The Federal Government has recently embarked on an initiative to consolidate its 1,100 data centers - the advertised primary objective being cost reduction, primarily through energy savings. While a simplistic approach to consolidation (virtualize everything and use lots of Clouds) may be tempting, changes taking place in the IT industry argue for careful consideration of the technology suites now coming to market. The storm that I see rising is the war between Oracle-Sun, H

Are you ready for the next step?

My interest in virtualization started many years ago, and I have played with Xen, Zones, VmWare, etc.  VmWare is without question the 800 LB gorilla in this space.  They have many, many great features that come at a price.  Sun XVM is a solution that is not quite as mature but comes at a cheaper price and Virtualbox is free and competes with VmWare Player. Sun now has a product line ready for cloud computing:

• CMT Systems
• Intel/AMD Systems

Change has been the one constant for Oracle over the past five years.  Since 2005, Oracle has acquired over 60 companies that have added both new solutions and technical expertise to what was already considered to be one of the premier software development shops on the planet.  Some you’d heard of, like Peoplesoft, Siebel and BEA, others were less well known, but each brought new capabilities to the Oracle “stack” and h

In my previous blog  IT Services Delivery- “From the Ground to the Cloud”, I touched on the five major pillars of ITIL v3 library: 1) Service Strategy; 2) Service Design; 3) Service Transition; 4) Service Operation; 5) Continual Service Improvement, as they pertain to “physical” –  non-virtualized IT environments.  For this blog, I will examine the pillars 1) Service Strategy and 2) Service Design, as they pertain to virtualized or cloud based IT environments.  IT Service Strategies in virtualized environment

Current IT service environments in many enterprises are often faced with the difficult task of leveraging the old, the current and the upcoming technologies.  Dissimilar technologies use legacy applications and legacy systems and are often loosely coupled with current “semi-open systems” while administrators look toward the future with the hope of connecting these existing systems to “newer” technologies.  Even grander is the service provider or service administrator’s hope of keeping in alignment with the five major pillars of ITIL v3 library: 1) Service Strategy; 2) Service Design; 3) Servic