While March Madness may be taking most of your attention this Friday, spend a few cycles reviewing the following most excellent articles from the week of March 14th, 2011. It will only take a few minutes and then you check off that you got at least one thing accomplished today before geting back to the games (and if you are like me, your busted bracket).
The misconception is that virtualization is cloud. Virtualization has become widely adopted in the enterprise for server consolidation. It's an enabling technology, but the cloud is really about automation. People tend to connect popular virtualization technologies with the cloud, and if you look at the clouds out there they're not built on these same virtualization technologies.
Driven by the trends confirmed in this survey, IT increasingly is taking on the appearance of a supply chain. The traditional supply-chain model is usually connected to manufacturing, where loose collections of resources (technology, processes, goods, services and people) are organized in a logical manner to deliver goods and services to a customer base. However, as applications, infrastructure and even business processes migrate to the cloud, IT organizations can become effective managers of IT supply-chains using multiple internal and external sources.The goal of this approach is for IT to be able to create value-and increasingly drive business growth.
One of the primary questions that IT has to be able to answer, at a moment’s notice, is ‘what’s going on?” This is the problem that will be plaguing cloud vendors and their larger customers for years to come. And it’s one that that major service providers, such as IBM, HP, BMC, and others are trying to figure out how to approach.
Many of these large companies use open source tools and tweak them as they see fit. Stuart Radnidge, an infrastructure architect at a large, multinational financial services firm, viewed a video demonstration of Facebook engineers and their back-end management. “You never see guys like them buying from the Big Four,” Radnidge said. “They use open source tools and modify them for their massive scale.”
The truth is, the lessons learned by teams working hard to adopt to cloud models and devops concepts will be invaluable to you regardless of what types of clouds IT ends up officially supporting--public, private, or hybrid. If you don't have the capacity to support experimentation with new models within IT, the initiative taken by "rogue" developers in this case might be the difference between getting ahead and falling behind.
Because the very nature of codifying processes and integrating infrastructure implies myriad use-cases, scenarios, and requirements, there is a need for flexibility. That means options for integration and remote management of infrastructure component
The worlds of IT and operational technology (OT) are converging, and IT leaders must manage their transition to converging, aligning and integrating IT and OT environments, according to Gartner, Inc. Analysts say the benefits that come from managing IT and OT convergence, alignment and integration include optimized business processes, enhanced information for better decisions, reduced costs, lower risks and shortened project timelines.
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