The Hot Aisle Logo
Fresh Thinking on IT Operations for 100,000 Industry Executives

Cloud

I recently had a conversation with Mark Anzani, IBM’s CTO for System z, the mainframe platform. Regular readers will know that cooling technology is a favourite subject here on the hot aisle and I was keen to get an answer to how IBM plan to cool their next range of machines, the z11 series. IBM [...]

Share
Continue Reading

I met up with my old friend Martin Williams yesterday; he is CEO of a startup company called ATOV.  Apparently AtoV means Anarchy to Visualisation, which is exactly what they do. Some firms have limited instrumentation to monitor their IT systems, some firms even have a Command Centre or Bridge Operations to react to outages [...]

Share
Continue Reading

Telephone has Shortcomings – It was printed in a memo at Western Union in 1878 that “This ‘telephone’ has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us” Electric Light will Close as well – Oxford professor Erasmus Wilson predicted that “When the [...]

Share
Continue Reading

I received a very thought provoking article about the relative merits of FCoE and Fibre Channel storage networks from Christian Illmer, Senior Director Application and Solution Management Enterprise, ADVA Optical Networking – 8G FC versus FCoE – distinguishing myth from reality. I publish the article here in it’s entirety and add a bit of analysis [...]

Share
Continue Reading

I am giving the Cloud Summit Keynote at Virtualization World (co-located with SNW Europe in Frankfurt on the 27th and 28th October), my subject will be a familiar theme to readers of the hot aisle – The  Data Center of the Future – M&E plant to Cloud. I am also chairing a couple of panels, [...]

Share
Continue Reading

For some time I have been saying that a real IT shop would be ill advised to attempt consolidation to a single hypervisior. Why? My sense is that we have two types of workload, the mission critical, drives the business applications and services that cannot fail. These are the Fedex Logistics platform, the eBay portal, [...]

Share
Continue Reading

In the end content drives adoption. I refer you to Apple’s iPhone platform and the game changing nature of the AppStore. For those of us old enough to remember, look at Betamax and VHS and Sony’s subsequent acquisition of much of Hollywood to make sure they didn’t loose a technology war again. We are now [...]

Share
Continue Reading

The hypervisor is the new critical area of focus in the cloud. Enterprises cannot afford to adopt a “single hypervisor solution fits all” approach yet they do need to  understand and manage the many problems and issues that this outcome exposes. Early virtualization adopters will have a large VMware ESX estate largely accomodating the massive unstructured [...]

Share
Continue Reading

Software licensing just hasn’t caught up with the realities of the modern IT Operation. Software vendors rightly need to monetize the customers valid use of their intellectual property, however it is in neither parties long term interests to increase operational costs by doing this. Many software licensing terms focus on an actual link between the [...]

Share
Continue Reading

Over the last few months I have been thinking about data centers, how we power and cool them and what we put in them. I’ve been looking at what the very largest consumers of IT infrastructure do with their data centers compared to industry norms. The first take away is that almost none of them conform [...]

Share
Continue Reading