, it's probably about to jump the shark. Savvy enterprise IT managers know there's little reason to embrace cloud this early in its development.
Gartner released its annual "Top 10 Strategic Technologies for 2009" and pride of place goes to virtualization, put right at the top of the list. More surprising, perhaps, is the fact that Gartner placed Cloud Computing directly below virtualization in the second spot.
The initial approach to storage virtualization, which has been around for years, was to address it in the storage-area network because the SAN sat between the storage and servers, and would cause the least disruption to these systems. However, after nearly a decade, this approach has not taken off while server virtualization has become widely accepted. What needs to be changed to make storage virtualization as ubiquitous as server virtualization?
There has been and is a great deal of work being done to address the inhibitors for virtual desktop adoption.
Market definition
Every now and again a technology comes along that, to some extent, sells itself. In recent years, the best example has been server virtualisation and many in the channel have had a great time closing deals based on this “no-brainer”. As usual in this industry, every man and his dog jumps quickly on the gravy train and skills that were recently seen as a market differentiator become commoditised before you can say ‘hypervisor’.
I have been very interested in virtualization security since early 2004 and it now seems like it has become a mainstream topic. Most of the focus however is on securing the technology of virtualization (the hypervisor) and providing virtualized security (usually as virtual appliances). My focus nowadays is more on the operational impact of virtualized infrastructure and by extension the impact on security operations. After all, security controls (technology) are essential but without operational controls (people) they are not sufficient. So what is the operational impact of virtualization?
In a recent review, I consolidated FC and Ethernet networks using FCoE (fibre channel over Ethernet) and Cisco's new Nexus 5000 switch. As the review showed, the combination merged the two transport protocols easily, allowing FC frames to channel through a 10G connection without giving up features or performance.
Virtualization on the Mac has never had it so good. There are several options available for running almost any x86-based operating system as a VM under Mac OS X, including Parallels, VMware Fusion, and VirtualBox. If you like the fact that Macs are less prone to problems, viruses, and spyware, but you simply have to run a few Windows applications, it's a great time to be alive.