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 in [...]

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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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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 is, [...]

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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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Confusion Persists
Through several posts on this blog, we discussed the many aspects of confusion around the term, “Cloud Computing.”  After attending this year’s Cloud Expo in New York City and seeing the same three-layer stack (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS) slide in fifty half of the presentations, I have to conclude that confusion still exists in the [...]

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A quick perusal of a typical contemporary IT project portfolio will show a strong representation of projects dependent upon, or directly related to the data center.  Changes in the growth and scale of data processing, applications, content storage, data communications, risk, compliance, and maturity of IT governance are all in some way connected to the [...]

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As I’ve watched the momentum of the Cloud, it’s caused me to reflect upon earlier discussions about data center physical security.  It’s long been my opinion that physical security will soon emerge (or re-emerge) as a top issue in data center planning, since businesses and consumers alike are increasingly reliant on the data and transaction [...]

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Many firms have gone looking for core/shell property with the intent of renovating these structures for use as a data center.  These projects are very capital intensive, and in many cases the benefits of having the existing structure are almost nil when viewed in the context of the broader project plan and budget.  However, many [...]

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Well, now I know why I’ve never come out on top whenever I buy one of Jim Cramer’s recomendations.
In a recent (10/22/2009) Mad Money piece on CNBC, Jim Cramer used the Equinix acquisition of Switch and Data to make the point that data centers are obsolete.  In his diatribe about why anyone with Equinix stock [...]

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When launching a new data center build project, where the data center will be located is a fundamental issue. There are many factors in deciding where the data center will be, but all of these factors can arguably be consolidated into two issues- Risk and Cost.
We mention risk in terms of Risk Management. [...]

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