The Cloud: More Than Just Dollars and Cents
The waning days of December have brought out the usual raft of year-end reviews coupled with year-ahead predictions, and it’s no surprise that the current crop of enterprise-related round-ups focuses primarily on the cloud.
As the most significant shift in data infrastructure since, well, the creation of data infrastructure, the cloud is seen as both inevitable and far-reaching in its potential to radically reshape the entire IT industry. But mixed in with all this enthusiasm, a bit of caution: For every predictable outcome from the cloud there will be multiple unpredictable ones.
Managing Yum Plugins
Yum is one of the most widely used package management tools, but many users don’t know that Yum has a plugin system to extend its capabilities. Let’s take a look at how to extend Yum to add some very useful features.
If you’re using Fedora, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), CentOS, or a number of other RPM-based systems, you are probably very familiar with using Yum to install packages and update your system. It’s very useful out of the box, so to speak, but it can be extended to add even more functionality.
A Glimmer of Security Hope for 2011
We’ve been talking as an industry about the convergence of security and IT operations management for the better part of a decade.
Security Questions to Ask Before Engaging with Cloud Providers
For Wall Street Firms, Cloud Computing to Gain Momentum in 2011
Why It’s Important: Cloud computing is gaining momentum quickly on Wall Street. In a 2010 Wall Street & Technology/ InformationWeek Analytics survey of 144 capital markets executives, 40 percent said their firms already use some type of cloud, while an additional 31 percent said they are considering it. "The current trend is how to optimize your footprint and minimize what you have to expend in capitalization, while maximizing performance," says Mark Popolano, a senior advisor with Ineum Consulting and a former AIG CIO. The cloud fits the bill perfectly, he notes.
Which storage technologies and vendors will fly in 2011?
Data growth and storage demand is seemingly unstoppable, and new storage tech has advanced quite a bit in 2010. Things are looking good for the industry in general.
Cloud Migration: Who’s Up to the Challenge?
It’s a given that next year will see a significant uptick in cloud computing – the start of what looks like a decade-long transition from static enterprise infrastructure to a more flexible, dynamic and global environment.
The Cloud, The Drugstore and The Social Customer
Sifting Through the Rubble
What’s the point in sponsoring a conference? Conventional wisdom holds that the real value is the exposure and the lasting impact on current and future customers. If so, someone might have mentioned that point to technology giant HP, which parlayed a sponsorship of this year’s Oracle OpenWorld conference into an opportunity to address the event’s 40,000-plus attendees (and thousands of additional online viewers) during the opening keynote.
Data Management Issues to Dominate IT in 2011
For far too long, data management has pretty much been an afterthought for IT. Historically, it’s been a lot easier to throw hardware at various problems in the form of giving each application its own dedicated server and storage resources.
But as we look at the impact of virtualization and cloud computing on the enterprise, it’s clear that shared IT infrastructure is going to be the general rule of thumb from here on out. The problem this creates for IT organizations is that anything that has to be shared by definition needs to be managed.