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orchestration

Living in a VM world

The big industry event about virtualization is VMworld, usually held in late Summer / early Fall. You don't have to wait for VMware's conference, however, to find yourself in VM World. We now live in it, every day.

It's really quite amazing how quickly virtualization has swept through, and become ensconced in, IT. Data centers have--for decades--been famously conservative when it comes to introducing changes that might threaten to disrupt production applications. For years, whenever we'd ask operationally focused IT managers about introducing new control software--for workload management, service provisioning, automated orchestration, and so on--we always heard … Read more

Fads aside, IT is not a fashion industry

It's been said that information technology is a fashion industry--that we just keep following the latest hype and fads. Oracle CEO Larry Ellison last year referred to cloud computing this way.

Ellison loves this dig, and he uses it least once every technology generation. He's not alone. I, however, disagree with the entire curmudgeon corps' "It's just hype!" attitude.

While it's true that we in IT have our fashions, just like any field of human endeavor, we're generally pretty practical. It's hard to see either IT's executives or its technicians as … Read more

8apps: Productivity and social networking come together

8apps is a suite of Web-based collaboration applications. It's got the look and feel of a site made for casual users but is aimed at small groups who need a place to get business and social networking done in the same place.

Right now there are only three applications to play around with, (Handshake, Orchestrate, and Blueprint) but five more are due out by this fall. The eventual goal is to have eight applications that can be used and managed from one place, kind of like what you get with Zoho's offerings, but more experimental.

Orchestrate and Blueprint … Read more