The prospect of outsourcing servers and storage to the cloud has an irresistible lure of operational simplicity and cash efficiency for today’s application developers. Cloud computing vendors help operate social networking applications, micro-blogging sites, global gaming networks and a plethora of applications that we use everyday. Yet, as successful and economically desirable as clouds have been for many organizations, outsourcing servers and storage causes a serious emotional and operational dilemma for the hardened breed of systems administrators called server huggers. Continue »

Anyone who knows me will tell you that I am not a great dancer. Yet I have recently become a proponent of a technology strategy that I have coined the “cloud two-step.” The cloud two-step is the way enterprise IT departments are going to dance their way to better infrastructure economics for their organizations during the current downturn.

Before we talk about specific two-step moves, it’s important to realize that the economic crisis has forced enterprise IT departments to stop or severely limit their spending. While this may help the enterprise stay afloat, it also requires that those departments find imaginative and cost-effective ways to serve technology needs. Put another way, they need to find the cheapest way to provide two commodity resources: storage and processor power. And providing flexible, cost-effective and outsourced storage and processor power is the value proposition of cloud computing that makes the CIOs of Fortune 1000 companies stand up and take notice. Continue »

There has been a rumor rustling around Silicon Valley for a number of months that Cisco Systems is on the verge of acquiring EMC. Such a move would make a lot of strategic sense for Cisco, but this rumored mega-merger of technology giants may have to wait for the U.S. economy to recover before becoming a reality.

If Cisco were to acquire EMC, it would have an enormous impact on the technology landscape and etch in granite the combined company’s role as the hub around which the rest of the enterprise data center industry revolves. It would also place the firm at the forefront of the ongoing synergy between storage and data networking, a trend observed back in July, when Brocade Communications Systems agreed to buy Foundry Networks for $3 billion dollars.

And it would give Cisco control over VMware, the leader in enterprise virtualization software, and help move it further up the technology stack from being a data networking vendor and into enterprise software. Last month at VMworld, Cisco announced the Nexus 1000V switch, an integration of their switching software with VMware ESX (this was not what I predicted, but it was a step  toward my prediction).

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Broadband service providers are looking to add higher-value services to their offerings, services that could soon include a virtual desktop for consumers. Indeed, the idea of a service provider offering a PC as a Service (PCaaS), essentially a PC in the cloud, may be coming to your broadband connection sooner than you might think. Continue »